Son of the Cursed House
Orestes was born into the most cursed family in Greek mythology — the House of Atreus, descended from Tantalus. His father was Agamemnon, the king who led the Greeks at Troy. His mother was Clytemnestra. His sister was Electra.
When Agamemnon returned from the Trojan War, Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus murdered him. Young Orestes was spirited away to safety, but he grew up knowing that duty demanded he avenge his father — even though that meant killing his own mother.
The Impossible Choice
Orestes faced a dilemma with no good answer. Apollo commanded him to avenge his father by killing Clytemnestra. But the ancient law of blood guilt — enforced by the Furies (Erinyes) — demanded that anyone who killed their own mother be hunted to madness and death.
He would be punished for acting. He would be punished for not acting. This is the tragic bind that makes the Oresteia one of the greatest works of Western literature.
The Matricide
Orestes returned to Argos with his cousin Pylades, entered the palace in disguise, and killed Aegisthus first. Then he confronted Clytemnestra. She bared her breast and begged him to spare the mother who nursed him. In Aeschylus's version, Orestes hesitated — then looked to Pylades, who reminded him of Apollo's command. He killed her.
Immediately, the Furies appeared — ancient goddesses of vengeance, older than the Olympians, with blood dripping from their eyes and serpents writhing in their hair. They chased Orestes across Greece, driving him to the edge of madness.
Trial at Athens
Orestes fled to Athens, where Athena established the first murder trial in history — the Areopagus court. Apollo served as Orestes' defense attorney. The Furies prosecuted. Athena presided as judge.
The jury of Athenian citizens voted — and the result was a tie. Athena cast the deciding vote in Orestes' favor, acquitting him. She then persuaded the Furies to accept a new role as the Eumenides ('Kindly Ones'), protectors of Athens, transforming the cycle of vengeance into a system of justice.
This trial represents one of the foundational myths of democratic law — the moment violence gave way to civic order.
Quick Facts
Parents: Agamemnon and Clytemnestra
Siblings: Electra, Iphigenia, Chrysothemis
Act: Matricide — killed Clytemnestra to avenge Agamemnon
Pursued by: The Furies (Erinyes)
Acquitted by: Athena at the Areopagus
Source: Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy
From Homer's model son to the tragic matricide
In the Odyssey Orestes is held up repeatedly as an example to Telemachus: a son who won glory by killing Aegisthus, his father's murderer. Nestor says he returned from Athens in the eighth year of Aegisthus' rule, killed him, and held a funeral feast "for his hateful mother and the cowardly Aegisthus." Homer never says outright that Orestes killed Clytemnestra, and there are no Furies. The moral crisis that dominates later versions is almost invisible in epic.
The lyric poet Stesichorus, in his lost Oresteia, moved the story toward tragedy. Fragments show Clytemnestra dreaming of a snake with a bloodied head, and Apollo giving Orestes a bow to defend himself against the Erinyes. Pindar's eleventh Pythian adds that his nurse Arsinoe saved him from the slaughter and that he was raised by Strophius at the foot of Parnassus, whose son Pylades became his lifelong companion. (Aeschylus calls the nurse Cilissa; Stesichorus is said to have named her Laodameia.)
Three tragedians, three Oresteses
Each of the great tragedians handled the revenge differently. In Aeschylus' Libation Bearers (458 BC), Electra recognises her brother by a lock of hair on Agamemnon's tomb, footprints matching her own, and a piece of weaving she once made for him. In his Electra, Euripides openly mocks these tokens through Electra's scepticism, a famous moment of literary parody.
Sophocles' Electra builds its suspense on a false report that Orestes has died in a chariot crash at the Pythian games, and on Electra mourning over an urn she thinks contains his ashes. Sophocles also reverses the usual order, so that Clytemnestra dies before Aegisthus, and the play ends without the Furies appearing at all.
Euripides' Orestes (408 BC) is the strangest: days after the murder, the sick, half-mad Orestes, with Electra and Pylades, is condemned to death by the Argive assembly; the three try to kill Helen and take her daughter Hermione hostage, and the palace is about to burn when Apollo appears and orders Orestes to marry Hermione. In Euripides' Andromache, Orestes engineers the killing at Delphi of Neoptolemus, Achilles' son, who had married Hermione first.
Cult, relics and what readers get wrong
Orestes was more than a stage figure. Herodotus (1.67–68) tells how the Spartans, told by Delphi they would never defeat Tegea until they brought home Orestes' bones, found a gigantic coffin under a blacksmith's yard at Tegea and carried the remains to Sparta, after which their fortunes turned. Pausanias describes a place in Arcadia called Maniai, "the Madnesses," where Orestes was driven insane and bit off one of his fingers; nearby was a shrine called Akē, "Healing," where the Furies, black while they tormented him, turned white once he was cured. At Troezen he was purified in a special hut, and in Athens the drinking contest at the festival of the Choes, when each person drank in silence from his own jug, was explained as a custom begun so that the polluted Orestes could be hosted without sharing a cup. Apollodorus says he finally died of snakebite at Oresteion in Arcadia, leaving a son, Tisamenus, as king.
Two common claims need care. The Areopagus trial is often called the first murder trial ever, but in myth the court was named for an earlier case in which Ares was tried for killing Poseidon's son Halirrhothius. And whether Athena's vote created the tie or broke it is still debated by scholars of the Eumenides; the text can be read either way.
In art, a red-figure krater by the Eumenides Painter in the Louvre shows Orestes at Delphi as Apollo purifies him with the blood of a piglet while the Furies sleep. Modern retellings include Richard Strauss's opera Elektra (1909), Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) and Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies (1943). The story of his sister continues in Iphigenia's Taurian adventure, and the full background is on the pages for Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and the Furies.
Ancient sources
- Homer, Odyssey 1.29–43 and 3.303–310 — Orestes as the avenger of Agamemnon and model for Telemachus.
- Aeschylus, Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides) — the recognition, the matricide, the pursuit by the Furies and the trial at the Areopagus.
- Sophocles, Electra — the false report of Orestes' death and the urn scene.
- Euripides, Electra, Orestes and Iphigenia in Tauris — the parody of the recognition tokens, the attempt on Helen, and the journey to the Taurians to recover Artemis' image.
- Herodotus, Histories 1.67–68 — the Spartan recovery of Orestes' bones from Tegea.
- Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.34.1–4 — Maniai, the bitten finger and the black and white Furies.
Frequently asked questions
Does Orestes kill his mother in Homer?
Homer only says he killed Aegisthus and buried both him and Clytemnestra; the matricide is implied at most. The Furies and the moral dilemma come from later poets, especially Aeschylus.
Who was Pylades?
Orestes' cousin and closest friend, son of Strophius of Phocis, who raised Orestes in exile. He helps with the revenge and later marries Electra.
What happened to Orestes after the trial?
Accounts differ. Euripides sends him to the Taurians to bring back Artemis' statue, where he finds Iphigenia. He later married Hermione, ruled Argos and Sparta, and was said to have died of a snakebite in Arcadia.
Why did Apollo order Orestes to kill Clytemnestra?
Apollo demanded vengeance for Agamemnon, threatening Orestes with sickness and madness if he refused. In the Eumenides he defends the act by arguing that the father, not the mother, is the true parent.