The poet’s clear thinking and ethical soundness are shown in his treatment of the hereditary Curse or Até (ἄτη). Some great sin brings this curse into being, and it oppresses the sinner’s family with an abnormal tendency to further crime. But the descendants are not forced to sin. The action of the curse, according to Æschylus, is upon their imagination. When some temptation to wrong-doing occurs to them, as to all men, they may suddenly remember the curse and exclaim in effect: “Why struggle against this temptation? our house is ridden by an Até which drives us to sin”. Thus they rush upon evil with a desperate gusto and abandon. So Eteocles[297] cries:— Since Heav’n thus strongly urges on th’ event, Let Laius’ race, by Phœbus loathed, all, all Before the wind sweep down the stream of Hell! But the curse can be resisted. The house of Atreus fed its curse from generation to generation by criminal bloodshed. But Orestes shed blood only at the behest of Heaven, and so combined necessary vengeance with innocence. Thus the curse was laid to rest.[298] The revision to which he subjected the myths of popular religion is therefore characteristic. There were four leading phenomena which it was necessary somehow to co-ordinate if a consistent faith was to be possible. First, there was the Olympian hierarchy, the object of the State-religion at Athens as elsewhere. Secondly, there was Chthonian religion or the worship of earth-powers. Thirdly, there was the vague, less personal, power called Fate. And lastly, there was conscience, the feeling that sin polluted the soul, not merely the hands of the wrong-doer.[299] None of these four conceptions was by itself adequate in the eyes of Æschylus. The Olympians, though the rulers of men and on the whole their friends, were according to universal report stained with all the crimes of humanity. The earth-deities ruled only by fear; they punished but they did not inspire; nor was it clear that their power was not somehow subordinate to that of Heaven. Fate was impersonal and had no moral aspect on which men could base their understanding of its law. The conception of personal righteousness had no visible basis in the scheme of things; there was no power outside man who guaranteed the authenticity of his thirst for holiness. When once Æschylus set out on his self-appointed path, he brooked no obstacle. First, as to the Olympian gods, he explains away the difficulties. Most of them are frankly ignored,[300] edifying accounts being substituted for them; some few are accepted with a shrug.[301] Zeus is no longer the head of a turbulent confederacy; he has become the father and lord of powers who obey him implicitly and derive their prerogatives from his will. The earth-deities, as has been shown, surrender their moral functions and become mere spirits of fertility, localized, in the case of the Furies, upon Attic soil. Nothing, even in this writer, is more audacious than