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The succession is, in part, accordant with that in the Theogonia of Hesiod, (vv. 116–136,) but the special characteristic of the Æschylean form of the legend is that each change is a step in a due, rightful succession, as by free gift, not accomplished (as in other narratives of the same transition) by violence and wrong.

Phœbe, in the Theogonia, marries Coios, and becomes the mother of Leto, or Latona, and so the grandmother of Apollo. The “birthday gift” was commonly presented on the eighth day after birth, when the child was named. The oracle is spoken of as such a gift to Apollo, as bearing the name of Phœbos.

The sacred circular pool of Delos is the crater of an extinct volcano. There Apollo was born, and thence he passed through Attica to Parnassos, o take possession of the Oracle, according to one form of the myth depriving Themis of it and slaying the dragon Python that kept guard over it.

The people of Attica are thus named, either as being mythically descended from Erichthonios the son of Hephæstos, or as artificers, who own him as their father. The words refer to the supposed origin of the Sacred Road from Athens to Delphi passing through Bœotia and Phokis. When the Athenians sent envoys to consult the oracle they were preceded by men bearing axes, in remembrance of the original pioneering work which had been done for Apollo. The first work of active civilisation was thus connected with the worship of the giver of Light and Wisdom.

Delphos, the hero Eponymos (name-giving) of Delphi, was honoured as the son of Poseidon. Hence the Priestess invokes the latter as one of the guardian deities of the shrine.

Pronaia, as having her shrine or statue in front of the temple of Apollo.

The Korykian rock in Parnassos, as in Soph., Antig. v. 1128; known also as the “Nymphs' cavern.”

Bromios, a name of Dionysos, embodying the special attributes of loud, half-frenzied revelry.

In the legend which Euripides follows, Kithæron, not Parnassos, is the scene of the death of Pentheus. He, it was said, opposed the wild or frantic worship of the Pelasgic Bacchos, concealed himself that he might behold the mysteries of the Mænads, and was torn in pieces by his mother and two others, on whose eyes the God had cast such glamour that they took him for a wild beast. English readers may be referred to Dean Milman's translation of the Bacchanals of Euripides.

Pleistos, topographically, a river flowing through the vale of Delphi, mythically the father of the nymphs of Korykos.

At one time the Oracle had been open to questioners once in the year only, afterwards once a month. The pilgrims, after they had made their offerings, cast lots, and the doors were opened to him to whom the lot had fallen. Plutarch, Qu. Græc., p. 292.

The altar of the adytum, on the very centre, as men deemed, of the whole earth. Zeus, it was said, had sent forth two eagles at the same moment; one from the East and the other from the West, and here it was that they had met. The stone was of white marble, and the two eagles were sculptured on it. Strabo, ix. 3.

The priestess dwells upon the outward tokens, which shewed that the suppliant came as one whose need was specially urgent. On the ritual of supplication generally comp. Suppl. vv. 22, 348, 641, Soph. Œd. King, v. 3. Œd. Col. vv. 469–489.

Æschylos apparently follows the Theogonia of Hesiod (1.278) who describes the Gorgons as three in number, daughters of Phorkys and Keto, and bearing the names of Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa. The last enters into the Perseus cycle of myths, as one of the monsters whom he conquered, with a face once beautiful, but with her hair turned to serpents by the wrath of Athena, and so dreadful to look upon that whoso gazed on her was turned to stone. When Perseus had slain her, Athena placed her head in her ægis, and thus became the terror of all who were foes to herself or her people. A wild legendary account of them meets us in the Prom. Bound, v. 812. As works of art, the Gorgon images are traceable to the earliest or Kyclopian period.

Here also we have a reference to a familiar subject of early Greek art, probably to some painting familiar to an Athenian audience. The name of Phineus indicates that the monstrous forms spoken of are those of the Harpies, birds with women's faces, or women with birds' wings, who were sent to vex the blind seer for his cruelty to the children of his first marriage. Comp. Soph. Antig. v. 973. In the Æneid they appear (III. 225) as dwelling in the Strophades, and harassing Æneas and his companions.

The old image of Pallas, carved in olive-wood, as distinguished from later sculpture.

The early code of hospitality bound the host, who as such had once received a guest under the shelter of his roof, not to desert him, even though he might discover afterwards that he had been guilty of great crimes, but to escort him safely to the boundary of his territory. Thus Apollo, as the host with whom Orestes had taken refuge, sends Hermes, the escort God, to guide and defend him on his way to Athens.

The thought that the highest wisdom came to men rather in “visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men,” than through the waking senses, which we have already met with in Agam. v. 173, is traceable to the mysticism of Pythagoras, more distinctly perhaps to that of Epimenides.

