Chapter III Euripides
The extant dramas of Euripides are permeated with references to homicide. It will be necessary to examine seventeen out of the nineteen extant plays. We need not discuss the Cyclops or the Rhesus. The Oresteian dramas will be our first concern. In attempting a legal analysis of Euripides we are confronted with a difficulty which is present only in a minor degree in the case of Aeschylus and of Sophocles, namely the difficulty of deciding how far Euripides followed mythological tradition, or how far he ignored this tradition and invented characters and plots which reflect mainly his own mental outlook and the ideas of his time. Owing to the prominence which he gives to the prologue and to the deus ex machina, and owing to the frequency of his allusions to contemporary ideas and developments, it is often maintained that the main elements of Euripidean drama are derived from fifth-century Athenian life, and that, therefore, the plots and the scenes are incongruous and impossible. Thus Jevons says1: ‘If Sophocles laid his scenes in “a past which never was present,” he at any rate adhered to his imaginary period with fidelity. But Euripides lays his scenes in a time which is neither past nor present, but an incongruous and impossible epoch, in which Theseus defends the republican institutions of Athens and Hecuba regrets the high price of Sophists’ lectures’; and again2: ‘The motive seems to have been to give as little time as possible to the myth as traditionally related, in order to concentrate attention on the incidents and situations of Euripides’ own making. Euripides could not throw off the myths altogether, but he got rid of them as much as possible by relegating them to the prologue and to the deus ex machina’.... ‘Compelled3 by the tradition of the tragic art to take his subjects from mythology, Euripides was impelled by his instinct as an artist to draw his characters from real life: and to present the heroes of mythology acting from everyday motives and with everyday feelings was to attempt in most cases an impossible fusion. The slaying of Clytaemnestra by Orestes is a proper subject for the art of Sophocles or Aeschylus, but is wholly unsuited to the new form of art which Euripides was making for.... The discords4 which exist in Euripides’ plays between his character-drawing and his situations, between his sentiments and his mythical subjects... are discords which Sophocles avoided and Euripides could not or would not convert into harmonies.’ On this subject, Verrall also holds a similar view.5
It would be obviously impossible for us to discuss this matter with any degree of completeness, but we must point out that we do not agree with this interpretation of Euripides. In Attic drama, as we conceive it, it was customary for the poet to derive the skeleton of his plots and situations from traditional myth. In clothing that skeleton with vitality and movement and with organic unity, the dramatist was compelled to translate himself into the past, to reconstruct from his data the details of speech, of action, and of character. In a word, he consciously archaised. Now we admit that in this vital point of ancient dramatic art Euripides is not so correct, so unimpeachable, as Sophocles or as Aeschylus. He could not always shake off the influences of his time. But to suggest that Euripides deliberately set himself to create a new form of drama admittedly incongruous, unhistorical and unreal, seems to us, as far as we can judge, as nonsensical as to suppose that Pheidias could have created a statue of Olympian Zeus with an Asiatic turban on its head and ‘barbarian slippers’6 on its feet. In our view, Euripides followed traditional legend not only in the prologue and in the epilogue, but also in the dramatic ‘episodes.’ To depart from tradition, it would have been necessary and, for a dramatist with new and advanced ideas, it would have been easy to invent new characters, new names, new situations. In such an event, Euripides could at least have been consistent. But since in actual fact we find that he concerned himself less with questions of consistency than with situations involving surprise and horror, with problems of human passion, and with incidents of human interest, we must attribute his inconsistencies to the fact that he was fettered by traditional legend and that he overreached himself in his desire to give to the characters of mythology a really living personality. He was, of course, aware of variations in the legend. Like Sophocles and Aeschylus, he had to become an ‘eclectic,’ to choose certain elements from different stories for dramatic purposes, and to ignore other elements. But whereas the eclecticism of Sophocles and also to a great extent of Aeschylus is dominated by the canon of consistency, that of Euripides is dominated mainly by a less orthodox canon which is more conducive to human interest and which we may call the canon of psychic hedonism. Judged by the criterion of the Horatian maxim aut famam sequere aut sibi convenientia finge,7
Euripides stands condemned if the latter alternative is applicable to the former. But if the maxim be interpreted to mean ‘Follow tradition and if there are variations in the story do not trouble about consistency8 provided that every character and every situation has a traditional basis, but if you abandon tradition consistency is absolutely necessary,’ then Euripides is canonical. Of the real meaning of this maxim we cannot be certain, but to our mind it seems to mean: ‘Consistency is the aim of all literary art, but tragedians must be guided by traditional myth, and therefore in tragedy consistency, though desirable, is not indispensable, whereas in all other domains of art consistency is essential.’ Miss Harrison and Gilbert Murray9 have suggested a theory of the origin of Greek tragedy which supposes, in effect, that its forms or characteristic ‘events’ were derived from an ancient ritual of the Year Spirit, while its actual ‘content,’ its characters, situations, episodes, were derived from Homeric saga. This theory we need not now discuss, but we must point out that Homer was not the only source of ancient mythology. When Horace says10:
rectius Iliacum carmen deducis in actus
quam si proferres ignota indictaque primus,
he merely mentions the Iliad as an example of traditional story, not as the boundary of its extent. In many instances—as, for example, in the case of Orestes—we have suggested that there were several variants in the post-Homeric myths.
Aristotle says11 of Sophocles and Euripides, Σοφοκλής ἔφη αὐτὸς μὲν οἵους δεῖ ποιεῖν, Εὐριπίδην δὲ οἷοι εἰσίν. This much-controverted statement is usually interpreted to mean that Sophocles reproduced the antique mythological atmosphere in his characters and in his plots, whereas Euripides imported contemporary types into the legendary background. But we find it very difficult to believe that Euripides conceived Orestes, Hercules, Menelaus and other heroic characters as ordinary fifth-century Athenians.12 The context in which this statement of Aristotle occurs is very obscure. Aristotle mentions three possible ideals of characterisation: ἢ γὰρ οἷα ἦν ἢ ἔστιν, ἢ οἷά φασιν καὶ δοκεῖ, ἢ οἷα εἶναι δεῖ, ‘Either as (things and people) were or are, or as they assert that they are and as they seem to be, or as they must be.’ Now if the criticism of Euripides which Aristotle attributes to Sophocles read οἷοι ἦσαν instead of οἷοι εἰσίν, meaning ‘men as they were,’ not ‘men as they are,’ we should be more readily prepared to accept it. We hope to show that the characters and situations in Euripides are often archaic, and this archaism must be attributed either to the conscious archaising of the dramatist or to the antiquity of the legends which he follows.
With this preamble we may proceed to discuss the references to blood-vengeance in the dramas of Euripides. Once more we will begin with the legend of Orestes. We do not possess a Euripidean play which describes the actual murder of Agamemnon; but the deed is attributed to Clytaemnestra and to Aegisthus in the prologue to the Electra.
The ‘Electra’
In the Electra Euripides follows closely the lines which were laid down by Aeschylus in his Choephoroe and by Sophocles in his Electra. There are certain minor divergencies which Verrall has indicated in the Introduction to his edition of the Choephoroe, but there are also very striking similarities, not only in the main plot, but even in the arguments which appear in the dialogue. We are told that Orestes left Argos while his father was still in Troy, and went to Phocis.13 We do not hear that at that period he was associated with Athens. Thus the Homeric narrative14 is ignored and we observe, once more, the strange omission of a fact which rendered so natural the legendary assumption of Orestes’ subsequent trial at Athens. But the omission is less flagrant in Euripides than it is in Aeschylus or in Sophocles, because Euripides follows in the main a legend which connected the trial of Orestes with Argos and not with Athens, and though the dramatist cannot altogether avoid a reference to a trial at the Areopagus, he refers to it in a subordinate manner,15 attributing, no doubt, any difficulty which he found in understanding it to the inscrutable nature of Apolline decrees.
Once more we find Clytaemnestra pleading, as a justification for her act, the ‘sacrifice’ of Iphigeneia. The peasant of the Prologue doubts the justice of this plea16 and the ordinary people are not in the least deceived by it. Electra repudiates it as a dangerous fiction. She reveals the insidious nature of the plea by pointing out, as she does also in the Electra of Sophocles, that if Clytaemnestra arrogates to herself the right to decide whether the sacrifice of Iphigeneia was or was not an act of murder, and whether, therefore, the death of Agamemnon was or was not justified by this sacrifice, she must logically concede to Orestes a similar right of decision regarding these issues, and therefore, also, the right to slay Clytaemnestra if he considers it right to slay her!
If blood, in righteous retribution, calls
For blood, by me behoves it thou should’st bleed,
And by thy son, Orestes, to avenge
My father: there if this was just, alike
Is it just here.17
In reasoning of this kind, which we cannot suppose to have been included in traditional saga, we see a deliberate effort at ‘conscious archaising’ on the part of Sophocles18 and of Euripides. In the Homeric society there existed, we have argued,19 a distinction between murder and righteous vengeance. If this distinction had not existed in the Achaean caste the result would have been chaotic. Instead of a restricted system of ‘private vengeance’ which is controlled by discipline and by public opinion, we should find prevailing everywhere a barbarous vendetta-system. The ‘sacrifice’ of his daughter by Agamemnon is not mentioned in Homer, and there is no reason for assuming that such a sacrifice ever took place. But if it had occurred, the Achaeans would not have regarded it as an act of murder. In historical Athens such a plea as that which Clytaemnestra here advances could never have been made, as the legal and religious atmosphere was so entirely different. Hence, in dramatising a legend of this kind the correct reproduction of such arguments as those which we are discussing demanded considerable skill. As this play of Euripides cannot be regarded as a mere servile imitation of the corresponding Sophoclean drama, we must suppose that Euripides had recourse to ‘conscious archaising.’ It so happens, as we think, that in attributing this sentiment to Electra he has visualised correctly the Achaean attitude to murder.
In the Orestes we shall find an argument attributed to Tyndareus which at first sight seems to resemble the reasoning of Electra in this passage, but which is really very different. Tyndareus says of Orestes20:
He ought t’ have called the laws, the righteous laws,
T’ avenge the blood, and by appeal to them
Have driven his mother from this royal house:
Thus ’midst his ills calm reason had borne rule,
Justice had held its course, and he been righteous.
We believe that this sentiment of Tyndareus was either included in or suggested by an Argive variant of the Oresteian legend, and that it is based on the assumption that trials for homicide existed before Orestes slew his mother. The contrast which is drawn in the Orestes passage is a contrast between social justice and private vengeance, but the Electra passage indicates a contrast between private vengeance and vendetta. Now, in social justice such as existed in historical Greece, from the seventh century onwards, the Achaean system of private vengeance would have been regarded as a crime. Similarly in the Achaean system of ‘private vengeance’ uncontrolled and indiscriminate ‘vendetta’ was a crime. In both cases the crime would have consisted in the violation of the existing order. Now Euripides suggests (as we infer from these two passages in the Orestes and the Electra) that the consequence of such a violation is identical in both circumstances, namely an indefinite series of murders. As applied to vendetta we admit that this criticism is true, but in regard to private vengeance it is false. We have seen21 that such a series of slayings did not characterise either the Achaean or the Pelasgian system of ‘private vengeance.’ We shall have occasion to refer to this topic again when we discuss the problems of the Orestes drama.22
In the Electra the Chorus approves of the long-expected vengeance of Orestes. Speaking of the slain Aegisthus, they say to his slayer, Orestes23:
His deeds were dreadful: dreadful hath he felt
Your vengeance. With great power is Justice armed.
Orestes tells Electra that, since Aegisthus was a murderer, his body cannot be buried24:
... his lifeless corse
I bring thee: treat it as thy soul inclines;
Cast it by rav’nous beasts to be devoured,
Or to the birds, the children of the air;
Fix it, impaled, a prey.
We have already quoted Plato for the custom of refusing burial to murderers. We presume that it was a legally prescribed custom in historical Greece. The precise origin of the custom cannot be determined with any degree of certainty, but we associate it with the doctrine of pollution and the evolution of State power in the seventh century. In Homer,25 of course, Aegisthus was duly and formally buried, even though the people of that age regarded burial as a passport to eternal repose in the Spirit-land. It is perhaps because of this Homeric fact that, at the end of the Electra,26 the deities Castor and Pollux decree that the body of Aegisthus must be buried. Thus we find Euripides making use of the deus ex machina to reconcile two divergent viewpoints, and probably, therefore, two inconsistent legends.27
Euripides is distinctly non-Homeric in attributing to Orestes a psychological conflict as the dread moment approached in which he was to slay his mother and his cousin Aegisthus. Such a conflict would have been natural, in Pelasgian tribalism, if a kin-slayer refused to go into exile; but the conflict would not have been confined to a single avenger: it would have been diminished by the group-consciousness of an avenging clan. Nor could such a conflict have arisen in historical times, for the punishment of kin-slayers had, as we maintain,28 been assumed by the State. Hence we must regard this tragic conflict as a piece of unhistorical conscious archaising on the part of Euripides. The fact that the picture is unhistorical is no doubt to be condoned in view of its dramatic value.
In this play Electra actually assists her brother in his deed of vengeance. For this co-operation she is sentenced to exile by Castor and Pollux,29 but we are prevented from regarding the penalty as severe by the further decree that she must become the wife of Pylades!30 It is true that Pylades was absent from the actual slaying of Clytaemnestra, but a short time previously he was present at the death of Aegisthus,31 although he took no actual part in the slaying. From the standpoint of historical Attic law, he was therefore as guilty (or as innocent) as Orestes and Electra were. Hence this decree of Castor and Pollux must be interpreted prophetically; they are speaking of the future, which, as gods, they foresee. Therefore they regard the exile of Electra as temporary and her guilt as that of extenuated matricide. That the death of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus involved their slayers in some degree of guilt, in the opinion of Castor and Pollux, is obviously suggested by the penalties which they impose. They say to Orestes32:
With justice vengeance falls
On her: in thee unholy is the deed.
Such sentiments can only be rendered intelligible by assuming the existence of what we have described33 as the second Attic legend, which conceived Orestes and his friends as guilty of quasi-involuntary homicide. Castor and Pollux are compelled by their foreknowledge of destiny to believe that, some day, a court will declare the act of Orestes to have been either justifiable or extenuated; that Court they know will be the Athenian Areopagus. They cannot understand, perhaps, why the court should be Athenian, but they know it must be so! From a legal point of view, nothing could be more strange than their decree that Orestes, pending his acquittal at the Areopagus, must leave his native Argos. In historical Greece an accused kin-slayer awaiting trial would only have been debarred from the temples and the public places of his own State; he would have been tried before a court of his own State. He would not have been tried by a foreign court unless he fled from his own State and sought permission to reside in a foreign State. Hence to command Orestes to leave Argos until he was tried at Athens is legally absurd. The only explanation which we can offer for such an absurdity is that Euripides is following either two separate legends or a fusion of two legends, and that he uses the dramatic device of the deus ex machina to remove, or rather to obscure, the inconsistency and the confusion.
Again, it is strange that, in this play, Castor and Pollux, who, as divine kinsmen of the slain Clytaemnestra, should appear in a diabolical implacable rôle clamouring for blood, content themselves with the promulgation of Apolline decrees which they do not profess to understand. We can only explain this fact by supposing that in the story of Orestes, as it evolved in post-Homeric times, the influence of Apollo, the pioneer Interpreter and Purifier, was so great that no respectable local gods could resist his decrees; and it devolved upon the quasi-diabolical Titanic Erinnyes to unfurl the standard of revolt.
Castor and Pollux proclaim that, at Athens, Apollo will take upon himself the guilt of having commanded the deed34:
For the blame
Apollo on himself will charge, whose voice
Ordained thy mother’s death.
In historical Greek law the plotter and the executor of bloodshed were equally criminal and culpable. To partition blood-guilt was not to remove it. Therefore, if Apollo can transfer to himself the guilt of Orestes, this can only be because there is a doubt about the nature of the guilt. But in estimating the nature or the extent of this guilt, the legends seem to have been divided, some of them regarding the case as one of justifiable matricide and others as one of extenuated matricide.35 Similarly the Erinnyes were divided in their opinion. Sometimes they pursue Orestes in the rôle of avenging relatives clamouring for the trial or extradition of a wilful kin-slayer who had fled to a foreign State with the intention of residing there as an exile and who hoped to secure admission by a plea of ‘justifiable slaying’; but sometimes they seem to suggest that Orestes was not a matricide of full guilt, that the anger of the slain was temporary and transient, and that it would ultimately terminate in ‘forgiveness,’ because of the extenuation involved in Apollo’s command.
This latter standpoint is undoubtedly implied in several passages in the Electra: we shall find it also at the end of the Orestes,36 for Orestes is there condemned to a period of one year’s exile from Argos and from Athens, and this penalty can only refer to involuntary or quasi-involuntary slaying, and presumes, in the event of kin-slaying, that the deed was either formally ‘forgiven’ or that, at least, it merited ‘forgiveness.’ Plato37 assures us that in such cases the anger of the dead did not continue for more than a year. He refers to a sacred legend which described how a freeman who had been slain was angry with his slayer while his death was still a recent event, and in his anger he harassed and worried the slayer, ‘using memory as an ally.’ This picture seems to us very suggestive of the attitude of the milder group of Furies in some Oresteian legends, but the attitude of the fiercer group is more aptly illustrated by the following story from Herodotus which reveals the nature of the implacable anger of the dead. Herodotus38 tells us how Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, was anxious to drive out of Sicyon the spirit and the cult of the Argive hero Adrastus, and how, to secure this object, he established in Sicyon the hero-worship of a certain Theban, named Melanippus, who had slain a son and a son-in-law of Adrastus in the war of the Seven against Thebes. Cleisthenes therefore anticipated that by the magical induction of the spirit of Melanippus into a Hero-tomb at Sicyon he could drive out of Sicyon the Spirit of Adrastus, because Adrastus was still so angry with the slayer of his kindred that he could not, even after the lapse of five hundred years, tolerate the presence of the Spirit of Melanippus!
The meaning of the ‘conversion’ of the Erinnyes therefore varies according to the dramatist’s conception of the rôle of the Erinnyes. In Aeschylus the Erinnyes proclaim Orestes a wilful matricide, and their ‘conversion,’ which implies that they accept his plea of justifiable matricide, must be regarded as symbolical of a transition in their attitude to the social and religious aspect of homicide.39 But in Euripides the conversion of the Erinnyes symbolises not so much a transition as a compromise. Thus, in the Iphigenia in Tauris some of the Erinnyes refuse to be placated even when the Areopagus acquits Orestes.40 For them the issue does not lie between wilful matricide and justifiable matricide, but between varying degrees of extenuated matricide. Hence they reject a verdict of acquittal, because they interpret it not as an indication that Orestes was justified, but as an indication that he had already suffered a sufficient penalty for his ‘extenuated’ act of matricide. Some of the Erinnyes, however, accept the acquittal, because they are satisfied that Orestes has sufficiently atoned for his guilt.
The most severe and uncompromising attitude to the guilt of Orestes which is found in any legend appears in the Orestes drama, which we shall now discuss.
The ‘Orestes’
The main theme of the Orestes is the trial of Orestes at Argos, on the charge of having slain, unjustly, his mother, Clytaemnestra. It would not be correct—it would, in fact, be misleading—to assert that, as the Euripidean Electra corresponds with the Aeschylean Choephoroe, so the Orestes corresponds with the Eumenides. The points of resemblance between these two dramas are much less important than the points in which they differ. In this play we find, very strangely, a reference to two distinct trials of Orestes, at two distinct places, in two distinct States, namely Argos and Athens. But while the Argive trial is described at great length, and forms in fact the chief topic of the play, the Athenian trial is only casually referred to, in the closing scene, as an event of the not too distant future. In the Argive trial Orestes is condemned to death as an unjust avenger, or, which is almost the same thing, as a wilful matricide. His act is conceived, we think, as an act of culpable private vengeance committed in an atmosphere of social justice. But at the end of the play, when Apollo appears on the scene, the act of Orestes is presented, according to our interpretation, as extenuated matricide, which involves a penalty of temporary exile. The words of Apollo imply that when Orestes has served a period of one year’s exile—the penalty which was prescribed by Attic law for involuntary homicide—he will be declared by the Athenian Areopagus to have sufficiently atoned for his partial degree of guilt and he will be at liberty to return forthwith to Argos. Now these two verdicts, these two conceptions, are legally incompatible. The verdict of the Argive court is not found in Sophocles or in Aeschylus, and, needless to say, it is not found in Homer; the Athenian verdict has, however, been rendered familiar by references in Aeschylus, in Sophocles, and in the Electra of Euripides.
Are we then to suppose that the Argive verdict was the invention of Euripides? Such, no doubt, is the view of the matter which Jevons and Verrall would adopt. They would probably see in the Argive trial Euripides’ own idea of how Orestes ought to have been tried, and in the use of Apollo as a deus ex machina they would see a device by which Euripides’ idea was brought into harmony with the traditional legend.
