s only the right of the
mother. That Clytemnestra slew her husband is indifferent to them; on
the other hand, they demand punishment for the matricide, committed by
Orestes: in killing his mother he had committed the worst crime
imaginable under the old gentile order. Apollo, on the contrary, stands
on the opposite principle. Commissioned by Zeus to avenge the murder of
his father, he had led Orestes to the murder of his own mother. Apollo
now defends Orestes' action before the judges, saying:

That scruple likewise I can satisfy.
She who is called the mother of the child
Is not its parent, but the nurse of seed
Implanted in begetting. He that sows
Is author of the shoot, which she, if Heaven
Prevent not, keeps as in a garden-ground.
In proof whereof, to show that fatherhood
May be without the mother, I appeal
To Pallas, daughter of Olympian Zeus,
In present witness here. Behold a plant,
Not moulded in the darkness of the womb,
Yet nobler than all scions of Heaven's stock.

According to Apollo, the act of begetting confers the superior right;
whereas, according to the views in force until then, the mother, who
gives to the child her blood and its life, was esteemed the sole
possessor of the child, while the man, the father of her child, was
regarded a stranger. Hence the Erinnyes reply to the strange notions of
Apollo:

Thou didst lead astray
Those primal goddesses with draughts of wine,
O'erturning ordinance.
Young, thou wouldst override our ancient right.

The judges, thereupon, make ready for the sentence. One half stand by
the old, one half by the new right; a tie is threatened; thereupon
Athene seizes the ballot from the altar and dropping it in the urn,
says:

To me it falls to give my judgment last.
Here openly I give it for Orestes.
No mother bore me. To the masculine side
For all save marriage my whole heart is given,--
In all and everything the father's child.
So little care I for a woman's death,
That slew her lord, the guardian of her home.
Now though the votes be even, Orestes wins.

The new right won. Marriage with the father as head, had overpowered the
gyneocracy.

Another legend represents the downfall of the mother-right in Athens
this way: "Under the reign of Kekrops, a double miracle happened. There
broke forth simultaneously out of the earth an oil-tree, an