{133}
THOUGH the ancient Greek religion, there can be no question, was too
much the creation of mere imagination, and tended rather to cultivate a
delicate sense of beauty than to strike the soul with a severe reverence
before the awful majesty of the moral law, yet it is no less certain
that to look upon it as altogether addressed to our sensuous emotions,
however convenient for a certain shallow school of theology, would lead
the calm inquirer after moral truth far away from the right track. As
among the gods that rule over the elements of the physical world, Jove,
according to the Homeric creed, asserts a high supremacy, which
restrains the liberty of the celestial aristocracy from running into
lawless licence and confusion; so the wild and wanton ebullitions of
human passion, over which a Bacchus, a Venus, and a Mars preside, are
not free from the constant control of a righteous Jove, and the sacred
terror of a retributive Erinnys. The great lesson of a moral government,
and a secret order of justice pervading the apparent confusion of the
system of things of which we are a part, is sufficiently obvious in the
whole structure of the two great Homeric poems; but if it exists in the
midst of that sunny luxuriance of popular fancy as a felt atmosphere, it
is planted by Æschylus, the thoughtful lyrist of a later age, on a
visible elevation, whence, as from a natural pulpit, enveloped with dark
clouds, or from a Heathen Sinai, involved in fearful thunders and
lightnings, it trumpets forth its warnings, and hurls its bolts of
flaming denunciation against Sin. The reader, who has gone through the
two preceding pieces of this remarkable trilogy, without discovering
this their deep moral significance, has read to little purpose; but it
is here, in the concluding piece, that the grand doctrine of the moral
government of the world is most formally enunciated; it is in the person
of the Furies that the wrathful indignation of Jove against the
violators of the moral law manifests itself, in the full panoply of
terror, and stands out as the stern Avatar of an inexorable Justice.
Here, therefore, if we will understand the moral seriousness, of which
the gay Hellenic Polytheism was not without its background, let us fix
our gaze. If the principles of "immutable morality," of which our great
English Platonist talks so comprehensively, are to be found anywhere,
they are to be found here.
{134}
The Furies (or the Εὐμενίδες, _i.e._ the _Gracious-minded_, as
they are called by a delicate euphemism) are generally looked upon as
the impersonations of an evil conscience, the incarnated scourges of
self-reproach. In this view there is no essential error; but it may be
beneficial, in entering on the perusal of the present piece, to place
before the modern reader more literally the true Homeric idea of these
awful Powers. In the Iliad and Odyssey, frequent mention is made of the
Erinnyes; and from the circumstances, in which their names occur, in
various passages of these poems, there can be no doubt that we are to
view them primarily as the impersonation of an imprecation or curse,
which a person, whose natural rights have been grossly violated,
pronounces on the person, by whom this violation comes.[f1] Thus
the father of Phoenix (Il. ix. 453), being offended by the conduct of
his son in relation to one of his concubines, "loads him with frequent
curses, and invokes the hated Furies"--
Πολλὰ κατηρατο, στυγερὰς δ᾽ ἐπίκεκλετ Εριννΰς,
and "the gods," it is added, "gave accomplishment to his curse, the
subterranean Jove, and the awful Persephone." In the same book we find,
in the narration of the war, between the Curetes and the Ætolians,
about Calydon, how Althaea, the mother of Meleager, being offended with
her son on account of his having slain her brother, cursed him, and
invoked Pluto and Proserpine that he might die, and
Her the Fury that walketh in darkness,
Heard from Erebus' depths, with a heart that knoweth no mercy.
Both these instances relate to offences committed against the revered
character of a parent; but the elder brother also has his Erinnys.--(Il.
xv. 204), and even the houseless beggar--(Od. xvii. 575), and, more than
all, he to whose prejudice the sacred obligation of truth and honour
have been set at nought by the perjured swearer--
Mighty Jove, be thou my witness, Jove of gods supremest, best,
Earth, and Sun, and Furies dread, that underneath the ground avenge
Whoso speaks and sweareth falsely--
says Agamemnon--(Il. xix. 257)--in restoring the intact Briseis to
Achilles.
Thus, according to Homer's idea, wherever there is a cry of righteous
indignation, rising up to Heaven from the breast of an injured person,
there may be a Fury or Furies; for they are not {135} limited or defined
in any way as to number. It is not, however, on every petty occasion of
common offence that these dread ministers of divine vengeance appear.
