Æschylus connects the old and the new Athens. Before Marathon he produced his first play; in the interval before Salamis he gained a first prize; and he brought out his greatest dramas in the time of the Renascence, of which he was a great part. The bare hill of the Areopagus claims attention as we descend from the Propylæa. It rises as a physical barrier between the deserted site of the old city of Theseus and that of Classic or of Modern Athens. With the sanctity attaching to the time-honoured prerogatives of its venerable court it was also a moral barrier between the old and the new in the days when Pericles was reshaping the civic life. And Æschylus in his “Eumenides,” the third play of his great trilogy, strove as best he could to reconcile old traditions with the inevitable readjustment to the life of imperial Athens. He spoke with the authority of a Hebrew prophet. Whatever else was changed, blood-guiltiness must be judged. Only within the mysterious gloom of the cleft beneath the Areopagus could the dread and ancient Furies, spawn of Night, be transformed into willing coadjutors of the goddess of Wisdom. [Illustration: AREOPAGUS] The Furies in hot haste have pursued from Delphi Orestes, the mother-murderer. Confidently anticipating the verdict, they cry:— “Over the victim thus we chaunt, A frenzy and madness his mind to daunt, A hymn of the Furies to fetter the mind, A withering blight to human kind.” The god Apollo himself appears for the defendant, and when the decision goes against the Furies by Athena’s casting vote in the Areopagus Court, their bitterness against the “new” gods shoots forth like the serpents uncoiling in their hair:— “Ah upstart gods and parvenu! My ancient laws your hoof-beats spurn. Ye wrested them from out my hand, Alas for you! I, though dishonoured and distressed, Upon this land The grievous weight of my wrath shall turn And from my breast Shoot venom on venom, woe for woe, Drop upon drop of a poison flow For Earth unbearable, unblest.” Athena pacifies the Furies by promising them a local sanctuary and the reverence of the citizens for all time. The old order is reconciled with the new, and the Furies, now the Eumenides—the Propitious Ones—are escorted to their dwelling in the cleft of the Areopagus by Athena’s own attendants, boys, maidens, and matrons, with ceremonious honour equal to the Panathenaic procession:— “Fare ye on to your home in your emulous might With our loyal attendance, ye children of Night. (O my countrymen, bless them and praise them!) “In the caverns of eld, in the womb of the Earth With the offerings of honour befitting your worth. (O my demesmen, now bless them and praise them!)