Thyestes, the play’s titular character, is a grandson of Tantalus and the brother of Atreus. There is a tension in the play itself between how Atreus views Thyestes and how Thyestes himself comes across. We first see Thyestes through Atreus’s eyes as cruel, calculating, and ambitious—in other words, as no different from Atreus himself. Thus, on a few occasions, Atreus justifies his revenge by arguing that he must destroy Thyestes before Thyestes destroys him: “He will kill me, or I him; / the winner is the one who gets there first” (203-04). Atreus thus construes his revenge as “the kind of thing my brother / would wish he had done himself” (194-95). Atreus clearly is basing his view on the way Thyestes has behaved in the past, by seducing Atreus’s wife and stealing his kingdom—crimes to which Thyestes himself confesses.

Nevertheless, the Thyestes presented in the play seems, at least at first glance, to depart from Atreus’s portrait. When Thyestes arrives on stage, he is drawn more like an unwilling victim than anything else. At several points he even comes close to embracing a life of philosophical retirement, especially when he tells his son that it would be wisest to forget his kingdom and “to choose bad fortune over good” (454).