{95}
THE right of the avenger of blood, so familiar to us from its prominency
in the Mosaic Law (see Numbers, chap. 35), is a moral phenomenon which
belongs to a savage or semi-civilized state of society in all times and
places; and appears everywhere with the most distinct outline in the
rich records of the early age of Greece, which we possess in the Homeric
poems. No doubt, the most glowing intensity, and the passionate
exaggeration of the feeling, from which this right springs, is found
only among the hot children of the Arabian desert;[f1] and in no
point of his various enactments were the wisdom and the humanity of
their great Jewish lawgiver more conspicuous than in the appointment of
sacerdotal cities of refuge, which set certain intelligible bounds of
space and time to the otherwise interminable prosecution of family
feuds, and the gratification of private revenge. But the great traits of
the system of private revenge for manslaughter, stand out clearly in the
Iliad and Odyssey; and the whole of the ancient heroic mythology of
Greece is full of adventures and strange chances that grew out of this
germ. Out of many, I shall mention only the following instance. In the
twenty-third book of the Iliad (v. 82), when the shade of Patroclus
appears at the head of his sorrowful, sleeping friend, after urging the
necessity of instant funeral, for the peace of his soul, he proceeds to
make a further request, as follows:--
"This request I make, this strict injunction I on thee would lay,
Not apart from thine Achilles, place thy dear Patroclus' bones;
But together as, like brothers, in your father's house we grew,
Then when me, yet young, Menœtius from the Locrian Opus guiding,
To the halls of Peleus brought because that I had slain a man,
Even thy son, Amphidamas, whom unwittingly of life I reft
In a brainish moment, foolishly, when we quarrelled o'er the dice;
Then the horseman, Peleus, kindly took me to his house, and kindly
Reared me with his son, and bade me be thy comrade to the end;
So my bones, when they are gathered, place where thine shall also be,
In the two-eared golden urn which gracious Thetis gave to thee."
In these verses, we see the common practice of the heroic ages in
Greece, with regard to manslaughter. No matter how slight the occasion
might be out of which the lethal quarrel arose; how {96} innocent soever
of all hostile intention the unhappy offender; the only safety to him
from the private revenge of the kinsman of the person unwittingly slain,
was to flee to a country that acknowledged some foreign chief, and find
both a friend and a country in a distant land. All this, too, in an era
of civilization, when courts of law and regular judges (as from various
passages of Homer is apparent) were not altogether unknown; but nature
is stronger than law, and passion slow to yield up its fiery right of
summary revenge, for the cold, calculating retribution of an impartial
judge.
The person on whom the duty of avenging shed blood, according to the
heroic code of morals, fell, was the nearest of kin to the person whose
blood had been shed; and accordingly we find (as stated more at large by
Gesenius and Michaelis[f2]) that in the Hebrew language, the same
word means both an avenger of blood and a kinsman, while in the cognate
Arabic the term for an avenger means also a _survivor_--that is, the
surviving kinsman. In the same way, when Clytemnestra, as we have just
seen in the previous drama, had treacherously murdered her husband
Agamemnon, the code of social morality then existing laid the duty of
avenging this most unnatural deed on the nearest relation of the
murdered chieftain, viz.--his son, Orestes; a sore duty indeed, in this
case, as the principal offender was his own mother: so that in
vindicating one feeling of his filial nature the pious son had to do
violence to another; but a duty it still remained; and there does not
appear the slightest trace that it was considered one whit the less
imperative on account of the peculiar relation that existed here between
the dealer of the vengeful blow and the person on whom it was dealt.
WHOSO SHEDDETH MAN'S BLOOD BY MAN SHALL HIS BLOOD BE SHED was the old
patriarchal law on the subject, proclaimed without limitation and
without exception; and the cry of innocent blood rose to Heaven with
peculiar emphasis when the sufferer was both a father and a king.
"Good, how good, when one who dies unjustly leaves a son behind him
To avenge his death!"--Odyss. iii. 196,
is the wisdom of old Nestor with regard to this subject and this very
case: and the wise goddess Athena, the daughter of the Supreme
Councillor, in whom "all her father lives," stamps her distinct approval
on the deed of Orestes, by which Clytemnestra was murdered, and holds
him up as an illustrious example to Telemachus, by which his own conduct
was to be regulated in {97} reference to the insolent and unjust suitors
who were consuming his father's substance.
"This when thou hast done, and well accomplished, as the need demands,
Then behoves thee in thy mind with counsel rife to ponder well
How the suitors that obscenely riot in thy father's halls
Thou by force or fraud may'st slay: for surely now the years are come,
When too old thou art to trifle like a child with childish things.
Hast not heard what fair opinion the divine Orestes reaped
From the general voice consenting to the deed, then when he slew
The deceitful false Ægisthus, slayer of his famous sire."
Odyssey i. 293.
Public opinion, therefore, to use a modern phrase, not only justified
Orestes in compassing the death of his mother, but imperatively called
on him to do so. Public opinion, however, could not control Nature, nor
save the unfortunate instrument of paternal retribution from that
revulsion of feeling which must necessarily ensue, when the hand of the
son is once red with the blood of her whose milk he had sucked. Orestes
finds himself torn in twain by two contrary instincts, the victim of two
antagonist rights. No sooner are the Furies of the father asleep, than
those of the mother awake; and thus the bloody catastrophe of the
present piece prepares the way for that tragic conflict of opposing
moral claims set forth with such power in the third piece of this
trilogy--the Eumenides.
The action of this play is the simplest possible, and will, for the most
part, explain itself sufficiently as it proceeds. Clytemnestra,
disturbed in conscience, and troubled by evil dreams, sends a chorus of
young women to offer libations at the tomb of Agamemnon, which, in the
present play, may fitly be conceived as occupying the centre of the
stage.[f3] These "libation-bearers" give the name to the piece. In
their pious function, Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon, joins; and as
she is engaged in the solemn rite, her brother Orestes (who had been
living as an exile in Phocis with Strophius, married to Anaxibia, the
sister of Agamemnon) suddenly arrives, and making himself known to his
sister, plans with her the murder of Ægisthus and Clytemnestra--which
is accordingly executed. Scarcely is this done, when the Furies of the
murdered mother appear, and commence that chase of the unhappy son from
land to land, which is ended in the next piece only by the eloquent
intercession of Apollo, and the deliberative wisdom of the blue-eyed
virgin-goddess of the Acropolis.
As a composition, the Choephoræ is decidedly inferior both to {98} the
Agamemnon which precedes, and the Eumenides which follows it; and the
poet, as if sensible of this weakness, following the approved tactics of
rhetoricians and warriors, has dexterously placed it in a position where
its deficiencies are least observed. At the same time, in passing a
critical judgment on this piece we must bear in mind two
things--_first_, that some parts of this play that appear languid,
long-drawn, and ineffective to us who read, may have been overflowing
with the richest emotional power in their living musical exhibition;
and, _secondly_, that many parts, especially of the choral chaunts, have
been so maimed and shattered by time that the modern commentator is
perhaps as much chargeable with the faults of the translation as the
ancient tragedian.