Details: Mourning for Agamemnon.
The story of Orestes’ and the slaying revenge against his father murders begins on the left corner of the sarcophagus where Orestes and the Furies are weeping at the tomb of Agamemnon; one of them embraces the axe used against Agamemnon. The next scene shows the slaying of Aegisthus. Hit to death by Orestes (or, according to others, Pylades), he is falling back lifeless. The young hero, portrayed with his sword, is raising with his left hand a wide cloth in order to hide the horrible scene. Near him an elderly nurse is covering her face with her hands.
The Oresteia
The complexity of the myth justifies a somewhat detailed presentation.
In his Agamemnon Aeschylus describes how, on his return from Troy, the son of Atreus and commander of the Greek army was murdered in Argos along with Cassandra, by his wife Clytemnestra. She hated her husband chiefly because he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia at Aulis, and during Agamemnon’s absence Clytemnestra had found a lover in his cousin, Aegisthus.
In Choephorai Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, enters the scene. At the tomb of his father he swears revenge, as Apollo has commanded him. He also meets his sister Electra there, who long before had taken him to safety in Phocis, where he had grown up at the court of King Strophius. The king’s son, Pylades, is Orestes’ loyal friend and companion, in this scene and during the events that follow. Together the two friends slink into the palace at Argos under the pretext of delivering news of Orestes’ death. Then they kill first Aegisthus and a little later Clytemnestra, who tries vainly in words of anguish to dissuade her son from his plan. With the murder of his mother, Orestes himself becomes the victim of different ancient laws with all their contradictory demands: although he has indeed avenged the death of his father, in so doing he has shed the blood of his own family, and thus brings fresh guilt upon himself. This guilt now pursues Orestes in the shape of the Furies who appear to him straight after his matricide. He flees distraught to Delphi, to the shrine of the god who gave him the task of avenging the murder of his father, and thus bears part of the responsibility for his persecution by the Furies. At the beginning of the third drama, Eumenides, Apollo sends Orestes to Athens, where his case is examined by the highest court, the Areopagus: it is only this institution of the proud city, which the goddess Athena herself presides over, that is able to break the baleful cycle of guilt and atonement. When Orestes has been acquitted Athena placates the goddesses of revenge, who are subsequently honoured in the city as the Eumenides (the ‘kindly ones’)
Source: Paul Zanker and Björn Ewald, Julia Slater, “Living with Myths: The Imagery of Roman Sarcophagi”
Roman sarcophagus
Ca. 150-170 AD.
Vatican Museums, Museo Pio-Clementino, Galleria dei Candelabri.