But we venture to suggest, as against such an hypothesis, that in his account of the Argive trial Euripides is not putting before us his own conception of the moral and legal position of Orestes. Euripides leaves us in no doubt that in his opinion Orestes was not a matricide (i.e. an unjust avenger) and that he was not worthy of death. Hence the attitude of the dramatist is much more in harmony with the traditional Attic legends which regard Orestes as a just avenger, or at most as an avenger of merely nominal guilt, than with the attitude of the Argives and their verdict of condemnation which is the predominant feature of the drama.
At the Argive trial all the speakers save one solitary individual are opposed to the death penalty, yet only one speaker favours complete acquittal. Now it was in the speeches that Euripides found himself least trammelled by tradition, and if he ‘invented’ the Argive episode—including the verdict—in order to provide, for an Athenian audience, a thrill which the traditional accounts of the Athenian trial of Orestes no longer possessed, why is he not consistent in attributing to the speakers the sentiments which are expressed in the verdict? How do we explain, on the ‘invention’ hypothesis, the fact that the Messenger, in his account of the trial, takes the part of Orestes and condemns the verdict? The ordinary Athenian of Euripides’ day, who regarded the matter from the standpoint of contemporary law, could not possibly have approved of the act of Orestes. Why does not Euripides express this disapproval in his speeches, since he was free to do so?
Again, Euripides was an Athenian democrat, and the Athenian democratic party were anti-Spartan and pro-Argive. In the Andromache41 Euripides reveals his democratic leanings by a bitter attack upon Sparta. In the Orestes he undoubtedly exalts an Argive court above the Athenian Areopagus, but is there not a suggestion that the Argive verdict was barbarous and unjust?
Again, if the Argive trial episode was the invention of Euripides, would it not have been just as easy, and more consistent, for him to have caused the Argives to acquit Orestes? If he was not fettered by any tradition, would he not have represented the Argive verdict as similar to, if not identical with, the predicted verdict of the Athenian Areopagus? It may be suggested, as an objection to this view, that an adverse verdict at Argos was necessary as a prelude to the Athenian trial, and that Euripides was naturally anxious to include a reference to the Areopagus, out of respect for the legends and for the prestige of the Areopagus. The actual Orestes drama supplies the answer to this objection, for it ignores, almost completely, the Attic legends of Orestes, and it shows very little respect for the Areopagus court. Moreover, a favourable verdict at Argos could still have been followed by a trial at Athens, if we merely suppose that the Erinnyes refused to accept an Argive acquittal, just as the verdict of the Areopagus could have been followed by a trial among the Tauri (if these people had developed homicide courts), since in the Iphigenia in Tauris the Erinnyes refused to accept the Athenian verdict.
Again, it is not very flattering to the Argives (and Euripides was pro-Argive) to represent them as condemning Orestes to be stoned to death at one moment, and as accepting, twelve months afterwards, a condemned criminal as their king, simply because a different verdict had been brought in by an Athenian court! In fact, to suggest that Euripides invented the conjunction of two different trials, and represented one as overriding the decision of the other—the foreign court having the right to dictate to the native court—is to attribute to Euripides an astounding disregard for international Greek homicide-law. The introduction of Apollo in order to persuade42 the Argives to accept Orestes as their king would not be sufficient, on this hypothesis, to remove the insult to the Argive people which is implied in the suggestion that they are compelled to accept Athenian arbitration.
For these reasons then, and for others which will appear in the course of the discussion, we do not believe that the episode of the Argive trial was invented by Euripides. We admit of course that Euripides composed the speeches, because he wrote the play! But we believe that he was guided and controlled by a certain tradition, by the skeleton form of an Argive saga which supplied him with the fact of an Argive trial of Orestes, with the nature of the verdict, and perhaps with some remarks which were made at the trial. While there are many elements in Euripides’ account which could have been suggested by contemporary Attic thought, we think that the skeleton-saga reflects, and therefore probably originated in, the early historical era. The Achaean atmosphere is missing; Orestes was an Achaean, but he was judged, in this saga, as the Achaeans would not have judged him.
The reason why Aeschylus ignored this legend was that it obviously could not be reconciled with his theory that the Orestes trial was the first homicide-trial in Greek lands, it was less complimentary to Athens than the Attic legends were, and it was too much at variance with the Phocian legend, in which Apollo was the central figure and Orestes was conceived as a just avenger. It was probably for similar reasons that Aeschylus also ignored the Arcadian stories of Orestes, of which one seems akin to the Argive variant, for it represented Orestes as never having returned to Argos and as having died of a snake-bite in Arcadia.43 Euripides, however, apparently found the Argive legend more interesting than the others, though he condescends to mention, in passing, the Attic and Arcadian variants.44
If, then, Euripides reproduces in the same drama several different legends, without any regard for their mutual inconsistencies, this is probably because he aimed at variety and human interest rather than consistency, and because he felt that he could always fall back, in the last resort, on a deus ex machina to help him to maintain the appearances, if not the realities, of consistency.
In the beginning of the play Electra describes, though naturally she does not accept, the prevailing attitude of the Argives to the vengeance of Orestes. This attitude is post-Draconian. Orestes is conceived, not as an Homeric Achaean, but as an Argive citizen of the historical era. He is of course ‘polluted’ even before trial, and so also is Electra. A preliminary decree of social boycott has been issued against them and the sentence of death is foreshadowed as ultimately inevitable. Thus, Electra says45:
Meantime the State of Argos hath decreed
That shelt’ring roof and fire and conference
Be interdicted to us matricides.
And this decisive day the State pronounces
Our doom, to die, crushed with o’erwhelming stones,
Or by th’ avenging sword plunged in our breasts.
It is strange that Helen, the sister of Clytaemnestra, who would naturally have been expected to assume an attitude of stern condemnation, assures Electra that she regards Orestes and herself as innocent, and that she transfers the guilt to Phoebus:
With thee conversing I am not polluted,
Charging the crime on Phoebus.46
There is a suggestion of the Attic rather than of the Argive legend in this attitude of Helen. Her words are very similar to those spoken by Castor and Pollux in the Electra in a dialogue with Orestes and the Chorus47:
Chorus: O sons of Jove, may we presume t’ approach
And converse with you be allowed to hold?
Castor: You may: no curse this blood derives on you.
Orestes: May I address you, sons of Tyndareus?
Castor: Thou mayst: to Phoebus this dire deed I charge.
This confusion may be attributed to a conflation of ideas which had already affected the Argive legend prior to the time of Euripides, or it may be merely due to a lack of consistent discrimination, on the part of the dramatist, between the divergent viewpoints of the Attic and the Argive legends. In historical times a person accused of homicide was not debarred from private social intercourse. He was merely prohibited from frequenting the temples and public places. Plato asserts48 that there were degrees of pollution corresponding to degrees of guilt and in proportion to the certainty of guilt. In this case, therefore, the ‘pollution’ of Orestes and Electra was of a minor character, since they were both as yet untried and unconvicted.
Orestes naturally interprets his guilt from the standpoint of the Attic and the Phocian legends, but he does not distinguish very clearly49 between justification and extenuation. He says to Menelaus50:
Yet have we where to charge our miseries...
Phoebus, by whose command I slew my mother.
Again, he says to Tyndareus51:
See’st thou Apollo, who to mortal ears
Sounds from his central cave the voice of truth?
Him we obey in all that he commands:
Obeying his commands I slew my mother:
Drag him then to your bar, put him to death:
The guilt is his, not mine. What should I do?
The guilt on him transferred, is not the god
Sufficient to absolve me? Where shall man
Find refuge if the god, at whose command
I did it, will not now save me from death?
But the attitude of Tyndareus and Menelaus towards Orestes’ act which is revealed in their conversation with Orestes is fundamentally different. This attitude discloses a condemnation of private vengeance from the standpoint of social justice. As we conceive it, this attitude would normally have been adopted by Greek States, not only in Euripidean times but also in Draconian times. We have suggested that Euripides is following, in the play, a post-Draconian Argive legend—we use the term ‘post-Draconian’ merely to indicate that the legend presumes the existence of State interference in the trial and punishment of homicide. This legend was therefore, as we conceive it, so historical, so ‘modern’—in a sense—that it demanded little or no conscious archaising on the part of Euripides. Tyndareus says to Menelaus52:
If virtuous and dishonourable deeds
Are plain to all, who more unwise than he?
Deaf to the call of justice, he infringed
The firm authority of the public laws:
For when beneath my daughter’s murd’ring axe
Th’ imperial Agamemnon bowed his head,
A horrid deed, which never shall I praise,
He ought t’ have called the laws, the righteous laws,
T’ avenge the blood, and by appeal to them
Have driven his mother from the royal house:
Thus ’midst his ills calm reason had borne rule,
Justice had held its course, and he been righteous.
But the same Fury which had seized his mother
Had now seized him; and with ungoverned rage,
Justly abhorrent of her impious deed,
He did a deed more impious, slew his mother.
In this passage the historical Greek system of State trial and the historical penalty of exile for wilful murder are clearly indicated. We need not point out how inapplicable such an attitude is to Homeric Achaeans.
The manner in which social justice abolished the evils of vendetta is thus described53:
For, let me ask thee, should the faithless wife
Bathe in the husband’s blood her murd’rous hands,
And should th’ avenging son the mother slay,
His son retaliate by deed of blood,
What bound shall the progressive mischief know?
The wisdom of our ancestors ordained
That he who had the guilt of blood upon him
Be not allowed the sight, the walks of men,
By banishment atoning, not by death:
Else one must always be to death devote
Who hath the last pollution on his hands.
It was natural that the Greeks of the ‘pollution’ era—that is, the historical period—should have referred to the chaotic vendetta which their ‘fathers’ had abolished. But the Achaean vengeance-system was not a chaotic vendetta, because Achaean military discipline and Achaean public opinion were able to maintain a distinction between murder and just revenge.54 We have said55 that it was only in the Dark Ages of chaos and migration—that is, from 1000 B.C. to 700 B.C.—when the control of tribal chieftains, of phratry-assemblies, and of clan-courts, and the public co-operation of organised groups were paralysed and rendered impotent, that the instinct and habit of vendetta was awakened from its slumber. In the seventh century the doctrine of pollution and the evolution of State power restored equilibrium by the institution of the historical system of homicide law. But it was erroneously supposed that the vendetta system which was thus abolished had always existed in prehistoric Greece.
If in historical Greece Clytaemnestra had slain her husband, she would have been tried by a regular State-court, and, as her husband was not a kinsman, she would have been permitted, as Tyndareus here implies, the option of exile. But Tyndareus does not correctly visualise the Achaean mode of vengeance. He argues as if trials for homicide had been always and everywhere operative. This anachronism, at least, is absent in Aeschylus, who could not have attributed such an attitude to his characters, since, in his view, the trial of Orestes was the first Greek murder-trial.56 Hence it is that the condemnation of ‘private vengeance’ from the standpoint of social justice does not appear in Aeschylus—nor, we may add, in Sophocles.57
Further, the suggestion of Tyndareus that Clytaemnestra could have been sent into exile is an additional anachronism. In historical Greece a wilful murderer usually went into exile. But the autocratic Homeric Clytaemnestra remained in the royal palace with Aegisthus! Thus Tyndareus again fails to reproduce the essential elements of the Homeric story. Now Euripides elsewhere, as we shall see, frequently reproduces quite correctly the Homeric atmosphere. If then he attributes here58 to Tyndareus a non-Homeric standpoint, it is not because he was incapable of correctly archaising, but because he deliberately depicted a non-Homeric Oresteian legend and attributed a non-Homeric attitude to the Argives. The views which he attributes to Tyndareus are quite consistent with the subsequent verdict of the Argive court, and with the sentence of death for unjustifiable kin-slaying, which is pronounced against Orestes and Electra.
There is a very archaic—an almost Homeric—tone in the words with which, we are told, the herald ushered in the Argive trial59:
Soon as th’ assembly sate, the herald’s voice
Proclaimed free speech to all who wished to speak,
Whether Orestes for his mother slain
Should die or not.
In historical times such a proclamation could only be associated with a trial which was known as an ἄγων τιμητός, concerning offences for which the penalty was not fixed by law, and for which, therefore, the penalty had to be determined by the court, as, for instance, the crime of Impiety.60 We have argued61 that there were no homicide-indictments (γραφαί φόνου) at Athens, but even if there had been there could not have been any assessment of penalties in such cases, since the penalties for homicide were fixed by law from time immemorial. It is therefore, we believe, from the Homeric ἀγορά rather than from the Athenian Heliastic courts that Euripides received his inspiration for such a proclamation. Moreover, his description of the composition and of the general procedure of this Argive court is very Homeric, and reminds us very forcibly of other archaic pictures in Greek drama, such as the Council of Achaean chieftains in the Ajax of Sophocles,62 and the Assembly of the Greeks who condemn to death Helen63 and Polyxena.64 It is a herald who conveys the death-sentence pronounced by the Greeks against Astyanax, in the Troades65 of Euripides. Thus we have in this play a strange mixture of the archaic and the historical. We sometimes feel as if the Achaean atmosphere had momentarily reappeared in the Draconian age, as if Homeric heroes had been suddenly transformed into historical Argives, without, however, having completely divested themselves of their Homeric usages.
Pollux assures us66 that at the Athenian Areopagus it was not permitted to appeal to pity or to indulge in rhetorical persuasion, but it was necessary for the plaintiff and the defendant to confine themselves to the issues of guilt or innocence. Similarly, we may assume, at the Delphinium court no discussion of general principles would have been admitted, but merely evidential statements of fact. But at the Argive trial in this play there is no attempt at an investigation of facts. The speeches are entirely concerned with general principles. It is impossible to maintain that Euripides is explaining, in this trial, his ideas, based on contemporary practice, of the manner in which Orestes ought to have been tried.
Talthybius, the ubiquitous herald, sets his sails to the wind, but he cannot, unfortunately, decide how the wind is going to blow. He does not approve of the vengeance of Orestes, because, he says,67 it establishes a bad precedent in regard to parents. This viewpoint ignores the distinction between murder and vengeance. Orestes is conceived as a matricide, pure and simple, and being a matricide his guilt is greater than that of Clytaemnestra. It is regrettable, of course, that Agamemnon was slain, but Clytaemnestra, his slayer, was not his daughter, but only his wife! The Erinnyes, in Aeschylus,68 advance a similar argument, but in the Orestes such reasoning is more logical because the Argive court interprets the vengeance of Orestes as an act of barbarous vendetta and assumes that such a mode of vengeance was already obsolete and unlawful in his time. It is only by assuming that Orestes and Clytaemnestra were both criminals that one can logically compare the act of Clytaemnestra with that of Orestes and maintain that the act of Orestes was, because of blood relationship, more criminal than that of Clytaemnestra. It is thus that Hesiod,69 living in an age of chaotic vendetta, would have singled out for special condemnation the shedding of kindred blood. In the Aeschylean drama, on the other hand, and therefore, as we think, in the Attic legends of Orestes, ‘private vengeance’ is not definitely and dogmatically assumed to have been obsolete and unlawful in the time of Orestes. There is of course a doubt about the matter such as would naturally have arisen amongst legend-makers of the transitional seventh century. This doubt is, naturally enough, availed of by the Erinnyes of the slain. But Apollo has no doubt about the matter. In the interests of justice he commands a ‘private’ avenger to avenge.
After Talthybius, Diomedes utters a speech70 in which he attributes the guilt of matricide not only to Orestes but also to Electra, and proposes not indeed that they should be put to death, but that they should be banished from the city of Argos. He suggests, very curiously, that the death penalty would be impious! It is difficult to find any legal justification for this view. It is quite possible that Euripides is depicting for dramatic purposes, with a complete disregard for law, a variety of possible penalties. In Attic law a criminal who was convicted in a matter of grave import was punished by a general penalty of ἄτιμία, or loss of citizen rights; in some cases, such as parent-slaying, this degradation of civic status involved death and confiscation of property: in other cases, such as sacrilege, it involved death without confiscation; in ordinary wilful murder, it involved either death or banishment and confiscation, and in cases of malicious wounding the penalty of ἄτιμία denoted simple banishment without confiscation. It may be, then, that Euripides is applying such a gradation of penalties71 to a period when the penalties for crime were not rigidly fixed.
If we suppose that in this speech of Diomedes Euripides is consciously archaising, his archaism is not very felicitous. For kin-slaying amongst Pelasgian clans, we have seen,72 the normal penalty was exile: for kin-slaying amongst the Achaeans, the penalty was death. In historical times, when private vengeance gave place to State execution, the penalty was invariably death. Hence, Diomedes’ reference to impiety can become legally intelligible only if it is interpreted according to the standpoint of the tribal renaissance of post-Achaean days, when the group-system resumed its sway. From such a standpoint the act of the Achaean Orestes would have been viewed as matricide by the Elders of the tribe and in the public opinion of the clans. If a tribal court sat in judgment on Orestes in, say, the year 1000 B.C. and discussed the penalty which his act deserved, it would have been natural to suggest the exile penalty which was the normal punishment for kin-slayers. If then Euripides has been so very subtle in his archaising as to have attributed this proposal to the Argive Diomedes, he might at least have selected for the mouth-piece of this utterance someone whose name was not so inextricably connected with the Achaean domination!
After Diomedes, there rises up a bold bad man whom the messenger describes as ‘an Argive who was not an Argive’73 and who is generally supposed to typify, in Euripides’ view, the Athenian demagogue Cleophon.74 His speech, we are told,75 had been previously prepared for him by Tyndareus, who, though the nearest kinsman of the slain Clytaemnestra, does not speak at all at this assembly! His nameless subordinate, however, proposed76 that Orestes and Electra should be stoned to death. This was the opinion which in a modified form the assembly ultimately adopted,77 though only one speaker actually proposed it. Orestes succeeded in obtaining his request that he, together with his sister Electra, should be allowed to end their own lives in a respectable manner.
The penalty of death by stoning is not mentioned in Homer, in Attic law, or in Plato’s laws. Was it, then, mentioned in an Argive legend or did Euripides invent it? The penalty may have existed in the antique system of tribal vengeance. Plato assures us78 that the slayer of a parent or a kinsman was stoned, after death, by the judges and the magistrates. This custom was probably a survival of the more primitive custom of stoning criminals to death. If the Argive legend of Orestes did not mention such a penalty, Euripides is either archaising on the basis of this survival or is importing into the drama an idea which he derived from the crude customs of outlying ‘barbarian’ lands.
The sentence of the Argive court permitted suicide as an alternative to execution. We do not know of any legal basis for this option. We have no reason to doubt that suicide was always in practice, if not in theory, accepted as an alternative for execution in historical Greece. Here, however, the theory is accepted by a homicide-tribunal.
Before the verdict of the court was given, a nameless man, for whom Euripides clearly feels much admiration,79 a small farmer by occupation, proposed to crown Orestes because he avenged his father by slaying his impious mother, whose adulterous criminality was fatal, he said, to the interests of a martial or militaristic society. We have said80 that the legal aspect of the vengeance of Orestes is complicated to some degree by the fact that his mother was an adulteress. We have argued81 that death was not the regular penalty for adultery in Greek tribal life, and we do not think that the Achaeans, like the German tribes, followed a sterner code. It is difficult to derive any deductions either in regard to homicide or to adultery from this argument, because adultery and murder are mentioned in conjunction. The following words of the nameless speaker82 seem, however, to imply that adultery required a more serious punishment than that which custom sanctioned:
For who in distant fields, at honour’s call,
Would wield his martial arms if in his absence
Pollution stains his wife and his pure bed
Be made a foul sty of adulterous lust?
A similar conjunction of murder and adultery is revealed in the words of Orestes,83 who poses as a pioneer in the application of the death penalty to adultery:
Ye illustrious Argives... to vindicate your honour,
Not less than to avenge my father’s death,
I did this deed. For should the husband’s blood
Leave on the wife’s hand no foul stain, full soon
The purple tide would flow, or you must sink—
O shame to manhood!—vile slaves to your wives.
Now she that to my father’s bed was false
Hath died for it. If you require my life,
The law hath lost its force: and who shall say
His own life is secure, as these bold deeds
From frequency draw force and mock at justice?
In Aeschylus and in Sophocles the only plea of justification which Orestes advances is the command of Apollo. But in the Euripidean account of the Argive trial Apollo is not mentioned at all. We cannot explain this strange fact by supposing that it would have been unprofitable to refer to him because at the end of the play the decree of Apollo is accepted without question by the Argives. We cannot suppose that Euripides, in his conscious archaising, is trying to visualise a pre-Apolline Court, as he would probably, in such a case, have ignored Apollo completely and avoided all references to pollution. The most satisfactory and, to our mind, the most obvious explanation of the absence of any reference to Apollo at the Argive trial is this: Apollo appears in the Oresteian legends in the rôle of justifier and purifier. Such a rôle is consistent only with the conception of Orestes as an avenger of partial guilt or as an entirely justified avenger. It is quite irreconcilable with the theory that Orestes was a wilful matricide of full guilt. Now, the verdict of the Argive court conceived Orestes as a guilty matricide worthy of death. The only speaker who approves of his act does so not because he was a just avenger, but because his mother was an adulteress. To introduce Apollo into a court of this kind would have been to expose him to ridicule and contempt. Hence the attitude of the Argives to Orestes, whether invented by Euripides or, more probably, as we think, enshrined in an Argive legend, made it impossible to connect Apollo with this Argive trial.
