We have reason to believe that the Delphic God--through the agency of his politic priesthood--was asserting his claim in the eighth and seventh centuries to be the dictator in the matter of purification from homicide, and thus to satisfy the cravings of an awakening conscience. This claim may have been suggested partly by the fear of competition with the spreading Dionysiac religion, which also brought with it a ‘Kathartic’ message, and with which the Delphic priesthood were wise enough to agree quickly; partly also by the aboriginal nature of {75} Apollo, who was immemorially φοῖβος or ‘pure.’ Though the claim was not universally admitted and the Apolline jurisdiction could not obliterate the function of other divinities in this matter, yet it was powerful and effective of much that was vital both to law and religion. Of the early procedure at Delphi we know nothing. If the god exercised discretion in his grant of purification, if he refused, for instance, to purify the deliberate and cold-blooded murderer, here was the opportunity for the emergence of a civilised law of homicide. It may not have been until the seventh century that any Hellenic state could express in a legal establishment its consciousness of the difference between the act of murder and the act of justifiable or accidental homicide. The earliest that we know of was the law-court, ἐπί Δελφινίω, “near the image [or shrine] of the Dolphin-God”--established at Athens under the patronage of the Cretan-Delphic God to try cases where the homicide was admitted and justification was pleaded. In this, as in other Attic courts that dealt with the same offence, rites of purification were often an essential adjunct of the ceremony. The typical legend that enshrines the early ideas of ‘Katharsis’ and turns on the question of justifiable homicide is the legend of Orestes, which had spread around the Peloponnese and penetrated Attica as early as the eighth century, and later became Pan-Hellenic. Apollo, as a divine agent, appears in it first, as far as we have any literary record, in the lyric of Stesichoros, and at some indeterminate date in this period undertook the purification of the matricide.