Sovereign Athene, sped by Phoebus’ word, I come. Do thou with clemency receive The outcast—not red-handed nor unpurged, But mellowed by long time and travel-worn. Among new households, alien ways, o’er land And beyond sea.... Taught wisdom in the school of misery, I am learned in all atonement.... The stains Of slaughter on my hands are dulled and pale. The guilt of matricide is washed away, For while quite recent, at Apollo’s hearth, ’Twas driven out and purged with death of swine, And tedious were the number to tell o’er Of men I have communed with without harm. All-mellowing time makes old defilement pure. Nothing can remove the inconsistency in this quotation. We seek merely to explain it by attributing it to a confusion of two different legends, which viewed the act of Orestes from two different legal standpoints. In this passage Aeschylus happens to emphasise a standpoint which he usually ignores, namely the conception of Orestes as a matricide of partial guilt, or as an extenuated matricide, the conception which underlies the stories of the wandering of Orestes and of his sojourn as a homicide-exile in various lands. If Aeschylus does not consistently exclude this conception from his drama, this must be attributed not only to a certain legal affinity which exists between the conception[72] of Orestes as justified, and the conception of him as partially guilty, but also to a confusion of these conceptions in pre-existing legends. This analysis which we have given indicates, at least, the value of legal considerations for the complete intelligibility of this play. For the history of law, also, we may infer from Aeschylus, or rather from pre-Aeschylean legend, that the early Areopagus, and therefore the early Ephetae courts, adjudicated in various kinds of homicide cases. The division of labour which took place, we believe,[73] in pre-Solonian times, and which left to the Areopagus exclusive jurisdiction in cases of wilful murder, of malicious wounding, and of poisoning with intent to kill, had obviously not yet appeared at the time when this Attic legend took shape. There is thus no basis for Ridgeway’s hypothesis[74] that the place of Orestes’ trial was not the Areopagus but the Palladium. The image of Athene which Orestes embraces in the _Eumenides_ was not, as Ridgeway thinks, the famous wooden image of the goddess at the Palladium, but was rather, as Müller points out,[75] the image of Athene on the Acropolis. The relation between the legal and the dramatic aspects of the story of Orestes may be indicated by the following useful, if fanciful, hypothesis: Let us suppose, for the moment, that there existed in the time of Aeschylus no other legends of Orestes except that which is found in the Homeric poems. If Aeschylus wished to incorporate this legend, in the form of a tragic drama, following we may assume in his dramatic art the Horatian maxim[76]: