CHAPTER V

RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF HOMICIDE IN EARLY GREECE

Current views: digression on evolution of Greek religion:

ancestor-worship: nature-worship: animal sacra: image-magic:

anthropomorphism: Achaean and Pelasgian contributions to

Homeric religion: fusion of Achaean and Pelasgian dogma and

ritual: religious aspect of kin-slaying amongst Pelasgians

and Achaeans: origin and evolution of the Erinnyes: origin

of homicide-purgation: comparison of Pelasgian with Achaean

Erinnys, and of Homeric Erinnys with post-Homeric and ‘tragic’

Erinnys.

There is a considerable variety and conflict of opinions about the

religious aspect of homicide in Homeric Greece. We have already explained

by quotations from Glotz[1] and Bury[2] the theory which conceives the

shedding of human blood as a deed which, in those days, did not touch the

gods or draw down the anger of the gods on the community. On the other

hand, Leaf, who indicates a clear and emphatic distinction between the

religious beliefs and customs of the Achaeans and the Pelasgians, holds

that the Achaeans ignored and the Pelasgians respected[3] ‘the most

sacred of all taboos which forbids the shedding of _kindred blood_’: for

the Pelasgians retained the ‘primitive family system, with all its rites

and taboos’[4] and possessed, therefore, the foundations of primitive

society and religion.’[5] Again, Fustel de Coulanges, in his analysis of

the primeval domestic religion of the Ancient City, says[6] that ‘the

shedder of blood was no longer able to sacrifice: the hand stained with

blood could not touch sacred objects.’ He believes, however, that[7]

the manslayer could be purified by an expiatory ceremony. Miss Harrison

holds a somewhat similar view[8]: ‘Purification,’ she says, ‘is the

placation of ghosts and, unknown to the Olympians (_i.e._ _Achaeans_),

was the keynote of the lower stratum (_i.e._ _Pelasgians_).’ ... ‘The

extreme need of primitive man for placation is from bloodshed: this is

at first obtained by offering the blood of the murderer; later, by the

blood of a surrogate victim applied to him.’ ... ‘So long as primitive

man preserves the custom of the blood feud, so long will he credit his

dead kinsman with passions like his own.’[9] So, Müller maintains[10]

that the religious rites of expiation and purification are derived from

the remotest times of Greek antiquity and were designed to reinstate

the slayer in religious communion with his family and his comrades.

Purgation ceremonies are, he thinks,[11] based upon the idea that the

manslayer must atone with his own life, but that this life may be bought

off by vicarial substitution, by a sacrificial victim symbolical of

such substitution. Our own views upon these subjects will appear in the

course of the discussion: we shall point out, amongst other things, the

distinction between expiation (ἱλασμός) and purgation (καθαρμός), and

while refusing to accept on the one hand the views of Müller and of Miss

Harrison, and indicating, on the other hand, the inaccuracies in the

views of Glotz, Bury and the generality of writers, we shall develop

and expand a theory which is suggested by Leaf’s[12] general position

and which distinguishes carefully between the religious attitude of the

Pelasgians and the Achaeans. To achieve this purpose it will, however, be

necessary, even at the cost of a digression, to give a brief account of

the evolution of early Greek religion.

ANALYSIS OF EARLY GREEK RELIGION

To the scientific mind of a modern European living in the atmosphere

of a highly secularised society, nothing can appear more curious

and incomprehensible than the almost universal belief in ubiquitous

supernatural forces which is revealed in ancient literature. Such a

belief is not, however, a symbol of savagery or barbarism; it is merely

a symptom of the absence of scientific knowledge. The general principle

that men in all ages attribute to occult forces every effect of which

the cause is unknown or mysterious, is clearly expressed by Lucretius[13]:

quippe ita formido mortales continet omnes

quod multa in terris fieri caeloque tuentur

quorum operum causas nulla ratione videre

possunt ac fieri divino numine rentur.

It was natural then, in an age of unscientific mentality, that plagues

and pestilences, and diseases of all kinds, lunacy and sterility,

the failure of harvests, misfortune in peace or war, adverse winds,

volcanoes, inherited characteristics, the activities of genius, emotion

and desire, birth, growth, death and decay—almost everything that crosses

the threshold of human consciousness—should be ascribed to the ubiquitous

and perpetual operation of supernatural agents. The literature of ancient

Greece and Rome is permeated with such beliefs. We will quote just one

characteristic passage from the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus. When the

avenging Erinnyes of the slain Clytaemnestra threaten to hurl the shafts

of their wrath upon the Attic land because it has harboured Orestes,

whom they regard as the murderer of his kin, Athene, who has caused a

murder-court to declare him free from guilt, apparently on a plea of

justifiable homicide, commands the Erinnyes to be appeased, and says:

‘Hurl you not the weight of your wrath upon Attica; be not indignant,

nor cause barrenness by sending down the blighting drops that come from

Spirits, the cruel bitter destroyers of our seed.[14] ... Fling not upon

earth the fruit of thy wild curse, causing all things not to prosper.[15]

... Sow not within my boundaries those spurs to bloodshed that ruin young

men’s hearts, maddened by a frenzy not born of wine[16] ... but (send)

blessings from earth and from the waters of the deep, and from the sky

wind-breezes that blow with kindly sunshine over earth: (send) fruit of

the soil and of things that live, flowing with untiring vigour to my

citizens, and of man’s seed a safe deliverance at the birth.’[17] The

Erinnyes, in consenting to be appeased, reply: ‘With kindly prophecy we

pray for you here, that the radiant sunlight may bring forth with speed

from earth the blessings of your life[18] ... never—such is my boon—may

the trees feel the hurtful wind or the scorching fire that robs them of

their buds ... or blight creep over them eternally that blasts their

fruitfulness: and may Pan bring to full growth the prosperous flocks that

will bear from wombs a twofold fruit, and in due season may the produce

of rich earth present you with the good gods’ gift of fortune[19]: ... on

the young men I forbid to fall the stroke of death untimely: and that the

lovely maids find each her husband—do ye grant it, O ye who reign, and

ye, O Fates divine![20]... May the roar of Faction, thirsting for evil,

never in this place be heard, nor the dust that drinks the dark blood of

fellow-citizens bring to the State, from passion for revenge, the doom of

retaliation. But may the citizens rejoice one another with a common love

and hate only in union as one man.’[21]

The modern European, taught in childhood to accept the Christian doctrine

of the divine creation of the world, must exert himself considerably if

he is to realise that in Greek religion the notion of such a creation

is not found before the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and even then

it existed only in the atmosphere of a pious philosophic sect. To

the ancient Greek mind, the earth was not created; it had been from

everlasting: it was itself divine. Gilbert Murray rightly says[22]

that the chief objects of primitive man’s emotional activity are the

food-supply and the tribe-supply. By a well-known confusion of cause and

effect characteristic of the primitive mind, the earth became the object

of universal worship, because of its association with the production of

food.

Similarly, animals came to be regarded as sacred, though different races

adopted different viewpoints in regard to their sacred character. In some

instances a certain animal was ‘sacred’ simply because it was eaten: in

others it was ‘sacred’ because it was ‘tabu’ or sinful to eat it. We

shall see that the animal slain in certain Chthonian rites could not be

eaten,[23] but it was ‘sacred’ all the same. The ancient notion, which

has survived so long in witchcraft, of the magical power of placation by

images or effigies led to the widespread construction of those animal

images which are so familiar to the students of primitive religion.[24]

When divinities in human form, when anthropomorphic _sacra_, take

precedence of the animal god, traces of a fusion in image-magic are

clearly visible. Whether by accident, or by reason of some traditional

connexion, certain human gods came to be associated with certain species

of animals. The sacrifice of such animals was regarded as particularly

pleasing to such gods, and it is therefore arbitrary to assume that

the sacrifice of animals was originally accepted as a substitute for a

previous human sacrifice. Herodotus says[25] that the image of Isis in

Egypt was that of a woman with cow’s horns: that a statue of Zeus in

Egypt showed the figure of a man with the face of a ram. When the people

of Egyptian Thebes sacrificed, annually, a ram to Zeus, they covered the

statue of Zeus with the skin of the ram.[26] We know that the worshippers

of the orgiastic Dionysus clothed themselves in fawn-skins,[27] and

that the satyric choruses from which, we may suppose, Greek tragedy

developed,[28] were dressed, to some extent, as goats. The goat and the

snake, as well as the bull and the ram, seem to have been worshipped in

early times as symbols at once of the fertility of the soil and of the

fertility of the race. The serpents which gaze at us so terribly from the

heads of the Aeschylean Erinnys are probably, in origin,[29] derived from

the belief that the souls of the dead are connected with the fertility of

the earth.[30] Herodotus tells us that offerings were regularly made to

an imaginary serpent which was supposed to reside in the temple of Athene

Polias at Athens.[31] This serpent symbolised, like the undying fire of

the Roman Vesta,[32] the immortal progenitor of the race.

ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND THE OLYMPIANS

In regard to the origin of anthropomorphic religion in Greece, we can

only say that we prefer the opinion of F. de Coulanges,[33] which derives

it from the ancestor worship of the early Pelasgian peoples, to that of

Miss Harrison which, in its latest form, attributes it to a political

anti-Persian reaction of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.[34] Coulanges

believes that when once the idea of human gods took shape, it tended at

once to personify and humanise all the various objects of worship.[35] It

is significant that the Persians, who had no ancestor worship, did not

conceive their gods in human form.[36] Amongst the Greeks, however, who

worshipped dead ancestors from the dawn of their history, the ‘ghost’

gave its form to the god.

