Thyestes

“Is anything worse

Than to be always wet and always thirsty, worse than hunger

Yearning without end?”

Tantalus’s “tantalizing” punishment in the underworld is the perfect symbol for the desires that plague his descendants Atreus and Thyestes. Atreus and Thyestes hunger for power and thirst for each other’s blood. Tantalus is the literal embodiment of the play’s frequent use of such food-based metaphors (See: Symbols & Motifs), as it is his punishment to experience eternal hunger and thirst in the underworld.

“Listen to what I have to say: believe me, I learnt the hard way:

Love your punishments. When will I achieve

Escape from those above?”

Crushed under the weight of his own misdeeds, Tantalus would rather experience punishment than commit yet more evil. In death, it seems that Tantalus finally understands what he (like his descendants) failed to understand in life: That no hunger or thirst is more terrible than the desire for evil. Tantalus’s predicament thus introduces the theme of The Destructive Power of Desire, through which his descendants are doomed to repeat his mistakes.

“Good! Spread out your madness through the house

Make them resemble you, make them hate, make them thirst

To drink their own blood.”

The Fury here orders Tantalus to infect his descendants with his own terrible desires, so that they will “thirst / To drink their own blood.” The imagery of “thirst” linked with “blood” once more invokes the food-based metaphors of insatiable desire for power and evil in the play (See: Symbols & Motifs). However, even before the Fury sends Tantalus to “spread out [his] madness through the house,”