Villains of Myth
- Argo Crew
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Is evil a choice? Check out some famous figures from Greek mythology to understand what makes someone truly villainous.
Greek myth is full of monsters, but its most disturbing figures are rarely monsters at all. Kings, gods, and ordinary mortals all star in some of Greek mythology’s more troubling stories. If you actually dig into these myths, "villain" turns out to be a pretty blurry label. Some characters are just plain cruel, others represent evil as a force that exists whether or not anyone "chooses" it, and some get blamed for terrible things without ever really having a choice at all.
We still argue about this same split today. Think about how we talk about real-world wrongdoing: there's the person who does something awful on purpose, knowing exactly what they're doing. There's "evil" as something bigger than one person: a toxic environment, a broken system, a culture where bad stuff happens even without one clear mastermind. Sometimes there’s just a scapegoat, a person who gets blamed for something even though they never really made the choice themselves. The names change, but people have been arguing about where the blame of evil actually belongs for thousands of years.
Let's break down all three types, Greek-mythology style.
The Villains Who Chose It
Atreus and Thyestes were twin brothers who turned a fight over a throne into one of the most messed-up feuds in myth. Thyestes seduced his brother's wife to steal a golden ram that would win him the crown of Mycenae, exiling his brother Atreus. When he returned, Atreus got the throne back and instead of leaving it there he murdered Thyestes' two young sons and served them to their own father at a fake "peace" dinner. The House of Atreus suffered under the curse of the Furies (the goddesses of Vengeance) for three generations, with other famous names in their family being Agamemnon and Menelaus, the sons of Atreus and legendary in the Trojan War, and Orestes, Agamemnon’s young son.
Tantalus was actually trusted enough to eat at the table of the gods. He used that trust to run an experiment: he killed his own son Pelops, cooked him, and served him to the gods just to see if they'd notice.
They noticed instantly and his punishment in the underworld of having food and water always just out of reach is where we get the word "tantalise" from.
Lykaon, an early king of Arcadia, wanted to find out if his dinner guest was actually Zeus. So he served the god a meal made from a slaughtered child (depending on which version you read, it was his own son Nyktimos, his grandson Arkas, or a captive) and waited to see if Zeus would notice. Zeus noticed immediately, blasted Lykaon's fifty sons with lightning, and turned the king himself into a wolf. Lykaon's transformation into a wolf is widely considered the origin of the werewolf myth in Western storytelling. The Greek word lykanthropos ("wolf-man"), where we get "lycanthropy" from, comes directly from his name and from religious rituals held in his honor on Mount Lykaion.
Evil as a Force, Not a Person
Not every bad thing in Greek myth has a face attached to it or a clear motive behind it. Eris, the goddess of strife and discord, doesn't really scheme but rather she just shows up, the way a storm shows up.
Nobody invited her to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, on purpose, because everyone knew what tended to happen when she was around. She crashed the wedding and when she got turned away at the door, she threw a golden apple into the crowd of goddesses with "to the fairest" written on it. Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena all wanted it, and their fight over one single apple eventually kicked off the entire Trojan War.
The poet Hesiod takes it even further, describing Eris as basically the mother of every kind of misery there is. Things like hard labor, forgetting, starvation, grief, fighting, lying, and lawlessness are all described as her "children." It's a pretty interesting way to think about evil: not as one bad decision at a time, but as something that just keeps generating more bad stuff on its own.
Villains Who Never Really Had a Choice
The saddest stories are the characters that history blamed for terrible things, even though they didn't really get a choice.
Pandora was the first mortal woman, formed out of clay by the gods. Hephaistos, under Zeus’ orders, made her to be a punishment aimed at humanity for Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. She was beautiful, curious, and cunning, and was given to Prometheus’ younger brother Epimetheus as a bride. Zeus sent with her a wedding gift, a pithos (storage jar), and told her not to open it. Of course, she couldn’t overcome her curiosity. She opened the jar and a swarm of evil spirits trapped within came out to plague humankind: disease, war, famine, sorrow, toil, and death. Pandora slammed the lid shut just in time to keep Hope in the jar, a single blessing to comfort humans.
Orestes from the House of Atreus is a sadder version of the same idea. He didn't choose the curse hanging over his family, but he was born into it, three generations deep. When his mother Clytemnestra murdered his father Agamemnon, Orestes was ordered by the Furies to kill her as revenge.
The Furies avenging his mother then hunted him for the same murder, until the god Apollo finally cleared his name at Delphi. He was forced to commit the very crime that he was attempting to avenge!
Who’s Actually The Villain?
Line all these characters up next to each other, and "villain" stops being one simple thing. Tantalus, Atreus, and Lykaon chose cruelty, while Eris is more like evil-as-weather, a condition of the world rather than a decision any one person made. Pandora and Orestes prove that you don't need to be guilty to end up infamous, sometimes you just need to be standing wherever the gods need someone to stand. Greek myths don't seem too worried about sorting all of this into one neat category, which might be exactly why these stories are still around thousands of years later.
Until next time,
λεῖος πλόος!
Written by Eleanor Russell
Education and Programs Officer
Hellenic Museum
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