Orestes' Torment

After Orestes kills his mother, the Chorus sings out in praises saying, “Oh raise a shout of triumph over the escape of our master's house from its misery and the wasting of its wealth by two who were unclean, its grievous fortune!”  They also say, “Look, the light has come, and I am freed from the cruel curb that restrained our household. House, rise up! You have lain too long prostrate on the ground.”  Orestes, however, cannot join in the rejoicing with the rest of the people in his household.  He is very distraught over the act that he just committed; the killing of his own mother.  He does not care about the killing of Aegisthus because “he has suffered the penalty prescribed for adulterers.”  The death of his mother though he must justify.  He does this by saying, “Not without justice did I slay my mother, the unclean murderess of my father, and a thing loathed by the gods.”  Even though the gods want Clytaemestra dead, Orestes knows that somehow there will be revenge for his mother, and the hounds of wrath will come at him.  This shows how difficult it is to pass judgment on someone that is close to us, and also shows the cycle of death and revenge that is occurring.  Orestes does not leave with peace and the passage suggests that he will be tormented with the thought of his actions for the rest of his life.  The entire play, actually, does not end with closure for the chorus says, “Now again, for the third time, has the tempest of this clan burst on the royal house and run its course. First, at the beginning, came the cruel woes of children slain for food; next, the fate of a man, a king, when the warlord of the Achaeans perished, murdered in his bath. And now, once again, there has come from somewhere a third, a deliverer, or shall I say a doom? Oh when will it finish its work, when will the fury of calamity, lulled to rest, find an end and cease?”  The cycle can never end, and for Orestes he will forever be tormented by his actions.  Maybe that is the revenge he must pay for his killing of his mother. 

P.S. I commented on Gary Hamner’s Justified

-Susan Berner