Which fell from Jove, and in th’ Athenian land
To fix it.... If we obtain
The statue of the goddess, I no more
With madness will be tortured.[146]
Here we breathe the atmosphere of religious expiation rather than of legal atonement. The origin of this oracular command may be attributed to Attic priests of Artemis, for in the temple at Halae there was an image which was believed to have been brought from the Tauri.[147] This expiation was not in any real sense ‘purgation,’ but it was sufficiently similar in character to be readily confused with it.[148] We are reminded of the expiatory sacrifice offered at the altar of the Erinnyes or the Semnai Theai at the Areopagus by persons who had been acquitted of homicide at the Areopagus court and by involuntary slayers who had returned from exile.[149] We may recall also the expiatory festival which Medea instituted at Corinth after she had slain her children and put to death the King of Corinth and his daughter.[150] In this play a mock ceremonial of purgation is performed in connexion with Orestes by Iphigeneia. She says[151]:
The strangers come, the sacred ornaments,
The hallowed lambs, for I with blood must wash
This execrable blood away, the light
Of torches, and what else my rites require
To purify these strangers to the goddess.