CLYTEMNESTRA. Heed not thou these brainless barkings. While to folly folly calls, Thou and I with wise command shall surely sway these Argive halls. [The End] CHOEPHORÆ OR, THE LIBATION-BEARERS {93} A LYRICO-DRAMATIC SPECTACLE Ἐκ γὰρ Ὀρέσταο τίσις ἔσσεται Ἀτρέιδαο Ὁπποτ ἄν ἡβήσῃ τε κὰι ἧς ἱμείρεται ἄιης. HOMER. Think upon our father, Give the sword scope--think what a man was he. LANDOR. PERSONS {94} ORESTES, Son of Agamemnon. PYLADES, Friend of Orestes. CHORUS OF CAPTIVE WOMEN. ELECTRA, Sister of Orestes. NURSE OF ORESTES. CLYTEMNESTRA, Mother of Orestes. ÆGISTHUS. SERVANT. SCENE--_as in the preceding piece. The Tomb of Agamemnon in the centre of the Stage._ INTRODUCTORY REMARKS {95} THE right of the avenger of blood, so familiar to us from its prominency in the Mosaic Law (see Numbers, chap. 35), is a moral phenomenon which belongs to a savage or semi-civilized state of society in all times and places; and appears everywhere with the most distinct outline in the rich records of the early age of Greece, which we possess in the Homeric poems. No doubt, the most glowing intensity, and the passionate exaggeration of the feeling, from which this right springs, is found only among the hot children of the Arabian desert;[f1] and in no point of his various enactments were the wisdom and the humanity of their great Jewish lawgiver more conspicuous than in the appointment of sacerdotal cities of refuge, which set certain intelligible bounds of space and time to the otherwise interminable prosecution of family feuds, and the gratification of private revenge. But the great traits of the system of private revenge for manslaughter, stand out clearly in the Iliad and Odyssey; and the whole of the ancient heroic mythology of Greece is full of adventures and strange chances that grew out of this germ. Out of many, I shall mention only the following instance. In the twenty-third book of the Iliad (v. 82), when the shade of Patroclus appears at the head of his sorrowful, sleeping friend, after urging the necessity of instant funeral, for the peace of his soul, he proceeds to make a further request, as follows:--