In the above quotation Orestes poses as a pioneer in the stern punishment of adultery. We have already84 suggested what we consider to have been the evolution of the penalties of adultery in Greece. We have quoted Pausanias85 for the view that, at first, adultery was leniently treated. A certain Hyettus, he says, first punished it by death, and Dracon finally legalised the death penalty, but only for adultery in flagrante delicto. We believe that this plea of Orestes was the invention of Euripides. Seeing that he could not permit any reference to Apollo at the Argive trial, he had to invent a new plea. But ancient law shows no regard for pioneers. Until the law is changed the pioneer reformer is a criminal. In our opinion, Greek law never adopted the penalty for adultery which, according to Orestes, it ought to have adopted.
In this quotation Orestes refers86 to a law upon which he seems to rely for his acquittal. ‘If you require my life,’ he says, ‘the law hath lost its force.’ It is obvious that he is not referring to any law which the Argives recognise, for otherwise they would have acquitted him. Yet he suggests that such a law exists somewhere. We cannot suppose that he is referring to an actual law which prescribed the death-penalty for adultery, since he is definitely represented, like the nameless farmer, as endeavouring to persuade the Argives to adopt a code of penalties for adultery which would be more conducive to martial efficiency than the existing system. In the Troades the Achaean army conferred on Menelaus the right to slay the adulterous Helen. But this fact implies that no existing law would have justified such a slaying. Moreover, there was nothing in contemporary Attic law or social custom to suggest to Euripides that murder and adultery in conjunction could be legally punished by death. Yet the law which Orestes mentions implies the legality of such a punishment somewhere. We cannot suppose that Euripides is indicating a contrast between Athenian and Argive legislation, for, so far as murder is concerned, we believe that their laws were similar. The explanation which we propose to offer for this peculiar reference is an alternative one, such as we have suggested in regard to the speech of Diomedes in the play. We believe that the law which Orestes mentions is either a pure fabrication of Euripides’ mind, derived from the supposition that archaic penalties were more severe than the penalties of contemporary law, or an instance of conscious archaising, in which Euripides attributes to an Homeric Achaean a discrimination in certain cases between murder and just revenge. The former alternative is rendered somewhat improbable by the fact that the Argives do not recognise the legality of this ‘archaic penalty.’ The latter alternative is therefore the more probable and suggests, if it is correct, that Euripides could sometimes be very subtle and, at the same time, successful in his archaising. According to this theory, Orestes suggests that he is justified by a law of the Achaean caste. But the Argives, who reflect the viewpoint of historical social law, reject a plea of justification which would compel them to recognise the legality of private vengeance.
Between the conclusion of this trial of Orestes at Argos and the appearance of Apollo as a deus ex machina at the end of the play there occur some exciting incidents, such as the seizure of Hermione as a hostage and the murder of Helen87 by Orestes. Apart from the fact that Menelaus, her husband, is very angry and vindictive, no one else seems to take much interest in the death of that famous woman who lived (and died!) in so many places.88 The argument used by Pylades to Orestes in urging the death of Helen is very unscrupulous.89 ‘Slay Helen,’ he says, ‘and people will forget that you slew your mother.’ The slaying of Helen was really murder, but Apollo ignores it. Legally, it does not exist. Legally, its presence in the Orestes is a grotesque anomaly. But it has at least this value: it shows us how little Euripides cared for the legal aspect of a story as compared with its dramatic vitality. When Apollo comes on the scene, Orestes is in the act of setting fire to the royal palace at Argos. Orestes’ threats of incendiarism, his use of Hermione as a hostage, and the murder of Helen have delayed the doom which was pronounced by the Argives until Apollo comes! But when he comes,90 how different is the picture! The conception of Orestes’ vengeance is completely altered. In an instant we pass from wilful matricide to quasi-involuntary matricide. We breathe once more the atmosphere of the Attic legend which we find in the Electra. Apollo is not consulted about the problem which had occupied, throughout the play, the attention of the Argive court, namely the question whether Orestes pursued an obsolete course of unlawful vendetta and obeyed the dictates of an Achaean system of vengeance which a later system of social justice had superseded, or whether he did not. The only problem which confronts Apollo is the question how he will most easily persuade the Argives, and the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra, to recognise the fact that he, Apollo, commanded Orestes to slay his mother and that, therefore, Orestes’ act was either justified or at least extenuated.
The contrast in this drama between the attitude which Apollo adopts in regard to Orestes and the attitude which the Argives adopt is so obvious and important that the legends which incorporated these attitudes could never have been reconciled. No Athenian with an interest in legal problems could ever have thought of them together without mentally contrasting them. But these legends, namely what we have called the Argive and the Attic legends, are both found in juxtaposition in this drama, and Euripides is naturally compelled to make use of Apollo as a deus ex machina in order to produce a nominal appearance of dramatic unity. Euripides could not have ignored altogether the Attic legend. He was an Athenian, not an Argive. The Electra could have been written without any reference to the Areopagus, but the Iphigenia in Tauris could not. Thus, whether he is condemned or acquitted at Argos, Orestes must in either event go to Athens! But before he goes to Athens, Orestes must go into exile for a year in Arcadia.91 Two problems now arise: (1) Why is one year the limit of the exile-period? (2) Why is this exile spent in Arcadia? The first question can only be solved by a reference to the Laws of Plato. In the Laws92 Plato assures us that there was a fixed penalty of one year’s exile which was applicable only to the following homicide cases: (1) involuntary homicide; (2) slaying in a passion (in which we include quasi-involuntary or extenuated homicide), if the dying person ‘forgave’ his slayer; and (3) quasi-involuntary kin-slaying, if the slayer was ‘forgiven.’ Of these three possible cases, only the last can be relevantly93 applied to the slaying of Clytaemnestra by Orestes. Legally therefore it is necessary to regard the act of Orestes as quasi-involuntary matricide if we wish to explain the penalty which Apollo decrees at the end of the play. When Orestes has served a period of one year’s exile, he will be ‘acquitted’ by the Areopagus.94 We cannot interpret this acquittal as a verdict of ‘not guilty,’ since on this assumption the preliminary penalty of one year’s exile becomes either meaningless or unjust. It is a curious kind of ‘acquittal,’ since it is intended to imply that a certain degree of guilt has now been sufficiently atoned. In the Attic homicide-code there is no reference to an acquittal of this kind, but Plato mentions something which suggests that such an acquittal was a legal possibility. Speaking of extenuated homicide, Plato says95 that ‘when the period of exile shall have expired, it is right to send twelve judges to the borders of the State that... they may judge of the pity to be shown and of the return (of the exiles to their home-land).’ Now Apollo in this play says96 that Orestes will be tried by gods, not by men, at Athens. Demosthenes gives the tradition more explicitly when he says97 that ‘the twelve gods judged between Orestes and the Erinnyes.’
We have said that there were two Attic legends of Orestes, that one of these represented him as tried by the Areopagus on a plea of justifiable matricide, and the other, on a plea of quasi-involuntary matricide. There is some difficulty involved in connecting the Areopagus with either of these pleas. In regard to the first we must assume that the Areopagus in early times tried pleas of homicide between strangers which were normally tried by the Delphinium. In regard to the second plea, we suggest that it is necessary to suppose that the ancient Areopagus would have tried pleas of involuntary and quasi-involuntary homicide which normally came under the jurisdiction of the Palladium court and of minor local courts. It is therefore, we must assume, in the unusual rôle of a reconciling court that the Athenian Areopagus ‘acquitted’ Orestes in the ‘second Attic legend.’ That he was not satisfactorily ‘acquitted’ will be manifest98 when we discuss the Iphigenia in Tauris. Orestes had to leave Athens and to undergo still further wanderings as an exile, because all the Erinnyes did not recognise his ‘acquittal.’ We have already suggested99 that the Erinnyes in the Oresteian legend frequently symbolise the conflict of opinions which sometimes preceded the consent of the relatives of the slain to accept ‘appeasement’ in cases of involuntary and quasi-involuntary homicide. The court to which Plato refers in the passage cited above was a ‘court of reconciliation.’ The ‘twelve judges’ whom Plato mentions may have been suggested by the ‘twelve gods’ who judged between the Erinnyes and Orestes. Such myths and such ‘courts of reconciliation’ made it possible, we believe, for the creators of the ‘second Attic legend’ to connect Orestes with the Areopagus.
It is not easy to explain why Euripides selected Arcadia as the place of exile for Orestes. First of all, there seems to have existed an Arcadian variant of the Oresteian legend which associated Orestes with Arcadia and maintained that he actually died there.100 One of the Arcadian towns was called, from Orestes, ‘Oresteum.’ Again, it is possible to suppose that Euripides, who, in this drama, reveals a certain desire for originality, should have selected Arcadia because Aeschylus and Sophocles had exalted the association with Orestes of Athens and of Phocis, and had entirely ignored Arcadia. But there may also have been a religious or quasi-legal fact behind this idea of Euripides. We have seen that, in Attic law,101 a homicide-exile was debarred (a) from his native place, (b) from the country of the slain, (c) from the State in which the deed took place. The basis of these legal facts was sentimental or religious. It was supposed that the spirit of the slain was not merely intolerant of the presence of the slayer in civic proximity to his burial-place, but was also indignant at the thought that the slayer should be enjoying himself, as it were, and not suffering any real hardships as a punishment for his crime.102 Now, Argos was of course forbidden ground to the exiled Orestes. But one legend said that he had lived in Athens, another that he had lived in Phocis, before he slew his mother. In these places he had made friends and companions. In these places exile would not have involved for him sufficient hardship and suffering. Arcadia, however, held no attraction for Orestes, and hence it was to Arcadia that the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra desired that he should go.
We can therefore, in the light of these conclusions, understand in their full meaning the words of Apollo to Orestes103:
Thou, Orestes,
Quitting this country, in Parrhasia’s plains
For one revolving year thy dwelling fix,
And give the place thy name: that honour share
With Azan and with Arcas. Pass from thence
To Athens: there against the Furies urge
Thy plea; acquit thee of thy mother’s blood:
There in that awful court the gods shall sit
Thy judges; and thy just cause shall prevail.
After the lapse of a single year and after his ‘acquittal’ by the Areopagus, Orestes may again return to the city of Argos. This return is announced prophetically by Apollo to Menelaus, when he says104:
Thou, Menelaus, yield that Orestes reign
In Argos: haste to Sparta, reign thou there....
It shall be mine t’ appease the State to him,
Compelled by my command to slay his mother.
The Problem of Pylades
We may now consider a problem concerning Pylades which is presented by this drama. As in Aeschylus and in Sophocles, so in Euripides, Pylades co-operates with Orestes in avenging Agamemnon. But in Euripides the guilt of Pylades is more clearly emphasised. Hence, we hear for the first time that he is punished. He tells Orestes105:
My father in his rage hath banished me.
We saw that in Greek law the plotter, the co-operator, was as guilty as the actual slayer.106 Hence the problem of Pylades’ guilt depends on that of Orestes’ guilt. If therefore Strophius, the King of the Phocian land, punishes Pylades pendente lite,107 we attribute this to the autocratic power of a king on the one hand, and on the other to the general principle of Greek law that an accused person was presumed to be guilty until he had established his innocence.108 Now, in the Electra109 Castor and Pollux declare that Electra will marry Pylades and that he will take her to his home, but there is a suggestion that a brief period of time, probably one year, must elapse before this event takes place. We presume that he would be permitted by his father to return, in obedience to the divine decree. In the Orestes he is still an exile from his home, as the guilt which he shares with Orestes has not yet been atoned by exile. But has he any legal right to remain in Argos? Orestes warns him that his life is in danger there, but Pylades replies that the Argives have no power to punish him110:
They have no right: I am no subject here.
Which of these opinions is correct—that of Orestes or that of Pylades? We have shown111 that, in Greek law, accused and convicted slayers were debarred from three possible States, of which one was the State of the deceased. Demosthenes says112: ‘The boundary-line for all homicides is exclusion from the country of the deceased... from everything in which the deceased in his lifetime had a part.’ We cannot of course suppose that this law applied to unconvicted slayers, but we may presume that they were at least debarred from the temples and the public places of the State. Hence we can reconcile these two opinions by assuming that Orestes is referring to the public aspect and Pylades to the private aspect of residence at Argos. When Pylades asserts that he deserves to suffer at Argos,113 he is referring to the period which follows the trial of Orestes, which involved, we presume, a condemnation of Pylades. Menelaus asks if Pylades had a share in the slaying of Helen, and leaves us in no doubt that his life is forfeit in Argos.114 We have quoted115 Plato in support of the assertion that strangers were liable to more serious penalties for homicide than natives were. But this assertion only applies to convicted slayers. Hence it is possible to accept the suggestion of Euripides that Pylades was not imprisoned at Argos, as Orestes was, and that he visited Phocis before the trial of Orestes.
The Problem of Orestes’ Pollution
From what has been said it will be obvious that Orestes is more ‘polluted’ in Euripides than he is in Aeschylus or in Sophocles. The ‘pollution’ of a person who was conceived as guilty of wilful and unjustified matricide was the greatest and the most horrible kind of ‘pollution,’ and it is this conception of Orestes which predominates in this Euripidean drama. At the end of the play the pollution of Orestes is miraculously diminished. This is because Orestes is here conceived not as a wilful matricide of full guilt, but as a quasi-involuntary matricide who transfers the main portion of his guilt to Apollo. In Greek law an extenuated act of homicide produced, even when the dying person ‘forgave,’ a minor temporary ‘pollution,’ which continued until the slayer had endured a minimum period of one year’s exile and had appeased the relatives of the slain. During this period of exile the slayer had to abstain from three possible States, which we have already defined. But a kin-slayer was in a peculiar position. Until the fact of involuntariness was established before a court he was liable to be regarded as polluted wherever he went. In Arcadia Orestes was not ‘polluted,’ according to Euripides, perhaps because Apollo commanded him to go there, perhaps because his residence there did not create any special anger on the part of the slain Clytaemnestra. But in Argos he would have been polluted, because Argos was his native State and could not therefore have been for him a place of exile even if he had been guilty of involuntary homicide, and not, as he was, of involuntary kin-slaying. In Athens, too, he would have been regarded as polluted until he had been tried, especially if he was accused (as he was accused, by the Erinnyes) of wilful kin-slaying; but his pollution would have been that of an untried criminal, and therefore public rather than private. We shall see in the Iphigenia in Tauris that he was, in a certain sense, polluted when he came to Athens for his trial, and the Athenians based upon this ‘pollution’ an explanation of a peculiar ritual of which the origin was obscure, namely the Feast of the Pitchers (χόες) at the Anthesteria.116 Now in Aeschylus and in Sophocles the predominant conception of Orestes is that of an unconvicted matricide who pleads justification for his act; and if we find, in addition, the conception of Orestes as a quasi-involuntary matricide, this does not affect to any great extent the question of Orestes’ pollution, because Orestes has already atoned for the guilt of extenuated matricide. He has actually been purged by Apollo himself, and he is still, so far as Athens is concerned, untried and unconvicted, and therefore his pollution is minor and merely ‘public’—that is, he is forbidden to frequent the temples or public places but he is free to associate privately with his fellow-men. In Euripides, however, Orestes is convicted of wilful matricide by an Argive court. His pollution is therefore technically so great that no Greek city could receive him. If his pollution is subsequently reduced to the minor pollution of involuntary kin-slaying, this is only because Apollo acts not as a purifier, but as a dramatic deus ex machina who does miraculous and impossible things.
Wedd, in his edition of this play, proposes a strange explanation for the graver pollution of the Euripidean Orestes, which is based, as we think, on a false interpretation of the dramatic ideals of Euripides. ‘In Sophocles,’ he says,117 ‘all men will honour Orestes, in Aeschylus he is welcomed as a deliverer, in Euripides the whole State rises up in horror against him... in Aeschylus, although Orestes flies for his first purification to Apollo, many others aid in freeing him from guilt and he associates with thousands in harmless intercourse; in Euripides all doors are shut against him, all speech is denied him, none will perform the purifying rites for him; the full rigour of Athenian law, which refused to the parricide alone among murderers the right of escaping death by flight, is exercised against him... the attitude of the whole State towards the matricide, the feeling of the murderers themselves with regard to their own act, are precisely what would be expected if in modern (? fifth century B.C.) Athens two children were induced by an oracle to take the law into their own hands and put their mother to death.’
This account of the facts is fairly accurate, but it suggests that the Euripidean Orestes is a definite unitary personality, whereas we have shown that there are at least two different conceptions of Orestes in this play. The ‘full rigour of Athenian law’ is certainly apparent in the Argive verdict, but Wedd assumes that Euripides, in this play, adopted towards Orestes an attitude which ignored Homer and the Attic legends made familiar by Aeschylus and Sophocles, and which paid no attention to Apolline decrees. In this respect the account is misleading. It is based on an erroneous conception of Euripides. According to Wedd, Aeschylus and Sophocles adopted towards Greek legends an attitude which was quite different from that which Euripides adopted. These two dramatists accepted, he thinks, the legends in their main outline and sought to reproduce them as far as possible in their archaic setting, with the least possible admixture of ‘historical’ ideas. Euripides, on the contrary, adopted a critical attitude to the myths and made it his object not to reproduce them for their own sake but to contrast them with the more enlightened feeling of his own time. This interpretation of Euripides is very similar to that of Jevons which we have already discussed.118 The arguments which we adduced against Jevons are therefore applicable to Wedd, but we offer here an additional criticism which is more definitely concerned with the Orestes drama.
According to Wedd’s hypothesis, the trial of Orestes at Argos which is described in this play contains the Euripidean conception of the manner in which the myth should have regarded Orestes. We admit that the viewpoint of the Argive court is in the main historical; by an anachronism it identifies the world of Orestes with that of the Argives of the historical era.
But the existence of an Argive legend which despite its lack of archaism119 was of considerable human interest would explain Euripides’ description of such a trial. The fact that at the end of the play120 the resultant verdict of the trial is ignored and reversed suggests rather that Euripides regarded the Attic legend as more archaic and therefore more correct than the Argive legend. We have already121 pointed out that the Messenger’s description of the trial and the opinions of some of the speakers at the trial are more suggestive of the dramatist’s own views than is the verdict of the Argive court. According to Wedd, the real myth occurs at the end of the play, and the rest of the play is the invention of Euripides. Euripides did not agree with the mythical presentation of Orestes, so he invented a new version which he deliberately set in emphatic contrast to the obsolete Attic myth! In our view, Euripides reproduces two pre-existing legends—an Attic and an Argive legend of Orestes. The Argive legend he regarded as more dramatic, the other as more orthodox but less replete with human interest. According to Wedd, the graver pollution of the Euripidean Orestes is due to the fact that Euripides conceived him as a fifth-century Athenian. For us, the different degrees of pollution in Orestes are due to different conceptions of Orestes’ guilt or to the different legal and religious attitudes of the legends which the dramatists followed. They are not to be attributed to any distinction in the attitude of the dramatists to the legends themselves. The contrast is in the legends, not in the dramatists.
The Erinnyes in Euripides
The conception of the Erinnyes in this play is naturally different from the Aeschylean and Sophoclean conceptions. It is similar to but not identical with the picture of these goddesses which we shall find in the Iphigenia in Tauris.122 It is, however, erroneous to suppose that the Furies who in this play assail Orestes are conceived by the dramatist as the subjective delusions of a madman. In our opinion, the Erinnyes in Euripides, though not actually brought upon the stage, are as real and as vital as the Erinnyes of Aeschylus.123 If the psychical effect which these goddesses produce upon Orestes is greater in Euripides, this is because the Erinnyes stand, so to speak, like vultures beside their prey, since the Argives are about to condemn him to death, and because Orestes is conceived as irremediably polluted, a victim already ‘devoted’ to the Erinnyes. Hence, naturally, at Argos Orestes feels that he is powerless to struggle against the Erinnyes; his insight into the immediate future and his contemplation of his approaching fate deprives him, temporarily, of sanity and self-control. We must not suppose that a more tender or more civilised and ‘modern’ Orestes realises his guilt more keenly than does the archaic Orestes of Aeschylus, nor must we imagine that this feeling of remorse and self-contempt produces the mental insanity which creates a more hideous Erinnys. On the contrary, Orestes is here, as elsewhere, subjectively innocent. He admits no moral guilt. If the legend insists that he is guilty, if the public opinion of the Argives decides to punish him with death, he does not admit the validity of this conception or of the decision, but nevertheless his fear of the Erinnyes naturally increases, since in death even more than in life can these titanic monsters torture the slayer. Aeschylus makes them say124:
It is our fate to track the steps of men
By murderous wantonness polluted, till
Beneath the earth they pass, nor yet for them
Can death grant freedom from our power.
