This affected and obscure exordium is followed by verbal subtleties at every opportunity: “through my sorrows I live not, yet see the light”[702]—“my deeds, not my appearance, ravage me”[703]—“my body’s gone, my name alone remains”.[704] But all this is nothing to the detestable exhibition wherewith he answers the aged Tyndareus. To the vital point—that Clytæmnestra should have been brought before a legal tribunal—he makes no reply whatever. His only difficulties are that Tyndareus is wounded to the soul by his daughter’s death, and that he is far older than Orestes. What is to be done? Simply to “contract out of” natural feelings so that the way may be clear for pure logic:— True, matricide doth taint me, yet again Pure am I, for my sire I did avenge. Therefore let thy great age be set aside From this our conference, for it puts me out; And let me on—’tis but thy hair I dread.[705] There follows a frigid “statement”—“balance two against two”[706]—of his father’s claim and his mother’s offences, and of his own glorious achievement in purifying social life. The original sinner is Tyndareus himself who begot so vile a daughter! He ends by an appeal to Apollo’s behest, and a pompous comment on the importance of marriage. The aged Spartan having given his grandson over to justice as irreclaimable, the youth turns to Menelaus, whom he insists on regarding as his real hope, in spite of Menelaus’ plain reluctance and extreme unpopularity in Argos. He is, moreover, unwilling to endure another display: “Let me be; I am reflecting....”[707] At all times he is impatient of subtleties; in the first moments of their meeting he asks his accomplished nephew: “What mean you? Wisdom is shown not by obscurity, but by plain speech.”[708] But now that Orestes has his chance, he refuses to suffer Menelaus’ “reflections,” and with a warning that “a long address is better than a short one, and easier for the auditor to follow”[709] produces a masterpiece of metallic cleverness which presses Seneca himself very hard; perhaps the finest gem is the offer of Hermione as a kind of discount.[710] Before the Assembly he succeeds in combining several insanely tactless insults to the Argives: they are “possessors,” not original citizens, of the land; they were Pelasgians at first, but later “Danaidæ,” descendants of the women who slew their husbands; and he has killed his mother as much for their sake as his father’s.[711] But Euripides’ most frightful satire on “advanced education” is reserved for the nightmare of the close, where the raving Orestes leans down over the battlement to the grief-maddened Menelaus and begins by a lunatic reminiscence of the “Socratic method”: “will you be the questioner or the respondent?”[712]