Orestes

Orestes is the only son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. In Euripides's Orestes, his sister Electra names the family: three daughters, Chrysothemis, Iphigenia and herself, and one son. When Agamemnon came home from Troy, Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus murdered him. The boy was taken to safety. Pindar's eleventh Pythian ode and Apollodorus's Epitome send him to Strophius, an old friend of the family who lived at the foot of Parnassus in Phocis. Apollodorus adds that Strophius raised him with his own son Pylades, who became Orestes's lifelong companion.

Who saved the child is disputed. Apollodorus's Epitome gives the rescue to Electra. In Sophocles's Electra, an old servant says he carried the boy away after receiving him from his sister. Euripides's Electra credits the old servant alone, and Pindar credits the nurse Arsinoe.

Grown to manhood, Orestes asked Apollo's oracle at Delphi how to avenge his father. Apollodorus's Epitome says the god gave him leave. In Aeschylus's Libation Bearers he says Apollo threatened him with plagues and the Furies of his father if he did not act. Sophocles's Electra has the god order him to strike alone and by stealth.

In Aeschylus's play he lays a lock of his hair on his father's tomb and comes to the palace disguised as a stranger from Phocis, with Pylades. He kills Aegisthus first. When his mother bares the breast that nursed him, he hesitates and asks Pylades what to do. Pylades answers that Apollo's oracles outweigh every human enemy. Orestes kills her, then displays the robe in which she had trapped his father.

The punishment follows at once. At the end of the Libation Bearers, Orestes sees the Furies as Gorgon-like women wreathed in snakes. The chorus cannot see them. He leaves for Delphi as a suppliant. In Aeschylus's Eumenides the priestess finds him at the omphalos, bloody sword in hand, with the Furies asleep around him. Apollo sends him on to Athens under Hermes's escort.

At Athens Athena sets up a court of citizens on the Areopagus to try him. Orestes admits the killing and says Apollo shares the responsibility. Athena casts her vote for him, and the ballots come out equal, which acquits him. Orestes swears that Argos will never march against Athens, and goes home to rule his father's house.

Euripides tells the aftermath differently. In his Orestes, six days after the killing, Orestes lies sick and raving while Electra nurses him, and Argos votes to put both of them to death. With Pylades they seize Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus and Helen, as a hostage. Apollo appears at the end and settles everything: Orestes will spend a year in Parrhasia in Arcadia, stand trial at Athens and marry Hermione.

In Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris the trial did not end the madness. Some of the Furies refused the verdict and kept hunting him. Apollo then sent him to the land of the Taurians to steal an image of Artemis. There he found his sister Iphigenia serving as priestess, and the two escaped together with the statue.

Apollodorus's Epitome ends his story in Arcadia. Orestes married Hermione, or in some accounts Erigone, fathered Tisamenus, and died from a snakebite at Oresteum. Herodotus reports that the Spartans later found his giant bones at Tegea, on an oracle's instruction, and carried them home.

Homer and the tragedians judge Orestes differently. Homer's Odyssey never mentions the matricide directly. It holds him up as the model son who killed his father's murderer and won fame among all men. Nestor adds that Orestes held a funeral feast over his hateful mother and Aegisthus. The Furies, the madness and the trial belong to later poets, above all Aeschylus.

His acquittal is told in several ways. Aeschylus's Eumenides has Athena found the Areopagus court for his case, with the Furies as prosecutors. Euripides's Electra says the hill had already tried Ares for murder. Apollodorus's Epitome names three possible accusers: the Furies, Clytemnestra's father Tyndareus, or Erigone, daughter of Aegisthus. Pausanias reports Peloponnesian antiquarians who named Perilaus, a cousin of Clytemnestra, instead. Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris makes the verdict incomplete, since some Furies rejected it.

His cure has a local version too. Pausanias saw a sanctuary called Maniae, or Madnesses, near Megalopolis in Arcadia. The Arcadians said the Furies appeared to Orestes black until he bit off one of his own fingers. Then they looked white and he regained his senses. Pausanias also saw the stone at Troezen where nine men purified him of the killing.

His marriage is the sharpest disagreement. In Euripides's Andromache, Orestes says Menelaus first promised him Hermione, then gave her to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles. When he asked for her back, Neoptolemus taunted him with his mother's murder. Orestes then plotted his rival's death at Delphi, and a messenger reports that he was among the ambush in the sanctuary. Euripides's Orestes has Apollo predict instead that Neoptolemus will never marry Hermione and will die by a Delphian sword. Apollodorus's Epitome records both endings: Orestes killed Neoptolemus, or a Phocian named Machaereus did.

Pausanias adds that the Spartans accepted Orestes as their king, because his mother was a daughter of Tyndareus. His son by Hermione, Tisamenus, succeeded him. Pausanias cites the epic poet Cinaethon for a second son, Penthilus, by Erigone.

Orestes returns in two landmark modern plays. Jean Racine's Andromaque, first performed before the court of Louis XIV in 1667, makes him a lover. His Oreste loves Hermione, who wants only Pyrrhus, the tragedy's name for Neoptolemus. Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies opened in occupied Paris in June 1943. Sartre turns the matricide into an act of freedom: his Orestes takes the town's guilt on himself and walks into exile with the Furies behind him.