It is Orestes’ fear of such titanic monsters waiting to inflict on him unspeakable punishment that makes him cry out in this Euripidean drama:
Ah! mother, do not set thy Furies on me.
See how their fiery eyeballs glare in blood,
And wreathing snakes hiss in their horrid hair!
There, where they stand, ready to leap upon me....125
And again:
O Phoebus, they will kill me, those dire forms,
These Gorgon-visaged ministers of hell.126
The conflicting attitudes of the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra and the Erinnyes of Agamemnon which we found in the Choephoroe of Aeschylus are also revealed in this play. Speaking of his father’s Erinnyes, Orestes says127:
Had I in silence tamely borne her deeds,
Would not the murdered, justly hating me,
Have roused the Furies to torment my soul?
Or hath she only her assisting fiends
And he no fav’ring power t’ avenge his wrongs?
We shall meet the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra in a somewhat similar rôle in the Iphigenia in Tauris. But in that play the Erinnyes are not united in their conception of Orestes as they are here. Those Erinnyes who refuse to accept the ‘acquittal’ of Orestes by the Areopagus continue to pursue him to the Tauric Chersonese. When Orestes sees them he cries out128:
Dost thou behold her, Pylades,
Dost thou not see this dragon fierce from hell—
Rushing to kill me, and against me rousing
Her horrid vipers? See this other here
Emitting fire and slaughter from her vests,
Sails on her wings, my mother in her arms
Bearing, to hurl this mass of rock upon me!
Ah, she will kill me! Whither shall I fly?
The important thing to remember about the Euripidean Erinnyes is that they are real goddesses, not mental fictions. The Furies of the ‘Argive Scene’ are the Furies who pursue the criminal convicted of wilful matricide. For him there is no cleansing. To him no land can offer the shelter of its protection. ‘Alone, he has arrayed against him the universe.’129 Sooner or later he will be put to death and will be delivered into the hands of the Erinnyes. But in the Attic legend Orestes is not a wilful matricide. Hence the Erinnyes of the Iphigenia drama are not so implacable as the Erinnyes of the Orestes. They are placated by the simple device of transferring an image of Artemis from the Tauric land to Athens!
The ‘Iphigenia in Aulide’ and ‘Iphigenia in Tauris’
A comparison of these two dramas reveals at first sight a rather obvious inconsistency. The Aulid play centres round Agamemnon’s sacrificial slaying of his daughter at Aulis, while in the Tauric play the victim reappears as a priestess of Artemis amongst the Tauri! It is generally maintained that the last scene of the Aulid play, which describes the substitution of a stag for the maiden by a miraculous intervention, is not the work of Euripides. But in the Orestes Apollo intervenes to preserve the life of Helen, though he can do so only by deifying her! In the Aulid play, also, Iphigeneia is said to have been saved from death by deification.130 In the Tauric drama, however, the daughter of Agamemnon has once more assumed a mortal form and appears as a priestess of Artemis among the Tauri. Nowhere else in Euripides can we find such a magical atmosphere. If the human Iphigeneia was really saved, would we not expect that her father and her mother should have been informed of her deliverance? But they both believe that she is dead.131 The plea which Clytaemnestra advances in the Electra of Euripides,132 namely that the death of Agamemnon was a revenge for the death of her daughter, is based upon the reality of her death. Hence we think that Euripides reproduced both these legends of Iphigeneia simply because of their human interest and dramatic merit, without any special concern for their consistency. It is clear that Euripides did not invent the Aulid story, since it is found in Aeschylus133 and in an epic poem,134 entitled the Cypria, of post-Homeric date. The Tauric story is not found in any previous author, but we do not think that it was invented by Euripides. Both legends suggest a similar source. Two hundred years before Euripides134 it was said that Iphigeneia was made immortal by Artemis, who brought her from Aulis to the Tauri, and substituted for her a stag-victim. As soon as Iphigeneia became a goddess she could, like other goddesses, be easily transferred from place to place by a simple transference of images. Herodotus says135 that the goddess to whom the Tauri sacrificed was Iphigeneia the daughter of Agamemnon. The word ‘Iphigeneia’ was apparently a cultus epithet of Artemis136 which signified her connexion with fertility and her influence on the birth of men and animals. The real as distinct from the legendary deification of Iphigeneia was therefore due to the abstraction and personification of a cultus epithet. The existence of a temple of Artemis-Iphigeneia at Aulis, whence Agamemnon sailed to Troy, and the similarity of the name Iphigeneia with Iphianassa (the Homeric name for a daughter of Agamemnon), led to a belief in the deification of Iphianassa at Aulis. Moreover, the survival at Halae, in Attica, in historical times of a mock ritual of human sacrifice to Artemis induced the further idea that Iphianassa had been deified through sacrifice at Aulis. The existence at Halae of a statue of Artemis believed to have been brought from the Tauric land, and the existence there of a temple to ‘the maiden’ at which real rites of human sacrifice were enacted, explain the origin of the Tauric belief which is referred to by Herodotus. Iphianassa, identified with Iphigeneia, becomes a goddess among the Tauri, and Iphigeneia is worshipped as the daughter of Agamemnon! The final transition to the stage in which Iphigeneia returns to life as a priestess of Artemis at Tauri is explained by reference to the ancient tendency to identify the priest with the god and by the ritual of resurrection or re-birth which is found in ancient fertility-religion. England137 thinks that this stage was probably pre-Euripidean but that the story of Orestes’ visit to the Tauri was invented by Euripides. We do not think that even this story was of Euripidean origin. It belongs rather, we think, to the legends of the wandering of Orestes, which conceived him as guilty of extenuated or quasi-involuntary matricide which was ultimately ‘forgiven.’ When Iphigeneia was conceived as a priestess of Artemis and at the same time as the sister of Orestes, the evolution of a story which described Orestes’ visit to the Tauri does not, we think, require the genius of Euripides. Again, the inconsistencies of this story with the Aulid story which he has dramatised, with arguments which he introduces in the Electra138 and with other legends of Orestes, such as the Arcadian legend, and, moreover, the insult to Apollo, the degradation of Athene, and the exaltation of Artemis which this story involves—all suggest a local origin for the story and the inspiration of theocratic legend-makers rather than the invention of a dramatist.
In the Iphigenia in Aulide the sacrifice of Iphigeneia is condemned as murder not only by Clytaemnestra139 but also by Achilles,140 whose promised marriage with Iphigeneia was the bait by which legend lured her from her Argive home. This view, we have said,141 belongs to an age which has rejected human sacrifice and which interprets all the traditional systems of blood-vengeance as unrestricted hereditary vendetta. It belongs therefore to the border-line between the Dark Ages of Greece and the civilised historical era. From the legal point of view Clytaemnestra’s plea has no validity; we see in it rather a counterpart to the plea of justification which Orestes based on the command of Apollo. If Orestes claims the command of Apollo as a justification and if this claim is disputed, then the command of Artemis to Agamemnon may also be impugned. Artemis has the same right to obedience as Apollo has. If the Furies of the dead Clytaemnestra rejected the Apolline oracle, it was natural that the living Clytaemnestra should have repudiated the justice of the decree of Artemis at Aulis.
The Iphigenia in Tauris merits special consideration from our present point of view. As the general dénouement of the plot is sufficiently familiar, we shall proceed in medias res. We may confine our comments to the speech delivered by Orestes to Iphigeneia after their mutual recognition. Omitting for the moment Orestes’ reference to the Athenian custom of using separate drinking-cups on the Libation-day of the Anthesteria festival, we will give first Orestes’ description of his trial at Athens and of its immediate sequel. It will be noted that he has already served a period of exile before he reaches Athens and that the verdict of the Areopagus is not accepted by all the Erinnyes. We have suggested142 that the Erinnyes symbolise in this legend the attitude of the relatives of the slain and that the Areopagus acts as a court of reconciliation rather than as an ordinary homicide court. We have seen that the relatives had always a theoretical right to refuse to accept ‘appeasement’ in cases of involuntary homicide, according to the Draconian law, ἁπάντας ἢ τὸν κωλύοντα κρατεῖν: ‘let all be appeased or let one objector hold the field.’143 We cannot suppose that the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra in this play assume the same attitude to Orestes as they assume in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, for in Aeschylus the conversion of the Erinnyes signifies acceptance of the plea of justifiable matricide. Neither is their attitude to be compared to that of the Erinnyes of the Argive scene in the Orestes, for there they conceive Orestes as guilty of wilful matricide. Their attitude here is rather that of the ‘second Attic legend,’ in which Orestes is conceived as a matricide of partial guilt—his crime being conceived as extenuated by Apollo’s command. According to this assumption we can explain the conflict of opinion which characterises the Erinnyes. It is derived from a legendary conception of the Erinnyes as the symbols of the relatives of the slain Clytaemnestra who are presumed to have refused ‘appeasement’ and to have resisted the verdict of the Areopagus, which was conceived as a court of reconciliation rather than as a high State court adjudicating with full authority on questions of guilt or innocence. Orestes says:
When vengeance from my hands o’ertook
My mother’s deed—foul deed which let me pass
In silence—by the Furies’ fierce assaults
To flight I was impelled: to Athens then
Apollo sent me, that, my cause there heard,
I might appease the vengeful powers whose names
May not be uttered. The tribunal there
Is holy, which for Mars when stained with blood,
Jove in old times established...144
... when to the tribunal on the mount
Of Mars I came, one stand I took, and one
The Eldest of the Furies opposite:
The cause was heard touching my mother’s blood,
And Phoebus saved me by his evidence;
Equal, by Pallas numbered, were the votes,
And I from doom of blood victorious freed
Such of the Furies as there sate, appeased
By the just sentence, nigh the court resolved
To fix their seat: but others whom the law
Appeased not, with relentless tortures still
Pursued me, till I reached the hallowed soil
Of Phoebus.145
But Orestes’ visit to Delphi merely suspends, it does not terminate, the pursuit of the Erinnyes. At this point the religious rather than the legal aspect of the Erinnyes comes into prominence, and what may be described as a magical mode of appeasement is indicated by Apollo when he commands Orestes to visit the temple of Artemis among the Tauri, to bring back with him the image of the Tauric Artemis and to deposit it in an Attic temple. Orestes says to Iphigeneia:
From the golden tripod burst
The voice divine, and sent me to this shore,
Commanding me to bear the image hence
Which fell from Jove, and in th’ Athenian land
To fix it.... If we obtain
The statue of the goddess, I no more
With madness will be tortured.146
Here we breathe the atmosphere of religious expiation rather than of legal atonement. The origin of this oracular command may be attributed to Attic priests of Artemis, for in the temple at Halae there was an image which was believed to have been brought from the Tauri.147 This expiation was not in any real sense ‘purgation,’ but it was sufficiently similar in character to be readily confused with it.148 We are reminded of the expiatory sacrifice offered at the altar of the Erinnyes or the Semnai Theai at the Areopagus by persons who had been acquitted of homicide at the Areopagus court and by involuntary slayers who had returned from exile.149 We may recall also the expiatory festival which Medea instituted at Corinth after she had slain her children and put to death the King of Corinth and his daughter.150 In this play a mock ceremonial of purgation is performed in connexion with Orestes by Iphigeneia. She says151:
The strangers come, the sacred ornaments,
The hallowed lambs, for I with blood must wash
This execrable blood away, the light
Of torches, and what else my rites require
To purify these strangers to the goddess.
It will seem curious that Thoas, a barbarian king, should admit the necessity for such a ceremony, seeing that in the Andromache152 Hermione is made to say
Such is the whole abhorred barbarian race.
... friends by their dearest friends
Are murdered: deeds like these no wholesome law
Prohibits.
We shall see presently153 that this sentiment was the outcome of Hermione’s emotional attitude to the Trojan Andromache.
Orestes and the Pitcher Feast
The suggestion of Orestes that his ‘pollution,’ when he reached the Attic land, was the origin of the Attic rite which prescribed the use of separate cups on the second day of the Anthesteria is of interest as an illustration of what is known as the aetiological myth. Orestes says to Iphigeneia154:
There arrived,
None willingly received me, by the gods
As one abhorred: and they, who felt the touch
Of shame, the hospitable board alone
Yielded, and though one common roof beneath,
Their silence showing they disdained to hold
Converse with me, I took from them apart
A lone repast; to each was placed a bowl
Of the same measure: this they filled with wine,
And bathed their spirits in delight. Unmeet
I deemed it to express offence at those
Who entertained me, but in silence grieved,
Showing a cheer as though I marked it not,
And sighed for that I shed my mother’s blood.
A feast, I hear, at Athens is ordained
From this my evil plight, e’en yet observed,
In which the equal-measured bowl then used
Is by that people held in honour high.
Euripides is not our only authority for such a myth. Its existence is confirmed by Athenaeus155 and by Suidas.156 It is not probable that Euripides himself invented it. At the Libation-feast which was known as the ‘Cups’ (χόες) an unusual custom decreed that each man should drink from a separate goblet and forbade any suggestion of collective drinking such as attached to the ordinary wine-bowl. The Athenians did not understand the real origin of this rite. In the strange blending of joy and sorrow which characterised this Dionysiac festival, they overlooked the connexion which existed between the public civic offering, at this festival, of libations to dead ancestors of the citizens as a whole and the primitive tomb-offerings (χοαί) of tribal ancestor-worship. Coulanges has indicated157 the private, individual, or domestic nature of such tomb-offerings. He goes so far as to suggest that the origin of private ownership in land is to be attributed to the exclusive and non-communistic character of primitive ancestor-worship. Even in Solon’s time the laws defined rigidly the limit of relationship to the deceased which permitted a relative’s presence at the funeral.158 The worship of Dionysus had many affinities with the worship of the dead. It is in such affinities that we must seek, in the last resort, the explanation of the gloom and morbid mourning which permeates all Greek tragedy. But we cannot suppose that the Dionysiac festival was able to import an aspect of civic communism into the essentially local and tribal ritual of tomb-libations. Hence, we believe a compromise was accepted in which men were permitted to drink together at a public libation-festival but were compelled to drink from separate vessels and to sit at separate tables! Such, we believe, was the real origin of this strange rite. But the Athenians, who were ignorant of its true origin, sought to find for it at least an intelligible explanation. They knew from the Attic legends of Orestes that this Argive prince had come to Athens for his trial. They knew that a kin-slayer who had not yet been tried and declared innocent was ‘polluted’ with a minor kind159 of pollution wherever he went. His purgation by Apollo was legally valid for Phocis if an Apolline court had declared him innocent. But in the Attic legends he was untried and therefore unpurged. They argued therefore that when Orestes came to Athens to submit to trial on a charge of kin-slaying, he was prohibited from public civic and religious communion with Athenian citizens. It does not matter in this connexion whether the plea of Orestes was justifiable matricide or extenuated matricide. As he had been proclaimed as an unjust slayer by the avengers, who in this case were the Erinnyes, he was ‘polluted’ until he had either established his innocence or indicated the completion of his atonement to a court of reconciliation. Now ‘pollution’ was regarded by the ancients as a disease of a quasi-physical nature. Murder courts had to be held, even by night, in the open air. The ‘polluted’ man could not enter the temples or the market-place. He could not eat at anyone’s table. He was isolated from public life. His civic existence was suspended. If, then, it be supposed that Orestes arrived for his trial at Athens during the Anthesteria festival, he could not have been received into civic or religious communion. Hence the creators of this myth could quite naturally have conceived that a compromise was agreed upon by which the Athenians preserved, on the one hand, their reputation for hospitality, and respected, on the other, the religion of pollution. They admitted Orestes to the public feast, but they insisted that he should sit apart and drink from a separate vessel! It was thus that the Athenians explained the origin of this rite: nor is the explanation to be regarded as ‘anomalous’ or ‘artificial,’ as Miss Harrison suggests.160 To people who were ignorant of the real origin of the Pitcher Feast, this was at least a respectable and intelligible aetiology.
Orestes says to Iphigeneia that he had some difficulty in refraining from rebuking his hosts on this occasion.161 Miss Harrison’s explanation162 of this statement is that Orestes was mad! But we are convinced that Orestes was not mad, either at Athens or amongst the Tauri, though he may have been temporarily insane amongst the Argives.163
We have seen that there were conflicting opinions concerning the guilt of Orestes in different legends. The predominant opinion in Aeschylus and in the legend (probably Phocian) which referred to his purgation by Apollo suggests that his act was justified. The Argive legend which we have met in the Orestes of Euripides conceived his act as wilful matricide which involved an eternal pollution. But the prevailing conception of Orestes’ act which we find in the legends of post-Homeric times regards him as guilty of matricide extenuated through Apollo’s command. The dramatic attempt to unify these various legends is the source of the complexity of the problem of Oresteian blood-vengeance in Euripides. It is impossible to analyse successfully the legal and religious position of a hero who is tried and who is at the same time untried, who is eternally and who is at the same time temporarily polluted, in one and the same drama! But the myth of the Pitcher Feast was based on a well-defined tradition. It ignored the Argive and the Phocian legends, it ignored also what we have called the first Attic legend, and it considered only the second Attic legend from which the Iphigenia in Tauris drama was ultimately derived.
The surprise which Orestes feels at the partial social boycott which confronts him in Athens is, we think, to be attributed to the coexistence of the Attic and the Phocian legends. In the Phocian legend Orestes was tried and purged, therefore he could visit any Greek city with impunity. But the Attic legend suggested that this purgation, though valid for Phocis, could not be accepted by the Athenians, so long as the avenging Erinnyes pursued, until Orestes had been acquitted by an Athenian court. This conflict of legendary view-points explains, we believe, the divergence of opinions which is suggested by these words.
The ‘Phoenician Maidens’ and the ‘Suppliants’
The homicide-problems of the Phoenissae and of the Supplices may be simultaneously discussed, as both these dramas are concerned with the war of the Seven against Thebes. The dramas correspond in their general atmosphere and in regard to the problems which they present with the Septem of Aeschylus or the Antigone of Sophocles. We also find an incidental reference164 to the punishment of Oedipus which recalls the Oedipus at Colonus and the King Oedipus of Sophocles. Euripides, in his account of the conflict which took place between Polyneices and Eteocles and of the war between the Argives and the Thebans is, from a legal point of view, more satisfactory than his brother dramatists, inasmuch as he makes a clear distinction between the different aspects of the problem of burial in both cases. Polyneices may or may not have been a fratricide and a traitor,165 but the Argives at least were legitimate belligerents. In the Antigone these two issues seem to have been deliberately confused. The burial of the Argives was a question for Greek international law, the violation of which brought down upon the offenders the anger of the gods. The burial of Polyneices was a more delicate question, upon which the gods might adopt divergent attitudes. Teiresias, in the Antigone, does not differentiate very clearly between the religious aspects of these two problems. The gods were angry—about that there was no doubt. But might not this anger have been mainly, if not entirely, due to the non-burial of the Argives? Here are the words addressed by Teiresias to Kreon166:
And this evil state
Is come upon the city from thy will:
Because our altars—yea, our sacred hearths,
Are everywhere infected from the mouths
Of dogs or beak of vulture that hath fed
On Oedipus’ unhappy slaughtered son.
Kreon is unmoved by this declaration, which he regards as the outcome of bribery and political corruption.167 But Teiresias now utters words which strike terror into Kreon’s heart168:
A little while, and thine own palace-halls
Shall flash the truth upon thee with loud noise
Of men and women, shrieking o’er the dead,
And all the cities whose unburied sons,
Mangled and torn, have found a sepulchre
In dogs or jackals or some ravenous bird
That stains their incense with polluted breath,
Are forming leagues in troublous enmity.
Now, Euripides, on the other hand, keeps these two questions clearly distinct. The burial of the Argives, being an international question, is referred by Adrastus to Theseus,169 King of Athens. At first Theseus refuses to intervene, and rightly, since Athens was merely one of a number of Greek States, and she did not wish to undertake single-handed a war which was properly an Amphictyonic war. But ultimately Theseus, yielding to the persuasion of his mother and of Adrastus, fought and defeated the Theban army under the command of Kreon, and handed over the bodies of the Argives to their relatives for burial.170 That in refusing burial to the Argives Kreon had violated a Greek international law is clear from many passages in the Suppliants. Thus Aethra says171:
The mothers now of these,
Spear-slain, are fain to lay them in the grave,
Wherefrom the victors let them, and refuse
The corpses, setting the gods’ laws at nought;
and Theseus says172:
But lifeless bodies—harming not your State,...
