ORENSE, an episcopal see and the capital of the Spanish province of Orense; on the left bank of the river Miño, and on the Tuy-Monforte railway. Pop. (1900) 15,194. The river is here crossed by a bridge—one of the most remarkable in Spain—of seven arches, 1319 ft. in length, and at its highest point 135 ft. above the bed of the river. This bridge was built by Bishop Lorenzo in 1230, but has frequently been repaired. The Gothic cathedral, also dating from Bishop Lorenzo’s time, is a comparatively small building, but has an image, El Santo Cristo, which was brought from. Cape Finisterre in 1330 and is celebrated throughout Galicia for its miraculous powers. The city contains many schools, a public library and a theatre. In the older streets there are some interesting medieval houses. Chocolate and leather are manufactured, and there are sawmills, flour-mills and iron foundries. The three warm springs to the west, known as Las Burgas, attract many summer visitors; the waters were well known to the Romans, as their ancient name, Aquae Originis, Aquae Urentes, or perhaps Aquae Salientis, clearly indicates.
The Romans named Orense Aurium, probably from the alluvial gold found in the Miño valley. The bishopric, founded in the 5th century by the Visigoths, was named the Sedes Auriensis (see of Aurium), and from this the modern Orense is derived. The city became the capital of the Suevi in the 6th century; it was sacked by the Moors in 716, and rebuilt only in 884.
OREODON (i.e. "hillock-tooth"), the name of an Oligocene genus of North American primitive ruminants related to the camels, and typifying the family Oreodontidae. Typical oreodonts were long-tailed, four-toed, partially plantigrade ruminants with sharp-crowned crescentic molars, of which the upper ones carry four cusps, and the first lower premolar canine-like both in shape and function. In the type genus there are forty-four teeth, forming an uninterrupted series. The vertebral artery pierces the neck-vertebrae in the normal manner. The name Oreodon is preoccupied by Orodus, the designation of a genus of Palaeozoic fishes, and is likewise antedated by Merycoidodon, which is now used by some writers. See Tylopoda.
ORESME, NICOLAS (c. 1320–1382), French bishop, celebrated for his numerous works in both French and Latin on scholastic, scientific and political questions, was born in Normandy at the opening of the 14th century. In 1348 he was a student in the college of Navarre at Paris, of which he became head in 1356. In 1361 he was named dean of the cathedral of Rouen. Charles V. had him appointed bishop of Lisieux on the 16th of November 1377. He died in that city on the 11th of July 1382. One of his works, of great importance for the history of economic conceptions in the middle ages, was the De origine, natura, jure et mutationibus monetarum, of which there is also a French edition. Oresme was the author of several works on astrology, in which he showed its falseness as a science and denounced its practice. At the request of Charles V. he translated the Ethics, Politics and Economics of Aristotle. In December 1363 he preached before Urban V. a sermon on reform in the church, so severe in its arraignment that it was often brought forward in the 16th century by Protestant polemists.
See Francis Meunier, Essai sur la vie et les ouvrages de Nicole Oresme (Paris, 1857); Feret, La Faculté de théologie de l’Université de Paris (Paris, 1896, t. iii. p. 290 sqq.); Émile Bridrey, Nicole Oresme. Étude des doctrines et des faits économiques (Paris, 1906).