Assuming, then, Coulanges’ theory of the evolution of anthropomorphism,

we must regard as absurd the opinion of some ancient writers who

maintained that Homer and Hesiod not only told false stories about the

gods but gave them, moreover, the manners and shapes of men.[37] The

precise contribution of such poets as Homer to ancient religion is

difficult to define, but we believe that it was not so much constructive

as destructive. The poet gave a certain immortality to the conceptions

which he expressed: the effect of a Bible in religious evolution is

essentially conservative. It tends to stereotype for all men and for

all time the religious opinions of its day. Now Homer was the poet

of the Achaeans, and the Achaeans, as Leaf says,[38] conceived the

gods as typical Achaeans of the other world. Whether they brought new

human gods[39] to Greece or merely gave a personal interpretation to

the Pelasgian gods, we need not at the moment decide. The gods of the

Achaeans were conceived as kings and rulers like themselves. If they

do not create the universe, they at least divide it into realms or

dominions.[40] Moreover, they are presented as related to one another

by blood, or connected by intermarriage, as the Achaeans were. They

naturally have their quarrels, their disputes, their rivalries and their

jealousies, as the Achaeans had. The stamp of the Achaean caste marks

the Homeric pantheon. But apart from the great Olympian gods, there are

a number of minor deities who suggest the existence of a less privileged

social and religious caste. It is in this caste that we believe that we

can find the source of supply or the materials for the creation of the

Olympic Pantheon. Such a Pantheon could never have been the exclusive

creation of Homer. If the Achaeans created it, they were limited,

surely, by the nature of the materials at their disposal. Their creative

power was restricted and directed, as we believe, by a pre-Achaean

evolution of grades of divine greatness within the galaxy of Pelasgian

divinities[41]: an evolution which attributed to elemental forces and

to national ancestor-gods a power to which no mere local ‘ghost’ could

aspire to attain. The Pelasgians and Minoans in their tribal villages,

and particularly in their city-religion, had, we think, evolved the

distinction between the greater and the lesser gods, between the gods

of the upper air, and those of the sea and of the earth below, which

was so characteristic a feature of later Greek religion. True, many of

their ‘deities’ were nameless, as Herodotus[42] seems to have heard

that they were at Dodona, and as the ancestral spirits of historical

times still were, since they were addressed as _Keres_ at the Athenian

Anthesteria.[43] But the old tribal and city gods must have had names.

It would have been otherwise impossible to distinguish them from one

another in the multitudinous deifications of an ancestor-worshipping and

nature-worshipping peninsula. Coulanges[44] holds that the local gods of

primitive peoples often carry the same name even when they are really

different in form and ritual. But here we think that we can detect the

influence of Homer and the Achaeans. The Homeric god is stereotyped in

form and character as in name. The form and character was created, we

believe, by the military Achaean caste, while the name was in most if

not all cases a Pelasgian product. It was all the more possible for the

Achaeans to give character and personality to the gods, if there had been

local variations in the Pelasgian types. Moreover, the Achaeans drew, so

to speak, a line of demarcation around the gods of their choice. They

created a Pantheon of an exclusive type, which, by its prestige in later

years, checked the Pelasgian tendency to increase the number of the

greater gods, and compelled the Greeks to accept, instead, the worship

of _Heroes_.[45] The creation of such a Pantheon presupposes, we think,

the existence of an identity of type within some widespread organised

society. No mere local poet or city-state could have created it. As we

have no evidence of the existence in pre-Homeric days of a national union

or federation of Minoan kings, or of a national Amphictyony, such as

we meet with in later times, we naturally attribute to the ubiquitous

Achaean caste and their poet-Royal the creation of that Pantheon which

was the mainstay of Achaean religion. But this Pantheon was created

out of pre-existing Pelasgian materials. We do not agree with Leaf and

Chadwick in the view that the Achaeans were the _creators_ of Greek

anthropomorphic religion.[46]

ACHAEAN-PELASGIAN RELIGIOUS FUSIONS

Many of the difficulties presented by Homeric religion are to be

attributed to the fact that that religion was an eclectic product. If

we compare the beliefs and customs of the Achaeans and the Pelasgians,

it will be obvious that despite the circumstance of their social

coexistence, a complete blending or fusion in dogma or in ritual would

have been impossible. Yet it is equally impossible to suppose that both

Pelasgians and Achaeans preserved their religious rites and conceptions

unadulterated and pure.

Miss Harrison is, we think, mistaken—she seems to admit it in a later

work[47]—in assuming that the Achaeans are to be associated with Olympian

ritual, and the Pelasgians with Chthonian ritual, and that there is a

rigid line of distinction between the two castes. Just as the Olympian

rites which are so common amongst Homeric Achaeans were, we think,

practised also by Minoan kings and Pelasgian nobles, so the Chthonian

rites of the tillers of soil were practised, on occasions, by the

Achaeans, and would perhaps have been more frequently practised if there

had not existed within the two castes differences of dogma, such as we

shall presently indicate. In our analysis of the social and judicial

aspect of Homeric homicide we were enabled to differentiate clearly

between the Achaeans and Pelasgians, for their social organisations

were different and distinct. In a religious analysis, however, the gulf

cannot with equal clearness be indicated, if we suspect that the practice

of common rites and the eclectic conception of common gods may have

modified the differences which are otherwise maintained. Leaf is aware

of the complexity of the problem, which he aptly describes as a ‘tangled

skein.’[48] We do not, however, agree with Leaf’s opinion[49] that ‘there

is no trace in Homer of any Chthonian religion,’ if the word ‘Chthonian’

carries its usual significance. Leaf implies that the Achaeans, before

they came to Greece, were worshippers of the dead. The absence of such

worship in Homer is, he says,[50] due to the severance of the military

adventurer from the tombs of his fathers. ‘It is impossible to pay due

rites to the departed when their tombs have been left far behind in the

course of long migrations.’ We have seen[51] that the Achaeans were

long enough settled in Greece, at the time of the Trojan war, to have

produced relations extending to second and third cousins once removed.

Surely the habit of ancestor-worship could easily have been renewed in

the course of so many generations. We believe that the Achaean conception

of a spirit land and their practice of cremation are a clear indication

of the absence of the primitive ideas of ghost-raising, ghost-laying and

fertility worship, which are the regular[52] concomitants of the cult of

the dead. _The dogmas which underlie these different burial rites cannot,

we think, be fused. They can only combine by the evolution of an eclectic

doctrine._ Had such a doctrine evolved in Homer? The only passage in the

Homeric poems which can help us to decide is the _Nekuia_[53] of the

_Odyssey_.

THE NEKUIA OF THE _ODYSSEY_.

Ridgeway’s theory[54] of the difference between the Pelasgian and the

Achaean cults of the dead is now well known. The former, he maintains,

buried their dead, honoured them with periodical offerings of food and

drink, and believed that the dead lived in a subconscious state in the

tomb; the latter, however, cremated their dead, practised no regular tomb

offerings (χοαί), and believed that the souls of the dead flitted away

through the air to a place called Hades in the west. The curious thing

about the _Nekuia_ is that the souls of the dead in Hades are represented

as anxious for food and drink, and when Odysseus sacrifices there, the

ghosts come forth to lick up the blood of the victim. Further, it is

only when they have drunk the blood that they regain their memory and

recognise their friends again.[55] Odysseus thus describes the scene

at the entrance to Hades to which he has been miraculously permitted

to descend: ‘There (_i.e._ at the entrance to Hades) Perimedes and

Eurylochus held the victims and I drew my sharp sword ... and dug a pit

... and about it poured a drink-offering to all the dead ... mead and

sweet wine and water ... and I took the sheep and cut their throats over

the trench and the dark blood flowed forth and lo! the spirits of the

dead came out of Erebus ... and they flocked together from every side

about the trench.[56] First came Elpenor that had not yet been buried

...[57] (who said) “Leave me not unwept and unburied ... burn me and

pile me a barrow on the shore....”[58] Anon came the soul of the Theban

Teiresias ...[59] (who said) “Whomsoever of the dead thou shalt suffer to

approach the blood, he shall prophesy truthfully ...”[60]: my mother too

drew nigh and drank the dark blood and at once she knew me.’[61]

Miss Harrison seeks to explain the difficulty which is presented by this

unique passage concerning the Homeric cult of the dead by maintaining

that it is a fusion of _Chthonian and Olympian ritual_.[62] On the

assumption which underlies the reasoning in ‘Themis,’ namely, that

the Homeric poems assumed their final form and their characteristic

theological setting in the time of Pisistratus,[63] it is surprising

that we have not more frequent instances of such a fusion in the Homeric

poems! Those poems contain many references to Chthonian deities,

_e.g._ to the Erinnyes, to Ge, and to Hades. But in the _Nekuia_ there

is question not of gods but of ghosts—ghosts, too, conceived in a

predominantly Achaean way, as living together in a western spirit-land.

Other Chthonian rites are frequently mentioned in Homer, but not the

placation of ghosts. Thus, in the _Iliad_[64] Agamemnon swears a solemn

oath in a manner which is essentially Chthonian. With sword in hand and a

boar prepared for sacrifice, he prays (or curses) thus: ‘Be Zeus before

all witness ... and Earth and Sun and the Erinnyes who under Earth take

vengeance upon men who forswear themselves, that I ... and if aught that

I swear be false, may the gods give me all sorrows manifold....’ ‘He

spake and cut the boar’s throat with the pitiless knife: and the body

Talthybius whirled and threw into the great wash of the hoary sea.’[65]

The reason for the action of Talthybius in this passage is that, in

Chthonian ritual the animal which was slain to symbolise the hypothetical

destruction of the swearer if certain promises were not carried out,

could not be eaten and hence was thrown into the sea.

Ridgeway, who believes that the whole of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_

was composed before 1000 B.C.[66] and who has done so much to

differentiate Achaean and Pelasgian burial customs, finds in the _Nekuia_

a fusion of _Achaean and Pelasgian ideas_. ‘Such a blending of religious

ideas,’ he says, ‘is but the natural concomitant of the intermixture of

two different races and cultures.’[67] But Ridgeway is still not quite

accurate if he means to imply that any real blending of _ideas_ had

occurred. We have said that the ideas underlying these different rites

could never be really fused, but they could amalgamate in the form of

an eclectic religion. We may regard it as a confirmation of our view

that Ridgeway has to confess that the fusion of Achaean and Pelasgian

ritual of which there is a solitary suggestion in the _Nekuia_ does not

seem to have established itself in Greece very long before the time of

Aeschylus.[68] He says: ‘According to the Homeric doctrine, once the body

was burned, the spirit returned no more from its dwelling place with

the dead. But on this point Aeschylus held a very different view. It

is evident that by the time of Aeschylus an eclectic doctrine had been

evolved. The Homeric belief in a separate abode for disembodied spirits

was adopted, but at the same time the ancient doctrine of the constant

presence of the soul in the grave of its body was retained, the gulf

between both doctrines being bridged over by the theory that even though

the body was burned, the soul could return to its ashes in the grave.’

