Odyssey 3.306 · Book 3, lines 306–308
Orestes comes home and kills
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τῷ δέ οἱ ὀγδοάτῳ κακὸν ἤλυθε δῖος Ὀρέστης ἂψ ἀπʼ Ἀθηνάων, κατὰ δʼ ἔκτανε πατροφονῆα, Αἴγισθον δολόμητιν, ὅ οἱ πατέρα κλυτὸν ἔκτα.
But in that eighth year there came, as his bane, noble Orestes, back from Athens, and he slew the father-slayer, guileful Aegisthus, who had slain his renowned father.
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The setting
The eighth year of Aegisthus's reign. Orestes, Agamemnon's son, returns from exile in Athens and takes the revenge the story has been waiting for — killing the man who killed his father.
A note on this passage
The reckoning lands in three lines. After seven unbroken years the eighth brings Orestes home from Athens, and the verse names him at once as Aegisthus's doom — the son grown up enough to strike. Two aorist verbs of killing frame the whole: Orestes slew the man who had slain his father.
The undercurrent is the pattern Nestor is pressing on Telemachus without saying so. Orestes is the model son: absent, then back, then decisive. The tight loop of the killing words makes vengeance sound like arithmetic, one death answering another, and behind it stands the question the whole visit circles: will Telemachus be an Orestes to his own house?
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