Aeschylus then in the _Oresteia_ is dealing with a primitive story and realizes to the uttermost its primaeval savagery. But he has chosen it for a moral purpose, nay more, when he comes to the Eumenides, with an actual topical intent. He desires first and foremost by the reconciliation of old and new to justify the ways of God to men, and next to show that in his own Athenian law-court of the Areopagus, those ways find their fullest practical human expression. That court, he somehow contrived to believe, or at least saw fit to assert, was founded on a fact of tremendous moral significance, the conversion of the Erinyes into Semnae. The conception of the Erinyes comes to Aeschylus from Homer almost full-fledged; his mythological data, unlike his plots, were ‘slices from the great feasts of Homer,’ and this in a very strict sense, for, owing no doubt partly to the primitive legend selected, he has had to narrow somewhat the Homeric conception of the Erinyes and make of them not avengers in general, but avengers of tribal blood. Moreover he has emphasized their legal character. It is noteworthy that when Athene formally asks the Erinyes who and what they are[575], their answer is not ‘Erinyes’ but ‘Curses our name in haunts below the earth.’ And when Athene further asks their function and prerogatives (τιμαί) the answer is: ‘Man-slaying men we drive from out their homes[576].’ The essence of primitive law resided, as has already (p. 142) been seen, in the curse, the imprecation. Here the idea is not that of a cosmic Fate but of a definite and tangible curse, the curse of blood-guilt. It is scarcely possible to doubt that in emphasizing the curse aspect of the Erinyes, Aeschylus had in his mind some floating reminiscence of a traditional connection between the Arae and the Areopagus. He is going to make the Erinyes turn into Semnae, the local Athenian goddesses invoked upon the Areopagus: the conception of the Erinyes as Arae makes as it were a convenient bridge. The notion of the Erinyes as goddesses of Cursing is of course definitely present in Homer, but it is the notion of the curse of the broken oath rather than the curse of blood-guilt. In the great oath of Agamemnon[577] he, as became an Achaean, prays first to Zeus, but also to Earth and to the Sun and to the Erinyes who ‘Beneath the earth Take vengeance upon mortals, whosoe’er Forswears himself.’ Hesiod[578], borrowing from Melampus, tells us that ‘On the fifth day, they say, the Erinyes tend Oath at his birth whom Eris bore, a woe To any mortal who forswears himself.’ Aeschylus narrows the Homeric and Hesiodic conception of the Erinyes to the exigencies of the particular legend he treats; they are for him almost uniformly the personified Curses that attend the shedding of kindred blood, though now and again he rises to the cosmic conception of Heracleitus, as when the chorus in the _Eumenides_ exclaim[579]