Nelo

Nelo
Profile
Cause of death	Killed with an Axe
Behind the scenes
Series	Xena: Warrior Princess
Appearance	"Plowshares Into Swords"

Nelo was the father of Xena, and was a man of mysterious background, possibly Spartan.

Although Xena had fond memories of her father, he disappeared when she was a young girl. He was in fact killed by his wife, Cyrene, with an axe, in order to prevent him from killing Xena in a fit of madness.

During Xena's warlord days, legends spread that her father was a Spartan king.

Many years later, Ares would impersonate Nelo, going under the name "Atrius" in an attempt to coax Xena out of her redemption.

The Furies later brought to light that Cyrene had murdered Nelo, but questions were brought up as to whether Nelo was Xena's true father. Decades later, the ghost of Cyrene would still be haunted by her murder of Nelo.

Background information

Nelo only made one true appearance, in the XWP comic: "Plowshares Into Swords." The appearance of Xena's father in "Ties That Bind" was Ares in disguise, and he was mentioned in two other episodes ("The Furies" and "The Haunting of Amphipolis").

Name

Ares appearing as "Atrius"

In the original script to "Sins of the Past," Xena's father was named Nelo of Mycenae, and was stated to have disappeared to Argos.

When "introduced" in "Ties That Bind" (in the form of Ares pretending to be him), he went by the name of Atrius. Xena doesn't object to this name, possibly because of her knowledge of his mysterious background.

In "The Haunting of Amphipolis," the ghost of Cyrene refers to her husband as Orestes. This may have been his real name that he kept from the rest of his family, or another name he went by with Cyrene.

Parentage

Both the episode "The Furies" and the Hercules & Xena Roleplaying Game raise the possibility that Nelo isn't Xena's father, and she is in fact a half-god - the daughter of Ares. The Furies took this in consideration when deciding to lift the judgment off of Xena and Gabrielle later reported this as likely in her tales of Xena's exploits.

Children

"Plowshares Into Swords" explicitly shows us that Nelo and Cyrene's first coupling resulted in the unexpected birth of Xena. Xena's brothers are not mentioned in the comic, but as Nelo later lived as husband to Cyrene, he is likely the father of her younger son Lyceus. As Toris is older than Xena, he must be the son of a different man.

In History, Quintus Atrius was a Roman military officer involved in Julius CaesarJulius Caesar's second expedition to Britannia/Britain in 54 BC. He was left in charge of ten cohorts of infantry and 300 cavalry to guard the beach-head while Caesar began his march inland, but halted his commander's advance by sending him word that his ships had been damaged by a storm while riding at anchor off the shore.

In greek mythology, Atreus (/ˈeɪtriəs/ AY-tri-əs, /ˈeɪtruːs/ AY-trooss; from ἀ-, "no" and τρέω, "tremble", "fearless", Greek: Ἀτρεύς) was a king of Mycenae in the Peloponnese, the son of Pelops and Hippodamia, and the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. Collectively, his descendants are known as Atreidai or Atreidae.

Atreus and his twin brother Thyestes were exiled by their father for murdering their half-brother Chrysippus in their desire for the throne of Olympia. They took refuge in Mycenae, where they ascended to the throne in the absence of King Eurystheus, who was fighting the Heracleidae. Eurystheus had meant for their stewardship to be temporary, but it became permanent after his death in battle.

According to most ancient sources, Atreus was the father of Pleisthenes, but in some lyric poets (Ibycus, Bacchylides) Pleisthenides (son of Pleisthenes) is used as an alternative name for Atreus himself.

In Greek mythology, Orestes or Orestis (/ɒˈrɛstiːz/; Greek: Ὀρέστης [oréstɛːs]) was the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and the brother of Electra. He is the subject of several Ancient Greek plays and of various myths connected with his madness and purification, which retain obscure threads of much older ones.