Double, as involving a sin against the laws of hospitality, so far as the suppliants were strangers—a sin against the laws of kindred, so far as they might claim by descent the rights of citizenship. Footnote 251: If, as has been conjectured, the tragedy was written with a view to the alliance between Argos and Athens, made in B.C. 461, this choral ode must have been the centre, if not of the dramatic, at all events of the political interest of the play. Footnote 252: The image is that of a bird of evil omen, perched upon the roof, and defiling the house, while it uttered its boding cries. Footnote 253: The suppliants' boughs, so held as to shade the face from view. Footnote 254: The name of Hecate connected Artemis as, on the one side, with the unseen world of Hades, so, on the other, with childbirth, and the purifications that followed on it. Footnote 255: The name of Lykeian, originally, perhaps, simply representing Apollo as the God of Light, came afterwards to be associated with the might of destruction (the Wolf-destroyer) and the darts of pestilence and sudden death. The prayer is therefore that he, the Destroyer, may hearken to the suppliants, and spare the people for whom they pray. Footnote 256: The “three great laws” were those ascribed to Triptolemos, “to honour parents, to worship the Gods with the fruits of the earth, to hurt neither man nor beast.” Footnote 257: The Egyptian ships, like those of many other Eastern countries, had eyes (the eyes of Osiris, as they were called) painted on their bows. Footnote 258: A side-thrust, directed by the poet, who had fought at Marathon, against the growing effeminacy of the Athenian youth, many of whom were learning to shrink from all activity and exposure that might spoil their complexions. Comp. Plato, _Phædros_, p. 239. Footnote 259: The saying is somewhat dark, but the meaning seems to be that if the “dogs” of Egypt are strong, the “wolves” of Argos are stronger; that the wheat on which the Hellenes lived gave greater strength to limbs and sinew than the “byblos fruit” on which the Egyptian soldiers and sailors habitually lived. Some writers, however, have seen in the last line, rendered— “The byblos fruit not always bears full ear,” a proverb like the English, “There's many a slip 'Twixt the cup and the lip.” Footnote 260: The words recall the vision of the “seven well-favoured kine and fat-fleshed,” which “came out of the river,” as Pharaoh dreamed (Gen. xli. 1, 2), and which were associated so closely with the fertility which it ordinarily produced through the whole extent of the valley of the Nile. Footnote 261: Two dangerous low headlands seem to have been known by this name, one on the coast of Kilikia, the other on that of the Thrakian Chersonese. Footnote 262: