Toynbee "Oreste"
Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; when his father was murdered by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, he was saved from a similar fate by his sister Electra, who had him secretly conveyed to the court of the Phocian king Strophius, who had married a sister of Agamemnon. Here Orestes formed a close friendship with Pylades, the king's son, with whom subsequently he repaired in secret to Mycenae and avenged his father's murder by slaying both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Being pursued by the Furies in consequence of his mother's murder, and seized with their madness, he was told by Apollo that he could recover only after fetching the statue of Diana from the Tauric Chersonese. On his arrival in that country he was in danger of being slain, but Pylades, who had accompanied him pretended that he was Orestes; the latter, however, would not allow Pylades to risk his life for him, and he persisted in declaring who he was; ultimately they were both saved through the instrumentality of Iphigenia, the sister of Orestes, who was there as priestess of Diana. [Pilade.]

The love of Pylades and Orestes is introduced as an example to the Envious in Circle II of Purgatory, where a voice is heard proclaiming, I' sono Oreste (representing probably the assertion of Pylades that he was Orestes, and the counterassertion of the latter as to his own identity), [Purg. xiii. 32] [Invidiosi]. D. perhaps derived his knowledge of the incident from the allusion of Cicero in the De amicitia (vii. 24) to a scene from the play of Pacuvius on the subject:

Qui clamores tota cavea nuper in hospitis et amici mei M. Pacuvi nova fabula, cum ignorante rege uter Orestes esset, Pylades Oresten se esse diceret, ut pro illo necaretur, Orestes autem, ita ut erat, Oresten se esse perseveraret!

[Cf. Defin. i. 20, v. 22; and Ovid, Epist. ex Ponto III. ii. 69 ff.]

©Oxford University Press 1968. From A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante by Paget Toynbee (1968) by permission of Oxford University Press