But Orestes was not yet relieved from the vengeance of the Erinyes. At length he took refuge with Minerva at Athens. The goddess afforded him protection, and appointed the court of Areopagus to decide his fate. The Erinyes brought forward their accusation, and Orestes made the command of the Delphic oracle his excuse. When the court voted and the voices were equally divided, Orestes was acquitted by the command of Minerva. Byron, in “Childe Harold,” Canto IV., alludes to the story of Orestes: “O thou who never yet of human wrong Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis! Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss, And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss, For that unnatural retribution,—just, Had it but been from hands less near,—in this, Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!” One of the most pathetic scenes in the ancient drama is that in which Sophocles represents the meeting of Orestes and Electra, on his return from Phocis. Orestes, mistaking Electra for one of the domestics, and desirous of keeping his arrival a secret till the hour of vengeance should arrive, produces the urn in which his ashes are supposed to rest. Electra, believing him to be really dead, takes the urn and, embracing it, pours forth her grief in language full of tenderness and despair. Milton, in one of his sonnets, says: “. . . The repeated air Of sad Electra’s poet had the power To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.” This alludes to the story that when, on one occasion, the city of Athens was at the mercy of her Spartan foes, and it was proposed to destroy it, the thought was rejected upon the accidental quotation, by some one, of a chorus of Euripides. TROY The facts relating to the city of Troy are still unknown to history. Antiquarians have long sought for the actual city and some record of its rulers. The most interesting explorations were those conducted about 1890 by the German scholar, Henry Schliemann, who believed that at the mound of Hissarlik, the traditional site of Troy, he had uncovered the ancient capital. Schliemann excavated down below the ruins of three or four settlements, each revealing an earlier civilization, and finally came upon some royal jewels and other relics said to be “Priam’s Treasure.” Scholars are by no means agreed as to the historic value of these discoveries. ———— CHAPTER XXIX ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES—THE LOTUS-EATERS—CYCLOPES—CIRCE—SIRENS—SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS—CALYPSO RETURN OF ULYSSES THE romantic poem of the Odyssey is now to engage our attention. It narrates the wanderings of Ulysses (Odysseus in the Greek language) in his return from Troy to his own kingdom Ithaca.