To appreciate this masterpiece, we must realize that Euripides, who so often insists on considering tradition in the light of his own day, has here insisted on that principle even more definitely than elsewhere. Certain legendary data are, to be sure, retained. Troy has fallen but a few years ago; Iphigenia was offered by her father as a sacrifice at Aulis. Otherwise the events described might have occurred in the fifth century. Agamemnon, though a noble of great eminence, was not a king[697]; Argos is ruled by an Assembly not distinguishable from the Athenian Ecclesia. The youth who exacts vengeance with his own hand is told in language which might have been employed by Pericles, that the vendetta is an outrage upon law and society; punishment for crime rests with the State alone.[698] The behest of Apollo, all-important in the _Choephorœ_, is not even mentioned in the discussion which decides the fate of Orestes. The oracle is indeed treated with scant courtesy even by those most concerned to uphold it; Electra complains of the god’s “wickedness,”[699] and her brother “blames Loxias” for urging him to a villainous deed and then giving no aid.[700] The atmosphere is one in which the slaughter of Clytæmnestra must be regarded with horror and the traditional defence of Orestes as unthinkable. This is not a theological study, but a dramatic essay in criminal psychology. In Orestes the playwright has given us one of his most terrible portraits. Highly sensitive, weak-minded, over-educated in a bad school, he is unbalanced by the horror of his father’s death and by the oracular command which has blasted his life. In the magnificent sick-bed scene he, like his sister, fills us with nothing but pity. But the calmer he becomes the more are we filled with loathing for this pedant of eighteen, with his syllogisms justifying murder, his parade of rhetoric, his hopeless inability to grasp a situation. Rich as is the world’s drama in villains, Orestes occupies a place conspicuous. He has little heart and no sense. Both failings are common. But that both heart and brain should be replaced by a factitious perverse cleverness, an incredibly superficial passion for scoring logical points against opponents who have in hand urgent interests of real life—this grips us irresistibly. He is an example of the wreck produced by a highly specialized mental training which has ignored character. His first address to Menelaus strikes the note:— Freely will I divulge my woes to thee. But _as the first-fruits of my plight_, I touch Thy knees, a suppliant, _tying prayer_ the while To thy _unleafèd lips_....[701]