Now the tomb-offerings made by Odysseus in the _Nekuia_ do not take place

at a tomb, but at the entrance to Hades. The inference from this fact is

_not_ that there was a blending of Achaean and Pelasgian _ideas_, in the

cult of the dead, but that it was possible for Achaeans who practised

other forms of Chthonian ritual to perform such rites when commanded to

do so in the realm of Hades, _the only place where their dogmas made

such rites intelligible_. If the Achaeans had believed in the Pelasgian

doctrine of the presence of the soul in the tomb, they would normally

have made Chthonian offerings at their tombs. Believing, as they did,

that the souls of the dead lived in Hades, they could only find meaning

in such a rite if they came, as Odysseus came, to the realm of Hades. We

have seen that the Achaeans, and Odysseus in particular, were familiar

with Pelasgian beliefs, and had, in common with their subjects, certain

Chthonian rites. The _Nekuia_ therefore, instead of proving a fusion of

beliefs, seems to us to suggest, on the contrary, that such a fusion had

not taken place in Homeric Greece.

In the _Odyssey_[69] Circe instructs Odysseus in the rites which he must

perform when he goes to the ‘dank house of Hades.’ The fact that he

has to be instructed in this matter suggests that it was not a normal

procedure in his domestic life. The same may be said about the command of

Circe in regard to Teiresias. Circe bids Odysseus, when he performs the

Chthonian rite in Hades, to promise that on his return to Ithaca he will

offer up in his home ‘a barren heifer’ and fill a pyre with treasures,

and ‘sacrifice apart, to Teiresias alone, a black ram without blemish.’

The burning of a mock-pyre, and the sacrifice of a barren heifer, may

be an Achaean rite. The motive is the placation of the dead, but the

rite is quite different from that regular feeding of the dead which

is so frequent in necromantic magic and in ancestor-worship.[70] The

offering of a black ram to Teiresias is, however, somewhat different.

It is Chthonian, but we connect it especially with the worship of

‘prophets.’ Teiresias was a prophet of the old Pelasgian religion.

He belongs to a stage in the evolution of prophecy which is akin to

necromancy and witchcraft and which preceded prophetic colleges, ‘magical

secret societies,’[71] or divination by direct inspiration. This latter

divination retained indeed traces of the older rites. Thus in the _Ion_

of Euripides[72] the pilgrims to Apollo at Delphi are required before

consulting the oracle to sacrifice a πέλανος, a Chthonian offering of

meal, honey, and oil. So in Vergil’s story of the visit of Aristaeus to

the underworld, we find that Cyrene tells Aristaeus to offer, nine days

after his return, a Chthonian sacrifice to an offended prophet, Orpheus:

inferias Orphei Lethaea papavera mittes

et _nigram mactabis ovem_ lucumque revises.[73]

We do not therefore agree with H. Seebohm[74] when he says that the

placation of Teiresias proves that offerings to the dead were regularly

made by the Achaeans in their ordinary domestic life.

RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF HOMICIDE

We have pointed out that in Homeric Greece there were, so to speak, two

different religions, which reflected, in their main features, the social

caste-differences of the Achaeans and the Pelasgians. It has been rightly

said that primitive man creates his gods in his own likeness, and in the

absence of any definite Homeric references to the religious aspect of

homicide we must assume that the two religions of Homeric Greece adopted,

towards homicide, the attitudes of the two corresponding social strata.

Amongst the Achaeans, we have seen, homicide was a deed which concerned

only the slayer and the nearest blood-relations of the victim; there

was no co-operation of large groups, no trial, no civic interest in the

execution of vengeance: it was entirely a matter for ‘private settlement’

between the relatives of the slain and the individual slayer. And this

‘settlement’ was not a payment in money or in kind: it was a payment in

blood, and in blood alone. The Achaeans, as a caste, had no interest

in such ‘crimes’: on the whole, they regarded bloodshed as a local

misfortune, which should not be aggravated by an extension of the dispute

to wider areas, and therefore they frequently adopted and protected

murder-exiles. We are not then surprised to find that in Homer the

Olympian gods of the Achaean caste manifest no anger against a murderer.

In the Pelasgian tribal religion we may assume that the position of the

homicide was somewhat different. It required the payment of wergeld

to purchase back the friendship of tribal gods. But we have seen[75]

that for slaying within the kindred no payment of wergeld could be

offered or accepted; and we have said[76] that the penalty of slavery

or bondage was probably inapplicable and that therefore exile was the

normal punishment for bloodshed within the clan. It follows that the

murdered man whose body was interred in the family tomb would never have

come in contact, through worship, with his kinsman who had slain him.

And in this sense we may accept the dictum of Coulanges[77] that ‘the

hand stained with blood could not touch sacred objects: the shedder of

blood could not sacrifice.’ Hence it is perhaps significant that, in

Homer, Tlepolemus who, when he had slain his maternal uncle, went into

exile to Rhodes, is said to have been ‘loved by Zeus,’[78] for by exile

he had atoned for his offence. In ordinary cases of homicide, however,

between members of different clans, we must suppose that the gods of the

phratry, of the tribe, and of the city became reconciled to the slayer

if the relatives of the slain received the customary wergeld. If then

Miss Harrison says[79] that ‘so long as primitive man retains the custom

of the blood-feud, so long will he credit his dead kinsmen with passions

like his own,’ she is compelled, by her own reasoning, to admit that the

‘ghosts’ of murdered men, in the tribal wergeld system, did not revolt at

the presence of a murderer, unless he were a kinsman.[80]

Coulanges[81] implies that in addition to clan-religion there was

domestic worship. Now this domestic worship was shared by a husband and

wife who normally belonged to two different clans, and are we to assume

that if a husband slew his wife or a wife her husband, the domestic

religion would have compelled them to go into exile even when the clan

could atone by wergeld? This point we cannot decide with any certainty.

Clytaemnestra, in later legend, offers sacrifice at the tomb of her

murdered husband: her children assert, not that it is sacrilegious, but

only that it is unavailing as a placation. We think that the tribal penal

code did not demand the exile penalty for homicide of this kind and would

have permitted wergeld. But within the genuine kindred, and especially

within the small kindred, bloodshed, particularly parricide, was from the

earliest times a serious religious offence.

There remain for discussion two problems which most writers regard as

intimately related—namely, the origin and evolution of the Erinnyes, and

the source and significance of the ritual of homicide-purgation.

THE ERINNYES AND PURGATION

The Greek word ἐριννύς is probably an adjective meaning ‘angry,’ and

should therefore be applicable to any spirit, whether ghost or god. But

Miss Harrison[82] believes that the word was originally an epithet of a

ghost or _ker_. The following is a summary of her opinions: The _Keres_

(κῆρες), she thinks, were primarily ghosts: they were neutral potencies

who might be either quite harmless[83] or baleful bacilli, or good

spirits.[84] The _word_ Erinnys was originally probably an epithet of

_ker_, and denoted a ghost-pest, a Poine. The Erinnys primarily is the

_ker_ of a human being unrighteously slain. It is the _ker_ as Poine.[85]

Thus, because it was a _ker_, the Erinnys was primarily a human ghost,

but the word came, by a process of specialisation, to be applied only

to such ghosts as are angry because they have been murdered.[86] In

Homer, she thinks, the Erinnyes have passed beyond this stage and are

‘personified (? deified) almost beyond recognition.’ They are no longer

souls, but the avengers of souls. They have even lost their exclusive

connexion with souls, and are become the avengers of the moral law, vague

equivalents of underworld Zeus and Persephone.[87]

Now Miss Harrison implicitly connects the Erinnyes with purgation, since

she asserts that ‘purification (_i.e._ purgation) is the placation of

ghosts.’[88] But in Homeric times the ghosts of murdered men would

not, she holds, accept any purgation sacrifice save the blood of the

murderer.[89] Therefore, in a certain sense homicide could be purged, and

in another sense it could not be purged in Homeric times!

Homer,[90] she says, does not understand the mystery of Bellerophon

and the Aleïan plain, but Apollodorus[91] reveals the fact that

Bellerophon slew his brother unwittingly and that he was purified by

Proetus. Apollodorus, she thinks, is unhistorical in speaking of the

purification of Bellerophon: in those old days, she says,[92] he could

not be purified. But as murder was a physical infection, Bellerophon

had to go to the Aleïan plain, an alluvial deposit which had recently

been recovered from the sea and which was not therefore included in the

‘earth’ which was polluted by his deed of blood. The fallacies of this

interpretation will become evident in the course of our reasoning. At

present we will merely point out (1) that there is no evidence for the

assertion that murder was a ‘physical infection’ in the Homeric age.

Everything that we have said about the Pelasgian wergeld system and the

Achaean protection of murder-exiles proves the contrary; (2) the plain

of wandering, if that is what Homer meant by Ἀλήϊον, (it may have been

a local place-name which conveyed to him no special meaning,) does not

imply an alluvial deposit of any kind, but possibly a special place which

known murderers, condemned to perpetual exile, were wont to frequent;

(3) Apollodorus may be unhistorical, in speaking of the purgation of

Bellerophon, but so is every Greek writer of the historical period who

attributed purgation to Achaean heroes, as Aeschylus, for instance,

does, to Orestes; (4) to explain the absence of references to purgation

in Homer by suggesting that the death of the murderer was the only

purgation of his crime, and to imply that Bellerophon was fleeing from

purgation when he fled from death to the Aleïan plain, is equivocal and

misleading. For a murderer was either purged or he was not purged; and if

a murderer was put to death in sacrifice, no one could logically speak of

him as ‘purged.’

