Pallas Athene came down to preside at Areopagus, and directed the judges to pronounce that, though the slaying of a mother was a fearful crime, yet it was Orestes’ duty to avenge his father’s death.  He was therefore acquitted, and purified by sacrifice, and was no more haunted by the Furies, while with Pylades he sailed for Tauris.  In that inhospitable place it was the custom to sacrifice all strangers to Diana, and, as soon as they had landed, Orestes and Pylades were seized, and taken to the priestess at the temple, that their hair might be cut and their brows wreathed for the sacrifice.  The priestess was no other than Iphigenia, who had been snatched away from Aulis, and, when she and the brother, whom she had left an infant, found each other out, she contrived to leave the temple by night, carrying the image of Diana with her.  They went to Delphi together, and there Iphigenia met Electra, who had heard a false report that her beloved Orestes had been sacrificed by the priestess of Tauris, and was just going to tear out her eyes, when Orestes appeared, and the sisters were made known to each other.  A temple was built for the image near Marathon, in Attica, and Iphigenia spent the rest of her life as priestess there.  Orestes, in the meantime, married Hermione—after, as some say, killing Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, to whom she was either promised or married—and reigned over both Mycenæ and Sparta until the hundred years’ truce with the Heracleids, or grandsons of Hercules, had come to an end, and they returned with a party of Dorians and conquered Sparta, eighty years after the Trojan war.