the hero of several old Greek tragedies, was the only son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. The events of his history appear under various modifications in the Choephorae and Eumenides of Aeschylus, in the Electra of Sophocles, and in the Orestes and Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides. The following account, however, contains the essential incidents of the story. On the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra and her paramour Egisthus, the boy Orestes was saved by his sister Electra, and was entrusted to the protection of his uncle Strophius, King of Phocis. There he was educated, and formed a friendship with his cousin Pylades, which became proverbial. At the end of eight years a response of the Delphic oracle sent him home to Mycenae to revenge his father's death. Gaining admittance into the palace by stratagem, he slew Clytemnestra and Egisthus with his own hand, and thus entailed upon himself the severest woes. The Eumenides immediately appeared, and in punishment for the murder of his mother, remorselessly hunted him from country to country. They had tortured him into frenzy when he found himself at Delphi. The oracle there, by informing him that he would free himself from his dread persecutors by bringing away the statue of Diana from Tauris in Scythia, only sent him into new troubles. He and his friend Pylades were on the point of being sacrificed to Diana, according to the custom of the country, when his sister Iphigenia, the priestess of the goddess, discovering them, assisted them to escape, and gave them the object of their visit. The sorrows of Orestes were thus ended, and the remainder of his life was prosperous. The hand of Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus and widow of Neoptolemus, was conferred upon him; the death of his father-in-law left him in possession of his paternal kingdom of Mycenae; the Lacedemonians voluntarily became his subjects; and the Arcadians and Phocians became his allies. He died at an advanced age in Arcadia, in consequence of a bite from a snake. His bones were afterwards removed from Tegea to Sparta.