Pelops was born in Lydia, the wealthy kingdom in Asia Minor whose capital was Sardis, the son of Tantalus, the king who had once been a favourite of the gods and had lost everything through hubris, the dangerous pride that leads mortals to challenge the gods. Tantalus had murdered his own son Pelops, carved his body, and served him to the gods at a feast to test their omniscience. The gods knew immediately what they were eating. Demeter, the goddess of the grain, who was grieving the loss of her daughter Persephone to the underworld, absent-mindedly ate a piece of the shoulder before she realised what it was. The other gods were horrified, and they restored Pelops to life by gathering his body parts from the cauldron and replacing his missing shoulder with one carved of ivory, the only substance that could match the perfection of the original. Tantalus was punished with eternal thirst and hunger in Tartarus, the dark pit beneath the world, and Pelops, marked by his ivory shoulder and his father's crime, grew to manhood in a kingdom that would never forget his family's shame.

When Pelops came of age, he left Lydia and travelled westward across the Aegean Sea to Greece, bringing with him the wealth of Asia and the ambition to found a new kingdom. He was handsome, cunning, and ruthless, a man who understood that the world belonged to those who took it. He landed in the northwestern Peloponnese and made his way to Pisa, the city in Elis where King Oenomaus, the son of Ares, the god of war, ruled with a chariot and a spear and a terror that had already killed eighteen suitors. Oenomaus had a daughter, Hippodamia, and he had sworn that no man would marry her. The suitors who tried were forced into a chariot race: they would drive away with Hippodamia, and Oenomaus would pursue them in his divine car, drawn by horses that were a gift from Ares. If the king caught the suitor, he killed him with a spear through the back. Eighteen heads adorned the pillars of Oenomaus's palace, and Pelops, hearing the story, saw not a warning but an opportunity.

He approached Myrtilus, the charioteer of Oenomaus, who was also the son of Hermes, the messenger god. Pelops offered him a bargain: sabotage the king's chariot, and receive half the kingdom and one night with Hippodamia. Myrtilus, tempted by the prize, agreed. He removed the bronze linchpins that held the wheels of Oenomaus's chariot to the axle and replaced them with pins of wax. On the day of the race, Pelops drove away with Hippodamia, and Oenomaus pursued in his sabotaged car. The king's horses were faster, as always, but as the chariot heated with speed, the wax pins melted. The wheels came loose, the car collapsed, and Oenomaus was thrown from it and caught in the reins. His own divine horses dragged him across the rocks of the plain until his body was torn to pieces, and he died cursing the charioteer who had betrayed him. Pelops crossed the finish line, married Hippodamia, and claimed the throne of Pisa.

But Pelops did not honour his bargain with Myrtilus. When the charioteer came to collect his reward, Pelops accused him of trying to rape Hippodamia, or simply declared that a traitor deserved no payment, and he threw Myrtilus from a cliff into the sea below. As Myrtilus fell, he cursed Pelops and all his descendants, and the curse took root in the blood of the house. Pelops and Hippodamia had many children, but the most important were Atreus and Thyestes, the twin seeds of destruction. Atreus became king of Mycenae, and Thyestes coveted his brother's throne. Their feud produced the most terrible crimes in Greek mythology: Thyestes seduced Atreus's wife and stole the golden fleece of the lamb that signified royal power; Atreus killed Thyestes's children and served them to their father at a feast; Thyestes raped his own daughter to beget a son who would avenge him; and the curse continued through Agamemnon and Menelaus, the sons of Atreus, and through Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, until it finally burned itself out in blood and madness.

Pelops himself was not destroyed by the curse in his lifetime. He ruled Pisa wisely, or at least successfully, and he founded the Olympic Games beside the tomb of Oenomaus, establishing the athletic contests that would be held every four years for more than a thousand years. The games were a celebration of his victory and a propitiation of the dead king's ghost, a combination of triumph and guilt that characterised Pelops's whole life. When he died, he was buried at Olympia, and his tomb became one of the most sacred sites in the sanctuary. The Greeks called the whole peninsula the Peloponnese, the island of Pelops, and every city-state that rose within its borders traced its origin back to one of his sons or grandsons. He was the founding father of the Greek mainland, the immigrant from Asia who became the ancestor of the greatest heroes and the greatest tragedies the world had ever known.