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House Of Tantalus Research Paper

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The evil started with Tantalus. Tantalus sired Pelops and the sons of Pelops, Thyestes and Atreus. The murder of Pelops’ bastard son Chrysippus brought down the wrath of Olympus and an ancestral curse on the House of Atreus. Demeter bore Zeus a daughter Persephone as a result of an incestuous union. The mother concealed Persephone in a subterranean cave guarded by serpents but Zeus desired her and bad-tempered and cunning transformed himself into a winged serpent to rape her, their coupling creating Dionysus, and another union between Zeus and Europa gave birth to Minos, the ruler of Crete. And so forth, from one generation to the next, the bitter legacy endured across the generations of Agamemnon, Cassandra, and Electra, and inspired the dark tragedies of Homer, Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus.

The windows of the large trailer had blackout shades. Night and day were much the same. A chart pinned to his wall set out the tree of the House of Atreus. As always Hartley Crane stood awed before the pantheon with its legacy of divine incest, murder, betrayal and deceit. …show more content…

It was littered with papers and open books, rock fragments, brownish bones and a petrographic microscope. The only semblance of order on the desk was a digital chessboard. The current game had been in play for quite some time. One move each day. The Mieses-Reshevsky stratagem from the thirties was almost unknown. His unseen adversary had advanced a knight and bishop in a pincer attack that now threatened his queen. He had found the slow-motion game an unlikely and unexpected

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