Orestes

• 1. Orestes

  ›

  Orestes killed his own mother. The ancient spirits of vengeance came for him regardless of his reasons, and the question that followed had never been formally settled: what counts as justice, and who is authorized to decide?

  His name comes from the Greek words for mountain and to stand, and so can be read as meaning "stands on a mountain." His patronymic, Agamemnonides, simply meant "son of Agamemnon." Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides each built plays around him. He belonged to the House of Atreus, descended from Tantalus and Niobe. His father Agamemnon had led the Greeks at Troy. His mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon upon his return. Orestes was absent from Mycenae when it happened and spent seven years in exile before returning to act.

  Centuries after his death, the reported discovery of his bones became a matter of Spartan military strategy. His ashes were later counted among the sacred foundations of the Roman Empire.

• 2. Years on Parnassus

  ›

  A nurse named Arsinoe, also identified in some versions as Laodamia, helped the young Orestes escape from Mycenae. Pindar records that Clytemnestra intended the boy to die. Electra, his sister, may also have played a role in his escape.

  He was taken to Phanote on Mount Parnassus, where King Strophius agreed to take charge of him. There Orestes met the man who would become his constant companion: Pylades, the son of Strophius and of Anaxibia. Anaxibia was Agamemnon's sister, making Orestes and Pylades first cousins.

  In his twentieth year, Electra sent word urging him to return and avenge their father. He came back to Mycenae with Pylades at his side. Homer's Odyssey had already established what such a homecoming was worth. When Telemachus was beset by suitors who had overrun his household, Orestes served as his explicit model. A son who waited and returned could settle what had been taken.

  The settlement Orestes made in Mycenae would eventually require something the Homeric world had no mechanism to supply. A court of twelve judges convened on the Acropolis of Athens.

• 3. A Goddess Votes Last

  ›

  At the temple at Delphi, Orestes sought shelter from the Erinyes. These ancient spirits held a single duty: to punish every violation of the bonds of family. Apollo had commanded the killing but found himself unable to protect Orestes from them.

  Athena offered what Apollo could not. She received Orestes at the Acropolis of Athens and arranged a formal trial before twelve judges, herself included. The Erinyes pressed their claim: the act of matricide had been committed and the perpetrator stood before them. Orestes stated that he had acted on Apollo's direct orders. Apollo confirmed the commission.

  Athena cast the final vote in favor of acquittal. The full tally came out as a tie. By the rules Athena had set at the outset, a tied vote meant the defendant went free.

  The Erinyes were not satisfied, but Athena persuaded them toward a new function. They became the Eumenides, the "Semnai Theai," meaning Venerable Goddesses, and took on wisdom and counsel as their purpose rather than pursuit. New ritual was established in their honor. Orestes dedicated an altar to Athena Areia. Euripides, writing his own treatment of the story, did not regard Athens as the final chapter of Orestes' obligations to the gods.

• 4. The Taurian Mission

  ›

  Apollo sent Orestes to Tauris on a new errand. His task was to find the statue of Artemis that had fallen from the heavens and carry it back to Athens. He traveled with Pylades, and on arrival both men were captured.

  The local practice in Tauris required that all Greek strangers be sacrificed to Artemis. The priestess responsible for the sacrifice turned out to be Orestes' sister Iphigenia, whom he had believed dead. Iphigenia saw an opportunity: she would release one prisoner if he would carry a letter back to Greece for her. She did not yet know who the prisoners were.

  Orestes refused to go. He urged Pylades to carry the letter and escape while he himself stayed to be killed. A contest of devotion followed: each man wanted to remain so the other could survive. Pylades eventually agreed. But when Iphigenia brought out the letter and read aloud from it, the words identified her as the sister of Orestes. The recognition was immediate. All three escaped Tauris together, carrying the image of Artemis with them.

  Lucian, writing centuries later, would return to that same shoreline as his key piece of evidence. His argument concerned what Orestes and Pylades had truly been to each other.

• 5. The Same Vessel of Life

  ›

  A dialogue attributed to Lucian, entitled Erotes or "Affairs of the Heart," compared the merits of heterosexual and homoerotic love. Orestes and Pylades were its principal representatives of the latter.

  The Erotes describes the arrival at Tauris: Orestes fell to the ground in a fit of madness. The Erinyes had not finished with him even after the acquittal at Athens. Pylades, in Lucian's account, "did wipe away the foam and tend his frame and shelter him with a fine well-woven robe," acting, the text says, not merely as a lover but also as a father.

  At the letter scene, Lucian's narrator detected a reversal in the expected roles. Orestes refused to take it, insisting Pylades was the fitter person to carry it. By declining the safer exit, the narrator argued, Orestes showed himself "almost to be the lover rather than the beloved."

  Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had not framed the relationship in those terms. The homoerotic reading was a Roman-era interpretation. George Frederic Handel's opera Oreste, based on Giangualberto Barlocci's Roman libretto of 1723, premiered at Covent Garden in London in 1734. Darius Milhaud's L'Orestie d'Eschyle, a French-language opera in three parts, was composed across 1913-1923. It drew on Paul Claudel's French translation of Aeschylus. For the Erotes, the two men had "sailed together as it were on the same vessel of life." The text refused to confine their friendship to the limits of Hellas.

• 6. A Kingdom and Its Remains

  ›

  Aletes, Orestes' half-brother by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, had seized Mycenae while Orestes was absent. Orestes killed him and recovered the throne. He then added Argos and Laconia to his control, eventually ruling the whole of the Peloponnesus.

  Before the Trojan War had started, Orestes had been pledged in marriage to Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus and Helen. The matricide changed that arrangement. Menelaus gave Hermione to Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles and Deidamia. Orestes eventually killed Neoptolemus just outside a temple and took Hermione as his wife. Their son Tisamenus inherited the throne and was later killed by the Heracleidae. In some accounts, Orestes also fathered a son named Penthilus by his half-sister Erigone; in others, he married her. One tradition held that Tisamenus was the child of Orestes and Erigone, not of Hermione.

  Orestes died of a snakebite in Arcadia. His body's destination was disputed. Some accounts assigned it to Sparta for burial; a Roman tradition held that his remains were later transferred from Aricia to Rome. Pausanias recorded a sanctuary of the Maniae, goddesses of madness, on the road between Megalopolis and Messene. Local citizens said that was the place where madness had first overtaken Orestes.

  In Sparta, the bones became a strategic matter. Herodotus records that the Oracle at Delphi gave the Spartans a condition. They could not defeat the Tegeans until they moved the bones of Orestes to Sparta. A man named Lichas found them. The bones measured seven cubits, roughly 311 centimeters. Regional bones of that scale have been attributed to Pleistocene animals: horses, mammoths, elephants, deer, cattle, and cetaceans.

  The early 4th century grammarian Maurus Servius Honoratus counted the ashes of Orestes among the seven pignora imperii. These were the sacred pledges whose presence Romans believed kept the empire intact. The other six pledges were the stone of the Mother of the Gods, the terracotta chariot of the Veientines, and the ancile. They also included the sceptre of Priam, the veil of Iliona, and the palladium. The ashes of Orestes were kept at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitolium. A Latin epic called the Orestes Tragoedia, approximately 1,000 hexameter lines long, has been ascribed to Dracontius of Carthage.

  King Telephus, in one variant of the tradition, kidnapped the infant Orestes and held him hostage. His demand was that Achilles heal a wound Telephus had received. Orestes was used as a pawn before he was old enough to understand the word.