Orestes to have been rightly done, and the guilt of matricide to have been wiped away. Then the Furies were angered with Athena and her land: but Athena promised them great honour from the Athenians, and a sacred dwelling place in the land, even a cave beneath Areopagus; and they were appeased, and were called no more Furies, but Gracious Goddesses. And Orestes went back unto his father's kingdom, and the curse of blood upon the house of Atreus was stayed.[1]
It will be obvious, even from a compendium like the foregoing, that the myth is an epic in itself: and regarding Æschylus' treatment of it as a whole, we may discern a special propriety in the poet's recorded saying, that his dramas were "scraps from the lordly feast of Homer." I have sometimes fancied that an interesting parallel might be drawn between the three parts of the Trilogy, and the three divisions of the Divina Commedia. For we have in both, the same central idea; the succession, that is, of guilt, atonement, absolution. Dante fixes his epic in the future world, Æschylus in the present: but mutatis mutandis, substituting the deepest religious thought of Athens for that of the middle ages, the most shadowy and gigantic vision of retributory forces for the clearest and most distinct—we shall find the parallel curiously suggestive, to say the least, of the essential unity of moral speculation. The first part of the Trilogy, the drama Agamemnon, takes up the above myth at the point where Agamemnon's return from Troy is being anxiously awaited at Argos, in the tenth year of the war. The first choric ode recalls some of the previous history, dwelling
