Orestes

Revenge at Mycenae

In the plays of the playwright Aeschylus, Orestes avenges one parent by killing the other. His father Agamemnon came home from the war at Troy to the royal house of Mycenae. There he was killed by his wife Clytemnestra, the mother of Orestes, and her partner Aegisthus.

Orestes returns later in secret. He meets his sister Electra at their father’s grave and enters the palace to carry out the revenge the god Apollo has ordered.

He kills Aegisthus first. The harder moment follows when Clytemnestra appeals to the bond between mother and son. Orestes hesitates and asks his companion Pylades what to do. Pylades has been silent the whole play. His only words remind Orestes of Apollo’s oracle, the god’s command, and warn him not to make an enemy of the god. Orestes accepts the command and takes Clytemnestra inside to die beside Aegisthus.

Two claims he cannot both obey

Aeschylus refuses to make the conflict simple. Apollo commands the son to answer his father’s murder. The Erinyes, goddesses of vengeance, insist that Clytemnestra’s blood creates a new debt. Orestes can obey one claim only by breaking the other.

The revenge puts no household right. Orestes shows the robe that was used to trap Agamemnon and tries to explain why what he did was just. Then he sees figures that the chorus, the group of singers on stage, cannot see. They are the Erinyes, dressed in black and wreathed with snakes. He leaves for Apollo’s sanctuary, the god’s sacred ground, and they follow him.

Mycenae lies within the Nafplio destination. In this story it is more than a royal address. It is the ground where each killing claims to answer the one before. Orestes leaves it neither a clear winner nor a man whose duty is done.

The trial in Athens

Apollo purifies Orestes, but that does not persuade the Erinyes to drop their claim. Orestes at last reaches Athens and takes refuge at the statue of the goddess Athena. She hears both sides and refuses to decide the case by her own command. Instead she chooses Athenian jurors and sets up a court for murder on the Hill of Ares, the Areopagus.

The trial gives the old pursuit the form of a city’s law. Apollo speaks for Orestes. The Erinyes prosecute him for killing his mother, which nobody disputes. Athena announces in advance that equal votes will acquit the accused. The votes divide evenly, and that rule sets Orestes free.

The acquittal does not find that Clytemnestra’s death does not matter. Nor does it prove that Apollo’s order wiped out the bond between mother and son. The split vote makes disagreement part of the result. Orestes may go home because the court has reached the limit of what the law can do. Not every duty has been settled.

The goddesses beside the court

Orestes leaves Athens after promising a lasting alliance between his land and the city. The Erinyes are still furious. Athena must then persuade them to accept honours, worship and a home beside the court, instead of blighting Attica, the land around Athens, in anger at the verdict.

The Greek traveller Pausanias later records a sanctuary of these goddesses beside the Areopagus. The Athenians knew them there as the Semnai Theai, the August Goddesses. The sanctuary shows that Athenians worshipped them. It does not show that a real trial took place there. Even so, its position fixes the myth on the ground: the court and the avengers sit side by side.

That arrangement shows what the trial does for Orestes. It ends the pursuit without pretending that vengeance has gone. He is freed only after the killing he inherited has been heard by other voices, counted in public and settled in a way that also gives his accusers a place.