Only, when deeds of a deeper darkness are done, do these daughters of
primeval Night (for so Æschylus symbolises their pedigree) issue forth
from their subterranean caverns. There is something volcanic in their
indignation, whose eruption is too terrible to be common. They chiefly
frequent the paths, that are dabbled with blood. A murdered father, or a
murdered mother especially, were never known to appeal to them in vain,
even though Jove's own prophet, Apollo, add his sanction to the deed. An
Orestes may not hope to escape the bloody chase, which the "winged
hounds," invoked by a murdered Clytemnestra, are eager to prepare--the
sacred precincts of an oracular Delphi may not repel their
intrusion--the scent of blood "laughs in their nostrils," and they will
not be cheated of their game. Only one greatest goddess, in whose hands
are the keys of her father's armoury of thunder, may withstand the full
rush of these vindictive powers. Only Pallas Athena, with her panoply of
Olympian strength, and her divine wisdom of reconciliation can bid them
be pacified.
In order to understand thoroughly the situation of the matricide
Orestes, in the present play, we must consider further the ancient
doctrine of pollution attaching to an act of murder, and the consequent
necessity of purification to the offender. The nature of this is
distinctly set forth by Orestes himself in a reply to his sister
Iphigenia, put into his mouth by Euripides. "Loxias," he says, "first
sent me to Athens, and
There first arrived, no host would entertain me,
As being hated of the immortal gods,
And some, who pitied me, before me placed
Cold entertainment on a separate board;
Beneath the same roof though I lodged with them,
No interchange of living voice I knew,
But sat apart and ate my food alone."
Iphig. Taur. 954.
Like an unclean leper among the Jews, the man polluted with human blood
wandered from land to land, as with a Cain's mark upon his brow, and
every fellow-being shrank from his touch as from a living plague.
"For wisely thus our ancestors ordained,
That the blood-tainted man should know no joy
From sight of fellow-mortal or from touch,
But with an horrid sanctitude protected
Range the wide earth an exile."
EURIP. Orest. 512.
{136}
Under the ban of such a social excommunication as this, the first act of
readmission into the fraternity of human society was performed by the
sprinkling of swine's blood on the exile, a ceremony described
particularly in the following passage of Apollonius Rhodius, where Jason
and Medea are purified by Circe from the taint of the murder of
Absyrtus:--
"First to free them from the taint of murder not to be recalled,
She above them stretched the suckling of a sow whose teats distilled
The juice that flows when birth is recent; this she cut across the
throat,
And with the crimson blood outflowing dashed the tainted suppliants'
hands.
Then with other pure libations she allayed the harm, invoking
Jove that hears the supplication of the fugitive stained with blood."
ARGON. IV. 704-9.
The other "pure libations" here mentioned include specially water, of
which particular mention is made in the legend of Alcmæon, which bears
a remarkable resemblance to that of Orestes, and in which it is in the
sacred stream of the Achelous alone that purification is at length
found, from the deeply-engrained guilt of matricide.--(Apollodor, Lib.
III., c. 7.) All this, however, availed only to remove the unhallowed
taint, with which human blood had defiled the murderer. It was
necessary, further, that he should be tried before a competent court,
and formally acquitted, as having performed every atonement and given
every satisfaction that the nature of the case required. According to
the consuetudinary law of Athens, there were various courts in which
different cases of murder and manslaughter were tried; but of all the
courts that held solemn judgment on shed blood, none was more venerable
in its origin, or more weighty in its authority, than the famous court
of the Areopagus; and here it is, accordingly, that, after being wearied
out by the sleepless chase of his relentless pursuers, Orestes, with the
advice and under the protection of Apollo, arrives to gain peace to his
soul by a final verdict of acquittal from the sage elders of Athens,
acting by the authority and with the direction of their wise
patron-goddess, Athena.
The connection of Athena and the Areopagus with the Orestean legend
gives to the present play a local interest and a patriotic hue of which
the want is too often felt in the existing remains of the Attic tragedy.
But Athena and the grave seniors of the hill of Ares are not the only
celestial personages here, in whom an Athenian audience would find a
living interest. The Furies themselves enjoyed a special reverence in
the capital of Athens, under the title of Σεμνὰι θεαι, or the
_dread goddesses_; and the principal seat of this worship, whether by a
happy conjunction or a wise choice, was situated on {137} the north-east
side (looking towards the Acropolis) of that very hill of the war god,
where the venerable court that bore his name held its solemn sessions on
those crimes, which it was the principal function of the Furies to
avenge. Up to the present hour, the curious traveller through the wreck
of Athenian grandeur sees pointed out the black rift of the rock into
which the awful virgins, after accepting the pacification of Athena, are
reported to have descended into their subterranean homes;[f2] and
it is with this very descent, amid flaming torch-light and solemn hymns,
that the great tragedian, mingling peace with fear, closes worthily the
train of startling superhuman terrors which this drama exhibits.
