The bare hill of the Areopagus claims attention as we descend from the Propylæa. It rises as a physical barrier between the deserted site of the old city of Theseus and that of Classic or of Modern Athens. With the sanctity attaching to the time-honoured prerogatives of its venerable court it was also a moral barrier between the old and the new in the days when Pericles was reshaping the civic life. And Æschylus in his “Eumenides,” the third play of his great trilogy, strove as best he could to reconcile old traditions with the inevitable readjustment to the life of imperial Athens. He spoke with the authority of a Hebrew prophet. Whatever else was changed, blood-guiltiness must be judged. Only within the mysterious gloom of the cleft beneath the Areopagus could the dread and ancient Furies, spawn of Night, be transformed into willing coadjutors of the goddess of Wisdom.
AREOPAGUS
The Furies in hot haste have pursued from Delphi Orestes, the mother-murderer. Confidently anticipating the verdict, they cry:—
“Over the victim thus we chaunt,
A frenzy and madness his mind to daunt,
A hymn of the Furies to fetter the mind,
A withering blight to human kind.”
The god Apollo himself appears for the defendant, and when the decision goes against the Furies by Athena’s casting vote in the Areopagus Court, their bitterness against the “new” gods shoots forth like the serpents uncoiling in their hair:—
“Ah upstart gods and parvenu!