The words are both doubtful and obscure. Taking the reading which I have adopted, they seem to mean that while men in general had means of propitiating the Erinnyes and other Powers for the guilt of unavenged bloodshed, Orestes and Electra had no such way of escape open to them. If they, the next of kin, failed to do their work, they would be exposed to the full storm of wrath. But a conjectural emendation of one word gives us, “For making known to men the earth-born ills That come from wrathful Powers.” Footnote 418: Either that old age would come prematurely, or that the hair itself would share the leprous whiteness of the flesh. Footnote 419: The words, as taken in the text, refer to Orestes seeing even in sleep the spectral forms of the Erinnyes. By some editors the verse is placed after v. 276, and the lines then read thus:— “And that he calls fresh onsets of the Erinnyes As brought to issue from a father's blood, Seeing clearly, though he move his brow in darkness.” So taken, the last line refers to Agamemnon, who, though in the darkness of Hades, sees the penalties which will fail upon his son should he neglect to take vengeance on his father's murderers. Footnote 420: Stress is laid here, as in _Agam._ 1224, on the effeminacy of the adulterer. Footnote 421: The great law of retribution is repeated from _Agam._ 1564. As one of the earliest utterances of man's moral sense, it was referred popularly among the Greeks to Rhadamanthos, who with Minos judged the souls of the dead in Hades. Comp. Aristot. _Ethic. Nicom._, v. 8. Footnote 422: The funeral pyre, which consumes the body, leaves the life and power of the man untouched. The spirit survives, and calls on the Gods that dwell in darkness to avenge him. The very cry of wailing tends, as a prayer to them, to the exposure of the murderer. Footnote 423: The Lykians, of whom Glaucos and Sarpedon are the representative heroes in the _Iliad_, are named as the chief allies of the Troïans. Footnote 424: The words embody the widespread feeling that the absence of funereal honours affected the spirit of the dead, and that the souls with whom he dwelt held him in high or low esteem according as they had been given or withheld. Footnote 425: Pindar (_Pyth._ x. 47), the contemporary of Æschylos, had made the name of these Hyperborei well known to all Greeks. The vague dreams of men, before the earth had been searched out, pictured a happy land as lying beyond their reach. There were Islands of the Blest in the far West; Æthiopians, peaceful and long-lived, in the South; and far away, beyond the cold North, a people exempt from the common evils of humanity. The latter have been connected with the old Aryan belief in the paradise of Mount Meru. Comp. also Herod. iv. 421; _Prom._ 812. Footnote 426: