skill, but it may also involve a complete distortion of facts. We admit, of course, that ‘private settlements’ for homicide did occasionally take place in historical Athens, as they do in modern States. The actuality of such a settlement may perhaps be inferred from this speech of Demosthenes, but certainly not the legality of it. The second text which Glotz adduces in support of his theory is a passage from the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes,[297] in which Euripides criticises as a redundant expression the following Aeschylean verse[298] which describes the return of Orestes to Argos after his sojourn as an exile in Phocis: ἥκω γὰρ ἐς γῆν τήνδε καὶ κατέρχομαι. Aeschylus, in reply, denies that there is any redundancy in the verse, asserting that there is a very real difference between the home-coming of a citizen and that of an exile. Euripides, changing his ground, attacks the application of the verb κατέρχομαι (‘I return from exile’) to Orestes, because, he says, Orestes came home secretly, without having duly ‘appeased’ by gifts those who were competent to permit his return.[299] It does not, says Glotz,[300] occur to Euripides to say that no ‘appeasement’ was possible in the case of Orestes; and since, in the eyes of Aristophanes, the deed of Orestes was regarded as wilful murder, therefore, Glotz argues, Aristophanes may be regarded as implying in this passage that a wilful murderer could always return to his home-land, if he happened to be abroad, provided he paid ‘compensation’ to the relatives of the slain! There is a strange but very obvious error in this reasoning. Glotz has forgotten that in the early portion of the _Choephoroe_, in which the verse in question occurs, Orestes has not yet slain his mother! At this stage, therefore, he was not a murder-exile at all. He was merely a political or a quasi-political exile. Homer and later legend are quite clear in regard to the nature of this exile. Hence, obviously, the ‘persuasion of those in power’ in this passage has no connexion with homicide, and is, for Glotz’s argument, irrelevant. The return of political exiles was a common occurrence in the Greece of Aristophanes and Euripides. The persuasion used in such cases may have consisted merely of some kind of promise or undertaking to obey the existing government, but it may of course occasionally have taken the form of gifts or bribes. But the ruling power at Argos which Orestes would have had to persuade consisted of his deadliest enemies, Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus. He came home without their sanction and without their knowledge; Euripides therefore is right in his opinion that Orestes did not come home by permission of the Argive ‘government.’ The verb κατέρχομαι, which normally implies a formal and ‘recognised’ return, has not therefore here its normal meaning. Aeschylus is therefore technically in error in his use of this word, but he is right in maintaining that there is no verbal redundancy in the verse.