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62 and for myself, decide. If this were so, of what nature was the dramatic solution? How was the undoubted guilt of the heroines, in murdering their lords, balanced against the cruel and impious compulsion whereby they had been forced into a detested wedlock—a wedlock from which their own father bade them escape by murder?

Whatever guess be made as to this, I think that students of Æschylus' great surviving trilogy will admit that this situation has considerable analogy to that of Orestes, stained with the blood of a mother knowingly slain, yet directed to the deed by a god, protected by him while pursued by the Furies, and finally acquitted by the intervention of Athena and by the forms of human justice.

It is in this region of guilt undenied, yet justified,—of a contest and final reconciliation between co-equal duties—that the mind of Æschylus moved. It was so, apparently, in his Promethean trilogy; it is so in his trilogy of the "House of Atreus;" it may well have been so in his trilogy of the "Daughters of Danaus."

In the final choric strains of the "Suppliant Maidens" (ll. 1034–1051), the way is paved for some intervention or special appearance of Aphrodite: the surviving fragment of the "Danaides" is, as has been said above, part of an authoritative speech by her. The tone of reverence in which the heroines speak of her may possibly foreshadow her eventual appearance to protect them as wronged by a loveless marriage. Or again, Aphrodite may impeach them for their crime, and plead for Hypermnestra only; and some indirect intervention of Zeus, mindful of the wrongs of Io, may set free her female descendants. But I am disinclined to venture further on the path of conjecture, and will formulate briefly a general view, which no one, I trust, will mistake for a confident dogma.

The "Suppliant Maidens" is the first play of a trilogy. The second play, whatever was its title, related the surrender of the maidens, their marriage, and the murder of their husbands. The third, called "Danaides," represented their arraignment and acquittal: perhaps, also (see Prom. ll. 774, 869), some special honour paid to Hypermnestra; the descendants of whom and Lynceus, the husband whom she loved and spared, ruled in Argos for many generations.