Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/192

 160 HISTORY OF GREECE. BO called, are said to have been among them : Atreus and Thy- estes were also his sons, and his daughter Nikippe married Sthe- nelus of Mykenae, and became the mother of Eurystheus. 1 We hear nothing of the principality of Pisa afterwards : the Pisatid villages became absorbed into the larger aggregate of Elis, after a vain struggle to maintain their separate right of presidency over the Olympic festival. But the legend ran that Pelops left his name to the whole peninsula : according to Thucycides, he was enabled to do this because of the great wealth which he had brought with him from Lydia into a poor territory. The histo rian leaves out all the romantic interest of the genuine legends preserving only this one circumstance, which, without being bet- ter attested than the rest, carries with it, from its common-place and prosaic character, a pretended historical plausibility. 2 Besides his numerous issue by Hippodameia, Pelops had an Illegitimate son named Chrysippus, of singular grace and beauty, towards whom he displayed so much affection as to rouse the jealousy of Hippodameia and her sons. Atreus and Thyestes conspired together to put Chrysippus to death, for which they were banished by Pelops and retired to Mykenae, 3 an event which brings us into the track of the Homeric legend. For Thucydides, having found in the death of Chrysippus a suitable ground for the secession of Atreus from Pelops, conducts him at once to Mykenae, and shows a train of plausible circumstances to account for his having mounted the throne. Eurystheus, king of Mykenae, was the maternal nephew of Atreus: when he engaged in any foreign expedition, he naturally entrusted the regency to his uncle ; the people of Mykenae thus became accus- tomed to be governed by him, and he on his part made efforts to conciliate them, so that when Eurystheus was defeated mid slain in Attica, the Mykenaean people, apprehensire of an invasion from the Herakleids, chose Atreus as at once the most powerful 1 Apollod. ii. 4, 5. Pausan. ii. 30, 8; 26, 3 ; v. 8, 1. Hesiod. ap. Schol ad Iliad, xx. 116. 3 We find two distinct legends respecting Chrysippus: his abduction by Laius king of Thebes, on which the lost drama of Euripides called Chry- nippus turned (see Welcker, Griech. Tragodien, ii. p. 536), and his death bj he hands of his half-brothere. Hyginns (f. 85) blends the two together.
 * Thucyd. i. 5.