Calasso

I just finished reading chapter six of Calasso, and I must say that this book certainly contains some dense material. There were a few stories that were told in this chapter, and one of the main ones was the genealogy of Tantalus all the way down through the curse of Atreus. Suffice to say that Calasso went into a little bit more detail than we did in class, but that just helped to make the story interesting.
I found it interesting that the history of Pelops, post getting hacked up by his father, was divided into two major parts; the story of his descendents and the stories of the various talismans. Callasso went into a lot of detail about the story of Pelops' descendents, Atreus and Thyestes. Right off the bat, I was struck by a comment that Callasso made, and I had a "light bulb" moment. This comment stated that "Every story of two is always a story of three: two pairs of hands grab the same thing at the same time and tug in opposite directions." This is undoubtedly true, for if there was no third thing, then the original two would never have had anything to quarrel over. Callasso then took this point a bit further when he asserted that the third object, the golden lamb, was not a gift from the gods which was inserted into the body, but rather a mere object that was to be grabbed and fought over. I found this intriguing because for me, this sense of the physical seems to lesson the value of whatever is being fought over. In other words, because Atreus and Thyestes were not fighting over some divine relic as their father possessed, it would appear that their struggle was somewhat trite and unimportant.
Another interesting point that Calasso brought up in relation to Atreus and Thyestes was his notion of "weighing wrongs." I think that it is a fairly safe assumption to think that most people would consider Thyestes the victim in the story, especially considering how Atreus' "revenge" was really just an attempt to rub victory in his brother's face. Callasso corrects us, though, with his diagramming of each of the brother's sins. It was both brothers, we are reminded, who helped their mother kill their bastard brother and both had been afflicted with the curse that Zeus himself put on the house of Tantalus a couple of generations before. With this information realized, it becomes apparent that neither brother is all that innocent, but rather that they both have blood on their hands. And hence, the killing of Thyestes children loses some significance as a horrible atrocity and instead becomes just another event in some very dramatic lives.