Castor: You may: no curse this blood derives on you.
Orestes: May I address you, sons of Tyndareus?
Castor: Thou mayst: to Phoebus this dire deed I charge.
This confusion may be attributed to a conflation of ideas which had already affected the Argive legend prior to the time of Euripides, or it may be merely due to a lack of consistent discrimination, on the part of the dramatist, between the divergent viewpoints of the Attic and the Argive legends. In historical times a person accused of homicide was not debarred from private social intercourse. He was merely prohibited from frequenting the temples and public places. Plato asserts[48] that there were degrees of pollution corresponding to degrees of guilt and in proportion to the certainty of guilt. In this case, therefore, the ‘pollution’ of Orestes and Electra was of a minor character, since they were both as yet untried and unconvicted.
Orestes naturally interprets his guilt from the standpoint of the Attic and the Phocian legends, but he does not distinguish very clearly[49] between justification and extenuation. He says to Menelaus[50]:
Yet have we where to charge our miseries ...
Phoebus, by whose command I slew my mother.
Again, he says to Tyndareus[51]:
See’st thou Apollo, who to mortal ears