play, assume, respecting the limits of punishable homicide, views which are not compatible: or again that the question of the validity of the oracular command, though it is a main point in the defence, and though the jury must be supposed to disagree about it, is not argued, unless contradiction is argument, at all.... On law, therefore, and the history of law, the _Eumenides_ is but a dubious authority: and the reader or expositor of Aeschylus as such is not bound or perhaps entitled to consider the play from this point of view.’ This kind of reasoning seems to us very suggestive of a well-defined mental attitude, namely, that of a writer who knows little or nothing about law and who, in addition, does not want to know anything about it. We do not assert that the legal problems of the _Eumenides_ are simple, but they cannot for that reason be ignored. The more difficult a problem is, the greater is the prestige of a court which can decide the issue. Athene confesses the difficulty of the problem in this play and she requests the citizens of Athens to solve it.[61] What an exaltation of religion! What a contempt for law! The legal complexities of the trial of Orestes arise, we have said, from the circumstances which attended the evolution of the legends. The introduction of the story of Apollo’s command to Orestes was intended by the legend-makers of the ‘pollution’ era to explain and to reinforce the Homeric conception of Orestes’ act as justifiable matricide. That Apollo’s command justified his act is the legal plea of Orestes, in this play; at least, it is the predominant plea. Thus he says to Apollo[62]: Now give thy witness and expound the truth. Apollo, was I just in slaying her? To have done it I deny not. ’Tis the fact. But whether to thy thought this matricide Be justified or no, declare thy mind For information of those present here.