I claim to bury: lo! all Hellas’ law
Do I uphold.
The Messenger thus describes the words of the herald173:
Silence, ye people! Hush, ye ranks of Cadmus!
Hearken—we come but for the corpses’ sake,
To bury them and keep all Hellas’ law
Inviolate.
The problem of the burial of Polyneices has two distinct aspects in Euripides, as it has in Sophocles. In both accounts Polyneices was ultimately buried, as it was necessary for legend to insist that he should be, in view of the existence of tombs in Thebes which were said to contain the bones of all the seven Argive leaders.174 But whereas in Sophocles it is religious fear which causes Kreon to consent to the burial of Polyneices, in Euripides we feel that it is rather the victorious intervention of Theseus which is the cause of this dénouement. Eteocles and Polyneices are represented by Euripides as having foreseen the conflict which would rage over their burial when they had mutually slain each other. Thus, Eteocles solemnly binds Kreon to refuse burial to Polyneices175:
But I, on the city
And thee, O Kreon, this injunction lay:
If I prove stronger, suffer not the corse
Of Polyneices in this Theban realm
To be interred: let death be the reward
Of him who scatters dust o’er his remains,
Although he be the dearest of my friends.
Again, Polyneices is said to have commanded, as he lay dying, his mother and Antigone to bury him in Theban soil176:
But bury me, O thou who gav’st me birth,
And my loved sister, in my native land,
Your mediation to appease the city
Uniting, that of my paternal soil
Enough for a poor grave I may obtain,
Though I have lost the empire.
Thus Euripides conceives in a twofold aspect the act of Polyneices. Subjectively, he thinks, Polyneices was justified in attacking and in slaying his brother177: objectively, however, or technically, he was a traitor and a fratricide because prima facie he was the aggressor.178 But the sympathetic intuition of Antigone looks beyond the superficial enactments of a political justice of which the obscure and oscillating dictates cannot compete with her love for her brother in life, with her grief for him in death, and with her reverence for the solemn injunction which his dying lips had uttered.
The punishment of Oedipus which is mentioned in the Phoenissae is based, we believe, on the conception of his fatal act as voluntary homicide,179 but it also takes into account the facts of the Homeric narrative. The Homeric180 story of the continued rule of Oedipus ‘over the Cadmeans’ was not in harmony with Achaean principles of blood-vengeance. Homer does not understand it. Perhaps this is because, in Boeotia, as Leaf points out,181 the Achaeans had not established their power. It is possible that Oedipus enjoyed immunity from punishment because of his position as a Minoan autocrat, but as there existed in legendary story many capable and willing avengers it is better to attribute his immunity to a discrimination between degrees in homicide-guilt which we have associated with Pelasgian tribal custom, and to interpret the Homeric reference as a Pelasgian ‘reminiscence.’182
In Homer, Oedipus lives, dies, and is buried in Thebes. But post-Homeric legend, under the influence of the pollution doctrine, could not accept these facts. Even if the plea of quasi-involuntary homicide which Oedipus himself put forward had been accepted he would still have had to go into exile for at least a period of years, and even then he could not have returned to his domestic religion or have been buried in the tomb of his fathers. The duration of exile for extenuated or involuntary slaying in historical times, and therefore presumably183 in the pollution era, depended on the will of the relatives of the slain. One single objector could have extended the exile period indefinitely, at least in theory, according to the law ‘let all consent to be appeased or let one objector hold the field.’184 But in the post-Homeric story of Oedipus, as Sophocles gives it, the plea of Oedipus was not accepted. He was regarded as a voluntary homicide and sent into exile. It is true that when Polyneices himself was banished, for political reasons, from Thebes, he naturally relented, and in his altered mood he offered to restore Oedipus to his home.185 But in order to restore Oedipus it was necessary that Kreon and Eteocles should be either killed or exiled, and this contingency had not been realised. In Euripides the unhappy king ultimately suffers the same fate. Kreon says to Oedipus186:
But to my words, O Oedipus, attend:
Eteocles, thy son, hath to these hands
Consigned the sceptre of the Theban realm,...
I for this cause no longer can allow thee
Here to reside: for in the clearest terms
Teiresias has pronounced that, while thou dwell’st
In these domains, Thebes never can be blest.
Therefore depart. Nor through a wanton pride,
Nor any hate I bear thee, do I hold
Such language, but because I justly dread
Thy evil genius will destroy this land.
And Oedipus refers to the Apolline oracle which foretold that he would die in Athens (an oracle which Sophocles also mentions187) when he says188:
The oracle of Phoebus is fulfilled...
That in Athens an exile I shall die.
But in Euripides it is clear that Oedipus is not banished before the death of Eteocles and Polyneices. A number of years is known to have elapsed during which he still lived in Thebes. But he was imprisoned all the time, and, as this suggestion is not implied in the Homeric story, we must suppose that some legend invented this novel device by which part at least of the Homeric facts could be brought into harmony with the requirements of the post-Homeric doctrine of ‘pollution.’ It supposed that Oedipus continued to live in Thebes, not however as a king or as a free citizen with full civic rights, but as an imprisoned criminal who by the very fact of his imprisonment did not pollute the State. Jocasta, who, in accordance with the Homeric narrative, is represented as living in Thebes for many years after the crimes189 of Oedipus were committed, says:
Soon as he learned
That I whom he had wedded was his mother,
The miserable Oedipus, o’erwhelmed
With woes accumulated, from their sockets
Tore with a golden clasp his bleeding eyes.
But since the beard o’ershaded my sons’ cheeks
Their sire they in a dungeon have confined,
The memory of this sad event t’ efface,
For which they needed every subtle art.
Within those mansions he still lives, but sick
With evil fortunes, on his sons pours forth
The most unholy curses, that this house
They by the sword may portion out.
We have said190 that ‘pollution’ was conceived by the Greeks as a quasi-physical reality which resembled a contagious disease. In historical times a ‘polluted’ murderer was isolated by imprisonment. A law of Dracon, which is confirmed by Plato and by Demosthenes, prescribed that a convicted murderer en rupture de ban could be arrested and imprisoned, instead of being put to death, by the first person who encountered him.191 But imprisonment was never regarded, in Attic law, as a permanent method of isolation for a murderer, simply because it was not a recognised legal penalty for homicide. Oedipus therefore would have been justified, from the standpoint of historical law, in uttering curses against his relatives who imprisoned him. Hence we suggest that this story of the imprisonment of Oedipus was invented by some legend-maker of the pre-Draconian age, in an attempt to harmonise the Homeric story of the continued life of Oedipus at Thebes with the post-Homeric atmosphere which regarded him as ‘polluted’ and debarred from civil and religious communion with his fellow-citizens. Euripides implies192 that ultimately the Apolline oracle was fulfilled and that Oedipus died as an exile at Athens. In view of the general acceptance of this oracle by traditional legends and of the ‘established fact’193 of the burial of Oedipus at Athens, Euripides appears to have abandoned the Homeric account of the burial of Oedipus at Thebes. In this he reveals more intelligence and a greater insight into the meaning of the post-Homeric legend than did Pausanias and his authorities who believed that the bones of Oedipus were transferred from Thebes to Athens.194 For either Oedipus was ‘polluted’ or he was not. If he was, he could not have been buried at Thebes, since he was regarded as a wilful murderer: if he was not, then he need not have come to Athens as a homicide-exile at all.
The statement of Jocasta195 that Oedipus was imprisoned in order that his disgrace might be forgotten, and that of Kreon196 that Oedipus had to be exiled for ever because he was ‘polluted,’ are inconsistent; but we may infer from these statements, which Euripides himself composed, that he did not quite understand the origin and motive of the story of the imprisonment of Oedipus. For whoever invented this story did so with a definite purpose, namely, to reconcile religious doctrine with historical fact. The inventor knew the meaning and purpose of his invention. Hence the statement of Jocasta to which we have referred cannot have originated with the inventor of the story, for otherwise she would have said that Oedipus was imprisoned to avoid pollution.
Nevertheless we think that here again Euripides sought to achieve dramatic interest by introducing an antique variant of the story which Sophocles had ignored. In Sophocles, Oedipus dies before the clash of arms takes place between the Argives and the Thebans. In Euripides he lives to see the realisation of his own curses, and becomes more easily reconciled to his own sad fate when he finds that Destiny has avenged him in his turn, as Laius was avenged, and that in leaving Thebes he has removed from his life the local anger of ghosts and gods.
The ‘Mad Hercules’
The theme of this drama is one of the multitudinous episodes which are associated with the life of Hercules. Now the legends of Hercules have this much in common with such legends as we have examined concerning Orestes and Oedipus, that they refer to the deeds of a great man who has died. In Greek religion, apart from the Olympian Pantheon of the Achaean caste, every great man assumed a divine nature when he died. But the Olympian religion did not recognise the right of man to become divine, and therefore whenever legend attributes human acts to such Olympian gods as Apollo or Athene (of whose mortal life there was no record) we must assume that at the time of such acts these gods have temporarily assumed a human form. But Hercules never was an Olympian. In Homer, Hercules is mentioned in a manner which suggests that he had been living quite recently upon this earth, and living moreover a normal human life. We find him in Hades, like all other dead men, though, curiously, he retains some of his old vitality, for he is married to Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth.197 We hear of his maternal uncles living ordinary human lives in Argos or in Thebes,198 and his grandsons actually fought in the Trojan war! We will not here attempt to discuss the origin of the Grecian cult of Hercules. Müller, of course, connects him with the Dorians. He thinks that Hercules and Apollo, in their respective rôles of hero and of god, satisfied the normal wants of Dorian religiousness.199 We admit that the exaltation of Hercules as a divinity was of post-Homeric origin; but it is futile, we believe, to seek to distinguish the historical from the fictitious strata in Heraclean legends. At the dawn of European literature the human life of Hercules, if there ever was such a man, was a thing of the past, and it is therefore more than probable that all the post-Homeric legends of Hercules are equally fictitious. The main point which we wish to emphasise here is that most of the legends of Hercules are based on the assumption that he had not yet died: that he was a mortal man, who obeyed, on most occasions, the laws of social humanity, not a god who had condescended to take human form and who was superior to the operation of natural laws. We agree that in the legends of Hercules there is a certain element of magic, such as is found in the legends of Medea, or Jason, or Iphigeneia. This element imports into Heraclean legends a certain degree of lawlessness or of chaos. But, so far as homicide at least is concerned, we will assume that Hercules is a man; not indeed an ordinary man, subject to every ordinary law, but nevertheless a man, whose actions, however archaically they may be conceived, can nevertheless be explained. The difficulties which are presented by the Heraclean legends are due in part to their archaic setting, but still more to their almost infinite variety—a variety which we may attribute to the multitude of localities in which this Hero-god was worshipped. The greater the number of shrines which a god or hero possessed, the greater was the variety of the myths which grew up around him, because ancient myths—which are not like modern fairy tales, but which were rather sacred commemorations of religious events—could be transferred from one Hero to another. Herodotus tells200 how Cleisthenes of Sicyon transferred the ‘tragic choruses’ which commemorated the sorrows of Adrastus to the cult of Dionysus. Thus too must Hercules have had attributed to him the joyful exploits as well as the sorrowful events of the ‘lives’ of local Heroes. For this reason, and because of the tendency of myths to become more and more fanciful, we believe that the legends of Hercules as of most gods are ‘fictitious.’
In the Euripidean drama, the Mad Hercules, we are told that Hercules, in a fit of madness, slew his wife, Megara, and his children.201 He was deluded by the goddess Hera202 into believing that he was thereby inflicting death upon the children of his taskmaster, Eurystheus. We may recall a somewhat similar delusion which was sent in a Sophoclean drama by Athene upon Ajax. But whereas in the Ajax no actual homicide occurs, here we have actual bloodshed, and, worst of all, kin-slaying. From a legal point of view, the position of Hercules is therefore quite different from that of Ajax. It is, we think, more akin to that of Oedipus. Hercules slays his children without knowing that they are his children. We may omit, for purposes of legal analysis, the death of Megara, his wife, for this death is obscured by the more heinous slaying of his kindred. Like Oedipus, Hercules discovers the truth; like Ajax, he contemplates suicide. He gives expression to sentiments regarding the punishment of kin-slaying which are suggestive of historical Attic law; though he forgets, for the moment, that his act was involuntary, when he says203:
Ah! why lengthen out
A guilty life, when of my dearest children
I am become the murderer? Why delay
To leap from the high rock or with a sword
Transpierce this bosom, on myself their blood
Avenging? or t’avert that infamy
Which waits me, shall I rush into the flames?
Presently he begins to feel that he should not be considered fully culpable204; yet he sees that it will be difficult for him to establish ‘extenuation’ as a plea.205 The fit of madness which Hera had sent upon him was indeed a grim reality, but it would be difficult to prove it in a court of justice. Moreover, in the Euripidean account Hercules is an alien in Thebes. His native State is Argos.206 We have said that exile was not permitted as a penalty for voluntary kin-slaying in historical Greece. We have quoted207 Plato for the law that even involuntary slaying between aliens was punished by perpetual exile. If Hercules was an alien at Thebes, so also were his children. In Homer208 Thebes is the birthplace of Hercules, but this Homeric fact is not accepted by Euripides. In the following passage Hercules regards exile rather than death as his correct and proper punishment, but owing to the difficulty of proving involuntariness he fears that no city will receive him. Thebes, he says, he must leave. To Argos, his native home, he cannot return, because, as he says,209 he has been already banished from that State owing to his feud with Eurystheus. In other places he will indeed be called a kin-slayer, and if he cannot prove his innocence he may be banished. This statement lends support to our theory that in historical Greece exile was not permitted for voluntary kin-slaying.210 He says211:
My fate is such
That in my native Thebes I must not dwell:
But if I here continue, to what temple
Or friends can I repair? for by such curses
I now am visited, that none will dare
To speak to me. To Argos shall I go?
How can I, when my country drives me forth?
To any other city should I fly,
The consequence were this: with looks askance
I should be viewed as one well-known, and harassed
With these reproaches by malignant tongues:
‘Is not this he, the son of Jove, who murdered
His children and his consort? from this land
Shall not th’accursed miscreant be expelled?’
But the archaic atmosphere of the ‘life’ of Hercules furnishes a solution for this problem. Theseus arrives from Athens! Apparently we are now living in the days which preceded the institution of citizen juries or even of Ephetae courts! As Theseus, the autocratic King-judge, tried Oedipus at the shrine of the Semnai,212 so also, in a similarly informal manner, he tries Hercules. He knows already, without being told of it, that Hera is to blame. Therefore, he says213:
... This mischief
Springs from no god except the wife of Jove....
Hence he says to Hercules214:
From Thebes retire
Since thus the laws ordain: and follow me
To Pallas’ city: when thy hands are there
Cleansed from pollution, I to thee will give
A palace, and with thee divide my wealth.
What, we may ask, is the law to which Theseus here refers? Wilamowitz215 rightly says that the law is that which prohibits his continuance at Thebes. We believe, however, that this was not a specifically Theban law. If it had been, the fact would have been more clearly indicated. The law in question is, we believe, an international law, which declared that when an alien slew an alien, even without intent, he must be debarred for ever from the State in which the deed occurred. This law we have already quoted from Plato.216 Hercules therefore left Thebes and went to Athens,217 and we are told that when, in course of time, he dies in Athens he will receive the worship of a Hero!218 The similarity of this dénouement to that of the Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles needs no comment. Both these consummations are based, perhaps, on the existence of Hero-shrines in Attic soil. But the legend-makers were careful not to give us legal impossibilities. Hercules had shrines everywhere in Greece. Yet Hercules could not go to Argos, for the simple reason that he had been exiled from that city. He could not return to Thebes because of ‘the law.’ It was fortunate then for Hercules that he found a king such as Theseus who admitted without question the element of extenuation in his act. In historical Greece a wilful kin-slayer could not have been accepted as an exile in any State. The law which is referred to by Theseus cannot therefore have reference to wilful slaying, for it permitted him to leave Thebes. If he had slain his children wilfully, it would not have allowed him the option of exile. If he is allowed this option, it is because his deed was viewed, either by the dramatist or by the legend-maker, or by both, as extenuated or quasi-involuntary kin-slaying. Such slaying in Greek law prescribed a period of exile, temporary or perpetual, pending the appeasement of the kinsmen.
Owing to the important differences which exist between the Euripidean conception of the native state of Hercules and Homer’s conception, we must assume that Euripides has abandoned Homer and is following an Argive legend concerning Hercules. This conclusion is strengthened by the account which Euripides gives, in this play, of Amphitryon, the father of Hercules. Euripides makes Amphitryon say219 that he is an exile from Argos living at Thebes, because he had slain Electryon. Now, if Euripides conceived Amphitryon as a Theban by birth, he could not legally have presented him, since he was a man-slayer, as a resident in Thebes. We have seen220 that homicide-exiles were debarred from three possible places of residence, namely (1) the State of the slayer, (2) the State of the victim, and (3) the State in which the deed of blood took place.
Pausanias also refers221 to this legend of Amphitryon. The Thebans of his time pointed out a ruined house in Thebes, ‘where they say Amphitryon dwelt when he fled from Tiryns owing to the death of Electryon.’ As Tiryns was a city within the boundary of the historical Argive State it is frequently confused with Argos in the legends. Electryon was the father-in-law and the uncle of Amphitryon. That the slaying of Electryon was not wilful is suggested by certain facts. Thus, the return of Amphitryon to Argos is said to depend on the will of Eurystheus and the labours of Hercules are regarded as the necessary ‘appeasement.’222 We need not suppose that there is any reference to the Pelasgian wergeld system in the story of the ‘recompense’ which was demanded by Eurystheus. This ‘recompense’ is more akin to the ‘appeasement’ of relatives in the pollution system. It was the father of Eurystheus, Sthenelus, the brother of Electryon, who had driven Amphitryon into banishment. Euripides concedes this much to the claim of Thebes to be regarded as the home of Amphitryon, in so far as he makes Amphitryon say223 that he has settled there as an exile. But legally he could not have lived there as a homicide-exile if he had been a citizen of Thebes. Hence Euripides calls him ‘the Argive Amphitryon.’ His hopes of an ultimate return to Argos and of the ‘appeasement’ of Eurystheus suggest that his act was involuntary, or quasi-involuntary. The very fact of his exile points to the same conclusion.
The attempt of Lycus, King of Thebes, to murder Amphitryon, Megara, and the children of Hercules, is also described in the play. The motive of Lycus was political. Hercules had married Megara, daughter of Kreon, the Regent of Thebes, and his family was therefore a dangerous rival in the matter of dynastic succession. Hercules, as soon as he heard of the plot, put Lycus to death.224 This penalty, we have suggested,225 was a normal penalty for attempted murder (βούλευσις) in Achaean or quasi-Achaean226 society. We have discussed this penalty in our analysis of the Ajax of Sophocles. Whether there was an antique legend which referred to this penalty, or whether the dramatist is consciously archaising, it is difficult to decide. The Chorus, at least, have no doubt that the penalty was just and Amphitryon takes the same view.227 The Chorus say to him as he dies228:
Others have perished by that bloody hand.
... the retribution thou endur’st... is just.
The ‘Children of Hercules’
Of the Heracleidae, another family of Hercules, Pausanias says229: ‘When Hercules fled from Eurystheus at Tiryns, he went to his friend Ceyx, the King of Trachis. But when Hercules left the society of men230 Eurystheus demanded his children, and Ceyx sent them to Athens, suggesting that Theseus should protect them. And coming to Athens, they caused the first war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians, as Theseus would not give them up to Eurystheus.’
In this Euripidean play, also, the children of Hercules are represented as dwelling in the city of Athens, in the charge of Iolaus and Alcmene,231 and the war between Eurystheus and Theseus for their extradition is the main theme. The presence of Iolaus in the drama is probably, we think, derived from the legend of an expedition which the Athenians made under his leadership to Sardinia.232 The chief point which we wish to emphasise here is that the demand for the extradition of the Heracleidae has no connexion with homicide. Amphitryon had slain Electryon. Hercules had sought in vain to ‘appease’ Eurystheus. It is now evident that Eurystheus has refused all ‘appeasement,’ as the sons of Oedipus refused it, for political reasons. In Greek law homicide could not continue to afflict the children of a slayer unto the fourth generation. With the death of Amphitryon, the homicide episode is closed. In this drama, the extradition demand is therefore entirely political. Upon this point our play is quite explicit. Eurystheus says to Alcmene233:
For well I knew thy son
Was no mere cipher, but a man indeed:
Though strong my hate, on him will I confer
The praise he merits from his valiant deeds.
But after he was dead, was I not forced,
Because I was a foe to these his sons,
And knew what bitter enmity ’gainst me
They from their sire inherited, to leave
No stone unturned, to slay, to banish them
And plot their ruin? Could I have succeeded
In these designs, my throne had stood secure.
