NOTES
curious, is perhaps below the level of the rest of the play. For one thing, I think it is deliberately set, like the play scene in Hamlet, one remove further from reality. As the play in general is to real life, so is the Trial Scene to the play. Further, the acquittal of Orestes does not depend on the arguments used in the trial, but on the Will of Zeus, which is an ultimate fact not dependent on argument. The interest lies in the foundation of the Court of the Areopagus, as a tribunal superseding the blood-feud, the ordeal by oath, and all all the rigid and unreasoning practices of primitive justice, by a justice which can understand and therefore sympathize.
The arguments run roughly as follows:—
Prosecution.
Did the prisoner kill his mother? He admits it. He must die.
Defence.
Apollo ordered him to kill, because she had killed her husband.—Why did you not pursue her?
Prosecution.
A husband is not a blood relation. (A mere quibble, like Portia's pound of flesh without blood.)
Defence.
If it comes to that, neither is a mother. The best physiologists say that the human mother is in function exactly like Mother Earth. She provides the soil for the seed, she does not provide the seed itself.
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