‘Alas, thou Fate—grievous, dire to be borne, And Oedipus’ holy Shade, Black Erinys, verily, mighty art thou,’ chant the chorus again and again. Fate is close at hand and nigh akin, but the real identity and apposition is between the shade, the ghost of Oedipus, and the black Erinys. Here and in the _Prometheus Bound_[559] Aeschylus is fully conscious that it is the actual ghost, not a mere abstract vengeance that haunts and pursues. Io is stung by the oestrus[560] because she was a cow-maiden, but the real terror that maddens her is that most terrifying of all ancient ghosts, the phantom of earth-born Argus. ‘Woe, Woe! Again the gadfly stings me as I go. The earth-born neatherd Argos hundred-eyed, Earth, wilt thou never hide? O horror! he is coming, coming nigh, Dead, with his wandering eye. Uprising from the dead He drives me famished Along the shingled main, His phantom pipe drones with a sleepy strain. Ye gods, what have I done to cry in vain, Fainting and frenzied with sting-driven pain?’ But when we come to the Oresteia, the Erinyes are envisaged from a different angle. The shift is due partly to the data of the plot, the primitive saga out of which it is constructed, partly to a definite moral purpose in the mind of the tragedian. * * * * * The primitive material of the trilogy was the story of the house of Atreus in which the motive is the blood-curse working from generation to generation, working within the narrow limits of one family and culminating in the Erinys of a slain mother. At the back of the Orestes and Clytaemnestra story lay the primaeval thought so clearly expressed by Plato in the _Laws_[561]. ‘If a man,’ says the Athenian, ‘kill a freeman even unintentionally, let him undergo certain purifications, but let him not disregard a certain ancient tale of bygone days as follows: “He who has died by a violent death, if he has lived the life of a freeman, when he is newly dead, is angry with the doer of the deed, and being himself full of fear and panic on account of the violence he has suffered and seeing his murderer going about in his accustomed haunts, he feels terror, and being himself disordered[562] communicates the same feeling with all possible force, aided by recollection, to the guilty man—both to himself and to his deeds.”’ Here the actual ghost is the direct source of the disorder and works like a sort of bacillus of madness. It is not the guilty conscience of the murderer, but a sort of onset of the consciousness of the murdered. Its action is local, and hence the injunction that the murderer must leave the land. How fully Aeschylus was conscious of this almost physical aspect of crime as the action of the disordered ghost on the living comes out with terrible vividness in the _Choephori_[563]: