Orestes has returned to Argos, . For him to brandish at his father's murderers is natural there, where he is delivering a sort of general manifesto as to his aims, and where the strong word is justified and alleviated by the jingle with juxtaposed . But there is no reason for Orestes to go on insisting on the bloodthirstiness of these aims, and reads oddly in 100, where he is explaining soberly his plan of campaign.

All commentators on these lines make two assumptions about the first clause, that means ‘sitting in judgement’, ‘punishing’, or the like, that the which is its subject as well as that of is the second in a series of two: the subsequent slaying punishes or sits in judgement on the previous; thus the slaying of Cly taemnestra herself will sit in judgement upon that of Agamemnon, just as that had sat in judgement upon the of Iphigenia. Then opinions differ as (...) to whether is to be taken as the object of both verbs, or of one but not the other. (shrink)

Barrett finds lines 1010–15 difficult. He says that ‘hovers between “an heiress as my wife” and “marriage with an heiress”’, that ‘a Greek heiress did not inherit property as her own: it passed not to her but with her, to her husband and ultimately to her children.—In Attic law a widow was never : a man's property went to his legitimate children.