Woe for the omen that with impious men Joineth a righteous man in fellowship! Than evil converse, in all enterprise Nothing is worse; its harvest let none reap. Infatuation’s field hath death for fruit. If the godfearing man for shipmates hath A crew hot-hearted in iniquity, With that god-hated tribe he perisheth: The righteous man who dwells with citizens Traitrous to guests and reckless of the Gods, Is justly taken in the selfsame net, Lashed by the same impartial scourge of God.[133] We have just seen that Pindar shows a tendency to make man responsible for his sin, quite in contrast to the popular belief which still kept the Homeric view that the gods were responsible for all things. With this popular idea Aeschylus seems at times in accord. But if we consider his plays in their entirety, he makes man responsible for the first step. In the Eumenides, for example, the Furies declare that no just man has ever put his hands justly to any deed and met their wrath. The lesson is that when men have taken the initial downward step themselves an evil divinity or daemon drives them on, but that the first step no man is forced to take. When, however, he has taken it, then the poet represents the sinner as through god’s will infatuated with his sin. No other extant poet shows so impressively how sin relentlessly persists through generation after generation. The most familiar illustration is found in Aeschylus’ treatment of the story of the bloody line of Atreus, who sinned by slaying his brother’s sons and offering their flesh, an unholy banquet, to their father; then Agamemnon’s queen, with her paramour Aegisthus, slew her lord on his return from Troy; and finally Agamemnon’s son Orestes murdered his mother and Aegisthus to avenge his sire. Thus through three generations the curse ran, each generation adding its own crime until only the divine intervention of Apollo and Athena could stay the course of sin and its doom. When in the Choephoroe Orestes has exacted his vengeance and stained himself with his mother’s blood, the chorus finally sings: Lo, how upon the palace royal hath burst The third storm that fulfils the house’s fate! First, wretch Thyestes at a feast accurst Of his own children ate: Then shrieked the second storm the agony Of that king in that laver hacked to death, When the Achaians’ chief to treachery There yielded up his breath: Now on the third storm’s wild wings down doth sweep A Saviour—or a Doom shall he be named? Where shall the Curse end?—how be lulled to sleep Its fury?—how be tamed?[134]