Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Pylades.
The gallery
Pylades and Orestes Brought as Victims before Iphigenia
Benjamin West, 1766
West's National Gallery oil sends Pylades to Tauris bound beside Orestes — the friend who shares the sacrificial altar before recognition saves them. Friendship as the third voice of Euripides' plot.
Orestes and Pylades (San Ildefonso Group, Prado)
Unknown (Roman copy after Greek original), c. 1st century AD
The Prado's San Ildefonso Group — long read as Orestes and Pylades — shows two youths in sacrificial quiet. Whether Dioscuri or Oresteian companions, the marble has become the image of the friend who shares exile and blood-debt.
Orestes and Pylades Disputing the Sacrifice
Pieter Lastman, 1614
Lastman paints the Taurian dilemma: which friend will die for the other. Pylades offers himself so Orestes may live — Dutch history painting as a study in classical loyalty.
Orestes and Pylades in Tauris (Roman fresco)
Unknown (Roman wall-painter), 1st century AD
A Roman fresco keeps the pair before the Taurian altar — Pylades still at Orestes' shoulder as Iphigenia's recognition approaches. Ancient wall-painting of the friendship that opera later made famous.
On screen
In music & on stage
Iphigénie en Tauride
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Gluck's Pylades is the friend who offers to die for Orestes — the Tauris recognition trio's third voice, and one of opera's great portraits of loyalty.
Ermione
Gioachino Rossini
Rossini brings Pylades to Epirus at Orestes' side — still the companion, now in a court intrigue over Hermione and Andromache.