[490]. 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, to use the terminology of a later system, is a forensic justification.
[491]. 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.
[492]. 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.
[493]. 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 Argonauts.
[494]. 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 passage is interesting, as showing the extent of Æschylos's acquaintance with the African and Italian coasts of the Mediterranean.
[495]. 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.
[496]. White, as the special colour of festal joy, was not used in the worship of the Erinnyes.
[497]. Another rendering gives—
“To dim the bright hue of the fresh-shed blood.”
[498]. 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—