Wine, as in Soph. Œd. Col. vv. 100, 481, was rigidly excluded from the cultus of the Eumenides, and to them only as daughters of Night were midnight sacrifices offered.

The common rendering “in a dream” gives a sufficient meaning, and is, of course, tenable enough. But there is a force in the repetition of the same word, as in v. 116, which is thus lost, and which I have endeavoured to preserve. The Erinnyes, thus impotent in their rage, are as much mere dream-like spectres as is the ghost of Clytæmnestra.

Here, as throughout Æschylos, the Olympian divinities are thought of as new comers, thrusting from their thrones the older Chthonian and Titanic dynasty, Gods of the conquering Hellenes superseding those of the Pelasgi.

The accumulation of horrid forms of cruelty had, probably, a special significance for the Athenians. These punishments belonged to their enemies the Persians, not to the Hellenic race, and the poet's purpose was to rekindle patriotic feeling by dwelling on their barbarity, as in Agam. v. 894, he points in like manner to their haughtiness and luxury.

The argument of the Erinnyes is, to some extent, like that of the Antigone of Sophocles, (Antig. 909–913,) and the wife of Intaphernes, (Herod. III. 119.) The tie which binds the husband to the wife is less sacred than that between the mother and the son. This therefore brings on the slayer the guilt of blood of kin, while murder in the other case is reduced to simple homicide. Orestes therefore was not justified in perpetrating the greater crime as a retribution for the less.

The ideal interval of time between the two parts of the drama is left undefined, but it would seem from vv. 274–6 to have been long enough to have allowed of many wanderings to sacred places. Orestes does not go straight from Delphi to Athens. He appears now, not as before dripping and besmeared with blood, but with hands and garments purified.

The story of Adrastos and Crœsos in Herod. I. 35, illustrates the gradual purification of which Orestes speaks. The penitent who has the stain of blood-guiltiness upon him comes to the king, and the king, as his host, performs the lustral rites for him. Here Orestes urges that he has been received at many homes, and gone through many such lustrations. He has been cleansed from the pollution of sin: what he now seeks is a forensic justification.

Sc. the scent of blood, which though no longer visible to the eyes of men, still lingers round him and is perceptible to his pursuers.

Here, too, we trace the political bearing of the play. In the year when it was produced (B. C. 458) an alliance with Argos was the favourite measure of the more conservative party at Athens.

The names Triton and Tritonis, wherever found in classical geography, (Libya, Crete, Thessaly, Bœotia,) are always connected with the legend that Athena was born there. Probably both name and legend were carried from Greece to Libya, and then amalgamated with the indigenous local worship of a warlike goddess. Hesiod (iv. 180, 188) connects the Libyan lake with the legend of Jason and the Argonauts.

In the war with the giants fought in the Phlegræan plains (the volcanic district of Campania) Athena had helped her father Zeus by her wise counsel, and was honoured there as keeping in check the destructive Titanic forces which had been so subdued, burying Enkelados, e.g., in Sicily. The “friends” are her Libyan worshippers.

The Choral ode here is brought in as an incantation. This weapon is to succeed where others have failed, and this too, the frenzy which seizes the soul in the remembrance of its past transgression, is soothed and banished by Athena.

White, as the special colour of festal joy, was not used in the worship of the Erinnyes.

The thought which underlies the obscurity of a corrupt passage seems to be that, as they relieve the Gods from the task of being avengers of blood, all that the Gods on their side can legitimately do against them is to render powerless the prayers for vengeance offered by the kindred of the slain. Their very isolation, as Chthonian deities, from the Gods of Olympos should protect them from open conflict. But an alternative rendering of the second line gives, perhaps, a better meaning—

i.e., by being the appointed receivers of such prayers for vengeance, they leave the Gods free for a higher and serener life.

Perhaps, “With torch of sunless gloom.”

The words contain an allusion to the dispute between Athens and Mitylene in the time of Peisistratos, as to the possession of Sigeion. Athena asserts that it had been given to her by the whole body of Achæans at the time when they had taken Troïa. Comp. Herod. v. 94, 95. It probably entered into the political purposes of the play to excite the Athenians to a war in this direction, so as to draw them off from the constitutional changes proposed by Pericles and Ephialtes.

