Orestes, the child of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, kills his mother to avenge his father.

Aeschylus: Toward a Patriarchal Justice

Aeschylus’s Oresteia depicts the killing of Clytemnestra as morally ambiguous, incentivizing divine clarification of human justice. The moral ambiguity of the act manifests in divine conflict between the ancient goddesses the Furies, who viciously hound Orestes for spilling his mother’s blood, and Apollo, who supports Orestes in avenging his father. This divine dispute is settled by the goddess Athena, who presides over Orestes’ trial:

It is my duty to give the final judgment and I shall cast my vote for Orestes. For there was no mother who gave me birth; and in all things, except for marriage, whole-heartedly I am for the male and entirely on the father's side. Therefore, I will not award greater honor to the death of a woman who killed her husband, the master of the house. Orestes wins, even if the vote comes out equal. (Eumenides 735-41)

Two elements characterize Athena’s new justice. Firstly, new justice is achieved through the procedures of the court, rather than through vigilante killings. Secondly, the new system of justice valorizes patriarchal social bonds: marriage, which subordinates female to male, outweighs the mother-child bond, which favors the female.

Sophocles: Vengeance Unchallenged

In stark contrast to Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles utterly omits the anger of the Furies from his narrative of the matricide. As Orestes stabs Clytemnestra, his sister Electra screams for blood: Stab her doubly, if you can! (1416). Yet the children’s brutal treatment of their mother invokes no immediate consequences. Their apparent immunity is dramatically reinforced by the placement of another murder - that of Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover - after the death of Clytemnestra. Drawing attention away from the matricide and its moral ambiguity, the play ends with Orestes confidently leading Aegisthus into the house to his death: This just penalty ought to come straightaway upon all who would break the laws: the penalty of death. Then wrongdoing would not abound.(1506-7). In these final moments, the apparent justice of the matricide goes un-challenged by the Furies.

Euripides: Guilt Psychologized

Whereas Sophocles entirely cuts the Furies from his narrative, Euripides reinvents them in Orestes as a psychological phenomenon. Rather than dread goddesses pursuing Orestes, Euripides’ Furies exist within Orestes’ own mind, invisible to those around him. This internal portrayal of the Furies corresponds with the play’s treatment of guilt as a psychological, rather than divinely mediated, problem. And indeed, Orestes undergoes drastic psychological shifts regarding his sense of guilt about the murder, depending on his circumstances. Toward the beginning of the play, Orestes voices his remorse:

I believe that, if I had asked my father to his face whether I must slay my mother, he would have strongly entreated me, by this beard, never to plunge a sword into her throat, since he would not regain his life, and I, poor wretch, would accomplish such evil! (288-93).

Yet a few hundred lines later, condemned by a relative, Orestes justifies his actions, saying, I hated my mother and killed her justly (572). Orestes’ guilt, like the despair of Electra (see Euripides under The Curse) and the desires of Agamemnon and Iphigenia in Aulis (see Euripides under The Sacrifice), is in constant flux. Through such character studies, Euripides constructs a world in which human desires and behaviors are shallowly rooted in present circumstance, rather than in deeper convictions and commitments.