Orestes

• Revenge and Madness

• Iphigeneia among the Taurians

• King of Argos and Sparta

Revenge and Madness

Orestes was the King of Argos and Sparta, and the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Orestes (Ὀρέστης) was brother of Iphigeneia, Electra and Chrysothemis.

There are several variations of what happened after Agamemnon's death, different from Aeschylus' plays — how Orestes avenged his father and what happened to Orestes.

For eight years, Strophius, the king of Phocis, reared Orestes. Orestes befriended Pylades, Strophius' son. When Orestes consulted the oracle in Delphi, he was told to avenge his father's death by killing Aegisthus (Aigisthos) and his mother.

Forced into a dilemma, Orestes returned to Argos with Pylades where he was reunited with his sister, Electra (Ἠλέκτρη). Electra helped him decide to follow the oracle's instructions. With Pylades, he murdered Aegisthus and despite pleas for mercy from his mother, Orestes also killed Clytemnestra.

The Furies (Erinyes) immediately afflicted Orestes with madness for murdering a blood kin, his mother. Though Clytemnestra had plotted with her lover to murder Orestes' father, she did not actually kill him. Even if Orestes did not murder his mother, he would still be afflicted with madness by the Erinyes for not fully avenging his father's death. Such was the duality of the Erinyes' nature.

After wandering from place to place, he sought help from Delphi again. Apollo sent him to Athens to be tried by the Athenian jury, presided over by the goddess Athena. Though the jury was evenly divided on his guilt or innocence, Athena decided to acquit Orestes of murder. To prevent the Erinyes from continuing to persecute Orestes and to restore his sanity, she introduced the worship of the Erinyes in Athens.

The Erinyes (Furies) then became known as the Eumenides, which means the "Kindly Ones".

Sophocles and Euripides also both wrote plays titled Electra. According to Sophocles' play, Electra waited outside while Orestes murdered their mother. According to Euripides, Electra took a far more aggressive role, urging him on and actively helping her brother to kill their mother.

According to another play by Euripides titled Orestes, Tyndareüs arrested Orestes and Electra for murdering his daughter Clytemnestra. Tyndareus was going to try Orestes and Electra and they would have been sentenced to death, but the brother and sister escaped. The pair tried to kill Helen, but Zeus spirited his daughter away, so they took their cousin Hermione, daughter of Menelaüs and Helen, as hostage. At this point Apollo intervened, sentencing Orestes to live in exile for a year before being tried and acquitted in Athens.

Iphigeneia among the Taurians

Another story by Euripides said that he would continue to suffer from madness inflicted by the Erinyes unless he brought back a wooden image of Artemis from the land of the Taurians, north of the Black Sea. The Taurians, like the Colchians, were known for hostilities to foreigners. The Taurians were known to perform human sacrifices upon foreigners to the goddess Artemis.

Accompanied by his loyal friend Pylades, they were soon captured. The two prisoners were brought to the high priestess Iphigeneia (Ἰφιγένεια), Orestes' sister. Neither knew the other's identity until Orestes told his stories. Reunited with his long lost sister, they planned to escape and return home with the statue. They would have been killed by the Taurians had the goddess not intervened on her brother's behalf (Apollo's).

Iphigeneia's return home would have ended in tragedy, according to Hyginus. Electra heard untrue news that Iphigeneia had sacrificed their brother. Electra, in a fit of rage, would have blinded her older sister with a firebrand, but Orestes arrived just in time to intervene.

King of Argos and Sparta

Cured of the madness and no longer persecuted by the Erinyes, Orestes returned to Mycenae. Aletes, son of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, was ruling Mycenae during Orestes' absence. He had Aletes murdered and Orestes became king of Mycenae. Not long after he ruled Mycenae, Orestes seized the throne from his neighbouring kingdom, Argos, from Cylarabes (). Cylarabes was a descendant of Proëtus (Proetus or Proitos).

Before the war with Troy began, Agamemnon and Menelaüs (Menelaus) had decided to arrange a marriage between Orestes and his cousin Hermione (Ἑρμιόνη), daughter of Menelaüs and Helen. But during his exile in Phocis and later the persecution and madness from the Erinyes, Hermione instead was married to Neoptolemus (Νεοπτόλεμος), son of Achilles and Deïdaemeia, upon their return from Troy. Orestes' jealousy led him to have Neoptolemus murdered. Orestes would have also killed Neoptolemus' sons (Molossus, Pielus and Pergamus) by his Trojan concubine Andromache, had they not been rescued by their great-grandfather Peleus.

By marrying his cousin, Orestes also became the king of Sparta. He ruled two powerful kingdoms, Argos and Sparta. By Hermione, he became the father of Tisamenus. Orestes died in Oresteion, a place named after him in Arcadia, when he was bitten by a snake.

Fifty years after the death of Hyllus, the exiled Heraclids (descendants of Heracles) invaded the Peloponnesus under the leadership of Aristomachus, grandson of Hyllus. Orestes defeated the Heraclids, and Aristomachus was killed in one of the raids. The Heraclids withdrew from the Peloponnesus again and would not return until Orestes' son Tisamenus was ruling both Argos and Sparta.

See the Heraclids, for more detail about the Heraclids' return from exile.

According to a later legend told by Herodotus, Orestes' bone was buried in Tegea, Arcadia. Sparta was at war against the Tegeans and sought advice from the oracle in Delphi. They learned that they could never capture Tegea unless they found the bones of Orestes and re-bury him in Sparta. The Spartans sent a spy to Tegea, and the spy learned that Orestes was buried under the anvil of the blacksmith in Tegea. He recovered the bones and brought them to Sparta. From that point, Sparta captured Tegea, and Arcadia came under the hegemony of Sparta.