THE REIGN OF ORESTES

AEGISTHUS’S son Aletes now usurped the kingdom of Mycenae, believing the malicious rumour [spread by Oeax] that Orestes and Pylades had been sacrificed on the altar of Tauric Artemis. But Electra, doubting its truth, went to consult the Delphic Oracle. Iphigeneia had just arrived at Delphi, and [Oeax] pointed her out to Electra as Orestes’s murderess. Revengefully she seized a firebrand from the altar and, not recognizing Iphigeneia after the lapse of years, was about to blind her with it, when Orestes himself entered and explained all. The reunited children of Agamemnon then went joyfully back to Mycenae, where Orestes ended the feud between the House of Atreus and the House of Thyestes, by killing Aletes; whose sister Erigone, it is said, would also have perished by his hand, had not Artemis snatched her away to Attica. But afterwards Orestes relented towards her.

b. Some say that Iphigeneia died either at Brauron, or at Megara, where she now has a sanctuary; others, that Artemis immortalized her as the Younger Hecate. Electra, married to Pylades, bore him Medon and Strophius the Second; she lies buried at Mycenae. Orestes married his cousin Hermione-having been present at the sacrificial murder of Achilles’s son Neoptolemus, to whom she was betrothed. By her he became the father of Tisamenus, his heir and successor; and by Erigone his second wife, of Penthilus.

c. When Menelaus died, the Spartans invited Orestes to become their king, preferring him, as a grandson of Tyndareus, to Nicostratus and Megapenthes, begotten by Menelaus on a slave-girl. Orestes who, with the help of troops furnished by his Phocian allies, had already added a large part of Arcadia to his Mycenaean domains, now made himself master of Argos as well; for King Cylarabes, grandson of Capaneus, left no issue. He also subdued Achaea but, in obedience to the Delphic Oracle, finally emigrated from Mycenae to Arcadia where, at the age of seventy, he died of a snake bite at Oresteium, or Orestia, the town which he had founded during his exile.

d. Orestes was buried at Tegea, but in the reign of Anaxandrides, co-king with Aristo, and the only Laconian who ever had two wives and occupied two houses at the same time, the Spartans, in despair because they had hitherto lost every battle fought with the Tegeans, sent to Delphi for advice, and were instructed to possess themselves of Orestes’s bones. Since the whereabouts of these were unknown, they sent Lichas, one of Sparta’s benefactors, to ask for further enlightenment. He was given the following response in hexameters:

Level and smooth the plain of Arcadian Tegea.

Go thou Where two winds are ever, by strong necessity, blowing; Where stroke rings upon stroke, where evil lies upon evil;

There all-teeming earth doth enclose the prince whom thou seekest. Bring thou him to the, house, and thus be Tegea’s master!

Because of a temporary truce between the two states, Lichas had no difficulty in visiting Tegea; where he came upon a smith forging a sword of iron, instead of bronze, and gazed open-mouthed at the novel sight. ‘Does this work surprise you?’ cried the jovial smith. ‘Well, I have something here to surprise you even more! It is a coffin, seven cubits long, containing  a corpse of the same length, which I found beneath the smithy floor while I was digging yonder well.’

e. Lichas guessed that the winds mentioned in the verses must be those raised by the smith’s bellows; the strokes those of his hammer; and the evil lying upon evil, his hammer- head beating out the iron sword-for the Iron Age brought in cruel days. He at once returned with the news to Sparta, where the judges, at his own suggestion, pretended to condemn him for a crime of violence; then, fleeing to Tegea as if from execution, he persuaded the smith to hide him in the smithy. At midnight, he stole the bones out of the coffin and hurried back to Sparta, where he re-interred them near the sanctuary of the Fates; the tomb is still shown. Spartan armies have ever since been consistently victorious over the Tegeans.

f. Pelops’s spear-sceptre, which his grandson Orestes also wielded, was discovered in Phocis about this time: lying buried with a hoard of gold on the frontier between Chaeronea and Phanoteus, where it had probably been hidden by Electra. When an inquest was held on this treasure-trove, the Phanotians were content with the gold; but the Chaeroneans took the sceptre, and now worship it as their supreme deity. Each priest of the spear, appointed for one year, keeps it in his own house, offering daily victims to its divinity, beside tables lavishly spread with every kind of food.

g. Yet some deny that Orestes died in Arcadia. They say that after his term of exile there, he was ordered by an oracle to visit Lesbos and Tenedos and found colonies, with settlers gathered from various cities, including Amyclae. He did so, calling his new people Aeolians because Aeolus was their nearest common ancestor, but died soon after building a city in Lesbos. This migration took place, they say, four generations before the Ionian. Others, however, declare that Orestes’s son Penthilus, not Orestes himself, conquered Lesbos; that his grandson Gras, aided by the Spartans, occupied the country between Ionia and Mysia, now called Aeolis; and that another grandson, Archelaus, took Aeolian settlers to the present city of Cyzicene, near Dascylium, on the southern shores of the Sea of Marmara.

h. Tisamenus meanwhile succeeded to his father’s dominions, but was driven from the capital cities of Sparta, Mycenae, and Argos by the sons of Heracles, and took refuge with his army in Achaea. His son Cometes emigrated to Asia.