ORESTES, in Greek legend, son of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra. According to the Homeric story he was absent from Mycenae when his father returned from the Trojan War and was murdered by Aegisthus. Eight years later he returned from Athens and revenged his father’s death by slaying his mother, and her paramour (Odyssey, iii. 306; xi. 542). According to Pindar (Pythia, xi. 25) he was saved by his nurse, who conveyed him out of the country when Clytaemnestra wished to kill him. The tale is told much more fully and with many variations in the tragedians. He was preserved by his sister Electra from his father’s fate, and conveyed to Phanote on Mount Parnassus, where King Strophius took charge of him. In his twentieth year he was ordered by the Delphic oracle to return home and revenge his father’s death. According to Aeschylus, he met his sister Electra before the tomb of Agamemnon, whither both had gone to perform rites to the dead; a recognition takes place, and they arrange how Orestes shall accomplish his revenge. Orestes, after the deed, goes mad, and is pursued by the Erinyes, whose duty it is to punish any violation of the ties of family piety. He takes refuge in the temple at Delphi; but, though Apollo had ordered him to do the deed, he is powerless to protect his suppliant from the consequences. At last Athena receives him on the acropolis of Athens and arranges a formal trial of the case before twelve Attic judges. The Erinyes demand their victim; he pleads the orders of Apollo; the votes of the judges are equally divided, and Athena gives her casting vote for acquittal. The Erinyes are propitiated by a new ritual, in which they are worshipped as Eumenides (the Kindly), and Orestes dedicates an altar to Athena Areia. With Aeschylus the punishment ends here, but, according to Euripides, in order to escape the persecutions of the Erinyes, he was ordered by Apollo to go to Tauris, carry off the statue of Artemis which had fallen from heaven, and bring it to Athens. He repairs to Tauris with Pylades, the son of Strophius and the intimate friend of Orestes, and the pair are at once imprisoned by the people, among whom the custom is to sacrifice all strangers to Artemis. The priestess of Artemis, whose duty it is to perform the sacrifice, is his sister Iphigeneia (q.v.). She offers to release Orestes if he will carry home a letter from her to Greece; he refuses to go, but bids Pylades take the letter while he himself will stay and be slain. After a conflict of mutual affection, Pylades at last yields, but the letter brings about a recognition between brother and sister, and all three escape together, carrying with them the image of Artemis. After his return to Greece, Orestes took possession of his father’s kingdom of Mycenae, to which were added Argos and Laconia. He is said to have died of the bite of a snake in Arcadia. His body was conveyed to Sparta for burial (where he was the object of a cult), or, according to an Italian legend, to Aricia, whence it was removed to Rome (Servius on Aeneid, ii. 116). The story of Orestes was the subject of the Oresteia of Aeschylus (Agamemnon, Choephori, Eumenides), of the Electra of Sophocles, of the Electra, Iphigeneia in Tauris, and Orestes, of Euripides. There is extant a Latin epic poem, consisting of about 1000 hexameters, called Orestes Tragoedia, which has been ascribed to Dracontius of Carthage.
Orestes appears also as a central figure in various legends connected with his madness and purification, both in Greece and Asia. In these Orestes is the guilt-laden mortal who is purified from his sin by the grace of the gods, whose merciful justice is shown to all persons whose crime is mitigated by extenuating circumstances. These legends belong to an age when higher ideas of law and of social duty were being established; the implacable blood-feud of primitive society gives place to a fair trial, and in Athens, when the votes of the judges are evenly divided, mercy prevails.
The legend of Orestes is the subject of a lengthy monograph by T. Zielinski, “Die Orestessage und die Rechtfertigungsidee” in Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, ii. (1899). Orestes, according to Zielinski, is the son of the sky-god Zeus-Agamemnon, who overcomes his wife the earth-goddess Gaia-Clytaemnestra; with the assistance of the dragon Aegisthus, she slays her husband, whose murder is in turn avenged by his son. The religion of Zeus is then reformed under the influence of the cult of Apollo, who slays the dragon brought up by the earth-goddess on Parnassus, the seat of one of her oldest sanctuaries. Parnassus becomes the holy mountain of Apollo, and Orestes himself an hypostasis of Apollo “of the mountain,” just as Pylades is Apollo “of the plain”; similarly Electra, Iphigeneia and Chrysothemis are hypostases of Artemis. Zeus being firmly seated on his throne as the result of the slaying of the dragon by Orestes, the theological significance of the myth is forgotten, and the identifications Zeus-Agamemnon and Gaia-Clytaemnestra are abandoned. In the Homeric Oresteia the soul of the murdered wife has no claim to vengeance, and Orestes rules unmolested in Argos. But the Apolline religion introduces the theory of the rights of the soul and revenge for bloodshed. Apollo, who has urged Orestes to parricide and has himself expiated the crime of slaying the dragon, is able to purify others in similar case. Hence
