Although later in the history of this people, mothers were not regarded as related to their own children, and although in the age of Homer relationships had begun to be reckoned through fathers, in many places this writer reveals to us the fact that the bond between mother and child was stronger than that between father and child, or that the tie between sisters and brothers of the same mother was closer than that between the children of the same father. In Apollo’s address before the assembled gods, in which he advocates the ransoming of the body of Hector by Priam and his sons, Homer puts the following words into the mouth of the oracle: A man may lose his best-loved friend, a son, Or his own mother’s son, a brother dear.[178] [178] _The Iliad_, book xxiv., Derby’s translation. Numerous illustrations might be drawn from _The Iliad_ as proof of the fact that the tie between mother and child was still regarded as more binding than that between father and child. Homer doubtless represents an age in which the manner of reckoning descent was in dispute, certain tribes acknowledging only the tie between children born of the same mother, others only the bond between those of the same father, while still others acknowledge both, though with a preference for either one or the other. In the _Eumenides_ of Æschylus the idea of male descent is put forth as a new doctrine. Orestes, who has murdered his mother, Clytemnestra, asks: “Do you call me related to my mother?” Although reproaches and imprecations are heaped upon him for his inhumanity, it is found that the new doctrine in which the father is represented as the only real parent, has many adherents—that the gods have concurred in it, Athene herself having succumbed to the new faith.