Orestes (486-575)

Always to honor one’s kin is a custom in Hellas.

And another custom is to yield a willing deference to the laws.

The wise hold that everything which depends on necessity is a slave.

Keep that wisdom for yourself; I will not have it.

Yes, for you are angry, and also old age is not wise.

What does a dispute about foolishness have to do with him? If right and wrong are clear to all, who was ever more senseless than this man, because he never weighed the justice of the case,

nor appealed to the universal law of Hellas? For instance, when Agamemnon breathed his last struck on his head by my daughter a most foul deed, which I will never defend,

he should have brought a charge against his mother and inflicted a holy penalty for bloodshed, banishing her from his house; thus he would have gained moderation instead of calamity, keeping strictly to the law and showing his piety as well. As it is, he has come into the same fate as his mother.

for though he had just cause for thinking her a wicked woman, he has become more wicked by murdering her.

I will ask you, Menelaus, just one question. If a man’s wedded wife should kill him, and his son in turn will kill his mother in revenge;

next the avenger’s son to expiate this murder will commit another: where will the chain of horrors end?

Our forefathers settled these matters the right way. They forbade any one with blood upon his hands to appear in their sight or cross their path;

but they purified him by exile, they did not kill him in revenge. Otherwise someone, by taking the pollution last upon his hands, is always going to be liable to have his own blood shed.

Now I hate wicked women, especially my daughter who killed her husband;

Helen, too, your own wife, I will never commend, nor would I even speak to her; and I do not envy you a voyage to Troy for a worthless woman. But the law I will defend with all my might, to put an end to this brutal spirit of murder,

which is always the ruin of countries and cities alike. Turning to Orestes Wretch! Had you no heart when your mother was baring her breast in her appeal to you? I, who did not see that awful deed, weep unhappy tears from my old eyes.

One thing at least agrees with what I say: you are hated by the gods, and you pay atonement for your mother by your fits of madness and terror. Why do I need to hear from other witnesses what I can see for myself? Therefore, Menelaus, take heed;

do not oppose the gods in your wish to help this man; but leave him to be stoned to death by the citizens, or do not set foot on Spartan land. My daughter is dead, and rightly; but it should not have been his hand that slew her.

In all except my daughters I have been a happy man; there I am not blessed.

He is enviable, who is fortunate in his children, and does not bring hazardous notoriety on himself.

Old man, I am afraid to speak before you,

in a matter where I am sure to grieve you to the heart. I am unholy because I killed my mother, I know it, yet holy on another count, because I avenged my father. Only let your years, which frighten me from speaking, set no barrier in the path of my words,

and I will go forward; but now I fear your gray hairs.

What ought I to have done? Set one thing against another. My father begot me; your daughter gave me birth, being the field that received the seed from another; for without a father no child would ever be born.

So I reasoned that I ought to stand by the author of my being rather than the woman who undertook to rear me. Now your daughter—I am ashamed to call her mother—came to a man’s bed in a private and unchaste wedding; I speak against myself when I speak

badly of her, yet I will speak. Aegisthus was her secret husband in the home; I killed him, and I sacrificed my mother, an unholy crime, no doubt, but done to avenge my father.

Now, as regards the matters for which I deserve to be stoned as you threatened,

hear the service I am conferring on all Hellas. For if women become so bold as to murder their husbands, taking refuge in their children, with the mother’s breast to catch the pity, they would think nothing of destroying their husbands

on any charge whatsoever. But I, by a horrible crime, as you boast it to be, have put an end to this custom. I hated my mother and killed her justly. She was false to her husband when he was gone from his home to fight for all Hellas at the head of its armies,

and she did not keep his bed undefiled; 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. By the gods! it is not a good time for me to mention the gods,