F. de Coulanges seems also to connect the purgation rites for homicide

with the worship of the dead. In the primitive family group, he says,[93]

‘there were domestic morals. The shedder of blood was no longer allowed

to sacrifice or to offer libations or prayer or to offer the sacred

repast.... The hand stained with blood could no longer touch sacred

objects. To enable a man to renew his worship and to regain possession

of his god, he was required at least to purify himself by an expiatory

ceremony.’ This opinion implies that such rites were as old as the

domestic religion of the Family. The most serious objection to this

implication is that Homer has no genuine reference to any such ceremony.

Bury, who rightly attributes the origin of purgation rites for homicide

to post-Homeric times, nevertheless connects those rites with the worship

of the Erinnyes and of the Chthonian deities. ‘Gradually,’ he says,[94]

‘as the worship of the souls of the dead and of the deities of the

underworld developed, the belief gained ground that he who shed blood

was impure and needed cleansing. Accordingly, when a murderer satisfied

the kinsfolk of the murdered man by paying a fine, he had also to submit

to a process of purification and to satisfy the Chthonian gods and the

Erinnyes or Furies who were, in the original conception, the souls of the

dead clamouring for vengeance.’ The validity of this conception of the

origin of the Erinnyes will be examined presently. We hope also to show,

at a later stage, that wergeld and ‘pollution’ were mutually destructive.

O. Müller holds[95] that the religious rites of expiation and

purification were derived from the remotest times of Grecian antiquity

and were designed to reinstate the slayer in community of worship with

his people. Confronted with the difficulty that such rites are not

mentioned in our Homeric text, Müller argues,[96] firstly, that the

reading ἁγνιτέω (= purifier) instead of ἀφνειοῦ (= rich man) in a passage

in the _Iliad_[97] was the reading of the original text of Homer. He

quotes a scholiast’s opinion to the effect that there is an anachronism

in the verse. Secondly, he holds that the absence of Homeric references

to purgation for homicide is not surprising, because the poet’s hearers

would have taken it for granted as a matter of course! We must leave

our readers to weigh for themselves the value of this argument. The

opinion of the scholiast, if it proves anything, proves that there was an

obviously false reading interpolated in the text.

Müller conceives[98] purgation (καθαρμός) as a form of expiation

(ἱλασμός) which is closely related to the worship of the dead and the

Erinnyes, and believes that it originated in the idea that the life of

the manslayer (and sometimes the lives of all his clansmen) must be

sacrificed in atonement for homicide. Such a sacrifice, he thinks, came

to be obviated in course of time, either (1) by the substitution of a

surrogate victim, or (2) by the degradation of the murderer to a state

of servitude, or (3) by wergeld, which was originally suggested by the

new religious custom of accepting the sacrifice of an animal in lieu of

the death of the slayer.[99] Regarding the Erinnyes as Chthonian deities

to whom this expiation is offered, he is surprised to find that, in the

_Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, the purgation of Orestes does not lay to rest

the wrath of the Erinnyes. To obviate this difficulty he falls back on

the obviously absurd assumption that Aeschylus, for dramatic purposes,

presents Orestes as not completely purified.[100] The text of Aeschylus

and the text of Homer furnish the best refutations of such hypotheses.

Glotz is quite definitely of the opinion, and in this we agree with him,

that purgation for homicide was unknown to the Greeks of Homeric times.

In Homer, he says,[101] we find traces of a purely physical cleansing

which is required as a preliminary to sacrifice: but such words as

μιαίνω, μιαρός and μιαίφονος refer to the victim, not to the slayer.[102]

Homicide is not a religious offence: the murder exile, received without

scruple,[103] eats at the same table as other guests, and takes part in

libations and in prayers. The first genuine instance of purgation for

homicide occurs in the _Aethiopis_ of Arctinus of Miletus (750-700 B.C.),

and the practice continued to develop until it reached its complete

systematisation in the time of Dracon.[104] ‘Its development,’ says

Glotz, ‘coincides with the disappearance of patriarchal clans and the

progress of city life.’ The purgation-system mediated the transition

from ‘private vengeance’ to ‘social justice.’ It was derived, he

thinks,[105] from the Semites. Before its advent in Greece, the Greeks

had long practised Chthonian rites, upon which, so to speak, it was

easily grafted, such rites, for instance, as that which accompanied

cursing or swearing, a rite in which ‘purging’ water was thrown over

the hands of those about to swear,[106] or that which was associated

with solemn reconciliations after feuds or enmities.[107] Hence, says

Glotz, it came about, by a natural transition, that in historical times

the preliminary pleas on oath of the accuser and the accused in cases

of homicide were taken at the altar of the Erinnyes, and it was at this

altar that sacrifice was offered by the defendant acquitted of murder

by the Areopagus and by the returned exile who had paid the penalty of

involuntary homicide.[108]

Returning to Miss Harrison’s theory of the Erinnyes, we are of the

opinion that the epithet ἐριννύς was originally equally applicable to all

supernatural beings, whether ghosts or gods, but that before the time of

Homer the epithet came to be limited to such divinities as were, for some

reason, difficult to placate by the ordinary magic of placation.[109]

The elemental forces which were deified, as we think, before the advent

of the Achaeans, developed, under Achaean influence, a neutral and

capricious nature, varying in moods of sun and shower, of calm and

storm, like ‘typical men of the other world.’ Like men, they could be

placated by gifts and by hospitable entertainment. But the ghost-worship

which characterised the Pelasgian stratum was of a much more gloomy

and terrible nature. Miss Harrison thinks[110] that Homer exalted the

Olympians but caused the bad aspect of Chthonian deities and ghosts to be

unduly emphasised. Though the Erinnyes are relegated by Homer to Erebus,

yet he does not think of them as ghosts, but as minor deities who carry

out instructions from their superiors. They are connected with Zeus (of

the underworld), with Ge (the Earth), with the Sun (who, like Zeus,

has an underworld aspect, for he too goes down every evening to Hades

in the west), and with the Moirae who, though originally agricultural

personifications of the Seasons, rapidly became synonymous with Destiny

itself, and in Homer are superior even to Zeus.[111] It is especially in

the ceremonies of cursing and of swearing that these Chthonian powers

are invoked in Chthonian ritual. We have already[112] indicated Miss

Harrison’s error in associating the Achaeans exclusively with Olympian,

and the Pelasgians with Chthonian ritual. She is, we think, equally

mistaken in assuming that the pre-Achaean Erinnys was an irrational

being, predominantly animal in form, which had to await the coming of

the humanising Achaeans before it assumed a respectable ‘personified’

shape. We think the Pelasgians retained quite faithfully the original

anthropomorphic conception of the Erinnyes, while the Achaeans merely

regarded them as minor deities who obediently submitted to ‘Olympian’

authority. The precise nature of the Pelasgian cult of the Erinnyes in

Homeric Greece is rather difficult to define. In the Pelasgian religion

there was but a small and indescribable difference between ghosts and

gods, between minor deities and greater deities. It is probable that the

Pelasgians practised, occasionally, Olympian ritual—for instance, at

public festivals and in civic worship; but in the local domestic worship

of the clan, the phratry, and the tribe, their placation of ancestors

gave a predominantly Chthonian tone to their whole religious outlook.

Hence their Erinnyes, also, though originally spirits which were angry

but placable, easily became spirits, whether ghosts or gods, whose wrath

was almost implacable. But the Achaeans did not realise the nature

of these Erinnyes: and hence in Homer they almost assume the role of

ministering spirits, sent to warn or to punish. They are not wicked and

malicious, like the Harpies or the Sirens. Thus they are much more human

and less, so to speak, diabolical than the real Pelasgian Erinnyes, and

this is, perhaps, what Miss Harrison meant to convey when she said[113]

that ‘in Homer they are _personified_ beyond recognition.’ The Achaeans

could not appreciate the terrible potentialities of the angry ghost-god

of the Pelasgians, for the simple reason that they did not worship the

ghosts of departed ancestors or any kind of ghosts.

It would, however, be a serious error to suppose that the Pelasgian

Erinnyes were as formidable and as implacable as the Erinnyes of

post-Homeric times. Moreover, it is gratuitous to assume that ghosts were

primarily and necessarily angry because they had been murdered. There

is no evidence that homicide in Pelasgian times generated implacable

Erinnyes. We admit, with Miss Harrison,[114] that primitive man credits

his dead kinsman with passions like his own. But we have already pointed

out[115] that if the passions of primitive man are checked and controlled

by a tribal society which tramples upon individual instincts, and acts in

a collective capacity, if wergeld, according to tribal and early civic

law, permits a slayer to remain at home and guarantees him immunity from

vengeance while his hands are still wet with blood, we cannot reasonably

ascribe to ‘dead kinsmen’ a fierce and implacable desire for vengeance.

How comes it then, we may ask, that so many writers regard the evolution

of early Greek blood-vengeance, and a corresponding evolution in the

blood-thirst of the Erinnyes, as a transition from the wild to the

tame, from the fierce to the gentle, from the barbarously savage to the

rationally civilised? The reason is twofold. First of all, previous

writers have not distinguished between the tribally controlled Pelasgians

and the bellicose Achaeans, and have therefore misinterpreted the text

of Homer. Secondly, many writers have regarded the dark age of chaos

of post-Homeric Hesiodic days as a valid picture for early Greece as

a whole. This confusion has not only affected modern writers, but it

also affected the Greeks of historical times. The various legends of

post-Homeric times came to be regarded as a proper medium for the

interpretation of Homeric saga. The Athenians of the Periclean age

were compelled to regard as barbarians their forebears of pre-Draconian

times. It is most important to bear this point in mind, in view of our

subsequent analysis of homicide in Attic tragedy. We do not assert that

all the legends of Attic tragedy are ‘unhistorical.’ We shall see that

in Euripides many legends suggest a reference to a period which we may

describe as Homeric or, at least, pre-Hesiodic, and are so faithful a

reproduction of that age that they must be either attributed to the

most skilful conscious archaising on the part of the dramatist, or

regarded as genuine legends which had been transmitted with the least

possible adulteration. But most of the legends which we find in the Attic

tragedians and in the later epic and prose writers are either adulterated

saga, or inventions framed in imitation of such saga. To base a theory of

social or religious evolution on such legends is obviously to build upon

sand.

