The technicalities of the Areopagos are still kept up. The three points on which the Erinnyes, as prosecutors, lay stress are: (1) the fact of the murder; (2) the mode; (3) the motive. “Three bouts,” as referring to the rule of the arena, that three struggles for the mastery should be decisive. Footnote 517: The pleas put in by the Erinnyes as prosecutors are: (1) That Clytæmnestra had been adequately punished by her death, while Orestes was still alive; and (2) when asked why they had not intervened to bring about that punishment, that the relationship between husband and wife was less close than that between mother and son. They drew, in other words, a distinction between consanguinity and affinity, and upon this the rest of the discussion turns. Orestes, and Apollo as his counsel, on the other hand, meet this with the rejoinder, that there is no blood-relationship between the mother and her offspring. Footnote 518: _Sc._ Their oath to give a verdict according to the evidence must yield to the higher obligation of following the Divine will rather than the letter of the law. Footnote 519: To have died in health by the arrows of a woman-warrior might have been borne. To be slain by a wife treacherously in his bath was to endure a far worse outrage. Footnote 520: In this new argument, and the answer to it, we may trace, as in the _Prometheus_ and the _Agamemnon_, the struggles of the questioning intellect against the more startling elements of the popular religious belief. Zeus is worshipped as the supreme Lord, yet His dominion seems founded on might as opposed to goodness, on the unrighteous expulsion of another. Here, in Apollo's answer, there is a glimmer of a possible reconciliation. The old and the new, the sovereignty of Cronos and that of Zeus may be reconciled, and one supreme God be “all in all.” Footnote 521: Comp. the thought and language of the _Suppliants_, v. 93. Footnote 522: The last argument is, that the acquittal can be, at the best, partial only, not complete; formal, not real. There would remain for ever the pollution which would exclude Orestes from the _Phratria_, the clan-brotherhood, by which, as by a sacramental bond, all the members were held together. Footnote 523: The question seems to have been one of those which occupied men's minds in their first gropings towards the mysteries of man's physical life, and both popular metaphors and primary impressions were in favour of the hypothesis here maintained. Euripides (_Orest._, v. 534) puts the same argument into the mouth of Orestes. Footnote 524: The story of Athena's birth, full-grown, from the head of Zeus, is next referred to as the leading case bearing on the point at issue. Footnote 525: