Oenomaeus' mother was either naiad Harpina (daughter of the river god Phliasian Asopus, the armed (harpe)[2] spirit of a spring near Pisa)[3] or Sterope, one of the Pleiades,[4] whom some identify as his consort instead.

Pausanias, who is generally skeptical about stories of humans descending from gods, makes Oenomaus son of a mortal father, Alxion.

The genealogy offered in the earliest literary reference, Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, would place him two generations before the Trojan War, making him the great-grandfather of the Atreides, Agamemnon and Menelaus.

[13] Pelops and Hippodamia, very much in love, devised a plan to replace the bronze linchpins attaching the wheels to the chariot axle with fake ones made of beeswax.

This was the source of the curse that haunted descendants of Pelops', including Atreus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, Aegisthus, Menelaus and Orestes.