Demophon, son of Theseus, refuses to give up the sons of Hercules and uses as a pretext the right of suppliants.234 We recall the statement of Pausanias235 that Demophon was the first Athenian who was tried at the Palladium court—a court which regularly tried cases of homicide between strangers.236 The words which Demophon speaks to the herald of Eurystheus237—
Therefore, go thou back
To Argos, and this message to Eurystheus
Deliver: tell him, too, if there be ought
Which ’gainst our guests he can allege, the laws238
Are open: but thou shalt not drag them thence—
imply that the right of suppliant was not potent to protect offenders but was only potent to secure for them a respite from merited punishment; moreover they imply that Eurystheus has no right to demand the extradition of offenders without the option of a trial.239 We have already admitted that the right of sanctuary helped to determine the locality of certain courts, but we have maintained240 that it had no essential connexion with the origin of the principle of trials for homicide, and that its connexion with murder courts is quite accidental. We have suggested that241 in historical Greece trial was a possible option for extradition in case of homicide. Hence the refusal of Eurystheus to accept trial suggests what Demophon definitely asserts,242 that the ‘offence’ of the Heracleidae was not criminal but political.
But if the Heracleidae are innocent, what shall we say of Eurystheus? Is he not as culpable as Lycus is in the Mad Hercules? Is he not guilty of plotting murder for political ends? If he is not yet αἴτιος φόνου, is he not guilty of βούλευσις? For this crime, we have said, in early Greece, the penalty was probably death.243 It is, then, significant that in this play Eurystheus is put to death by the servants of Alcmene.244 Both the penalty and its mode of execution are archaic. Either legend retained these elements unadulterated in their transition down the ages, or Euripides deliberately imported into the myth an archaic atmosphere. In neither case is Euripides giving us the ideas of his own time, for in historical Greece βούλευσις was not punishable by death.
Eurystheus was captured alive in the battle and hence he claims the right of a captive warrior and demands the protection of the Athenians!245 Alcmene, however, insists that he should be given up to her for execution!246 What a nice legal problem was this for a litigious Athenian audience! How replete it is with that intense human interest which was so dear to Euripides! The conflict is skilfully depicted in the dialogue which takes place between Alcmene and the messenger (or the Chorus?) after the battle.247 Eurystheus’ appeal to the ‘laws of Greece’248 implies the existence of international legislation concerning the rights of war-captives, but he himself had previously shown very little regard for the international status of exiles. In vain does he advance the plea of self-defence against these harmless but dangerous children! The Athenians decide to take no action. They cannot put to death a captive taken in war. But Alcmene claims that Eurystheus is a murderer. According to ancient practice, it is her privilege to avenge! Moreover, so far as Alcmene is concerned, she will not bury a man whom she believes to be a criminal.249 But unfortunately there was an oracle of Apollo that Eurystheus should be buried in Athens.250 The Athenians therefore are disposed to bury him.251 At first Alcmene says252 that she will not object to the burial of Eurystheus by the Athenians, but this assertion is incompatible with the command which she gives to her attendants later, to deliver the dead Eurystheus to the dogs. We may perhaps assume that she performed a mock ritual of ‘exposure’ of the dead, that she cast the body of Eurystheus beyond the boundaries, and that afterwards his relatives removed him for sepulture. Such is the attempt which Euripides seems to make to solve the deadlock between two elements of Greek law, namely that which permitted the burial of an enemy,253 and that which forbade the burial of a murderer.254 In the archaic atmosphere of the play, homicide and attempted homicide255 are equated as identical. In the words of Eurystheus, who declares in vain that his death will cause pollution to his slayer, we discern at once the failure of Euripides to be consistently archaic and the failure of a dead man’s ghost to impose ‘pollution’ in the teeth of civic law and international religion.
The ‘Medea’
In regard to the origin and the evolution of the story of Medea which is the subject of this drama, we cannot do better than summarise the account which Verrall gives in his edition of the play. Verrall thinks256 that Medea was a Phoenician moon-goddess who was worshipped at Corinth at an early period, and to whom were offered, in sacrifice, human victims, including children; that these rites, which in course of time assumed a more civilised form, (when a mock ritual of human sacrifice was accepted in the place of ancient realities,) were ‘transferred’ to the goddess Hera; that sacred legend retained indeed a memory of Medea, but the evolution of Corinthian religion degraded to the level of a priestess the Medea who once had been a goddess; and that hence arose the fiction that Medea had once slain children—in sacrifice! Later, Verrall thinks, this Corinthian story was expanded under the influence of eastern Greek colonisation, and legend traced in the route from the Euxine to Iolcos the natural course of Medea’s introduction to Greek lands. Weird Asiatic notions of sorcery and witchcraft clustered round her name; to her were attributed the atrocities which legend-memory recorded of the Aeolidae at Iolcos. Thus was Medea degraded not only from a goddess to a priestess, but also from a priestess to a sorceress, and from a sorceress to the vilest murderess whom Grecian legends knew.
If the creators of the story of Medea were ignorant of her original character, so also naturally was Euripides. For him, Medea is not a goddess who has assumed the form of a woman, but a woman who has not yet put off this mortal coil, and who as yet has done little to deserve that she should, after death, attain to divinity! As a woman, she is, despite her magic, subject to social laws. Her deeds of blood must be regarded from a legal standpoint, whether that standpoint is applicable to one era or to another. Let us consider how the deeds of Medea were avenged.
First of all, she slew her brother, Apsyrtus, in Colchis, to prevent his pursuit.257 For this crime she paid no penalty, if we except the exile which destiny had, in any event, decreed for her. It was quite unnecessary for the legend-maker to invent this additional atrocity of fratricide, for to Colchis Medea was never to return! But as exile was an archaic Pelasgian penalty for wilful kin-slaying, this conception bears an antique stamp which is attributable either to the antiquity of the story or to the archaising of later minds.
Again, Medea caused the daughters of Pelias to put to death their aged father by deluding them into the belief that by cutting him in pieces and boiling him with certain magic potions, they would restore him to youth and vigour.258 Here Medea acts as the ‘plotter and contriver’259 of murder. In primitive as in historical260 times, such a deed was regarded as equally culpable with that of an actual slayer—indeed, in the special circumstances of the case she was the real if not the actual murderer of Pelias, and the daughters of Pelias were guilty, at most, of involuntary slaying. We cannot of course attribute to Medea the guilt of kin-slaying, as she was not akin to Pelias. It is more probable that she would have been regarded, for purposes of punishment, as an ordinary murderess. In actual fact, she and Jason were expelled from Thessaly. Even so, in the play,261 she still fears the vengeance of Acastus, the son of Pelias. This fact does not imply that she was conceived as guilty of kin-slaying, which in historical Greece was punishable by death. We believe that the Thessalian story of Medea was not conceived from the standpoint of historical law.
In this story there are complications of blood-vengeance which suggest an Achaean, or rather what we may call a quasi-Achaean atmosphere. While, in Homer,262 Pelias, son of Poseidon, rules over Iolcos like an Achaean, by divine right, later legend revealed that he had previously defrauded his half-brother Aeson of the kingdom and put him to death, and that Jason the son of Aeson had himself narrowly escaped death at his hands. Hence it was natural that Jason, the one-sandalled hero of the oracle,263 should command Medea to put Pelias to death. That is the real reason why Jason, together with Medea, was banished from Thessaly by Acastus. This quasi-Achaean exile is therefore similar to the Achaean ‘flight from death,’ and hence it is that Medea still fears the vengeance of Acastus.264 When Jason arrived at Corinth, he became affianced to the king’s daughter, just as the Achaean Tydeus became the son-in-law of Adrastus.265 No pollution was involved in an alliance with a kin-slayer! The presence of such Achaean episodes in Euripides, side by side with episodes which bear a later stamp, suggests either a marvellous capacity for archaising on the part of the dramatist or, more probably, the unadulterated transmission of an antique legend.266
The main plot of this drama reveals two further atrocities which were perpetrated by Medea. She plots the death of her husband, of his intended wife, Glauce, of his intended father-in-law, Kreon, King of Corinth, and of her own two children, whom she had borne to Jason. Her murderous plot proved successful, except in regard to Jason. Her children she slew deliberately with her own hand. It happened, previously, that Aegeus, King of Athens, arrived at Corinth. Medea, well aware of the consequences of the murderous plot which she had planned, and being, in addition, under an edict of banishment from Corinth, entreated Aegeus to give her protection at Athens.267 He promised to do so, but she was not content with a promise. She bound Aegeus under a solemn oath:
Swear by the earth on which we tread, the sun,
Thy grandsire and by all the race of gods...
That from your land you never will expel,
Nor while you live consent that any foe
Shall tear me thence.268
One or two problems are suggested by this quotation. If Medea had not succeeded in securing this solemn contract on the part of Aegeus, would she have carried out her plot? And was Aegeus bound by the oath when he discovered the sequel? In this section of the story—which is the main theme of our play—homicide is conceived as a ‘pollution,’269 and in the pollution system exile was not permitted for voluntary kin-slaying.270 The murder of her children was by far the most serious offence which Medea committed, since they were her kindred. For the other deeds of blood she could have legally sought asylum at Athens, as she was not a citizen of that State, and the deeds had not been perpetrated there. Medea seems to be well aware of these facts, for she utters no hint to Aegeus of her dreadful plans. But it was her intention of slaying her children which led her to extract from Aegeus this solemn oath. If he had refused to swear, she would, we believe, have slain all her intended victims, but she would then have committed suicide.
But was the oath which Aegeus swore binding in Greek international law? Apparently Medea thought so, and Euripides seems to think so, too. The Chorus, however, do not understand how Medea can find a refuge at Athens. But it is only in the slaying of the children that they seem to find a difficulty. They say271:
For its holy streams renowned
Can that city, can that State
Where Friendship’s generous train are found
Shelter thee from public hate,
When, defiled with horrid guilt,
Thou thy children’s blood hast spilt?
Think on this atrocious deed
Ere the dagger aim the blow.
But at the end of the play the Sun-god, the grandfather of Medea, places his chariot at her disposal in order to facilitate her journey to Athens,272 the Corinthian gods accepting, as an expiation, the establishment by blood-stained hands of a festival and mystic rites!273 Jason is foredoomed to death,274 and we are told that Medea will escape the Erinnyes of her children!275
If Euripides, as Wedd maintains,276 habitually contrasts the morality of the legends with that of his own day, we can only say that here the contrast is so obvious that it need not have been indicated at all. But is such a contrast really indicated? Does the futile protest of the Chorus represent the Athens of Euripides, and does the action of Aegeus typify the Athens of a barbarous past? If not, how do we explain the facts of the drama? In our view, it is Jason, not Medea, who is the villain of this play. Medea had left her home, her kindred, everything that life held dear, for the love of a Greek adventurer. Jason never taunts Medea with the slaying of his father. He had commanded it. Driven forth as an exile from the land of Thessaly, she clings to her blood-stained mate. In Corinth he deserts her, and she is ordered to go away—anywhere, somewhere, into the great unknown. To the distracted mind of a desperate woman who sees herself deserted in a friendless world comes then the image of a two-edged sword, begotten of slighted love and sexual jealousy. Love rejected, love transferred, transforms Medea from a faithful friend into a dangerous enemy. Her children, erstwhile the sweetest pledges of affection, are now so many goads which stimulate her vengeance. The conflict of passions which rages in Medea’s breast is depicted by Euripides with matchless skill. It proclaims her at once human and insane. Subjectively therefore she need only plead guilty to extenuated homicide, to slaying in a passion; and if such a plea were accepted she would be entitled in Greek law277 to the sanctuary of exile. Why then does she bind Aegeus by an oath? We suggest that the explanation is to be found in the distinction between the objective or legal aspect of an act and its subjective or psychological aspect. It would have been difficult for Medea to have established her plea in any court, formal or informal. Aegeus might not have given her the benefit of the doubt, as Theseus did to Oedipus, and Medea could take no risks. Furthermore, this legend has an archaic setting, and portrays a Greek story of a period which was antecedent to the establishment of regular State courts of justice and to codified international law. This explains why Aegeus observed his oath. There was no authority of an international religion to declare that it was not binding. Viewed in this light, the protest of the Chorus in our last quotation is a confirmation of our hypothesis. They actually approve of the slaying of Kreon and of his daughter, though they regret that they should have suffered for Jason’s infamy. They say278:
Heaven its collected store of evil seems
This day resolved with justice to pour down
On perjured Jason. Thy untimely fate
How do we pity, O thou wretched daughter
Of Kreon, who in Pluto’s mansions go’st
To celebrate thy nuptial feast.
When the Chorus urge Medea not to slay her children, we feel that they are prompted by feelings of pity and humanity, rather than by any sense of legal or religious guilt. In the following passage in which we see the strongest and most emphatic instance of their disapproval of Medea’s act, their main objection is that her act is unusual! Only one woman, they say, has ever been known to do such a deed before!279
Art thou a rock, O wretch, or steel to slay
With thine own hand that generous race of sons
Whom thou didst bear? I hitherto have heard
But of one woman who, in ancient days,
Smote her own children, Ino, by the gods
With frenzy stung....
But she, yet reeking with the impious gore
Of her own progeny, into the waves
Plunged headlong from the ocean’s craggy beach.
Can there be deeds more horrible than these
Left for succeeding ages to produce?
Thus, in this play we have no Euripidean contrast of barbarous with civilised morality. Euripides favours Medea; so does the Chorus; so does the plot. So strong is her passion, so conscious is she of her own moral rectitude, so magnanimous is her soul, that, if Aegeus had not come, she would have carried out her plans, and if Aegeus had not sworn, she would have done the same. But with her blood-stained hands she would have driven into her heart the sword which had just drained the life blood of her children.
The ‘Hippolytus’
The scene of the Hippolytus is laid in Troizen, in S.E. Argolis, the realm of Pittheus, the maternal grandfather of Theseus, King of Athens. Thither Theseus has come, because, says Euripides, he was sentenced to one year’s exile for the slaying of Pallas and his sons. Aphrodite says280:
But from Cecropia’s realm since Theseus fled
To expiate his pollution, with the blood
Of Pallas’ sons distained, and with his queen
Sailed for this coast, to punishment of exile
Submitting for one year.
Now Pausanias informs us281 that ‘justifiable homicide was the plea of Theseus when he was acquitted for killing Pallas and his sons.’ We have pointed out282 that Pallas and his sons were slain in a civil war in Attica. As they were technically rebels, and unjust aggressors, seeking to dethrone Aegeus (the father of Theseus), who was the reigning monarch, it was quite natural that from one point of view the act of Theseus should have been morally regarded as justifiable homicide. It would not have required a court of justice to have established the validity of such a plea. Had not Eteocles been automatically ‘acquitted’ for the slaying of Polyneices? But why does Euripides speak of a sentence of one year’s exile? This penalty in relation to kin-slaying (Pallas was a brother of Aegeus) can only have one meaning. Plato assures us283 that if a kinsman slays a kinsman in a passion, and if the deceased before he expires shall have ‘forgiven’ him and absolved him from blood-guiltiness, the deed shall be regarded as involuntary homicide for which the normal penalty was one year’s exile. To explain this reference in Euripides, therefore, Theseus must be conceived as guilty of extenuated kin-slaying which was ‘forgiven.’ But we are nowhere told that the Pallantidae forgave their slayer! We have said284 that there was a legal affinity between the conceptions of justifiable and of extenuated slaying. Yet the two kinds of homicide were never identified, and it would be all the more difficult to identify them when the deed concerned a King of Athens. Hence we must suppose either (1) that Euripides has here abandoned the tradition mentioned by Pausanias, or (2) that the legal aspect of the slaying of the Pallantidae had become confused in the legends, before Euripides, with the legal aspect of some other deed of blood with which the name of Theseus was associated.
During the sojourn of Theseus at Troizen, where his son Hippolytus was being brought up, Phaedra, the second wife of Theseus, sought to seduce into adulterous intercourse her step-son, Hippolytus. Euripides represents Hippolytus as an Orphic votary,285 and we will condone the anachronism286 because it emphasises the probability of Hippolytus’ repudiation of Phaedra’s suggestions. Phaedra, in shame and anger, committed suicide,287 but in revenge for the puritan’s rejection of her love, she left behind her a letter in which she accused Hippolytus of forcible violation.288 Such an accusation, followed by suicide, would be sufficient to convict Hippolytus in either ancient or modern times. It would have convicted him of attempting an ‘indecent assault,’ and of attempted adultery. But would it have convicted him of having caused the death of Phaedra? Theseus believed him guilty of all these crimes, and decided to banish him from Troizen, pronouncing against him, in addition, a virulent curse which, in the religious atmosphere of the ancient world, was as dangerous to the life of Hippolytus as the σήματα λυγρά were which were sent, in analogous circumstances, by Proitus to the King of Lydia, in the legend of Bellerophon.289 He says290:
O Neptune, O my sire,
Since thou hast firmly promised that thou thrice
Wouldst grant me what I prayed for, now fulfil
One vow, and slay my son, nor let him ’scape
This single day, if thou with me design
To ratify the compact thou hast made....
Moreover I will drive him from the land:
For of these twofold fates, or this or that
Must smite him: Neptune, when he hears my curses,
Will plunge the miscreant to the shades of hell;
Else, cast forth from this region, and ordained
To wander in some foreign land, a life
Of the profoundest misery shall he drag.
The crimes which Theseus attributes to Hippolytus are so many and so various that it is impossible to connect this penalty of banishment with the homicidal aspect of Phaedra’s death. The penalty is too severe, as his action in causing Phaedra’s death could hardly have been regarded even as manslaughter.
It is to be noted that Hippolytus was banished from Athens as well as from Troizen.291 After leaving Troizen, as he was travelling along the coast, he was assailed by a sea-monster which was sent by Poseidon, within sight of the Scironian rocks292 (this point, we shall see, is important for the correct analysis of the legend): the horses took fright, and Hippolytus was dragged behind the chariot until he was mortally injured. He was brought back to Theseus; and as Artemis miraculously revealed to Theseus his innocence of the crime which had been alleged against him, the father and the son became reconciled; and, before he died, Hippolytus absolved his father from the guilt of blood.293 Thus the play ends.
We have said294 that in early Greece, and even amongst the Achaean caste, adultery was not punishable by death. Hence the curse of Theseus renders him liable to blood-guilt. He ‘contrives’ death, he is αἴτιος φόνου,295 even if he does not actually slay Hippolytus. He confesses his guilt in the closing scene. Now the ‘forgiveness’ of a dying kinsman did not absolve the slayer from all punishment. He had still, in historical Greece, to endure a penalty of one year’s exile from his home-land. Is it not strange, therefore, that in this play Theseus suffers no punishment for the death of Hippolytus? Troizen was reputed to have been the birth-place of Theseus; Athens was the birth-place of Hippolytus. Euripides remembers the latter fact when he represents the exiled Hippolytus as debarred from Athens. But he forgets the former fact when he makes Troizen a place of exile for Theseus! Pausanias says296 that Theseus went to Troizen to be purified for the slaying of Pallas and his sons, and that at Troizen Phaedra accomplished the death of Hippolytus. Moreover, Pausanias tells us297 that over the royal portico of the Athenian Prytaneum there was an earthenware statue which represented Theseus in the act of hurling into the sea a certain brigand named Sciron. For Euripides, Sciron is the name of a sea boulder in the Saronic gulf. But Plutarch assures298 us that Sciron was a kinsman of Theseus, that Theseus slew him, and that as an atonement he instituted the sacred Isthmian games!
It seems obvious that Euripides has either adopted an eclectic attitude to these various legends of Theseus, or that they had become ‘fused’ before his time. But he is not concerned with legal accuracy or consistency, so much as with the construction of an intelligible plot of intense human interest. To Euripides it must have appeared improbable that the temporary sojourn of Theseus at Troizen was connected, as Pausanias alleges, with purgation rites, since these rites would normally have been performed at Athens. Moreover, the brief period of time which such rites would have necessitated does not afford a sufficient explanation of his ‘exile’ for the space of one year. Again, it was absolutely necessary to suppose that Theseus returned to Athens. But, for this, it was necessary to assume that he was ‘forgiven’ by Hippolytus whom he, directly and immediately, and Phaedra indirectly,299 caused to be killed. But we have not yet discovered the secret of that one year’s sojourn at Troizen. We believe that it is in the legend of Sciron, which Euripides ignores, that we must seek the real origin of the tradition concerning a ‘forgiveness’ and a period of one year’s exile, in the life of Theseus. We have already300 pointed out how closely these two ideas may be correlated. We suggest that the real legends of Theseus presented some such facts as the following:
1. Theseus slew Pallas and his sons, was acquitted by the Delphinium court,301 and was purged at Athens.
2. Phaedra, not Theseus, caused the death of Hippolytus.302
3. Theseus slew a kinsman,303 named Sciron, in Attica, but Sciron, before dying, forgave his slayer. Theseus therefore went into exile for one year—not to Troizen—but to the Isthmus where he instituted a sacred festival. He could not have gone into exile to Troizen, for this realm belonged to him (since he was the grandson of Pittheus304), and in Euripides he claims the right to banish Hippolytus from Troizen.305 He was certainly a citizen of Troizen since in legend he was born there.