Here, and throughout the trial, we have to bear in mind the technicalities of Athenian judicial procedure. The prosecutor, in the first instance, tendered to the accused an oath that he was not guilty. This he might accept or refuse. In the latter case, the course of the trial was at least stopped, and judgment might be recorded against him. If he could bring himself to accept it, he was acquitted of the special charge of which he was accused, but was liable to a prosecution afterwards for that perjury. If, on the other hand, he tendered an oath affirming his guilt to the prosecutor, he placed himself in his hands. Orestes, not being able to deny the fact, will not declare on oath that he is “not guilty,” but neither will he place himself in the power of his accusers. The peculiarities of this use of oaths were: (1.) That they were taken by the parties to the suit, not by witnesses. (2.) That if both parties agreed to that mode of decision, the oath was either way decisive. An allusion to the latter practice is found in Heb. vi. 16, and traces of it are found, as the Yelverton cause celebre has recently reminded us, in the law-proceedings of Scotland.

Æschylos seems here to attach himself to the principles of those who were seeking to reform the practice described in the previous note as being at once cumbrous and unjust, throwing its weight into the scale of the least scrupulous conscience, and to urge a simpler, more straightforward trial. The same objection is noticed by Aristotle in his discussion of the subject. (Rhet. i. 15.)

Athena offers herself, not as arbitrator or sovereign judge, but as presiding over the court of jurors whom she proceeds to appoint.

Ixion appeared in the mythical history of Greece as the prototype of all suppliants for purification. When he had murdered Deioneus, Zeus had had compassion to him, received him as a guest, cleansed him from his guilt. His ingratitude for this service was the special guilt of his attempted outrage upon Hera. The case is mentioned again in v. 687.

In heathen, as in Jewish sacrifices, the blood was the very instrument of purification. It was sprinkled or poured upon men, and they became clean. But this could not be done by the criminal himself nor by any chance person. The service had to be rendered by a friend, who of very love gave himself to this mediatorial work.

In the legend related by Pausanias (Corinth. c. 3) Trœzen was the first place where Orestes was thus received, and in his time the descendants of those who had thus helped held periodical feasts in commemoration of it.

The course which Athena takes is: (1,) to receive Orestes as a settler with the rights which attached to such persons on Athenian soil, not a criminal fugitive to be simply surrendered; (2,) to offer to the Erinnyes, as being too important to be put out of court, a fair and open trial; (3,) to acknowledge that he and they are equally “blameless,” as far as she is concerned. She has no complaint to make of them.

The red blight of vines and wheat was looked on as caused by drops of blood which the Erinnyes had let fall.

Stress is laid on the fact that the judges of the Areopagos, in contrast with those of the inferior tribunes of Athens, discharged their duty under the sanction of an oath.

Perhaps

At a more advanced period of human thought, Cicero (Orat. pro Roscio, c. 24) could point to the “thoughts that accuse each other,” the honour and remorse of the criminal, as the true Erinnyes, the “assiduæ domesticæque Furiæ.” Æschylos clings to the mythical symbolism as indispensable for the preservation of the truth which it shadowed forth.

Once again we have the poet of constitutional conservatism keeping the via media between Peisistratos and Pericles.

The Tyrrhenian trumpet, with its bent and twisted tube, retained its proverbial pre-eminence from the days of Æschylos and Sophocles, (Aias, 17) to those of Virgil, (Æn. viii. 526.)

The fondness of the Athenians for litigation, and the large share which every citizen took in the administration of justice, would probably make the scene which follows, with all its technicalities, the part of the play into which they would most enter.

It was necessary that some one, sitting as President of the Court, should formally open the pleadings, by calling on this side or that to begin. Here Athena takes that office on herself, and calls on the Erinnyes.

The technicalities of the Areopagos are still kept up. The three points on which the Erinnyes, as prosecutors, lay stress are: (1,) the fact of the murder; (2,) the mode; (3,) the motive. “Three bouts,” as referring to the rule of the arena, that three struggles for the mastery should be decisive.

The pleas put in by the Erinnyes as prosecutors are: (1,) That Clytæmnestra had been adequately punished by her death, while Orestes was still alive; and (2,) when asked why they had not intervened to bring about that punishment, that the relationship between husband and wife was less close than that between mother and son. They drew, in other words, a distinction between consanguinity and affinity, and upon this the rest of the discussion turns. Orestes, and Apollo as his counsel, on the other hand, meet this with the rejoinder, that there is no blood-relationship between the mother and her offspring.

Sc., Their oath to give a verdict according to the evidence must yield to the higher obligation of following the Divine will rather than the letter of the law.

To have died in health by the arrows of a woman-warrior might have been borne. To be slain by a wife treacherously in his bath was to endure a far worse outrage.

In this new argument, and the answer to it, we may trace, as in the Prometheus and the Agamemnon, the struggles of the questioning intellect against the more startling elements of the popular religious belief. Zeus is worshipped as the supreme Lord, yet His dominion seems founded on might as opposed to goodness, on the unrighteous expulsion of another. Here, in Apollo's answer, there is the glimmer of a possible reconciliation. The old and the new, the sovereignty of Cronos and that of Zeus may be reconciled, and one supreme God be “all in all.”