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1. Iphigeneia seems to have been a title of the earlier Artemis, who was not merely maiden, but also nymph-‘Iphigeneia’ means ‘mothering a strong race’-and crone, namely the Solemn Ones or Triple Hecate. Orestes is said to have reigned in so many places that his name must also be regarded as a title. His death by snake bite at Arcadian Oresteia links him with other primitive kings: such as Apesantus son of Acrisius, identifiable with Opheltes of Nemea; Munitus son of Athamas; Mopsus the Lapith, bitten by a Libyan snake; and Egyptian Ra, an aspect of Osiris, also bitten by a Libyan snake. These bites are always in the heel; in some cases, among them those of Cheiron and Pholus the Centaurs, Talus the Cretan, Achilles the Myrmidon, and Philoctetes the Euboean, the venom seems to have been conveyed on an arrow-point. The Arcadian Orestes was, in fact, a Pelasgian with Libyan connections.

2. Artemis’s rescue of Erigone from Orestes' vengeance is one more incident in the feud between the House of Thyestes, assisted by Artemis, and the House of Atreus, assisted by Zeus. Tisamenus’s name (‘avenging strength’) suggests that the feud was bequeathed to the succeeding generation: because, according to one of Apollodorus’s accounts (Epitome), he was Erigone’s son, not Hermione’s. Throughout the story of this feud it must be remembered that the Artemis who here measures her strength with Zeus is the earlier matriarchal Artemis, rather than Apollo’s loving twin, the maiden huntress; the mythographers have done their best to obscure Apollo’s active participation, on Zeus’s side, in this divine quarrel.

3. Giants’ bones, usually identified with those of a tribal ancestor, were regarded as a magical means of protecting a city; thus the Athenians, by oracular inspiration, recovered what they claimed to be Theseus’s bones from Scyros and brought them back to Athens). These may well have been unusually large, because a race of giants-of which the Hamitic Watusi who live in Equatorial Africa are an offshoot-flourished in Neolithic Europe, and their seven-foot skeletons have occasionally been found even in Britain. The Anakim of Palestine and Caria belonged to this race. However, if Orestes was an Achaean of the Trojan War period, the Athenians could not have found and measured his skeleton, since the  Homeric nobles practised cremation, not inhumation in the Neolithic style.

4. ‘Evil lying upon evil’ is usually interpreted as the iron sword that was being forged on an iron anvil; but stone anvils were the rule until a comparatively late epoch, and the hammer-head as it rests upon the sword is the more likely explanation-though, indeed, iron hammers were also rare until Roman times. Iron was too holy and infrequent a metal for common use by the Mycenaeans-not being extracted from ore, but collected in the form of divinely-sent meteorites-and when eventually iron weapons were imported into Greece from Tibarene on the Black Sea, the smelting process and manufacture remained secret for some time. Blacksmiths continued to be called ‘bronze workers’ even in the Hellenistic period: But as soon as anyone might possess an iron weapon or tool, the age of myth came to an end; if only because iron was not included among the five metals sacred to the goddess and linked with her calendar rites: namely, silver, gold, copper, tin, and lead.

5. Pelops’s spear-sceptre, token of sovereignty, evidently belonged to the ruling priestess; thus, according to Euripides, the spear with which Oenomaus was killed- presumably the same instrument-was hidden in Iphigeneia’s bedroom; Clytaemnestra then claims to possess it (Sophocles: Electra); and Electra is said by Pausanias to have brought it  to Phocis. The Greeks of Asia Minor were pleased to think that Orestes had founded the first Aeolian colony there: his name being one of their royal titles. They may have been relying on a tradition that concerned a new stage in the history of kingship: when the king’s reign came to an end, he was now spared death and allowed to sacrifice a surrogate-an act of homicide that would account for Orestes’s second exile-after which he might lead a colony overseas. The mythographers who explained that the Spartans preferred Orestes to Menelaus’s sons because these were born of a slave-woman, did not realize that descent was still matrilineal. Orestes, as a Mycenaean, could reign by marriage to the Spartan heiress Hermione; her brothers must seek kingdoms elsewhere. In Argolis a princess could have free-born children by a slave; and there was nothing to prevent Electra’s peasant husband at Mycenae from raising claimants for the throne.

6. The psalmist’s tradition that ‘the days of a man are three score and ten,’ is founded not on observation, but on religious theory: seven was the number of holiness, and ten of perfection. Orestes similarly attained seventy years.

7. Anaxandrides’s breach of the monogamic tradition may have been due to dynastic necessity; perhaps Aristo, his co-king, died too soon before the end of his reign to warrant a new coronation and, since he had ruled by virtue of his marriage to an heiress, Anaxandrides substituted for him both as king and husband.

8. Hittite records show that there was already an Achaean kingdom in Lesbos during the late fourteenth century.