As an illustration of the confusion which may thus arise, we will cite

the legend of the Boeotian Athamas which is given by Herodotus[116] and

by Pausanias.[117] Pausanias says that Athamas, King of Orchomenus, slew

his son Learchus after having made an abortive attempt to sacrifice his

son Phrixus to Zeus Laphistius on a neighbouring mountain. Herodotus,

however, says that Phrixus was slain by Athamas, and that, as a

punishment for this act, an oracle decreed that the Achaeans of Thessaly,

to whom Athamas had fled, should purge their country by slaying Athamas

in sacrifice. When they were on the point of offering up Athamas, as

a ‘scapegoat’ for _their_ sins, Cytissorus, son of Phrixus, arrived

from Colchis and saved him! The natural avenger of Phrixus became the

deliverer of his slayer, even in defiance of the oracle! The gods, now

seriously annoyed, forbade the descendants of Cytissorus to enter the

Prytaneum of the city, and a mock human sacrifice was regularly offered

to make amends to the gods for their loss. We believe that this legend is

merely an attempt to explain two mock human sacrifices which survived, in

Boeotia and in Thessaly, in historical times, and that the fact of their

contiguity led to the association of Athamas with Phrixus in the legend.

Stories of this kind have suggested the theory that the rites of

homicide-purgation originated in human sacrifice: but they are merely

aetiological. Moreover the survival, in historical times, in barbarous

countries on the outskirts of Greece, of actual human sacrifice, and the

mock sacrifices of human beings which were offered at certain festivals

in various places, helped to confirm what stories of actual human

sacrifice in post-Homeric legend, and stories of bloodshed which could

be interpreted as human sacrifices in the Homeric poems, all seemed

to suggest, namely, the opinion that all the Greeks of pre-Draconian

days practised human sacrifice and were only induced to cease from the

practice by the device of a surrogate victim. But there is no trace of

real human sacrifice in Homer, certainly no trace of the sacrifice of a

murderer’s life to gods who demanded it.

We shall see later that, in the Apolline code, death was probably the

invariable penalty for kin-slaying,[118] and there was no ‘purgation’:

but in other cases purgation was possible, and in the purgation ceremony

an animal was slain. The conclusion which is suggested _prima facie_

by these facts, namely, that at one time human sacrifice was the only

purgation for homicide, is not necessarily correct. We believe it is

incorrect. We agree with Glotz[119] in deriving the purgation rite from

Chthonian sacrifice in its general aspect. In such sacrifice, originally,

human beings were probably offered, prior to, contemporarily with,

and even subsequent to, the adoption of animal sacrifice. We cannot

legitimately assume that the latter supplanted the former. Glotz points

out that religion, being conservative, tends to preserve in ritual

elements which civilisation has abandoned. Hence arose the mock-rites of

human sacrifice which took place in historical times.

The belief that homicide-purgation originated in the sacrificial slaying

of the murderer was encouraged by the similarity which existed between

the rites of homicide-purgation and the ordinary ritual of Chthonian

expiation. We shall see later that, in the ceremonial of purification

which was applied to persons guilty of homicide, from the seventh century

B.C. onwards, the blood of a slain animal was poured over the hands of

the slayer, and allowed to flow away into the sea or into a running

stream. Thus, homicide-purgation (καθαρμός) easily came to be regarded

as a kind of expiation (ἱλασμός); but it differs fundamentally in meaning

from expiation, inasmuch as it is symbolical of the fact that a social or

religious obligation has been discharged, rather than of the fact that

it is being thereby discharged. The sacrifice of an ox or a sheep or a

ram to a god or a ghost was _in itself_ a payment or a retribution. But

homicide-purgation (καθαρμός) was never permitted _until_ the slayer had

re-established his normal social equilibrium, had suffered the penalty

prescribed by law, namely exile, temporary or perpetual, and was ready

to resume religious communion with his fellow-men. Since, therefore,

homicide-purgation was rather a symbol of reconciliation than a medium

of expiation, it was more closely allied to the rites which accompanied

the swearing of oaths,[120] the giving of pledges and the making of

contracts. The animal on which an oath was sworn could not be eaten: so,

too, the pig or the lamb by whose blood a murderer was ‘cleansed’ could

not be eaten. Now it is unfortunate that such ceremonies, which were

really symbolic of reconciliation, should have been so similar to the

general ritual of religious expiation that they could easily be confused.

There is a vast difference in meaning between reconciliation and the

aversion of evil, yet all these ideas were confused in the general system

of Chthonian ritual. As an illustration of this confusion we may cite

a passage from Vergil, in which is described a rite which is really an

‘aversion of evil,’ a kind of purgation by anticipation. Urging the

farmer to be religious in the interest of his crops, he says[121]:

cui[122] tu lacte favos et miti dilue Baccho,

terque novas circum felix eat hostia fruges.

The milk, honey and wine here mentioned are the characteristic offerings

in the placation of ghosts.[123] The rite was easily transferred to

Demeter or Ceres, the Chthonian goddess, because of the natural tendency

of Chthonianism to identify the ghost with the god. The ceremony of

carrying a victim round the crops was not a symbol of atonement for

moral guilt so much as an aversion of quasi-physical evil spirit which

caused sterility.

Athenaeus,[124] describing the ‘purgation’ of an Arcadian city which

was necessitated by the visit of certain citizens from a town which was

polluted by bloodshed, says: ‘They made purgation of the city, carrying

“victims” round the city territory.’ The similarity of this ceremony to

the ‘aversion’ rite described by Vergil is obvious. Yet this ceremony

is somewhat different from the purgation of an actual homicide, which

we shall describe more fully later.[125] In the former a number of

victims are slain; in the latter, only one. Now, if homicide-purgation

originated in human sacrifice, and if, as Müller maintains,[126] wergeld

was suggested to men by the _de facto_ acceptance, on the part of the

gods, of an animal substitute, why was the number of animals sacrificed

in homicide-purgation limited to _one_? Why did men not offer to the gods

at least the _saraad_ or insult-price,[127] which generally consisted

of a number of animals? The sacrifice of only one animal in such a

ceremony cannot be explained by Müller’s hypothesis. It can, however,

be made intelligible if we assume a direct derivation of the rites of

homicide-purgation from the ritual which accompanied solemn oaths and

reconciliations. In such a ritual, only a single victim was slain: its

death was a kind of inductive symbol of the fate of its slayer, if he

ever proved false to his oath. But in ceremonies of general purgation,

such as Athenaeus describes, there was an element of expiation, or

aversion, and hence there was no limit to the number of victims, for

there was no such limit in expiatory sacrifice of any kind.

We shall see later how, in historical times, purgation for homicide was

inadmissible in cases of kin-slaying, unless the dying man forgave; even

then the slayer had to be exiled for one year before he could be purged

in his homeland: in cases of wilful murder, purgation of the slayer in

his own country was impossible at any time, but was possible, if not

compulsory, abroad: in cases of manslaughter, purgation could take place

at home when the conditions of exile and of the ‘appeasement’ of the

slain man’s relatives had been fulfilled. From such regulations we can

obviously infer that purgation was a symbol of reconciliation, but not an

expiation of guilt.

THE HOMERIC AND THE TRAGIC ERINNYS

We must now contrast what we may call the Homeric Erinnys with the

Erinnys of post-Homeric times and with the ‘tragic’ Erinnys. In

the course of our discussion we hope to suggest some reasons, more

satisfactory, even if they be more complex, than that which Müller[128]

gives, for the refusal of the Erinnyes in the Oresteian legends of Attic

tragedy to recognise the purgation of Orestes until they assume the rôle

of Semnai Theai or Eumenides. In our view there are just two reasons for

this refusal: one is the fact that the purgation-rites for homicide were

a symbol of reconciliation, not with ghosts, but with gods: the other

is the fact that the Erinnyes of Attic tragedy are a complex product,

reflecting the attitude of the relatives of the slain at different

periods, and from different points of view, in the post-Homeric era. We

shall see later that there must have been several different variants of

the Oresteian legend. The act of Orestes would have been approved or

condemned according as social custom, at any given epoch, recognised

the right of Apollo to command or to justify in advance the slaying of

Clytaemnestra, or the right of a State court to approve, or at least to

condone, an act which tribal society would have probably condemned.

We may thus summarise what we conceive to have been the different stages

in the evolution of the ‘tragic’ Erinnyes. We must distinguish clearly

between (1) the Pelasgian Erinnys; (2) the Achaean Erinnys; (3) the

post-Homeric pre-Apolline Erinnys, and (4) the Apolline or historical

Erinnys. In Homer there is a fusion of the first and second conceptions.

In Attic tragedy there is a most disheartening confusion of all four

conceptions. We must remember that the Erinnyes were not ordinary deities

possessing a stereotyped cult. Having attained divinity largely through

the personification or deification of an abstract cultus-epithet,

their nature was liable to vary according to men’s interpretation of

the meaning and origin of the epithet, and their forms could be freely

fashioned by the minds of poets and of legend-makers.[129]

(1) In regard to the Pelasgian Erinnyes, we have suggested that they were

divinities of different degrees of rank in the Chthonian religion. They

did not visit their wrath on a murderer if he paid the tribal penalty, or

even on the slayer of a kinsman, unless he remained in contact with the

domestic worship of his dead relative.[130] There was no ‘purgation’ for

homicide: because homicide was not yet an offence against _the greater

gods of the State_. The exile or death of a murderer or the payment of

wergeld appeased, of itself, the Erinnys of the slain: to refuse to

accept wergeld was impossible, in the organisation of the tribe.

(2) The Achaean Erinnys was an eclectic product. It was not Homer who

personified[131] the Erinnys because it was already personified, though

in that vague collective nameless manner in which alone a cultus-epithet

can be deified. The Achaeans conceived the Erinnyes as gods. For them

there are only gods and men: there are no ghosts or abstractions in the

galaxy of supernatural beings. The Achaean Erinnys has lost its connexion

with ghost-terror, though it retains sufficient traces of its Chthonian

importance to be treated with considerable respect. It is merely a

subordinate deity which executes the decrees of Olympian gods, but its

association with Zeus and the Moirae suggests the greater dignity which

it enjoyed in Chthonian religion. The connexion of the Erinnys with

curses is essentially Chthonian. All castes in Homer use the ritual of

swearing, but we cannot say how far the Achaeans understood the ideas

underlying the rite. The curse of a father or a mother was particularly

terrible in the Pelasgian domestic religion. But we cannot suppose that

the Achaean respect for parents, or their dread of curses, was as great

or as profound as that of the Pelasgians. The Achaean Zeus himself hurled

to Tartarus his aged father Kronos.[132] Hence the Homeric references to

parents’ curses, such as are found in the stories of the Achaean Phoenix

and the Achaean Meleager, indicate probably an assimilation of Pelasgian

ideas.[133] But the literary heirloom which the poet of the Achaeans

bequeathed to Greece helped to beget a false conception of the Achaean

Erinnys in the minds of later poets. The Achaean mode of blood-vengeance

and their desire of blood for blood caused later legend-makers to

attribute a veritable blood-thirst to the Erinnyes of murdered Achaeans.

(3) The post-Homeric pre-Apolline Erinnys—a divine being whose nature

can only be inferred by the logic of elimination—reflects in a more

emphatic manner the blood-thirst of the slain. In the relaxation of

Achaean military discipline which followed the Trojan war: in the great

invasions and migrations, and in the demoralisation of clan-control,

in a chaotic society such as Hesiod describes,[134] where force is

the only law, and justice, virtue, honour, hospitality, loyalty and

fraternal love have vanished from the earth, the Erinnys came to assume

a diabolical aspect: murder was confused with vengeance; the anger of

impotent avengers became implacable: and inexorable hatred was attributed

to the Erinnyes of the slain. At this period the gods were credited

with an approval of collective punishment[135] such as men themselves

practised. Nemesis became a god.[136] Kronos is now said to have devoured

his children, and Rhea, their mother, inflamed the Erinnyes against

him.[137] The blood-offerings which from time immemorial had been laid

at the tomb of the dead were now interpreted, not as a resuscitation of

the dead for purposes of necromancy or for the production of fertility,

but, in the case of murdered dead, as the satisfaction of an unquenched

thirst for blood. Curses became more frequent and more terrible than in

days when tribal law or military control rendered recourse to religious

sanctions less necessary. To this period we attribute the prevalence of

customs of which some survived to historical times, while others soon

became obsolete: we refer to the custom of writing curses on tombstones,

the custom of planting a spear in the grave,[138] and the custom of

μασχαλισμός, or partial mutilation of a corpse.[139] To those days,

rather than to historical Greece, apply the words of the Chorus in the

_Electra_ of Sophocles[140]:

The curse hath found, and they in earth who lie

Are living powers to-day.

Long dead, they drain away

The streaming blood of those who made them die.

In the _Ion_ of Euripides[141] we are told that around the Omphalos, or

Sacred Stone, were figures of the Gorgons. One editor[142] of this play

remarks that these figures suggested to Aeschylus the dramatic forms of

his Erinnyes. We are much more inclined to believe this, than to suppose,

with Miss Harrison[143] or with Verrall,[144] that Aeschylus invented

the dramatic form of the ‘tragic’ Erinnys. We shall see later[145] that

Aeschylus conceived the Erinnyes as Titans, as rebels against Zeus and

the Olympians. Whence came this rebel-rôle of the Erinnyes? The answer

will, perhaps, be more intelligible if we explain the nature of the

Apolline or ‘historical’ Erinnys.

(4) We are not concerned here with the nature of the cult of the Erinnyes

in historical Greece. We seek rather to describe the Erinnyes as they

were moulded in the minds of poets and of legend-makers in accordance

with conceptions of homicide which were modified by the Apolline doctrine

of ‘pollution’ and ‘purgation,’ and by the evolution of state-control.

We must postpone to later parts of our work the details of our theory,

and the more complete demonstration of its validity. We will merely

give here, as it were by anticipation, a summary of our conclusions.

The doctrine of ‘pollution’ which, as we think, came to Greece about

700 B.C., and which was gradually adopted in most Greek states under

the rule of the ‘aristocracy of birth,’ declared the homicide to be an

enemy to the gods of the State. His presence, in his native State, or in

the country of the slain, brought upon the whole community plagues and

pestilences and all those evils which the primitive mind attributes to

divine anger. In our opinion, such a doctrine was incompatible with any

further continuation of the wergeld system which had survived the age of

chaos. The abolition of wergeld, at the dictate of Apollo, the national

prophet-god of ‘aristocratic’ Greece, was a change which struck at the

root of the great tribal principle of retribution to the relatives of

the slain. Before the new doctrine acquired the prestige of traditional

custom, we should expect that a feeling of revolt would have manifested

itself in the sentiments of the old kindred of the clans. Such a revolt

would have been reflected, in legend, as an attribute of the Erinnyes

of the slain. This conception of a revolting Erinnys will explain the

Titanic rôle of the Furies in Aeschylus, and their refusal to recognise

the purgation of Orestes by Apollo.

There was another factor, too, which may have helped to give vitality and

realism to the rebellious rôle of the ‘tragic’ Erinnyes, especially in

Euripides. We shall see[146] that the Apolline doctrine did not abolish

every form of compensation. The relatives of a person involuntarily slain

were entitled to ‘appeasement,’ were, perhaps, permitted under certain

conditions to enter into what is known as ‘private settlement’—though

usually before ‘appeasement’ a certain period of exile was necessary.

Now if, as some maintain,[147] the ‘appeasement’ depended entirely on

the will of the relatives, and if the relatives had to be unanimous in

accepting the gifts or presents which constituted ‘appeasement,’ it is

clear that one single relative could have extorted enormous sums of

money, or otherwise have compelled the manslayer to abide in perpetual

exile. We shall argue, later, that the regular duration of exile for

manslaughter was one year, and that this custom implies the influence

of local control, on the part of judges or magistrates, directed

against the right to refuse ‘appeasement’ on the part of a slain man’s

relatives. Such a control would naturally have produced irritation

and dissatisfaction which, again, might have been reflected in men’s

conception of the Erinnyes. We shall see that at least one legend of

Orestes conceived his deed as involuntary kin-slaying. It was probably

this legend which represented some of the Furies as still implacable when

the Areopagus trial had declared Orestes ‘not guilty,’ or rather, immune

from further punishment.[148]

The main difficulty connected with the ‘appeasement’ of the Oresteian

Erinnyes arises from the fact that they are not unanimous in their

opinions about Orestes, and that some of them—the Erinnyes of

Clytaemnestra—are in violent conflict with the official opinion of

Apollo. At a later stage we shall be in a position to explain this

difficulty more clearly. At present we will merely cite a law of Plato

which is probably based on the old traditions of patriarchal tribes (as

they were modified in course of time by Apollinism), and which forbids

the slayer of a kinsman who slays under the influence of passion,

ever to return to domestic communion with his kindred, even though he

may return to his native state and undergo ‘purgation.’ We refer to

this law because it is possible to interpret the act of Orestes, from

Apollo’s standpoint, not as fully justified but rather as in a sense

involuntary, being extenuated by a religious command, as ‘passion’

would have extenuated it. Plato says[149]: ‘If a father or a mother

in a passion kills a son or daughter ... let them be exiled for three

years and be “purged,” but, on return, let the husband be divorced from

the wife and the wife from the husband ... and not dwell in communion

with (the family) ... or share with them in sacred rites.’ Now, in the

Apolline system it is probable that the murder of a husband by his wife

was of equal gravity with kin-murder which was punishable with death.

Coulanges points out[150] that the wife belonged to the domestic religion

of her husband, even though she did not belong to his kindred. In the

Pelasgian wergeld system husband and wife are ‘strangers’ in matters of

homicide; but in the Apolline religious system they are members of the

same hearth and home. Moreover, in historical times failure to obey the

Apolline laws laid the delinquent open to a charge of impiety, for which

the penalty of death might be inflicted. There is a suggestion of these

legal viewpoints in Apollo’s attitude when he tells[151] the Erinnyes

that Clytaemnestra, the murderess of her husband, was justly slain, and

that Orestes would have merited death if he had not slain her; and in the

answer of the Erinnyes concerning the act of Clytaemnestra, that ‘her

slaying was not kindred bloodshed’[152]; and that Orestes, the slayer

of his mother, must be pursued until he dies![153] Now, Plato suggests

that in the Apolline code exclusion from domestic religion attended the

‘extenuated’ slaying of a parent by a son, even when the dying parent

formally ‘forgave.’[154] Apart from the impossibility of the supposition

of a formal ‘forgiveness’ of Orestes on the part of Clytaemnestra, it is

clear that the Erinnyes of the Apolline era would have naturally objected

to the presence of Orestes in the home of his fathers. Thus they say, in

the _Eumenides_[155]:

His mother’s blood upon the earth he spilled.

Shall he in Argos dwell, his father’s home?

What phratry-altar can him e’er receive?

What common lustral water can he share?

But Orestes, fearing the Erinnyes of his father who naturally and

legally, in the Apolline system, pursue the relative who fails to avenge,

and who is ‘polluted’ almost equally with the murderer, cries out, in the

_Choephoroe_[156]:

The darkling arrow of the dead that flies

From kindred souls abominably slain

Should harass and unman me till the state

Should drive me forth, with brand upon my body.

So vexed, so banished, I should have no share

Of wine or dear libations, but unseen

My father’s wrath should drive me from all altars.

Thus, the Erinnyes seem to reflect the conflict of opinions and of

sentiments which would frequently have arisen amongst the relatives of

the slain concerning the guilt of a kinsman who had slain a kinsman.

They also, unfortunately, suggest the co-existence of conceptions of

blood-vengeance which are really to be attributed to different periods of

time and to widely different types of civilisation.

FOOTNOTES

[1] _Supra_, p. 80 ff.

[2] _Supra_, p. 78 ff.

[3] _H. and H._ p. 253.

[4] _Op. cit._ p. 251.

[5] P. 252.

[6] _Op. cit._ p. 135.

[7] P. 126.

[8] _Prolegomena_, p. 53, pp. 161-2.

[9] _Prolegomena_, p. 64.

[10] _Eumenides_, p. 106.

[11] _Ib._ pp. 118-120.

[12] _H. and H._ chap. vii.

[13] _De R. N._ i. 151 ff.

[14] _Eumenides_, 803-6.

[15] _Ib._ 833-4.

[16] _Ib._ 860-3.

[17] _Ib._ 905-10.

[18] _Eumenides_, 923-7.

[19] _Ib._ 939-49.

[20] _Ib._ 957-62.

[21] _Ib._ 977-87.

[22] _Four Stages of Greek Religion_, p. 43.

[23] _Infra_, p. 149 ff.; Glotz, _op. cit._ pp. 156, 182.

[24] See, _e.g._, Haddon, _Magic and Fetishism_; Burne, _Handbook of

Folk-lore_; and Frazer, _Golden Bough_, vol. i. et passim.

[25] ii. 40.

[26] ii. 42.

[27] Euripides, _Bacchae_, 111, 137.

[28] Aristotle, _Poetics_, ch. iv. (1449a); see, however, Ridgeway,

_Origin of Tragedy_, passim.

[29] See _infra_, pp. 120 ff., 298 ff.

[30] Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_, vol. ii. p. 650.

[31] viii. 41.

[32] F. de Coulanges, _op. cit._ pp. 35-40.

[33] _Op. cit._ p. 28.

[34] _Themis_, pp. 335, 447, 461.

[35] _Op. cit._ pp. 36, 160.

[36] Herodotus, i. 131.

[37] See, _e.g._, Cic. _Tusc. Disp._ i. 26, 65; Plato, _Rep._ ii. 378

A-D, 380 D, 381 D.

[38] _H. and H._ p. 262.

[39] Chadwick, _Heroic Age_, p. 418; Leaf, _H. and H._ p. 263 ff.;

Harrison, _Themis_, p. 491, _Proleg._ p. 299; Ridgeway, _J.H.S._ 1898, p.

34.

[40] _Il._ xv. 190 ff.

[41] Leaf, _H. and H._ p. 261 note.

[42] ii. 52; see Leaf, _H. and H._ p. 273.

[43] Harrison, _Proleg_. p. 35 and note.

[44] _Op. cit._ pp. 199-200.

[45] Leaf, _H. and H._ p. 273.

[46] _Ib._ p. 263.

[47] _Themis_, p. 134 note.

[48] _H. and H._ p. 261.

[49] _Ib._ p. 267.

[50] _Ib._ p. 267.

[51] _Supra_, p. 21.

[52] _Cf._ Halliday, _Greek Divination_, p. 242 ff.; Daremberg and

Saglio, Art. _Magia_.

[53] _Od._ xi. 23 ff.

[54] _E.A.G._ ch. vii. p. 494 ff.

[55] See, _e.g._, _v._ 153.

[56] _Od._ xi. 23-37.

[57] _Ib._ 51-2.

[58] _Ib._ 72-5.

[59] _Ib._ 90.

[60] _Ib._ 147-8.

[61] _Ib._ 153.

[62] _Proleg._ pp. 74-5.

[63] _Themis_, pp. 335, 445 ff.

[64] xix. 250-268.

[65] _Cf._ _Il._ iii. 268-292. So the Trojans offer black lambs to Zeus

and a black sheep to Ge, _Il._ iii. 103, 119, 246, 273, 292, 310; iv.

158. See Glotz, p. 156.

[66] _E.A.G._ p. 678.

[67] _Ib._ p. 642.

[68] _E.A.G._ p. 549.

[69] x. 520 ff.

[70] Ridgeway, _E.A.G._ pp. 328-9, 494-549.

[71] Harrison, _Themis_, p. 55.

[72] 226.

[73] _Georg._ iv. 545 ff.

[74] _Greek Tribal Society_, p. 6.

[75] See _supra_, p. 8.

[76] _Supra_, p. 9.

[77] _Op. cit._ p. 125.

[78] _Il._ ii. 669.

[79] _Proleg._ p. 64.

[80] _Infra_, p. 121.

[81] _Op. cit._ p. 52.

[82] _Proleg._ p. 214.

[83] _Ib._ p. 166.

[84] _Ib._ pp. 175, 184.

[85] _Ib._ pp. 213-214.

[86] _Proleg._ p. 215.

[87] _Ib._ p. 216.

[88] _Ib._ p. 53.

[89] _Ib._ p. 220.

[90] _Il._ vi. 200 ff.

[91] ii. 2. 3.

[92] _Proleg._ p. 221.

[93] _Ancient City_, pp. 125-6.

[94] _H. of G._ p. 172.

[95] _Eum._ p. 106.

[96] _Eum._ pp. 104-5; _supra_, p. 52.

[97] xxiv. 482.

[98] _Op. cit._ pp. 112-21.

[99] _Ib._ p. 123.

[100] _Ib._ p. 133.

[101] _Op. cit._ p. 228 ff.

[102] _Il._ iv. 146, xvi. 795; xxiv. 420; v. 31, 455, 844, xxi. 402.

[103] _Op. cit._ pp. 230, 231.

[104] _Ib._ p. 232.

[105] _Ib._ p. 153; _infra_, p. 141.

[106] _Cf._ _Il._ iii. 268-270, xix. 250.

[107] _Od._ xxiv. 545.

[108] Glotz, _op. cit._ p. 155; Dinarchus, 47; Antiphon, _Her._ 11; Paus.

i. 28. 6; Apoll. Rhod. iv. 715.

[109] See _Il._ ix. 572; _cf._ Müller, _Eum._ p. 161, on the worship of

Demeter Erinnys.

[110] _Proleg._ p. 172.

[111] Leaf, _H. and H._ p. 18.

[112] _Supra_, p. 102.

[113] _Proleg._ p. 215.

[114] _Ib._ p. 64.

[115] _Supra_, p. 109.

[116] vii. 197.

[117] ix. 34.

[118] _Infra_, pp. 142, 159.

[119] _Op. cit._ p. 153 ff.

[120] _Cf._ _Deuteronomy_ xxi. 1-9. In the case of homicide by a person

unknown, the Elders and Judges go to the nearest city and taking a heifer

they kill it, and all the Elders of the city wash their hands over the

heifer, saying ‘We know not the slayer.’

[121] _Georg._ i. 344.

[122] _i.e._ Ceres.

[123] See, _e.g._, Aesch. _Persae_, 203, 220, 609-17.

[124] xiv. 22. 626.

[125] _Infra_, p. 150 ff.

[126] _Eum._ p. 123.

[127] _Supra_, p. 7.

[128] _Eum._ p. 133.

[129] _Infra_, pp. 298 ff., 307, 366 ff.

[130] Coulanges, _op. cit._ pp. 125-6.

[131] See Harrison, _Proleg._ p. 215.

[132] _Il._ viii. 479, xiv. 203.

[133] _Supra_, p. 67 ff.

[134] _W. and D._ 182-193; _cf._ Glotz, pp. 226, 227.

[135] Hesiod, _ib._ 240.

[136] Hesiod, _Theog._ 223.

[137] _Ib._ 473.

[138] Glotz, p. 70; Dem. _contra Everg._ 69.

[139] Glotz, p. 62; Harrison, _Proleg._ p. 70.

[140] 1420 ff.

[141] 224.

[142] Bayfield.

[143] _Proleg._ p. 231.

[144] Introd. to _Eumenides_, p. xxxvii ff.

[145] _Infra_, p. 298 ff.

[146] _Infra_, pp. 143, 173 ff.

[147] _e.g._ Glotz, _op. cit._ p. 316.

[148] _Iph. Taur._ 965; see _infra_, Bk. III.

[149] _Laws_, ix. ch. 9.

[150] _Op. cit._ p. 54.

[151] Aeschylus, _Eumenides_, 213 ff., 617 ff.

[152] _Ib._ 212, 608.

[153] _Ib._ 210, 230.

[154] _Laws_, ix. ch. 9.

[155] 655-660.

[156] 285 ff.

BOOK II

FROM HOMER TO DRACON

CHAPTER I

SOCIAL AND LEGAL TRANSITIONS

SECTION I: Political changes in post-Homeric times: fall of

Achaean Empire and its causes: post-Homeric migrations: Achaean

survivals: the Hesiodic age of chaos: tribal stability and

decay: evolution of the Attic State: aristocracy and democracy.

SECTION II: Religious and legal transitions in post-Homeric

times: Asiatic-Greek intercourse: compromise between Asiatic

and Greek ideas adopted in regard to homicide: origin of

Apolline purgation-system: rise of Apolline influence:

organisation of theocratic nobles: Apollo and pollution:

extradition: origin of the laws of Dracon: proofs of author’s

theory from Greek legends, from Plato and Demosthenes:

pollution doctrine and wergeld: question of ‘legality’ of

‘private settlement’ for homicide in historical Athens.

SECTION I

Less than a hundred years[1] after the Trojan war, and some time about

the year 1100 B.C., the great and glorious rule of the Achaeans over

Greece came to an end. ‘Greece,’ as Leaf puts it,[2] ‘relapsed from

the temporary union imposed upon it by its rulers into its normal

congeries of loosely coherent cantons.’ The Achaeans did not, of course,

entirely disappear, but they ceased to maintain that unified control and

domination over Greece which they had enjoyed for two or three centuries.

