Interpretation
Fowler claimed that myths about curses of the royal houses of Mycenae and Thebes were likely used to explain the collapse of Bronze Age Greece, as due to the culminating wars all the great families were extinguished. What exact nature of those curses, particularly their generational extend and reach, was in Archaic literature is not clear. The idea of an ancestral curse gained a lot traction in the fifth century BC, as evidenced by the works of the tragedians.
Although most authors use the words harpazein or anarpazein (meaning 'to abduct' and 'to snatch up', rapio in Latin), which do not necessarily have sexual connotations, to describe the incident, nevertheless Chrysippus' myth is definitely a story about rape, as evidenced by use of words deriving from erao such as eros or erastheis, and Chrysippus' own suicide out of aiskhyne ("shame"). The exact origin of the violation myth has been much debated; an origin from the lost Oedipodea has been proposed but also challenged. Epic tradition did connect the houses of Pelops and Cadmus through marriage. Hubbard suggested that it does have pre-Euripidean origins, as Praxilla mentioned an abduction of Chrysippus by Zeus, but was mostly integrated into the Labdacid mythological corpus after the play was produced. Furthermore, he states that Hera's anger and punishment via the sphinx is not always connected to Chrysippus, while sometimes the sphinx appeared after Laius' death at the command of another god. Strong condemnations of pederasty do not appear until Plato's Laws, while epic poetry itself does not explicitly contain homosexual themes, making it unlikely that both of those elements were present in the myth particularly early. Praxilla might have modelled her rendition on the myth of Pelops and Poseidon's romance, as the two myths share a similar structure and a genealogical connection. Apollodorus in the Bibliotheca seems to have drawn from Euripides, but perhaps the combination of Laius' exile and the abduction was unique to him, possibly in order to create a coherent narrative with those multiple epidodes.
The versions where Pelops manages to retrieve Chrysippus seem to have been invented in order to reconcile the two main but conflicting narratives of Chrysippus, his abduction (and eventual suicide) with his murder by his brothers. Supposing the boy does not commit suicide, his final fate does not necessarily exclude him having been kidnapped earlier, but putting those stories in the same framework has been described as 'hard'; nevertheless some antiquity authors did manage to combine them. Pelops' pardon of Laius in the pseudo-Plutarchic version would equal an acceptance of the pederastic relationship, which in an ancient Greek context meant that the actions of Laius were legitimised by the consent of the father, the legal authority, and would not be socially or legally seen as rape. It is possible that the story is from a lost tragedy that presented the pederasty in a more positive light as a direct response to Euripides' negative attack on it, or that Dositheus (pseudo-Plutarch's source) combined some Atreus tragedy with Euripides' Chrysippus to create the melodramatic variation.
Devereux suggested that, taking in account the version where Oedipus and Laius fight over Chrysippus, the dispute between father and son as to who would go first through the 'narrow road' was a euphemism for the anal penetration of the youth. The versions with an amorous Oedipus likely originated from comedies parodying Euripides' works. Comedies titled Chrysippus and Phoenissae are known to have existed, and in the former Pelops is presented as an overprotective father who does not let his son go to the latrine out of fear of strange men talking to him.
