Orestes and Agamemnon

Orestes and Agamemnon are father and son in the Oresteia, bound by a chain of familial violence that turns filial loyalty into revenge. Agamemnon’s death becomes the reason Orestes kills his mother, Clytemnestra; that act then brings the Furies in pursuit of Orestes.

Kinship and Revenge

The relation is presented through its consequence rather than through a peaceful bond: Orestes avenges his father by killing Clytemnestra. The act makes the son’s loyalty to Agamemnon inseparable from violence within the family, as revenge against one parent requires the killing of the other.

Tragic Context

The revenge belongs to the larger sequence of the Oresteia. Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War while Clytemnestra awaits him with the intention of killing him; she has a lover, and Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter. Orestes’s later killing of Clytemnestra continues this cycle rather than resolving it: the Furies pursue and torment him for the matricide. The father–son relation thus connects the family’s earlier violence to Orestes’s own punishment.