"Good, how good, when one who dies unjustly leaves a son behind him To avenge his death!"--Odyss. iii. 196, is the wisdom of old Nestor with regard to this subject and this very case: and the wise goddess Athena, the daughter of the Supreme Councillor, in whom "all her father lives," stamps her distinct approval on the deed of Orestes, by which Clytemnestra was murdered, and holds him up as an illustrious example to Telemachus, by which his own conduct was to be regulated in {97} reference to the insolent and unjust suitors who were consuming his father's substance. "This when thou hast done, and well accomplished, as the need demands, Then behoves thee in thy mind with counsel rife to ponder well How the suitors that obscenely riot in thy father's halls Thou by force or fraud may'st slay: for surely now the years are come, When too old thou art to trifle like a child with childish things. Hast not heard what fair opinion the divine Orestes reaped From the general voice consenting to the deed, then when he slew The deceitful false Ægisthus, slayer of his famous sire." Odyssey i. 293. Public opinion, therefore, to use a modern phrase, not only justified Orestes in compassing the death of his mother, but imperatively called on him to do so. Public opinion, however, could not control Nature, nor save the unfortunate instrument of paternal retribution from that revulsion of feeling which must necessarily ensue, when the hand of the son is once red with the blood of her whose milk he had sucked. Orestes finds himself torn in twain by two contrary instincts, the victim of two antagonist rights. No sooner are the Furies of the father asleep, than those of the mother awake; and thus the bloody catastrophe of the present piece prepares the way for that tragic conflict of opposing moral claims set forth with such power in the third piece of this trilogy--the Eumenides.