This principle runs through the entire trilogy of the Oresteia. Agamemnon lost his life as recompense for the life of his daughter Iphigenia whom he slew with his own hand, and the murder of Agamemnon was avenged by the slaughter of Clytemnestra and her paramour. Throughout the three plays doom follows the criminal relentlessly and only divine interference in the end clears the account. And yet at times Aeschylus teaches a gentler belief, that wisdom comes through suffering and constraint, and that it is through the discipline of pain that we travel the road to understanding. Although Aeschylus lays overwhelming emphasis on the truth that punishment for sin falls upon the sinner in this life, he also teaches that there is punishment for the wicked in the world below. In his description of the dead there are many reminiscences of Homer. But his Hades is not Homeric; there is reality in punishment there no less than upon earth. In the Eumenides the Furies threaten Orestes thus: Nay, I shall suck—thou canst not choose but pay the penalty— The red gore from thy living limbs, and win me out of thee The banquet of a draught that shall with awful anguish flow. Yea, I will waste thy living frame, then drag thee far below, There to pay all thy penalty, the mother-murder’s woe. So shall all else that have transgressed, Have sinned against a God, a guest, Or parents, mark how each receives The dues of sin that Justice gives. For Hades ’neath the earth waits every soul, A mighty judge who watcheth to enscroll All sins on his eternal memory’s roll.[136] Of the rewards of the righteous in the next life Aeschylus has no word to say. There is no Elysium or Islands of the Blest. Aeschylus represents the Athens of the Persian Wars; Sophocles belongs to the Periclean age. He was born fifteen years before the battle of Salamis and led the chorus which sang a paean to celebrate the Greek victory. To his contemporaries his life seemed happy, as if he were beloved by the gods above all other men. In 468 B.C. he was successful in contending for the tragic prize with Aeschylus, and he continued to write until his death in 406. Instead of the rugged strength and passion that we find in Aeschylus, Sophocles displays a sunny and gentle nature that naturally sought out the kindly and mediating elements in life. A conservative, he was not an innovator, critic, or teacher, as both Aeschylus and Euripides were; he does not make his characters reason much on the deeper things of life or criticize the traditional order.