Summary

“Inside the palace, Orestes noticed a strange emptiness and silence” (69), reads the first line of House of Names’ second chapter. Told from a third person limited point of view, in past tense, the narrator describes the various events that occurred concurrently with Agamemnon’s murder, which began after Orestes was lulled away from the castle by two guards in the service of Aegisthus.

They walked for days and nights on end, sometimes without rest, passing villages and houses and other prisoners, along the way. On multiple occasions Orestes tried to cajole the nicer of the guards into giving him some information regarding his whereabouts or his family, but the guard remained cryptic in his answers. Eventually, Orestes accepted his fate. Soon, the guards received word of a farmer insurrection; to combat Mycenaean forces in the area, the rural people poisoned their wells...