In Thyestes, Seneca the Younger presents the history of the title character and his brother, Atreus. Both are the sons of Pelops, whose father, Tantalus, had sacrificed to the gods. Although Atreus is the legitimate ruler of Mycenae, Thyestes usurps his power by stealing the golden ram, the symbol of Mycenaean rulership. What is more, Atheus’s wife has run off with Thyestes. These events hare sparked a civil war, in which the furies get involved when one of them, Megaera, releases the deceased Tantalus from Hades to foment unrest. After Atreus defeats and exiles Thyestes, he seems to relent and invites him back to Mycenae.

Thyestes’s suspicions of his brother’s intentions are initially dispelled at the celebratory banquet that welcomes him home, at which he overindulges in excellent food and wine. Atheus, meanwhile, has done away with his brothers’ three sons and disposed of their bodies in fiendish ways, as the drama shows. He deals the coup-de-grace when he brings forth the heads of Thyestes’s children on a platter and reveals that the meat he served his brother was the children’s bodies and the wine contained their blood. Devastated over their deaths and his enforced cannibalism, the furious Thyestes both prays for his release through death and calls upon the gods to exact his revenge. Atreus’s two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, had been the emissaries to lure their uncle back home. They live and go on to important roles in the Trojan War.

The ultimate revenge tragedy, Thyestes became the model for other Greek plays on the same topic and similar themes. Its influence was further extended in the revenge play genre that became wildly popular in Elizabethan theater. Even more than the gruesome content, the drama raises questions about the effects of power and the nature of rulership. Atreus justifies his actions in relation to the severity of Thyestes’s crime of treason, which threatened to destroy Myceanean society. Moreover, he maintained that as the legitimate ruler, he was exempt from ordinary human morality. Although his brother is destroyed, he is in principle equally bad, as he wishes he had carried out the same plan against Atreus’s children.