extenuation of the vengeance of Orestes. We shall find traces of both these conceptions in Aeschylus. In Sophocles the conception of Orestes’ act as justifiable matricide is predominant: in Euripides it does not appear at all. The interpretation of Orestes’ act as extenuated matricide does indeed appear in Euripides, but it is subordinated to another viewpoint which is quite incompatible with this—namely, the viewpoint of the Argive legend which ignores Apollo and regards Orestes as a common matricide who is worthy only of death. One or two other minor variations may be traced in the Oresteian legends. Thus we read of a sentence which is very suggestive of perpetual exile in the _Electra_ of Euripides,[8] while in other plays there is a reference to the penalty of exile for the duration of a single year, a penalty which is elsewhere extended by a decree of Apollo so as to permit Orestes to embark upon a second expedition—this time to the Tauric Chersonese![9] Again, the story which was invented to explain the Athenian Pitcher-Feast, and which is mentioned in the _Iphigenia Taurica_ of Euripides,[10] is quite inconsistent with the Aeschylean legends, for in the former case Orestes was represented as ‘polluted’ when he came to Attica, while in the latter he is said to have been already ‘purged.’ The legal aspect of the Oresteia is further complicated by what we may term archaic assumptions. We hope to show presently that the Attic legends of Orestes would have been legally unintelligible if the Athenian legend-makers had not assumed that Orestes came to Athens as an exile _after_ he had slain his mother, and not, as Homer said, _before_. Again, if they had not assumed that the Areopagus court, which in historical times did not normally judge cases of homicide between strangers, did judge such cases in early times, and that its verdict of acquittal, which was ordinarily a proof of the innocence of the accused, could at one time have been applied to a person who admitted the fact but pleaded justification, the legal analysis of this legend would have been impossible. We have seen[11] that before Solon the Areopagus court adjudicated in all kinds of homicide cases. The attribution of such functions to the Areopagus by Attic legend is therefore an archaism, even though it is an ‘historical’ archaism. We cannot be certain whether the archaism was transmitted from the sixth century onwards or whether it was ‘invented’ by later minds by a process which is described as ‘conscious archaising.’ Again, according to the legend which conceived Orestes’ act as extenuated matricide, he had already served a period of exile before he reached Athens. In this account, therefore, the Areopagus merely decreed him immune from further penalties. But such a decree was never associated with the historical Areopagus! Thus it is clear that the Oresteian legends sometimes contain ‘unhistorical’ archaisms. We must now