Comp. the thought and language of the Suppliants, v. 93.

The last argument is, that the acquittal can be, at the best, partial only, not complete; formal, not real. There would remain for ever the pollution which would exclude Orestes from the Phratria, the clan-brotherhood, by which, as by a sacramental bond, all the members were held together.

The question seems to have been one of those which occupied men's minds in their first gropings towards the mysteries of man's physical life, and both popular metaphors and primary impressions were in favour of the hypothesis here maintained. Euripides (Orest. v. 534) puts the same argument into the mouth of Orestes.

The story of Athena's birth, full-grown, from the head of Zeus, is next referred to as the leading case bearing on the point at issue.

Here, of course, the political interest of the whole drama reached its highest point. What seems comparatively flat to us must, to the thousands who sat as spectators, have been fraught with the most intense excitement, showing itself in shouts of applause, or audible tokens of clamorous dissent. The rivalry of Whigs and Tories over Addison's Cato, the sensation produced in times of Papal aggression by the king's answer to Pandulph in King John, present analogies which are worth remembering.

The story ran that the tribe of women-warriors from the Caucasos, or the Thermodon, known by this name, had invaded Attica under Oreithyia, when Theseus was king, to revenge the wrongs he had done them, and to recover her sister Hippolyta. Ares, the God of Thrakians, Skythians, and nearly all the wilder barbaric tribes, was their special deity; and when they occupied the hill which rose over against the Acropolis, they sacrificed to him, and so it gained the name of the Areopagos, or “hill of Ares.”

As in the Agamemnon, (v. 1010,) so here we find the aristocratic, conservative poet showing his colours, protesting against the admission to the Archonship, and therefore to the Areopagos, of men of low birth or in undignified employments.

The words, like all political clap-trap, are somewhat vague; but, as understood at the time, the “lawless” policy alluded to was that of Pericles and Ephialtes, who sought to deface and to diminish the jurisdiction of the Areopagos, and the “tyrannical,” that which had crushed the independence of Athens under Peisistratos. Between the two was the conservative party, of which Kimon was the leader.

The Skythians may be named simply as representing all barbarous, non-Hellenic races; but they appear, about this time, wild and nomadic as their life was, to have impressed the minds of the Greeks somewhat in the same way as the Germans did the minds of the Romans in the time of Tacitus. Tales floated from travellers' lips of their wisdom and their happiness—of sages like Zamolxis and Aristarchos, who rivalled those of Hellas—of the Hyperborei, in the far north, who enjoyed a perpetual and unequalled blessedness.—Comp. Libation Pourers, v. 366.

Two topics of praise are briefly touched on: (1,) the lower, popular courts of justice at Athens might be open to the suspicion of corruption, but no breath of slander had ever tainted the fame of the Areopagos; (2,) it met by night, keeping its watch, that the citizens might sleep in peace.

The first of the twelve jurymen rises and drops his voting-ballot into one of the urns, and is followed by another at the end of each of the short two-line speeches in the dialogue that follows. The two urns of acquittal and condemnation stand in front of them. The plan of voting with different coloured balls (black and white) in the same urn, was a later usage.

Compare note on v. 419.

In the legend of Admetos son of Pheres, and king of Pheræ in Thessalia, Apollo is represented as having first given wine to the Destinies, and then persuaded them to allow Admetos, whenever the hour of death should come, to be redeemed from Hades, if father, or mother, or wife were willing to die for him. The self-surrender of his wife, Alkestis, for this purpose, forms the subject of the noblest of the tragedies of Euripides.

Partly as setting at nought the power of the Erinnyes and the Destinies, partly as giving wine to those whose libations were wineless.—Comp. Sophocles Œd. Col. v. 100.

The practice of the Areopagos is accurately reproduced. When the votes of the judges were equal a casting vote was given in favour of the accused, and was known as that of Athena.

Cock-fighting took its place among the recognised sports of the Athenians. Once a year there was a public performance in the theatre.

The Temple of the Eumenides or Semnæ (“venerable ones”) stood near the Areopagos.

Some two or three lines have probably been lost here.

Probably an allusion to the silver-mines at Laureion, which about this time formed a large element of the revenues of Athens.

Reference is made to another local sanctuary, the temple on the Areopagos dedicated to the Olympian Zeus.

The figure of Athena, as identical with Victory, and so the tutelary Goddess of Athens, was sculptured with outspread wings.

Cranaos, the son of Kecrops, the mythical founder of Athens.

The sanctuaries of the Eumenides were crypt-like chapels, where they were worshipped in gloom by the light of lamps or torches.

Perhaps,