We must suppose, therefore, according to this hypothesis, either that Euripides selected different elements from these legends and joined them together, or that they had been confused in some one legend before his time. In this fusion the forgiveness was shifted from Sciron to Hippolytus. Theseus was conceived as the cause of Hippolytus’ death; Sciron was ignored and the slaying of Pallas was regarded as extenuated but not as justifiable homicide.
The ‘Ion’
The most important incident in the Ion is the attempted murder (βούλευσις) of Ion, the eponymous ancestor of the Ionians, by his mother Creusa, who does not know that he is her son. Thus we meet once more a homicide problem forming the basis of a drama, and a solution of that problem which requires for its intelligibility the application of homicide-law. Euripides is deliberately pandering to Athenian national pride when he represents Ion, by repute the son of Xuthus, as really the son of Apollo and Creusa.306 In the temple of Delphi he is reared as a minister of the god. Creusa has almost forgotten the issue of her ancient amour, and by a tragic irony comes with Xuthus to Delphi, to consult Apollo as to the causes of her childlessness. Apollo informs Xuthus that he will give him a son and heir, and Xuthus is led to believe that his newly found ‘son,’ Ion, is the offspring of some intrigue of his youth. When Creusa hears about this ‘stranger,’ she regards him with hostile feelings, and decides to kill him by poison. In this design, however, she does not succeed. Have we here, then, a ‘plot to kill’ or attempted murder? The legal essence of the former, we have seen,307 is the realisation of the plot. Therefore, the guilt of Creusa is that of attempted murder or βούλευσις. No one except Apollo is supposed to be aware until the end of the play of the real relationship which exists between Ion and Creusa. Hence, we have here a suggestion of an act which, like that of Oedipus, is objectively related to kin-slaying, but which, subjectively, must be regarded as ordinary ‘attempted murder.’ We have seen308 that in early Greece attempts to kill and actual slayings were accorded equal punishment. But we find in the Ion that Creusa is not punished at all! The explanation of this problem is the main object of our present inquiry.
When the attempted murder of a minister of Apollo is discovered and reported, the whole civic machinery of the Delphian State is put in motion.309 A court is held at which Ion is the accuser. He charges his mother with attempted murder, but there is a subtle suggestion of the additional guilt of attempted sacrilege. This court of Delphian nobles condemns Creusa to death. Creusa’s servant says310:
Delphi’s rulers have decreed
My queen shall be thrown headlong from the rock,
Nor hath one single voice, but the consent
Of all, adjudged her death, because she strove
E’en in the temple to have slain the priest.
Pursued by the whole city, hither bend
Her inauspicious steps. She through a wish
For children to Apollo came: but now
She perishes with all her hoped-for race.
The Chorus recommend Creusa to take refuge in a sanctuary.311 She answers that sanctuary is valueless as a refuge against the sentence of death. The Chorus comfort her with the assurance that while she remains in the sanctuary she cannot be slain.312 But Ion, who by a tragic irony leads the executioners, leaves no doubt that her refuge will not avail her. He says313:
Behold
The sorceress, what a complicated scene
Of treachery hath she framed, yet trembles not
The altar of Apollo to approach.
As if Heaven’s vengeance could not reach her crimes.
But neither shall this altar nor the temple
Of Phoebus save thy life.
Creusa in the ensuing dialogue advances a plea of justification. She argues that if Ion came to Athens, sooner or later he would have slain her through dynastic rivalry:
I sought
To take away the life of you, a foe
To me and to my house....314
Lest I should perish if your life was spared.315
But this was also the plea of Eurystheus when he sought the lives of the Heracleidae. In Greek law the plea has no validity. Ion commands his mother to leave the altar,316 saying
Shalt thou ’scape unpunished
For thy attempt to slay me?317
At this critical moment the Pythian priestess intervenes, and requests Ion to desist. She holds that the attempt of Creusa was mitigated by ‘passion’—and that therefore she did not deserve to die. She says318:
Wives with inveterate hatred ever view
Their husbands’ sons sprung from another bed.
Thus does Apollo override the verdict of his priests! But he goes farther. Creusa, according to the oracular interpretation of her act, was guilty of an ‘extenuated’ attempt to kill, and should therefore in strict law319 have been punished by a penalty of temporary exile. Yet she is permitted to return forthwith to Athens, her native country! In the following verses Ion is urged to ‘forgive’:
Banish from thy soul
This rancour, now the temple thou art leaving,
And on thy journey to thy native land.320
But we have not yet rendered the dénouement legally intelligible. We think that it can only be explained by one hypothesis, namely, by assuming that Apollo takes upon himself the responsibility for Creusa’s act. It was he who, by concealing the true facts, had provoked Creusa to attempted murder. It was he, therefore, who must take the blame. We have seen that there is no doubt that otherwise Creusa would have suffered death. That penalty is an archaic one, being based, as we think, on the notion of the absence of discrimination in early Greece between degrees of homicide-guilt. In the more subtle analysis of Apollo we may see perhaps a suggestion of Euripides as to the evolution of such distinctions, which characterised the historical period. But it is possible that such distinctions existed in Pelasgian groups, though not in Achaean or quasi-Achaean societies. If there is anything legally improbable in this legend, it is obscured by the dramatic interest which attaches to the recognition scene between the mother and the son. Moreover Euripides and therefore the legend which he follows were compelled to indicate the important fact that Creusa did return with Ion to Athens, and that the glorious mother of the Ionian race had not been stained by the guilt of kindred bloodshed.
The ‘Andromache’
In the Andromache there are two events of a homicidal character which we must discuss: (1) the attempted murder of Andromache, who was then a war-captive in the home of Neoptolemus, and that of her son, by Hermione, the wife of Neoptolemus, and by her father Menelaus: (2) the slaying of Neoptolemus, at Delphi, by the Apolline priests and magistrates on a false charge of sacrilege which was urged against him by Orestes. The first event is clearly a case of attempted murder, because the plot failed to materialise owing to the arrival of Peleus. The second event is more difficult to define. Objectively, it points to the execution of a normal penalty for an alleged sacrilegious attempt to despoil the temple and for a previous actual spoliation: but, subjectively, Orestes was guilty of contriving the death of Neoptolemus, and he advances, in private, a sham plea of justification, when he says that he regards Neoptolemus, who had married Hermione, his own fiancée, as a virtual adulterer.321 From the words which are addressed by Thetis to Peleus at the end of the play,322 we may infer that the plot of Orestes was viewed with disapproval by the gods. But, legally, he must escape punishment because the actual slayers could plead sufficient justification, and his private motives were not publicly proclaimed. Let us give some details of both episodes. Hermione, when her attempt to kill is discovered and frustrated, meditates suicide, because, we are told, she fears that her husband will slay her or send her into exile. Thus, a nurse in Hermione’s service says323:
Within these doors
Hermione, my mistress, by her sire
Forsaken, and grown conscious of the guilt
She hath incurred by that attempt to murder
Andromache and her unhappy son,
Resolves to die, because she dreads lest, fired
With indignation at her guilt, her lord
Should cast her forth with scorn, or take away
Her life because she purposed to have slain
The innocent. The servants who attend
Can hardly by their vigilance prevent her
From fixing round her neck the deadly noose
Or snatch the dagger from her hand, so great
Is her affliction, and she now confesses
That she has done amiss.
In this passage death appears as the archaic penalty for attempted murder. If Neoptolemus, the husband of Hermione, permits an option of exile, it is perhaps because such an option was permitted for actual murder in historical times, and the penalties were supposed to have been identical, in cases of attempted and of actual murder, in prehistoric days. It is also possible to explain the option by reference to the fact that Andromache was a captive and that therefore her master had the right to forgo the full penalty. We have seen324 that the Achaeans did not discriminate between voluntary and involuntary homicide, and we may regard the reference to this penalty here as a case of historical archaising, which attributed to the Achaean Neoptolemus an ignorance of the distinction between attempted murder and actual murder. But we may also suppose that there was a legend which originally contained all these details and retained them as an unadulterated tradition down the ages. In historical times attempted slaying could not have been punished by a more severe penalty than that of exile, the duration of which depended perhaps on some form of ‘appeasement.’ That such was the historical penalty may be inferred from the fact that the Palladium court tried such cases in the time of Aristotle and, we think, from Solon’s time onwards.325 When the ‘attempt’ (βούλευσις) resulted in actual wounding or in physical injury, as in cases of attempted poisoning, the case was probably326 tried by the Areopagus, and the sentence was perpetual exile without confiscation of property.327 In this play, however, as in the Ion, the attempted murder of Andromache was unpunished; Neoptolemus, the natural punitive agent, did not live to hear of the attempt. Andromache herself warned Menelaus that the people of the district would put him and Hermione on trial and punish them. She says328:
O Menelaus, be it now supposed
I by thy daughter am already slain.
’Twill be impossible for her to ’scape
From the pollution ruthless murder brings;
Thou, too, by many tongues wilt be accused329
Of this vile deed, with her will they confound
Thee, the abettor.
Do we not seem to have here a legend which evolved? First of all we have private vengeance. Everything depends on Neoptolemus. Then pollution enters the story and the people have a religious interest in homicide. Yet the main fact could not be got rid of, namely that Hermione escaped punishment. If Euripides is archaising, could he not have been consistent? Or is he thinking of that vaguely defined post-Homeric age in which the conception of murder as a pollution existed, but in which homicide is still, as amongst the Hebrews, a matter for the avenger of blood? But why, then, does he mention the people? Is he thinking of the pressure of public opinion, such as was already gathering in Achaean times? Andromache seems to take a different view from that of Hermione. The issue of the plot confirms Hermione’s outlook, which is Achaean. Is it not more natural to suppose that an Achaean story became partially ‘Apollinised’ in later times than to suppose that Euripides gives us two different archaisms side by side?
Andromache’s attack on Spartan homicide becomes intelligible if we remember the anti-Spartan sentiments of the democrat Euripides. ‘Is not murder abundant at Sparta?’ asks Andromache.330 When, we ask, was it abundant? Is this statement merely a retort to Hermione’s assertion that murder was common in barbarian Troy?331 Or is Euripides deliberately asserting that Sparta was inferior even to barbarians? According to the latter hypothesis we must assume that he is speaking of historical Sparta, and his opinions are to be attributed to anti-Spartan prejudice.332
In the second homicide episode of this drama, Neoptolemus is slain at Delphi. Orestes who plots and in part executes his death escapes all punishment, for reasons which we have already indicated. The Delphians who are prepared, in the Ion, to condemn to death a person guilty of attempted murder, are here themselves engaged in slaying a visitor to their temple. But Neoptolemus was an enemy. He has already despoiled the temple. His life is therefore forfeit. To slay him was, like the projected execution of Creusa, a just revenge. Yet Fate has dealt harshly with Neoptolemus. He now visits the temple not to despoil it, as Orestes falsely alleges, but to make atonement for a previous offence which he had committed against Apollo.333 Despite the false evidence of Orestes, Apollo, the prophet who knows all things, should have intervened. Thus the messenger utters a criticism which suggests the sentiments of Euripides and of fifth-century Athens334:
Thus Phoebus,
Who prophesies to others, mighty King,
And deals out justice to the admiring world,
Hath on Achilles’ son revenged himself,
And like some worthless human foe, revived
An ancient grudge: how then can he be wise?
Thetis declares that the death of Neoptolemus is a disgrace to the Delphians and, is for Orestes, a murderous crime.335 Though slain on grounds of sacrilege, Neoptolemus is buried near the shrine of Phoebus!336 The existence of such a tomb at Delphi would naturally have begotten the story of his death there: the fact that Hermione was, in one legend, the wife of Orestes, in another the wife of Neoptolemus, and the close connexion of Orestes with Delphi in post-Homeric story, may explain his association with the death of Neoptolemus. But the murderous plot which is here attributed to Orestes we believe to be Euripidean. It has no proper sequel: it does not harmonise with anything antecedent or subsequent: it is just a novel, thrilling episode introduced by Euripides to give an artistic interest to an otherwise dull and lifeless drama.
The ‘Hecuba’
A deed of blood and its avenging forms the subject of the Hecuba. The scene is laid at Troy and the atmosphere is predominantly Homeric. Polymestor, King of Thrace, having consented to act as the guardian and protector of Polydorus, the son of Priam, King of Troy, murdered his ward and cast his body unburied on the sea-shore. The mode of vengeance which is put in force against Polymestor is peculiarly archaic. The avengers are exclusively women, and are led by Hecuba, the mother of Polydorus. The punishment which is exacted is not the death or the exile of Polymestor, but the death of his two sons, and the destruction of his eyes. Here we have an instance of physical torture such as was prohibited by a law of Dracon337 in the case of a convicted murderer caught en rupture de ban. We have also an instance of hereditary punishment which Greek law had abolished for homicide in the seventh century, and had retained for treason alone in the historical era,338 in the form of a civic degradation of the traitor’s posterity. Polymestor has no consciousness of guilt after the slaying of Polydorus, as he regards his act as justified in political self-defence, and therefore he proceeds to avenge himself on Hecuba and the Trojan women whom he now regards as the murderers of his children. At this stage Agamemnon is requested by Hecuba to act as an arbitrator.339 In his presence Polymestor says340:
But hear my motives for the deed, to prove
How justly and how prudently I acted:
Your enemy, that boy, if he survived
The ruin of his country, might, I feared,
Collect the scattered citizens of Troy,
And there again reside. I also feared
That when the Greeks knew one of Priam’s line
Was living, with a second fleet invading
The shores of Phrygia, they again might drain
Of their inhabitants the Thracian fields,
Involving us, their neighbours, in the vengeance
They on their foes at Ilion wreak. To us
Already hath such neighbourhood, O King,
Proved baneful.
The Chorus, however, imply that Polymestor has been justly punished341:
Hapless man,
How art thou visited by woes too grievous
To be endured: but by dread Jove, thy foe,
On him whose deeds are base, it is ordained
That the severest punishments await.
This passage suggests that the poet is reproducing an archaic atmosphere. Now the Achaeans, we have seen,342 ordinarily held no trials for homicide. The pleadings before Agamemnon, which we find here, do not, strictly speaking, constitute such a trial. We have seen343 that the Achaeans recognised a distinction between murder and just revenge. Athene upholds that distinction in the Odyssey. Agamemnon upholds that distinction here. He decides in favour of Hecuba, saying to Polymestor344:
Know, then, to me thou seem’st not to have slain
Thy guest through an attachment to my cause,
Nor yet to that of Greece, but that his gold
Thou might’st retain: though in this wretched state
Thou speak to serve thy interests. Among you
Perhaps the murder of your guests seems light;
We Greeks esteem it base. If I acquit thee,
How shall I ’scape reproach? Indeed, I cannot:
Since thou hast dared to perpetrate the crime,
Endure the consequence.
The acceptance by Polymestor of Agamemnon’s decision suggests to us the potency of Achaean military discipline in matters of homicide. Was this acceptance indicated in an ancient legend, which was preserved in Thrace, and which was transmitted without adulteration, or is Euripides correctly archaising from his general knowledge of Achaean procedure as revealed by Homer? The former alternative seems to us the more probable in view of the consistently archaic atmosphere of this play. There is no reference to homicide as a ‘pollution,’ to purgation, to Apollo, to State trial. A certain degree of divine anger against Polymestor is indicated, but this was caused by the violation of hospitality and by the act of deprivation of burial, both of which acts are religious offences in Homer. Hecuba says to the Chorus345:
O, ’twas a deed
Unutterable, a deed without a name,
Surpassing all astonishment, unholy,
And not to be endured. Where now the laws
Of hospitality? Accurséd man,
How cruelly hast thou with reeking sword
Transpierced this unresisting boy, nor heard
The gentle voice of pity!
Again she says to Agamemnon346:
Avenge
My wrongs upon the man who ’gainst his guest
Such treachery could commit, who, nor the gods
Of Erebus beneath, nor those who rule
In Heaven above regarding, this vile deed
Did perpetrate, e’en he with whom I oft
Partook the feast, on whom I showered each bounty,
Esteeming him the first of all my friends:
Yet, when at Ilion’s palace with respect
He had been treated, a deliberate scheme
Of murder forming, he destroyed my son,
On whom he deigned not to bestow a tomb,
But threw his corse into the briny deep.
In the scepticism of Talthybius regarding the existence of the gods, we have an anachronism which is strictly applicable only to the rationalists of fifth-century Athens. The comparative indifference of the Achaeans to religion left the road open for this anachronism on the part of Euripides.
When the son of Achilles is sacrificing Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles, he says to the spirit of Achilles347:
Son of Peleus,
My father, the propitiatory drops
Of these libations which invite the dead
Accept. O come and quaff the crimson blood
Of this pure virgin whom to thee all Greece
And I devote.
For this placation of the dead by human sacrifice we have perhaps a precedent in the sacrifice by Achilles of twelve Trojan youths to the shade of Patroclus. But the suggestion that the dead man came to the tomb to drink the blood offering indicates a fusion of Pelasgian and Achaean beliefs such as Ridgeway assumes to have taken place before the time of Aeschylus.348 Already in the Odyssey, however, there is evidence of the tendency to a fusion of ritual and beliefs, which reached maturity before the historical period.348 Such words as Euripides here attributes to Achilles could never have been spoken by the Homeric Achilles. For the Achaeans, the dead, once they were buried, could never leave Hades, and they did not, like Pelasgian ghosts, drink blood offerings at the tomb. This, then, is an anachronism, which was perhaps derived from a misinterpretation by Euripides of the Nekuia in the Odyssey. Hecuba naturally objects to the sacrifice of her daughter,349 but incidentally she objects to human sacrifice in general, save in the case of a real enemy. Polyxena, she argues, was not an enemy to Achilles. His ghost therefore could not be placated by her sacrifice. This attitude of Hecuba suggests that a post-Homeric Thracian legend contained a reference to a barbarous blood-thirst on the part of the dead, which we have attributed to the Hesiodic age of chaos. Euripides elsewhere attributes the sacrifice of Polyxena to the expressed desire of the ghost of Achilles!350 We cannot be certain whether a post-Homeric legend embodied these conceptions, or whether Euripides invented them in his desire to add to the horrors of the story another grim idea.
The ‘Bacchae’
On the first introduction, into Thebes, of the worship of Bacchus, or of what may be termed the orgiastic cult of Dionysus, Pentheus, the reigning King, opposed the new religion, declared Bacchus an impostor,351 and threatened him with death.352 Hence the chorus of Bacchanals, inspired with prophetic foresight, approve in advance the death of Pentheus whom they regard as an enemy or a traitor.353 By a tragic irony, Agave, the mother of Pentheus, who has joined the Bacchic worshippers and is mesmerised by Bacchic influence, is the actual perpetrator of the death of Pentheus. She is deluded by Bacchic frenzy into believing that she is slaying a lion, and returns to Thebes carrying what she believes to be a lion’s head. She says354:
Ye that within the high-towered Theban city
Dwell, come and gaze ye all upon our prey,
The mighty beast by Cadmus’ daughter ta’en;
Nor with Thessalian sharp-pointed javelins,
Nor nets, but with the white and delicate palms
Of our own hands. Go ye and make your boast,
Trusting to the spear-maker’s useless craft:
We with these hands have ta’en our prey, and rent
The mangled limbs of this grim beast asunder.
Where is mine aged sire? Let him draw near!
And where is my son Pentheus? Let him mount
On the broad stairs that rise before our house;
And on the triglyph nail this lion’s head
That I have brought him from our splendid chase.
Her position, then, differs from that of Ajax,355 in that the deed really takes place and that she did not intend it. The act is, we shall find, analogous to, but less culpable than, that of Oedipus when he slew his father.
Cadmus, father of Agave, refers the ultimate guilt to Bacchus356:
Justly—too justly hath King Bromius
Destroyed us, fatal kindred to our house.
