Begone! I bid you, forth of mine abode!... Profane not with your presence this fair shrine, But go where headsmen execute the doom, Where eyes are gouged, throats gashed, where robbed of prime, Boys lose all hope of offspring, tender limbs Are hacked or stoned: where men, impaled alive, Moan long and bitterly.... Go, Inhabit, as beseems such form, the den Of some blood-lapping lion, nor infect With touch accursed my oracular seat. Go! herded by no goat-herd, ye fell flock, Hated of all in Heaven. Away! Depart! Yet the Erinnyes have not lost all traces of the ghost-cult of primitive ancestor-worship and fertility-worship. We have already quoted[95] the magnificent passage in which they promise their blessings to the Attic land. We are reminded of primitive ancestral ghosts by the words which Clytaemnestra (herself a ghost) speaks to the Erinnyes[96]: Much wealth of mine ye have glutted, drink offerings, Unmixed with wine, tempered to soothe your heart; And rich burnt offerings at dead of night, That hour of dread, avoided by all gods. The conception of the Erinnyes as Titans is established by comparing their frequent references in this play to Apollo and Athene as ‘younger gods’[97] with their words applied by Prometheus, in another play, to the Olympian gods[98]: Yet who but I to these new deities Gave and determined each prerogative? and again[99]: Young gods, young pride of unproved majesty. We agree with Müller[100] that the ‘appeasement’ of the Furies and their transmutation into Semnai Theai was an essential part of the pre-Aeschylean legend. We have already suggested the forces which probably contributed to the story of their ‘conversion.’ Beneath the religious, mythical story of a transference of cult, beneath the story of the adoption by the Erinnyes of the worship of the Semnai, lurks, we believe, the echo if not the reality of legal and social evolution. The ‘conversion’ of the Erinnyes, which directly indicates the acceptance, on the part of non-Athenian avengers, of the verdict of an Athenian homicide court, symbolises also, in general, the acquiescence of rebellious clans, which in the seventh century B.C. were deprived of material retribution in cases of bloodshed, in the new system—the historical system—of murder-penalties, which we have associated with Apollo and political synoekism. The cult of the ‘Eumenides,’ who were probably the ‘Semnai’ under a different name, we need not discuss here. It is a religious rather than a legal matter. It has been discussed at length by Verrall,[101] Miss Harrison,[102] Müller,[103] and others, and we do not see that its elucidation affects in the least the intelligibility of this play. THE ‘SUPPLIANTS’ AND THE ‘SEVEN AGAINST THEBES’