Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Six days after killing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, Orestes lies delirious at Argos, tormented by visions of the Erinyes, nursed by Electra. The city prepares to judge the matricides. Menelaus arrives from Troy with Helen; he proves a hollow ally, unwilling to risk Tyndareus’s anger. Tyndareus demands death by stoning. The Argive assembly condemns Orestes and Electra; Pylades, loyal to the point of sharing their sentence, joins them. In desperation the three plot to kill Helen and seize Hermione as hostage to force Menelaus’s help. A Phrygian slave’s comic-tragic report describes the attack: Helen vanishes (rescued by Apollo, in the play’s turn), Hermione is taken. Menelaus storms the palace; Orestes threatens to kill Hermione and burn the house. Apollo appears on high, restrains the violence, declares that Helen shall become a starry savior of sailors, that Orestes must wander, stand trial at the Areopagus, marry Hermione, and that Pylades shall wed Electra—tying the bloody aftermath to cult and dynastic endings. Euripides’ *Orestes* thus stages political cynicism, friendship, and a last-minute divine settlement rather than Aeschylus’s solemn founding of the Areopagus courtroom (already catalogued in entry 058). It belongs after the revenge plays and beside *IT* as an alternative tragic “what next” for the Atreid survivors.