Agave adopts a similar attitude when she realises the nature of the deed which she has wrought.357 But she cannot escape all punishment. At the end of the play Dionysus propounds an oracle of Zeus which declares358 that Cadmus shall become a dragon, and his wife Harmonia shall become a serpent, but that they will nevertheless conquer many barbarian cities and will be borne ultimately to the land of the blessed gods. Yet they must leave Thebes now because of their impious attitude to Dionysus! Is this decree an instance of ‘collective’ punishment? Is it necessary that the entire family of Cadmus should suffer for the impiety of Pentheus which he has already atoned for by an ignominious death? It may be an explanation of this obscure punishment to say that it is collective. But what shall we say of Agave? She also has to leave Thebes. Is her exile to be regarded as a penalty for ‘impiety’ in regard to Dionysus? Surely she has already been sufficiently pious and to her cost! She was actually one of the Bacchic worshippers, in the play. Moreover, in going into exile she bids farewell to her father!359 They are all sent into exile together, yet she cannot go with her father.360 Surely, if impiety were the offence, and the penalty were collective exile, all the offenders could have gone in conjunction. Why is Agave exiled, then, if she is condemned to separate exile? We suggest that this penalty is inflicted because of kin-slaying in religious frenzy, that is to say, in legal language, ‘in a passion.’ Plato assures us361 that kin-slaying extenuated by passion prohibited the slayer from any further intercourse with her family. ‘If a father or mother in a passion kill their son or daughter by blows or in any other violent manner... let them remain in exile for three years and on returning let the husband be divorced from the wife and the wife from the husband, and let them never afterwards beget children together nor dwell in fellowship with those whom they have deprived of child or brother, or have a share in their sacred rites.’ But Agave goes into exile with her sisters Autonoe and Ino, who had shared in the death of Pentheus. They too are separated from Cadmus. The reason is perhaps that Cadmus symbolises the domestic religion of their home. From him, as from their home, they must be exiled for ever.
The ‘Alcestis’
Neither the Alcestis nor the other two plays of Euripides which remain for discussion are of very much importance from the point of view of homicide-law. In the prologue362 Apollo tells how he slew the Cyclops who forged the thunder-bolt by which Zeus slew Aesculapius, Apollo’s son, and how in consequence he went into bondage with Admetus of Pherae for a period of one year. Thus Zeus plots the death of his grandson and punishes his son for avenging it! The reason is that Zeus regards the death of Aesculapius as justified, and therefore, as Apollo’s vengeance is unjust, he must be punished. The penalty of bondage which is here referred to may be the Pelasgian servitude which we have discussed in an early part of this work,363 or it may be a form of that same penalty which was retained under the pollution-system, in pre-Draconian days when it was indispensably connected with exile. There is here, however, no reference to pollution or to purgation. Apollo was purified for slaying the Python364 but not for the slaying of the Cyclops! We cannot apply to the Olympian Apollo the laws which were made for mortal men. Apollo, unlike Hercules, could not be conceived as a man. It was from Olympus, the abode of the Olympian gods, that he was banished. The obvious motive for the legend is the association of Apollo with Admetus. Some reason had to be assigned for this ‘exile’ of Apollo. We may suppose that a deed of homicide was invented to explain this ‘exile,’ but that its details were not worked out. The only real importance of such a legend is that it affords a certain amount of evidence for the existence of servitude as a homicide-penalty in early Greece.
Admetus is permitted by the Fates to live if he can find a substitute. His wife Alcestis voluntarily dies in his stead. Was her death attributable to Admetus? Was he her murderer? His father, Pheres, seems to think so!365
I go: thou shalt entomb her, as thyself
Her murderer. Look for vengeance from her friends.
Acastus is no man if his hands fail
Dearly t’avenge on thee his sister’s blood.
As Hercules, in this play, raises to life the dead Alcestis, we are freed from the necessity of discussing the legal aspects of such a problem. The whole plot of this play belongs to the supernatural rather than to the natural order. The murder laws of Greece made no provision for such contingencies.
The ‘Troades’
In the Troades Cassandra foresees the murder of Agamemnon and the vengeance of Orestes, and connects these tragic misfortunes with the woes which were brought by the Atreidae upon the house of Priam. Aeschylus has a suggestion of this sentiment in the Agamemnon.366 To represent Clytaemnestra and Orestes as mere instruments in the hands of Destiny may be religiously orthodox to a superstitious people, especially in the Dark Ages of prehistoric Greece, but it has no legal validity. Such sentiments are really antagonistic to legal sanctions. Applied to Achaeans, they are, we think, anachronistic. Murder is distinct from war, and murder is not conceived as begetting murder, in the course of Destiny, until post-Homeric times. In the decision of the Greeks to slay Astyanax, the son of Andromache, as a reprisal for the adultery of Paris,367 we see an instance of hyper-vengeance, which is characteristic of hostile belligerents. We cannot infer that amongst the Achaeans the punishment for adultery was more severe than amongst the Pelasgians.368 Astyanax was not an adulterer! His punishment was a reprisal, and has therefore no legal significance. Talthybius refers to a strange proposal on the part of the Greeks, namely a proposal to set up a spear in the tomb of Astyanax.369 Now this spear is a symbol of future vengeance. It is strange that such a symbol should have been set up by the party who deserve and anticipate punishment. Moreover, we have seen370 that this custom was probably post-Homeric. The Achaeans did not credit their dead spirits, after burial, with any local habitation in the tomb or with any effective desire for vengeance. Here, the suggestion is clearly intended by Talthybius, and possibly by Euripides, to bring some slight comfort to Hecuba, the bereaved mother. We have referred to a passage in Demosthenes,371 in which a plaintiff, who was debarred from a prosecution for bloodshed, because of his not having been akin in blood to the deceased, was advised by the Exegetae to carry a spear at the funeral. It was therefore rather a cruel piece of irony for Euripides to suggest that by the setting up of this symbol—which had come, in historical times, to indicate the absence of avengers—the Greeks intended to express at once to Hecuba the hope of retaliation and to themselves the hope of immunity from vengeance.
The ‘Helen’
The scene of the Helen is laid in Egypt. We are told that the ubiquitous Helen escapes with Menelaus from Egypt, having deceived by a stratagem her amorous protector, Theoclymenus. She was aided in her plans by Theonoe, the sister of Theoclymenus, and he, therefore, in the anger of disappointed passion, proceeded to slay his sister. The Dioscuri intervened in time to prevent the realisation of his purpose, and all ends happily! Technically, Theoclymenus is guilty of attempted kin-slaying, but the poet leads us to suppose that an ungovernable fit of passion would, in such a case, be regarded as a complete extenuation. We may infer from the words of the Chorus that the slaying of one’s kindred was regarded with horror by races which were outside Greece. The Chorus will not permit the death of Theonoe, even though they intervene at their peril. They say to Theoclymenus372:
Kill me. Your sister you with my consent
Shall never slay: I rather would yield up
My life on her behalf. It is most glorious
To generous servants for their lords to die.
Euripides also makes the barbarian Thoas, King of the Tauric Chersonese, gasp with horror when Iphigeneia, the priestess of Artemis, informs him of the arrival of the matricide Orestes. When Iphigeneia says373:
They came polluted with domestic blood, he answers374:
O Phoebus! This hath no barbarian dared.
Euripides, then, did not believe that the conception of kin-slaying as a horrible and revolting act was an exclusively Grecian sentiment. When therefore in the Andromache he makes Hermione say375:
Such is the whole abhorred barbarian race:
The father with his daughter, the vile son
With his own mother, with her brother too
The sister sins; friends by their dearest friends
Are murdered: deeds like these no wholesome law
Prohibits: introduce not among us
Such crimes....
we may attribute such an assertion to a mind inflamed with the jealousy which a wife feels towards a concubine rather than suppose Euripides not to have known that the horror of kin-slaying is an aboriginal universal sentiment of the human race when once it has abandoned the cave of the cannibal.
We have now concluded our inquiry into the problem of blood-vengeance in Attic tragedy. Nothing has been revealed by this inquiry which is in conflict with the hypotheses which we have sought to establish in this work, as to the various systems of blood-vengeance which existed in Greece, from Pelasgian times to the age of the orators. While Attic tragedy does not in itself contribute anything to our knowledge of these various systems, there can be little doubt that an attempt, however imperfect, to investigate the origin and nature of these systems is indispensable for a proper appreciation of these dramatic masterpieces. If our analysis of blood-vengeance in the works of the three great Attic tragedians has not, in many cases, succeeded in establishing definite clear-cut conclusions, this, we hope, will be attributed to the intrinsic difficulty and obscurity of the subject. We can never be quite certain whether any particular drama gives us (a) an antique unadulterated legend; or (b) an antique legend which in course of evolution has taken on new forms without any regard to the consistency or the historicity of the tradition; or (c) whether the drama is based upon a late invention which owing to skilful archaising takes on the garb and appearance of an antique story, betraying perhaps, here and there, by its anachronisms, the mind and atmosphere of its creator. It so happens that the attitude to homicide or to religion which the Achaeans reveal was also taken up by many individual Athenians of the Periclean age. Thus the indifference to the gods which Sophocles attributes to Ajax was common to Achaeans and to many Periclean Athenians. So the conception of homicide as a matter for ‘private settlement’ which is found in Demosthenes, and the survival, in outlying places, such as Macedonia, of family vendettas, fierce and lawless, would have suggested to the mind of the dramatist that there was no very wide gulf between the primitive and the historical Greeks. Such a fact almost invites anachronisms. Nevertheless, we frequently find in dramatic legends an atmosphere so antique, so unlike that of fifth-century Athens, that we may assume, as the most probable hypothesis, that these legends are not inventions, but have behind them a long and, often, a chequered past.
Footnotes
1 Hist. Gk. Lit. p. 224.
2 Ib. p. 225.
3 Ib. 228.
4 P. 229.
5 See Euripides the Rationalist (passim) and Introduction to Aeschylus, Choephoroe, p. xxxvii ff.
6 Eur. Orestes, 1370.
7 A.P. 119.
8 See A.P. 131-5.
9 See Themis, 341 ff.
10 A.P. 129.
11 Poetics, 25.
12 See Wedd, Introd. to Orestes, p. xvii ff.
13 15 ff.
14 Od. iii. 307.
15 Electra, 1254 ff.; Orestes, 1648 ff.
16 29-30.
17 1093-6.
18 See supra, p. 308.
19 Supra, p. 58 ff.
20 500 ff.; infra, p. 348.
21 Supra, Book I.
22 Infra, p. 348 ff.
23 957-8.
24 895 ff.
25 Od. iii. 310.
26 1277.
27 Cf. Soph. Electra, 1483.
28 Supra, p. 236 ff.
29 1230.
30 1250.
31 840 ff.
32 1244 ff.
33 Supra, p. 282.
34 1266 ff.
35 Supra, p. 294. Such a conception is rendered possible by the command of Apollo, which gives an extra-legal complexion to the case. In strict law such a plea was probably inadmissible (Plato, Laws, ix. ch. 9).
36 1644 ff.
37 Laws, ix. ch. 8.
38 v. 67.
39 Supra, p. 145 ff.
40 See infra, p. 368.
41 445 ff.
42 See 1664-5.
43 Schol. ad Eur. Orest. 1640.
44 Electra, 1254-75; Orestes, 1643 ff.
45 46-50.
46 75-6.
47 1292-7.
48 Laws, ix. ch. 9.
49 See 268 ff., 390 ff., 545 ff., 776, 1229.
50 414-416.
51 591-9.
52 492-506.
53 507-517.
54 Supra, p. 76.
55 Supra, pp. 122, 132.
56 Eum. 685.
57 See supra, p. 308.
58 256-7.
59 884 ff.
60 Plato, Apologia Socratis, 36-42.
61 Supra, p. 258 ff.
62 Ajax, 749 ff.
63 Eur. Troades, 900.
64 Eur. Hecuba, 119 ff.
65 Troades, 715, 780.
66 viii. 117.
67 892-3.
68 Eum. 212, 608.
69 Works and Days, 180 ff.
70 898 ff.
71 See supra, p. 225 ff.
72 Supra, pp. 9, 47.
73 903-6. ὡσεὶ ἔλεγε νόθος πολίτης (Schol.)
74 Cleophon was of Thracian descent. (Schol. ad v. 772.)
75 915.
76 914-15.
77 944-6.
78 Laws, ix. ch. 12; supra, p. 231.
79 917 ff.
80 Supra, p. 74.
81 Supra, p. 59.
82 923-30.
83 932-42.
84 Supra, pp. 58 ff.; 217.
85 ix. 36.
86 941.
87 1300. Her miraculous translation to ‘heaven’ is not inconsistent with, but rather, we think, confirms our opinion that she was slain.
88 See, e.g., Herodotus ii. 113 ff.; Eur. Helen, 1640 ff.; Troades, 875 ff.
89 1140.
90 1625.
91 1645.
92 Laws, ix. chs. 8, 9.
93 See supra, p. 256. The command of Apollo was an extra-legal extenuation of Orestes’ act. This act therefore merited, though it did not actually receive, the ‘forgiveness’ of Clytaemnestra.
94 1648 ff.
95 Laws, ix. ch. 9.
96 1650.
97 In Aristoc. 641, 27.
98 Infra, p. 370 ff.
99 Supra, p. 124.
100 Schol. ad Eur. Orest. 1640.
101 Supra, p. 163.
102 See Plato, Laws, ix. ch. 8.
103 1643-1652.
104 1660-5.
105 765.
106 Supra, p. 223 f.
107 765.
108 Supra, p. 196.
109 1249 and 1285.
110 771.
111 Supra, p. 163.
112 In Aristoc. 635; see also Plato, Laws, ix. ch. 8.
113 1074.
114 1591 ff.
115 Supra, p. 103.
116 Infra, p. 375 ff.
117 See Introduction to Orestes, p. xxvi ff.
118 Supra, p. 332 f.
119 Supra, pp. 309, 345, 348.
120 1625 ff.
121 Supra, p. 344.
122 285 ff.
123 Supra, pp. 123 ff.; 298 ff.
124 Eum. 338-41.
125 Orestes, 255-7.
126 Orestes, 260-1.
127 Ib. 580-84.
128 Iph. Taur. 285-291.
129 Glotz, op. cit. p. 45.
130 Iph. in T. 1580 ff.
131 Iph. Aul. 1615-20.
132 Supra, p. 336.
133 Agamemnon, 194 ff.
134 See England, Introd. to Iph. in T. p. xii.
135 iv. 103.
136 See England, op. cit. p. xviii.
137 Op. cit. p. xxi.
138 1020 ff.
139 1190 ff.
140 940 ff.
141 Supra, pp. 337, 349.
142 Supra, p. 360.
143 Supra, pp. 193, 213.
144 940-946.
145 961-972.
146 976-982.
147 See Callimachus, Hymn to Artemis, 173 ff.; England, op. cit. p. xiii.
148 Supra, p. 117 ff.
149 Supra, p. 148.
150 Eur. Medea, 1380 ff.
151 1223-5.
152 Eur. Androm. 173-6.
153 Infra, p. 421.
154 947-960.
155 x. 49.
156 s.v. χόες.
157 Ancient City (trans.), p. 78 ff.
158 Supra, p. 87.
159 Supra, pp. 175, 347.
160 Proleg. p. 41.
161 955.
162 Loc. cit.
163 Supra, p. 367.
164 Phoen. 1585 ff.
165 Supra, p. 323.
166 Ant. 1012-1017.
167 Ant. 1035-62.
168 Ib. 1080 ff.
169 Eur. Supp. 113 ff.
170 Ib. 940 ff.
171 16-19 (trans. A. S. Way); cf. 310 ff.
172 524-7; cf. 560 ff.
173 669-72.
174 Eur. Supp. 1207; cf. Pausanias, ix. 18.
175 Phoenissae, 774-7 (trans. Woodhull); cf. 1646.
176 Ib. 1447-50.
177 See 360 ff. and 465 ff.
178 Supra, pp. 216, 323.
179 Supra, pp. 311, 317.
180 Od. xi. 271 ff.; supra, p. 55.
181 Homer and History, p. 52.
182 Supra, p. 21.
183 See supra, p. 143.
184 Supra, pp. 193, 213.
185 O.C. 1255-1345; ib. 1341.
186 Phoenissae, 1585-94.
187 O.C. 87 ff.
188 Phoen. 1703-5.
189 Phoen. 59-68.
190 Supra, p. 376.
191 Supra, pp. 195, 258.
192 Phoen. 1705 ff.
193 Pausanias, i. 28.
194 i. 28.
195 Phoen. 64.
196 Ib. 1593.
197 Od. xi.
198 Il. ii. 660 ff.
199 Dorians, i. 411 ff.
200 v. 67.
201 977 ff.
202 840-75.
203 1146-52.
204 1253-80; 1310-1364.
205 1229 ff.
206 462, 1285.
207 Supra, p. 163.
208 Il. xix. 98-9.
209 H.F. 1285.
210 Supra, p. 234 ff.
211 1281-90.
212 Soph. O.C. 490-660; supra, p. 317.
213 1311-12 (attributed to Theseus by the MSS.).
214 1322-5.
215 Note ad loc.
216 Laws, ix. ch. 8; supra, p. 163.
217 See 1422.
218 1333.
219 15 ff.
220 Supra, p. 163.
221 ix. 41.
222 Eur. H.F. 19.
223 Ib. 13.
224 H.F. 567, 754.
225 Supra, p. 327.
226 Supra, pp. 20, 283.
227 732.
228 755-6.
229 i. 32.
230 i.e. when he died.
231 50 ff.
232 Pausanias, i. 29.
233 997 ff.
234 238 ff.
235 i. 28.
236 Supra, p. 251.
237 250-252.
238 δίκης κυρήσειν.
239 See supra, p. 164 ff.
240 Supra, p. 263.
241 Supra, p. 164 ff.
242 464-470.
243 Supra, p. 327.
244 1050.
245 1009 ff.
246 1022 ff.; 1045 ff.
247 961-980.
248 1010.
249 1050.
250 1028 ff.
251 1053.
252 1024.
253 Supra, p. 379.
254 Supra, p. 223.
255 βούλευσις, in the sense of a plot to kill which is not realised.
256 See introd. to Medea, p. xi ff.
257 1334.
258 485.
259 βούλευσις, when the plot was realised.
260 Supra, p. 223 f.
261 735.
262 Od. xi. 253 ff.
263 Pindar, Pyth. iv. 95 ff.
264 735.
265 Eur. Phoen. 410-425.
266 Supra, p. 116.
267 709 ff.
268 746-7 and 749-51.
269 See 796, 850, 1268, 1383.
270 Supra, p. 234 ff.
271 846 ff.
272 1321-2.
273 1378 ff.
274 1386 ff.
275 1389 ff.
276 Supra, p. 365.
277 Supra, p. 234.
278 1231 ff.
279 1279 ff.
280 34-7. I venture to modify Woodhull’s version of v. 37—ἐναυσίαν ἔκδημον αἰνέσας φυγήν,—as he renders ‘to voluntary exile submitting for one year.’
281 i. 28.
282 Supra, p. 245.
283 Laws, ix. ch. 9.
284 Supra, p. 214.
285 950 ff.
286 Supra, p. 240 ff.
287 800.
288 877 ff.
289 Homer, Il. vi. 160 ff.
290 887-898, omitting 891-892.
291 974, 1094.
292 1195 ff.
293 1282 ff.
294 Supra, pp. 58 ff.; 76.
295 Supra, p. 223.
296 i. 22.
297 i. 3.
298 Theseus, 10.
299 Paus. i. 22.
300 Supra, p. 178.
301 Paus. i. 28.
302 Ib. i. 22.
303 Plutarch, loc. cit.
304 Through his mother, Aethra.
305 Eur. Hipp. 974, 1094.
306 Müller, Dorians, i. 265 ff.
307 Supra, p. 224 f.
308 Supra, p. 326 f.
309 1106 ff.
310 1222 ff.
311 1254 ff.
312 1259.
313 1275 ff.
314 1291 ff.
315 1301.
316 1306.
317 1308.
318 1329.
319 From 750 B.C. onwards.
320 1330 ff.
321 1000 ff.
322 1231 ff.
323 802 ff.
324 Supra, p. 75.
325 Ath. Pol. ch. 57; supra, pp. 192, 251.
326 According to the usual interpretation of Aristotle, supra, pp. 225, 251.
327 Supra, p. 225.
328 333 ff.
329 Cf. 496.
330 450.
331 174 ff.
332 Supra, p. 173.
333 1106.
334 1161 ff.
335 1241-2.
336 1240.
337 Supra, p. 195.
338 Glotz, op. cit. p. 473 ff.
339 1232 ff.
340 1136-1144.
341 1085-6.
342 Supra, p. 83.
343 Supra, p. 76.
344 1243-51.
345 714-20.
346 789-97.
347 534-8.
348 Supra, p. 106.
349 260 ff.
350 40.
351 Bacchae, 240 ff.
352 356 ff.
353 995 ff.
354 1202-15.
355 See supra, p. 325 ff.
356 1250.
357 1296.
358 1330 ff.
359 1363, 1379.
360 1350.
361 Laws, ix. ch. 9.
362 5-7.
363 Supra, p. 44 ff.
364 Plutarch, Greek Questions, 12; Aelian, Var. Hist. iii.
365 730 ff.
366 E.g. 333 ff.
367 Troades, 705 ff.
368 Supra, p. 58 ff.
369 1150 ff.
370 Supra, p. 122.
371 Contra Euerg. et Mnesib. 1160, 15; supra, p. 182.
372 1639-41.
373 Iph. in T. 1171.
374 1174.
375 Androm. 173 ff.