The main difficulty which the ancients found in the post-Homeric legends of Orestes was the interpretation of the command which Apollo gave to Orestes. Some legends, of course, such as that which we have called the ‘Argive legend,’[67] did not include any reference whatever to such a command. But in the Attic legends, which represent this command as an essential element in the story, there is no precise and definite answer to the question: ‘Did this command justify the vengeance of Orestes or was it a mere “extenuation” of his guilt?’ We have said that the conception of this command as a complete justification predominates in the _Eumenides_, though the Erinnyes naturally object to this interpretation. But the command may also be regarded as an abnormal psychic factor which would make it possible to interpret the act of Orestes as ‘kin-slaying in a passion,’ or extenuated kin-slaying, which is akin to involuntary homicide. It is only thus that we can explain the reference in certain forms of the legend to a penalty of one year’s exile: and to other details of punishment which are never associated with voluntary homicide. The Furies, in the _Eumenides_,[68] find it difficult to conceive that Orestes will ever return to his domestic religion. Now Plato[69] asserts that a son who slew his parent in a passion could not, unless the dying parent ‘forgave,’ return again to his domestic hearth, even though he could return, after a period of exile, to his native State. We cannot suppose that the Furies, in the _Eumenides_, represent an attitude of ‘forgiveness’ on the part of Clytaemnestra, and hence we could not expect them to accept the possibility of Orestes’ return to his native home in Argos. But the mere mention of such a detail suggests a plea of quasi-involuntary matricide. A verdict of acquittal on a plea of justifiable slaying is precisely the verdict which the Erinnyes in Aeschylus, before their ‘conversion,’ cannot recognise. But they might have accepted as an alternative to their charge of wilful matricide a charge of extenuated matricide. Such a charge, such a conception of Orestes’ guilt, is very prominent in a form of the legend which Euripides gives.[70] But even in Aeschylus this conception is not altogether absent, though it is very much suppressed, perhaps because it was inconsistent with the dominant viewpoint of the Aeschylean drama. Thus, Orestes suggests that before he came to Athens to stand his trial he had already atoned for any element of guilt which was involved in his obedience to Apollo. He says to Athene, before the trial[71]: