“Finally Orestes, embittered and disappointed with kin and kinship, philoi and philia, turns to his friend and co-murderer of Clytemnestra, Pylades, who himself has been rejected by kin, his father. The two friends now seek to reconstitute (with Electra) a new family, based not on blood but the spilling of blood. In a kind of manic elation, they throw off guilt and remorse and escape the sentence of death by acting out their own conflicts instead of continuing to suffer with them.”
— Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece, Bennett Simon
