[522]. 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.
[523]. 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.
[524]. 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.
[525]. 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, presents analogies which are worth remembering.
[526]. 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.”
[527]. 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.
[528]. 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 had been the leader.
[529]. 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.
[530]. 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.
[531]. 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.