Areopagus she proclaims the great principle, "that the highest tribunal upon earth is the collective conscience of humanity."[1] The cause is tried before this august assembly; righteous regard is had for the special circumstances of the deed; Orestes is acquitted, the sanctity of the primeval goddesses is recognized; their wrath is appeased, and thus the intuitive thirst for revenge is transmuted into the principle of eternal justice. Thus the drama of the Eumenides exhibits, under one of its grandest phases, the contest between the Titans and the Olympian gods, issuing in the triumph of free will and moral power over blind instinct and necessity, while the transmutation of the Erinyes into the Eumenides symbolizes the profound thought that even the instinctive tendencies in human nature are implanted there by its Divine Author, and consequently that man's highest well-being demands, not their suppression or annihilation, but their harmonious subordination to the higher faculties of the soul.
Classical poetry affords the true key to classic art; it is, therefore, interesting to turn from the study of Æschylus to the contemplation of the Parthenon, where the Athenians beheld translated into marble the same profound ideas which the great dramatist has embodied in his immortal works. Thus the sculptures of the eastern pediment, having reference to the birth of Athena, indicate, by the presence of the Fates and other divine personages, the deep significance attached
