Next to religion the most prominent feeling in the mind of the early Greeks was filial piety.[142] Nowhere among men were parents held in higher honour. The reverence paid to them partook largely of the religious sentiment. Regarded as the instruments by which God had communicated the mysterious and sacred gift of life, they were supposed by their children to be for ever invested with a high degree of sanctity as ministers and representatives of the Creator. Hence the anxiety experienced to obtain a father’s blessing and the indescribable dread of his curse. A peculiar set of divinities, the terrible Erinnyes, all but implacable and unsparing, were entrusted with the guardianship of a parent’s rights, and indescribable were the pangs and anguish supposed to seize upon transgressors. These were the powers who tracked about the matricides Orestes and Alcmæon, scaring them with spectral terrors and filling their palaces with the alarms and agonies of Tartaros. On the other hand, nothing can be more beautiful than the pictures of filial piety exhibited by the nobler characters of heroic times. The examples are innumerable, but none is so striking or complete as that of Achilles towards his father Peleus. Fierce, vehement, stern in the ordinary relations of life, towards his aged father he is gentle as a child. His heart yearns to him with a strength of feeling incomprehensible to a meaner nature. He submits to his sway and authority not from any apprehension of his power, not even from the fear of offending him, but from the fulness of his love, from the natural excellence and purity of his heart. He would erect his valour and the might of his arm into a rampart round the old man, to protect him from injury and insult; and even in the cold region of shadows beyond the grave this feeling is represented as still alive, so that in death, as in life, the uppermost anxiety of the hero’s soul is for the happiness of his father. Even in the government of his impetuous passions during his mortal career, in the choice of the object of his love, Achilles expresses a desire to render his feelings subordinate to those of his parent, thus verging on the utmost limits of self-denial and self-control conceivable in a state of nature. Homer understood his countrymen well when he gave these qualities to his hero. Without them, he knew that no degree of courage or wisdom would have sufficed to render him popular, and, therefore, we find him not only pre-eminent for his piety towards the gods, but at the same time the most affectionate and dutiful of sons, the warmest, most disinterested, and unchangeable of friends. Footnote 142: Respect for old age is still a remarkable feature in the Greek character. Thiersch. Etat Actuel de la Grèce, i. 292. On the same trait in their ancestors see Mitf. i. 186. Odyss. ω. 254. Plat. Repub. vi. p. 6. f. Æsch. cont. Tim. § 7.