Ghosts and gods are never visible to the bystander, but only to the person or persons who may be under their special influence at the moment of their appearance--so in the Iliad (I. 197), Pallas Athena-- "There behind him stood, and by the yellow hair she seized Pelides, Seen to him alone; the others saw not where the goddess stood." and so in a thousand places of the poet. To the spectator, however, in the theatre, spiritual beings must be visible, because (as Müller, Eumen. 3, properly remarks) they are the very persons from before whose eyes it is the business of the poet to remove the veil that interposes between our everyday life and the spiritual world. That the Furies of the following piece were seen bodily at this part of the present play, and are not supposed to exist merely in the brain of Orestes, is only what a decent regard for common poetical consistency on the part of a great tragic poet seems to imply. Note 76 (p. 130). ". . . the god whose eyes in love behold thee!" What god is not said, but the word θεός is used indefinitely without the article. The Greeks had an indefinite style when talking of the divine providence--_a god_, or _some god_, or _the god_, or _the gods_--a style which arose naturally out of the Polytheistic form of celestial government. Examples of all the different kinds of phraseology are frequent in Homer. Sometimes, in that author, the expression, though indefinite in itself, has a special allusion, plain enough from the context; and in the present passage I see no harm in supposing an allusion to Apollo, under whose immediate patronage Orestes acts through the whole of this piece and that which follows. NOTES TO THE EUMENIDES {373} Note 1 (p. 141). "Old earth, primeval prophetess, I first With these my prayers invoke; and Themis next."