Orestes

And Orestes too, you doubtless see in the tragedies blaming the god and reproaching him, whenever he was mad, as though Apollo had counseled him to kill his mother.

and again, in another poet of later times, how Electra, inquiring about her brother with grief and pitying him for his exile, asks somewhat thus:

Indeed, men charge even their private passions to Fortune:

How great a thing this is the feigned fables of the ancients declare, in which, though they are so many and so various and fetched from the remotest antiquity, scarcely three pairs of friends are found, so that, setting out from Theseus, you come at last to Orestes.

Or, being Pylades, will you say that you are Orestes, that you may die for a friend?

'I am Orestes,' and, on the contrary, from the other:

But I see Pylades, the best of friends, coming at a run from Phocis—a pleasant sight!

I blame Loxias, for urging me on to do a deed most unholy, encouraging me with words but not in deed.

and when her sin had found her out, she did not impose punishment on herself, but, to avoid paying the penalty to her husband, punished my father by death.

Who, then, was first and who last to be slain by Ares and Hektor?

Then, when we reach Achaean Argos, wealthiest of all lands, he shall be my son-in-law and I will show him like honor with my own dear son Orestes, who is being nurtured in all abundance.

Then, when we reach Achaean Argos, wealthiest of all lands, you shall be his son-in-law, and he will show you like honor with his own dear son Orestes, who is being nurtured in all abundance.

for I sent Hermes to warn him not to do either of these things, inasmuch as Orestes would be sure to take his revenge when he grew up and wanted to return home.

have you not heard how people are singing Orestes' praises [ kleos] for having killed his father's murderer Aigisthos?

At that moment he was thinking of Aigisthos, who had been killed by Agamemnon's son Orestes;

First, then, in ancient times, as we are told by tradition, in this court alone the gods condescended both to render and to demand satisfaction for homicide, and to sit in judgement upon contending litigants,—Poseidon, according to the legend, deigning to demand justice from Ares on behalf of his son Halirrothius, and the twelve gods to adjudicate between the Eumenides and Orestes.

and that, arguing that Orestes, having slain his own mother, confessing the fact, and finding gods to adjudge his case, was acquitted, they formed the opinion that there is such thing as justifiable homicide,—for gods could not have given an unjust verdict.

You alone of my friends have honored me, Orestes, being as I am in dreadful suffering from Aegisthus, who killed my father, he and my most deadly mother.

A scar along his brow, where he fell and drew blood one day in his father’s home when chasing a fawn with you.

That I see Orestes here, Agamemnon’s son.

and her mother, your wife Clytemnestra, is with her, and the child Orestes, a sight to gladden you after your long absence from your home;

here, take this child Orestes, son of Agamemnon, baby as he still is.

Awake to bless your sister’s wedding;

See, Orestes, I bring you a tablet from your sister here, and give it to you.

O dearest, for you are my dearest, none other, I have you, Orestes, far from our country of Argos, my darling.

And you told me to go to the boundaries of the Tauric land, where Artemis, your sister, has an altar, and to take the statue of the goddess, which is said here to have fallen to this temple from heaven;

in all the contests that the judges announced, he carried away the prize, and men deemed him happy as often as the herald proclaimed him an Argive, by name Orestes, son of

They still live, as he, too, lives, sorrowing in his secluded youth, yet happy in that this famous realm of the Mycenaeans shall one day receive him as a noble lord, if with the blessing of Zeus’s escort he, Orestes, returns to this land.

there, Orestes, is the Lycean market place, named from the wolf-slaying god;

Far away in the regions of darkness, where no ray of light ever enters, there is a country, where men sit at the table of the heroes and dwell with them always —except in the evening.

Should any mortal meet the hero Orestes at night, he would soon be stripped and covered with blows from head to foot.

For this insanity, which, joined with folly, extends more widely, we separate from raving fury.

"Orestes, what disease destroys you?

The son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, by name Orestes, on my way to the oracle of Zeus at Dodona.

a stranger of foreign appearance from some other land comes hurrying towards us.

Thereupon the rumour, spread by Orestes, proved to have great weight, suggesting that my master was lying and had come on a shameful errand.

This passage is parallel to a better known passage in the Eumenides of Æschylus, in which Apollo, as advocate for Orestes, argues that he was not of kin to his mother, Clytemnestra, whom he had killed.

for we are told, in the third book of the Odyssey, that Ægisthus, who had added the crime of murder to that of adultery, was honoured with funeral ceremonies by Orestes, the son of the murdered king.

Do you think that the mad Orestes, or Margites, the greatest fool of all time, would act like that?

So we have songs telling also how Orestes, Pylades, Theseus, Peirithous, and many other illustrious demi-gods wrought glorious deeds of valour side by side, not because they shared a common bed but because of mutual admiration and respect.