But Æschylus is not a patriot only, and a pious worshipper of his
country's gods in this play, he is also, to some small extent at least,
manifestly a politician. The main feature of the constitutional history
of Athens in the period immediately following the great Persian war, to
which period our trilogy belongs, was the enlargement and the systematic
completion of those democratic forms, of which the timocratic
legislation of Solon, about a century and a-half before, had planted the
first germs. Of these changes, Pericles, the man above all others who
knew both to understand and to control his age, was the chief promoter;
and in a policy whose main tendency was the substitution of a numerous
popular for a narrow professional control of public business, it could
not fail to be a main feature, that the authority of the judges of the
old aristocratic courts was curtailed in favour of those bodies of paid
jurymen, the institution of which is specially attributed to Pericles
and his coadjutor Ephialtes.[f3] Whether these changes were
politic or not, in the large sense of that word, need not be inquired
here; Mr. Grote has done much to lengthen the focus of those
short-sighted national spectacles, through which the English eye has
been accustomed to view the classic democracies; but let it be that
Pericles kept within the bounds of a wise liberty in giving a fair and a
large trial to the action of democratic principles at that time and
place; or let it be, on the other hand, that he overstepped the line
"Which whoso passes, or who reaches not,
Misses the mark of right"--
in either case, where decision was so difficult, and discretion so
delicate, no one can accuse the thoughtful tragic poet of a stolid
conservatism, when he comes forward, in this play, as the advocate of
{138} the only court of high jurisdiction in Athens, now left unshaken
by the great surge of those popular billows, that were yet swelling
everywhere with the eager inspiration of Marathon and Salamis.[f4]
The court of Areopagus was not now, since the legislation of Solon, and
the further democratic movement of Cleisthenes, in any invidious or
exclusive sense an aristocratic assembly, such as the close corporations
of the old Roman aristocracy before the series of popular changes
introduced by Licinius Stolo; it was a council, in fact, altogether
without that family and hereditary element, in which the principal
offence of aristocracy has always lain; its members were composed
entirely (not recruited merely like our House of Lords) of those
superior magistrates--archons annually elected by the people--who had
retired from office. To magnify the authority of such a body, and
maintain intact the few privileges that had now been left it, was, when
an obvious opportunity offered, not only excusable in a great national
tragedian, but imperative. One thing his political attitude in this
matter certainly proves, that he was not a vulgar hunter after
popularity, delighting to swell to the point of insane exaggeration the
cry of the hour, but one of those men of high purpose, who prove a
greater strength of patriotism by stemming the popular stream, than by
swimming with it.
Besides the championship of the Court of the Areopagus, there is another
political element in this rich drama, which, though of less consequence,
must not be omitted. No sooner had the Persian invaders been fairly
driven back from the Hellenic shore, than that old spirit of narrow
local jealousy, which was the worm at the heart of Grecian political
existence, broke out with renewed vigour, and gave ominous indications
in the untoward affair of Tanagra, of that terrible collision which
shook the two great rival powers a few years afterwards in the famous
Peloponnesian war. Sparta and Athens, opposed as they were by race, by
geographical position, and by political character, after some public
attempts at co-operation, in which Cimon was the principal actor, shrunk
back, as in quiet preparation for the great trial of strength, into a
state of isolated antagonism. But, though open hostility was deferred,
wise precaution could not sleep; and, accordingly, we find the
Athenians, about this time, anxious to secure a base of operations, so
to speak, against Sparta in the Peloponnesus, by entering into an
alliance with Argos. As a genuine Athenian, Æschylus, whatever his
political feelings might be towards Cimon and the Spartan party, could
not but look with {139} pleasure on the additional strength which this
Argive connection gave to Athens in the general council of Greece; and,
accordingly, he dexterously takes advantage of the circumstance of
Orestes being an Argive, to trace back the now historical union of the
two countries to a period where Fancy is free to add what links she
pleases to the brittle bonds of international association.
Such is a rapid sketch of the principal religious and political
relations, some notion of which is necessary to enable the general
English reader to enter with sympathy on the perusal of the very
powerful and singular drama of the Eumenides. The professional student,
of course, will not content himself with what he finds here, but will
seek for complete satisfaction in the luminous pages of Thirlwall and
Grote--in the learned articles of Dr. Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities,
in the notes of Schoemann, and, above all, in the rare Dissertations of
Ottfried Müller, accompanying his edition of the Eumenides--a work
which I have read once and again with mingled admiration and
delight--from which I have necessarily drawn with no stinted hand in my
endeavours to comprehend the Orestean trilogy for myself, and to make it
comprehensible to others; and which I most earnestly recommend to all
classical students as a pattern-specimen of erudite architecture raised
by the hand of a master, from whom, even in his points of most baseless
speculation (as what German is without such?), more is to be learned
than from the triple-fanged certainties of vulgar commentators.