Orestes

Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytæmnestra. When his father was murdered by his mother and her paramour Ægisthus he was saved by his sister Electra, who sent him secretly to Phocis to the court of Strophius, husband of Agamemnon's sister. Here he formed a romantic friendship with the king's son, Pylares, and as soon as he had grown up the pair went secretly to Argos, and slew Clytæmnestra and Ægisthus. Madness seized him after the matricide, and he fled from land to land, ever haunted by the avenging Erinyes or Furies. At Athens, whither he had fled by advice of Apollo, he was purged of guilt by the Areopagus. Learning from Apollo, according to another story, that he could only recover from his madness by carrying off the statue of Artemis from the Tauric Chersonesus, he journeyed thither along with Pylares, but the friends were seized by the natives to be sacrificed to Artemis. Her priestess Iphigenia recognised her brother in Orestes, and all three escaped together, carrying the statue with them. Orestes recovered his father's kingdom at Mycenæ, slew Neoptolemus, and married his wife Hermione, who had been formerly promised to himself. The story of Orestes afforded a favourite theme to the great tragedians—to Æschylus in the extant trilogy, the Orestia; to Sophocles in his Electra; to Euripides in his Orestes and Electra. See Becker, Die Orestes-sage der Griechen (1858).