Myth & LegendGreek → English
Orestes
/ɒˈrɛstiːz/proper noun
The son of Agamemnon in Greek myth, who kills his mother to avenge his father.
The Greek roots
ὄρος
óros
mountain
Literally: “man of the mountains”
Follow a root:ὅρος3 words
The story of the word
Orestes kills Clytemnestra, is hunted across Greece by the Furies for it, and is finally acquitted by an Athenian jury at the close of Aeschylus's Oresteia, which is the city's founding story about courts replacing revenge. The name is usually read as mountain man, from ὄρος, and the mountains are where he is hidden as a child and where the mad are imagined to wander. Psychoanalysts later hung an Orestes complex on him, as they had hung Electra on his sister.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
Same family
orogenyorographyoread
In a sentence
The production gave Orestes a soldier's duffel bag and left the Furies offstage.
She wrote her thesis on how juries in Athens read the trial of Orestes.