[Footnote 946: ][ (return) ] "Sup.," 265.
[Footnote 947: ][ (return) ] "Theb.," p. 602.
The pollution and curse of sin, when once contracted by an individual, or entailed upon a family, will rest upon them and pursue them till the polluted individual or the hated and accursed race is extinct, unless in some way the sin can be expiated, or some god interpose to arrest the penalty. The criminal must die by the hand of justice, and even in Hades vengeance will still pursue him. [948] Others may in time be washed away by ablutions, worn away by exile and pilgrimage, and expiated by offerings of blood. [949] But great crimes can not be washed away; "For what expiation is there for blood when once it has fallen on the ground." [950] Thus the law ([νόµος])--for so it is expressly called--as from an Attic Sinai, rolls its reverberating thunders, and pronounces its curses upon sin, from act to act and from chorus to chorus of that grand trilogy--the "Agamemnon," the "Choephoroe," and the "Eumenides."
[Footnote 948: ][ (return) ] "Sup.," l. 227.
[Footnote 949: ][ (return) ] "Eum.," l. 445 seq.
[Footnote 950: ][ (return) ] "Choeph.," l. 47.
But after the law comes the gospel. First the controversy, then the reconciliation. A dim consciousness of sin and retribution as a fact, and of reconciliation as a want, seems to have revealed itself even in the darkest periods of history. This consciousness underlies not a few of the Greek tragedies. "The 'Prometheus Bound' was followed by the 'Prometheus Unbound,' reconciled and restored through the intervention of Jove's son. The 'Œdipus Tyrannus' of Sophocles was completed by the 'Œdipus Colonus,' where he dies in peace amid tokens of divine favor. And so the 'Agamemnon' and 'Choephoroe' reach their consummation only in the 'Eumenides,' where the Erinyes themselves are appeased, and the Furies become the gracious ones. This is not, however, without a special divine interposition, and then only after a severe struggle between the powers that cry for justice and those that plead for mercy."
The office and work which, in this trilogy, is assigned to Jove's son, Apollo, must strike every reader as at least a remarkable resemblance, if not a foreshadowing of the Christian doctrine of reconciliation. "This becomes yet more striking when we bring into view the relation in which this reconciling work stands to Ζεὺς Σωτήρ, Jupiter Saviour--Ζεὺς τρίτος, Jupiter the third, who, in connection with Apollo and Athena, consummates the reconciliation. Not only is Apollo a Σωτήρ, a Saviour, who, having himself been exiled from heaven among men, will pity the poor and needy; [951] not only does Athena sympathize with the defendant at her tribunal, and, uniting the office of advocate and judge, persuade the avenging deities to be appeased; [952] but Zeus is the beginning and end of the whole process. Apollo appears as the advocate of Orestes only at her bidding; [953] Athena inclines to the side of the accused, as the offspring of the brain of Zeus, and of like mind with him." [954] Orestes, after his acquittal, says that he obtained it
"By means of Pallas and of Loxias
And the third Saviour who doth all things sway." [955]