Orestes, the son of Agamemnon who killed his mother

Orestes is the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, heir of Mycenae, who comes back from exile to kill his mother’s lover and then his mother. His is the most extreme case Greek thought ever constructed: a man whom two sacred duties order to do incompatible things. Athenian tragedy drew from it not a moral but an institution — the city’s first criminal court.

The Homeric model

In the Odyssey, Orestes is not a dilemma but an example. Zeus opens the poem by citing Aegisthus, who seduced Agamemnon’s wife and killed the king on his return in spite of a divine warning; “and so Orestes took his revenge” (1.29-43). Athena and Nestor both hold him up to Telemachus as the son to be: Orestes “won great glory among men” (1.298-300).

What stands out is what Homer does not say. He narrates the killing of Aegisthus but not that of Clytemnestra: he mentions only in passing that Orestes gave the Argives a funeral feast “for his hateful mother and for cowardly Aegisthus” (3.309-310). The matricide is there in outline and never named. No Furies, no oracle, no trial: the vengeance is good, and it closes the case.

Stesichorus and the entry of the Furies

Sixth-century lyric is what loads the story. In his Oresteia, Stesichorus has Apollo give Orestes a horn bow to drive off the powers pursuing him, and assigns Clytemnestra the warning dream of a snake with a bloodied crest from which a king emerges. Pindar, in the eleventh Pythian, tells how the nurse Arsinoe saved the child from Clytemnestra’s hands and sent him to Strophius in Phocis, at the foot of Parnassus — from where he will return to kill his mother and Aegisthus (11.15-37).

Aeschylus’ Oresteia

The Libation Bearers (458 BC) opens at Agamemnon’s tomb. Orestes, back in secret with his friend Pylades, lays a lock of his hair on it; Electra, who has come with the offerings her mother sent to avert a nightmare, recognises the lock, then a footprint, then a piece of weaving she made herself. Orestes then sets out the oracle: Apollo threatened him with leprosy, exile and death if he failed to avenge his father (269-296).

He presents himself at the palace under a false name, announces his own death, and kills Aegisthus. Then Clytemnestra comes out, bares her breast and reminds him that he was fed there. Orestes turns to Pylades — “what do I do?” — and Pylades, silent for the whole play until now, speaks his only three lines: remember the oracle of Loxias, better to have every man for an enemy than the gods (900-902). Orestes strikes. At the play’s end he alone sees black-robed women with snakes in their hair closing in; the chorus sees nothing. He flees to Delphi.

The Eumenides takes the case to court. Purified by Apollo but still hunted, Orestes reaches Athens and takes refuge as a suppliant at the statue of Athena. The goddess refuses to decide alone and founds a court of citizens on the hill of Ares: the Areopagus. The Furies prosecute — a mother’s blood is blood of one’s own blood; Apollo defends with an argument from archaic physiology, that the true parent is the father and the mother merely nurses the seed. The ballots are counted: the vote is tied, and Athena’s suffrage acquits the defendant. The Furies threaten to blight Attica, then agree to become the Semnai, powers honoured beneath the Acropolis.

Sophocles and Euripides: one act, three verdicts

Sophocles, in his Electra, reverses the order of the killings — Clytemnestra first, Aegisthus after — and removes the Furies entirely. His play contains the urn scene: Orestes in disguise brings his sister the vessel supposedly holding his own ashes and listens to her mourn him before revealing himself (1098-1231). The drama ends in victory, with no shadow over it.

Euripides refuses that comfort. In his Electra the murder happens in a peasant’s hut and the two children leave the stage crushed, while the Dioscuri reproach them for obeying an oracle unworthy of Apollo. In Orestes (408 BC) the hero is an invalid on a sickbed, wrecked by fits, condemned to death by the assembly of Argos; with Pylades and Electra he tries to kill Helen and takes her daughter Hermione hostage at swordpoint, until Apollo appears to untie the knot. It is the darkest version of all: the avenger has become a dynastic terrorist.

After the trial: the Tauric land, Hermione, Arcadia

Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians gives Orestes one more penance: because part of the Furies refuse the verdict, Apollo orders him to fetch the image of Artemis from the Tauric land. There he finds Iphigenia, the sister he believed dead at Aulis, and comes home with her. The play also serves as an aetiology for an Athenian custom: Orestes, received at Athens on the day of the Choes, is said to have drunk at a separate table, each man from his own jug, so as not to pollute the other guests — hence the rite of the Anthesteria (947-960).

What follows belongs to genealogy more than to drama. Orestes marries Hermione, daughter of Menelaus and Helen, who had been promised to him and then given to Neoptolemus; he kills his rival at Delphi (Euripides, Andromache 993-1008; Apollodorus, Epitome 6.14). He rules Mycenae, Argos and Sparta, and dies in Arcadia of a snakebite (Epitome 6.28).

The bones of Orestes: a myth turned political

Herodotus tells the most concrete episode of Orestes’ posthumous career. The Spartans, beaten by Tegea, consulted Delphi; the Pythia told them to bring home the bones of Orestes. They had no idea where to look, until one Lichas, at Tegea, walked into a blacksmith’s yard and was shown a seven-cubit coffin dug up there. Lichas understood, rented the forge by a ruse, dug up the bones and carried them to Sparta; from that day, Herodotus says, the Spartans had the upper hand over Tegea (1.67-68).

The episode belongs to the mid-sixth century. It shows what a hero was for in archaic Greece: a relic, a territorial argument, a way for Sparta to present itself as heir of the Achaean kings — and not merely a character in a story.

Why he matters

Orestes is the point at which Greek myth stops narrating revenges and starts asking how they end. Aeschylus answers with an institution: from the Areopagus verdict on, blood is no longer avenged by the family but judged by the city. That shift — from vendetta to court — is the central claim of the Oresteia, which is why the trilogy closes with a civic procession rather than a punishment.

Psychoanalysis and the modern stage kept the other side of him, the son crushed by a dead father. He returns in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), in Sartre’s The Flies (1943), where Orestes freely owns his crime against a tyrannical god, and across post-war European theatre, which has often read the Oresteia as the story of a justice that is hard to found.

Further reading

For the father whose murder he avenges, see Agamemnon; for the mother he kills, Clytemnestra. For the sister who waits for him and recognises him at the tomb, see Electra; for the one he finds among the Taurians, Iphigenia. For the god who commands and then defends him, see Apollo and the sanctuary at Delphi; for the family curse he is the last link of, Pelops.