822 PAPERS RELATING TO ANTHROPOLOGY. 



In the Orestean trilogy, of which the Eumenides forms the final and 

 most striking part, iEschylus had apparently several objects in view. 

 He glorified the institutions of the Athenian people by assigning a 

 divine origin to their great council, the Areiopagos, doubtless as op- 

 posed to the "modernizing institutions;" he showed the perfect action 

 of an ancestral curse, together with divine vengeance upon a doomed 

 race, the impious house of Pelops, and those who had become engrafted 

 upon it ; and I venture to think that in the Euimenides he also gave a 

 dramatic version of the change effected in past ages in the line of des- 

 cent. The whole gravamen of the charge against Orestes is that he has 

 shed the blood of his mother " being kindred." In reply for the defense 

 Apollo delivers a dictum, which, he takes care to state, is derived 

 directly from Zeus himself, and this dictum is confirmed by Athene, 

 .he embodimenc of Divine wisdom. The words placed in the mouth of 

 Apollo are those I desire to note. In the course of the prosecution of 

 Orestes, the Erinyes declare their ancient jurisdiction to be over those 

 who have shed the blood of kindred, and they claim the right to " hale 

 below "* the accused, he having " poured out upon the ground the kin- 

 dred blood of his mother." t In reply to this, Apollo, as counsel for 

 the defense, raises a nice point, on which, as the mouth-piece of Zeus, 

 he declares the law. He denies the authorship of the child to the 

 woman, declaring that she receives the germ merely " as a bailee," so 

 to speak. The sire, he says, is the author, for whom she preserves and 

 nourishes the young plant, as for one to whom she is united by ties, 

 which, though sacred, are expressly denied to be those of kinship.! 



(Uivr fry-) 



Here we have precisely the sentiment already quoted by me from my 

 aboriginal informant, that " the man gives the child to a woman to take 

 care of for him" ; and this I recognize as being at the root of changes 

 which have occurred in the social organization of the Australian tribes. 

 iEschylus shows the uterine line of descent as being the foundation oh 

 which rested the jurisdiction of the Erinyes, "assigned to them at their 

 birth," § and therefore of venerable antiquity. By the equally divided 

 vote of the judges he shows men's minds halting half-way between the 

 old views and the new, and he assigns the cause and the reason justi- 

 fying the momentous change which was effected under a direct divine 

 mandate through the mouth of the prophetic Apollo. It seems to me 

 that these conclusions may be drawn from the language used by the 

 dramatis persona?, and moreover that iEschylus may possibly have had 

 such conclusions in his mind when composing the Orestean trilogy. 



It has been a feature of the past history of mankind that great and 

 momentous changes have been made under an alleged divine direction. 

 Of old the lawgiver was the priest, and the priest declared himself to 



* Eumenides, 257, Camb. Texts. t Eum., 627 k.t.A. 



t lb., 623. §J6.,320, 329. 