The causes of this change are variously estimated. Historical analogies,

such as that of the Normans in England and in Sicily,[3] suggest in

general the brief duration of such a hegemony. ‘The domination of a small

military caste over a large subject population contains of necessity,’

says Leaf,[4] ‘the germs of its own destruction....’ ‘The _Iliad_ itself

gives us vividly, in the portrait of Agamemnon, the inherent weakness

of all hereditary military despotisms.... The time came ... whether

through the effort of the Trojan war which had reduced their numbers, or

through lack of moral grit following on too long a tenure of power, when

the Achaeans had to cast in their lot with their former vassals ... the

group system resumed its sway and the Achaeans were drawn into it.’[5]

Ridgeway, arguing from analogous instances, attributes the decay of

Achaean vigour partly to climatic influences, partly to the enervating

effects of luxury and power. In regard to this latter factor, he says[6]:

‘It is a known fact that the upper classes in all countries have an

inevitable tendency to die out ... the dwindling of the master races in

the Mediterranean, whether they were Achaeans, Celts, Goths, Norsemen or

Turks, must be in part accounted for by the mere fact that they formed in

each case the upper and ruling class, and could therefore afford to lead

a life of luxury which was the very bane of their race.’ For our part we

are convinced with Leaf[7] that ‘an invasion of Southern Greece by rude

tribes from the north or north-west swept away the Achaean civilisation

after the Homeric age’; that a military confederation of hereditary

monarchs and nobles, such as that of the Achaeans, could not have lost

its unified control if these inherent factors of disintegration had not

been supplemented by an invasion from without.

O. Müller[8] has pointed out that in Thessaly, the former realm of Peleus

and Achilles, there existed in historical times three strata of social

and political privilege: (1) the Thessalians, post-Homeric immigrants,

who ruled directly over the central territory, including the towns of

Larissa, Crannon, Pharsalus, Iolcus. (2) Perioeci or semi-independent

vassals, such as the Perrhaebians, the Magnesians, and the Phthiotian

Achaeans, who paid tribute and were bound to assist in war. (3) Penestae,

of Pelasgian stock, like the Helots of Sparta, who cultivated the land

and served in war, who had private rights but no political privileges,

who were, in a word, serfs, but not slaves. He mentions, further,[9]

that the Achaeans of the north coast of the Peloponnese remained in towns

and fortified strongholds, keeping entirely aloof from the natives; they

were still conquerors here, though they had become vassals elsewhere. In

Sparta there appears to have been a mingling of Achaeans and Dorians.

Thucydides says[10] that here ‘the few rule over the many, having

obtained sovereignty by victory in the field.’ That this victory was not

very decisive is suggested by the view, which is commonly held,[11] that

one of the two Royal families of Sparta was Achaean. The Perioeci of

Laconia were always considered Achaeans[12]; there were about a hundred

towns of Laconian Perioeci, both inland and on the coast; they paid

tribute to Sparta, but they had a monopoly of trade and commerce, and in

the time of Nabis were liberated and federated as independent states of

the Achaean league.[13] The Helots, of course, were serfs. They tilled

the soil, and lived in hamlets which made up the greater part of the town

of Sparta. They were probably Pelasgians, though they are called Achaeans

by Theopompus.[14] Similarly, in Argos and in Corinth there are traces

of pre-Dorian peoples who can probably be regarded as including some

remnants of the Homeric Achaeans.[15]

Leaf suggests[16] that the Dorians may have followed methods of conquest

similar to those of the Achaeans, yet he has no doubt that they were

identical in social organisation with the Pelasgians.[17] ‘Hellenism

as we know it,’ he says, ‘is founded on tribal distinctions, beginning

with the great racial divisions of Dorian, Ionian, and Aeolian in the

wide sense—the general name for all which did not belong to the other

two;—passing thence to the local state, Athenian, Spartan and the rest.

Each of these again is divided internally by tribe, clan, and family

systems of the most complicated nature. Upon these ramifying subdivisions

is based the polity, and largely the religion, of classical Greece.’

This statement is of first-rate importance for our theories concerning

post-Homeric homicide. It means, in effect, that, in spite of conflicts

and migrations, the dominant Hellenic or post-Homeric Greek society was

based on clan and tribal organisations similar to those of the early

Pelasgians. The militarist Achaeans of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_

must then be regarded as a solitary accidental ephemeral phantom which

crossed the stage of Grecian history never to return. The Achaeans who

survived the invasions either remained in isolated groups as in Achaea

and in South Thessaly, where they seem to have preserved for a time their

military character,[18] though they may, in course of centuries, have

evolved the mechanism of clan life: or they became subject Perioeci,

and were rapidly merged in tribal organisations, or they were accepted

as partners in government, as at Sparta, at Argos, at Corinth, and at

Sicyon, and, like the Roman _Patres minorum gentium_, developed along the

lines of tribal society. Their peculiar Homeric character disappeared:

they were Hellenised—which is to say, with Leaf,[19] that they were

‘drawn into’ the ‘group-system,’ which, after Homer, ‘resumed its sway.’

It was perhaps because of special circumstances that _Sparta_ developed

along peculiar lines of a quasi-Achaean and non-Hellenic kind. Thus,

Müller holds[20] that the Spartans represent a continuation of the

heroic age, a system of military rule over agricultural classes. So

Holm[21] says that ‘The Spartan monarchy was a continuation of that of

the Homeric age, only its authority was more strictly defined and became

gradually more limited.’ Grote,[22] criticising the opinion of Müller,

who holds that the Spartans were typical Dorians, maintains that the

‘institutions of Sparta were peculiar to herself, distinguishing her not

less from Argos, Corinth, Megara ... than from Athens or Thebes.’ Crete,

he says, was ‘the only other portion of Greece in which there prevailed

institutions in many respects analogous, yet still dissimilar.’ The

creator or inventor of the peculiar Spartan character, was, he thinks,

Lycurgus. We consider these opinions much more probable than that of

Gilbert,[23] who believes that the three Dorian tribes, known as Hylleis,

Dymanes, Pamphyloi, existed in the earlier days, at Sparta, as a social

organisation. The reference of Demetrius of Scepsis (about 100 B.C.)

to the existence of twenty-seven phratries and nine tribes at Sparta,

gives, of course, no basis for assuming their existence in post-Homeric

times. We have a special reason for emphasising the peculiarity of

Spartan institutions. A solitary reference in Xenophon[24] to a penalty

of perpetual exile for involuntary homicide at Sparta, in contrast with

the well-known penalty of temporary exile at Athens, has been taken

to justify the opinion that the murder-laws of Athens were peculiar

to herself. But, in our view, the peculiarity of Sparta[25] militates

against the validity of such a conclusion. We hope to prove more clearly

at a later stage that this conclusion is false.

The social evolution of post-Homeric Boeotia is a subject on which a wide

diversity of opinions appears to exist. Ridgeway[26] thinks that the

Boeotians were Achaeans: Leaf[27] supposes that they were Thessalians:

Müller[28] believes that they were Pelasgian Aeolians driven out of the

land which was afterwards called Thessaly, by invading Thessalians.

Leaf argues[29] that the Achaeans did not occupy Boeotia at the time

of their domination in Greece, but we do not see why they may not have

occupied that district at a later date. Bury[30] contrasts the ‘Boeotian

conquerors’ with the ‘older Greek inhabitants’ of Boeotia: Hogarth[31]

distinguishes between Aryan Boeotians and the non-Aryan Asiatic Cadmeans

of Thebes. We cannot attempt to decide between these various opinions,

and, fortunately, it is not necessary that we should do so. We have

indicated the probable fate of the Achaeans after the fall of Troy, and

for the rest we may be satisfied with the description of Thucydides.[32]

‘The country which is now called Hellas was not,’ he says, ‘regularly

settled in ancient times. The people were migratory and readily left

their homes whenever they were overpowered by numbers. There was no

commerce ... the several tribes cultivated their own soil just enough

to obtain a maintenance from it. They were always ready to migrate. The

richest districts were most constantly changing their inhabitants.’

Thucydides mentions, as rich districts, Thessaly, Boeotia and the

Peloponnese (except Arcadia). Attica, however, of which the soil was poor

and thin, enjoyed, he says, a long freedom from civil strife and retained

its original inhabitants. Hence ‘... the Athenians[33] were the first who

laid aside arms and adopted an easier and more luxurious mode of life.’

Again he points out[34] that ‘... Even in the age which followed the

Trojan War, Hellas was still in a state of ferment and settlement and

had no time for peaceful growth. The return of the Hellenes from Troy

after their long absence caused many changes; quarrels too arose in every

city, and those who were expelled went and founded other cities ... a

considerable time elapsed before Hellas became finally settled ... after

a while she recovered tranquillity and began to send out colonies.’

Glotz[35] paints a lurid picture of the homicide customs of what he

calls the Middle Ages of Hellenism (Le Moyen Age hellénique). ‘Passé,

le temps où toutes les forces du groupe se coalisaient spontanément,

instantanément, contre toute agression, d’où qu’elle vint. Le meurtrier

riche et puissant n’avait plus à craindre un aussi grand nombre de

vengeurs: il n’était plus contraint de fuir par un aussi formidable

soulèvement de haines.... Le meurtrier d’un parent pouvait avoir des

accomplices ou trouver des complaisants parmi ses plus proches....

Ainsi les homicides commis à l’intérieur d’une famille étaient moins

sûrement punis à l’époque où s’organisèrent les tribunaux de l’Etat que

dans la période précédente, où la justice du γένος avait encore toute

son efficacité.... Il y eut un moment où vraiment, dans certains cas,

le parricide n’avait rien à redouter d’aucune justice.’ The references

which Glotz here makes to the control exercised by the clan in cases

of kin-slaying are quite in harmony with our theory of the nature of

Pelasgian homicide customs, but they are quite inconsistent with Glotz’s

general hypothesis as to the nature of Homeric blood-vengeance. This

inconsistency is to be explained by the absence of that distinction

between the Achaean and the Pelasgian attitude to homicide which we have

made the basis of our reasoning. Moreover, Glotz is not quite sound in

supposing that the age of chaos began about the year 800 B.C. The date

of Hesiod is now generally regarded as approximately 850 B.C., and the

condition of things which he depicts must have existed for a considerable

time before that date. It was not a temporary or spasmodic condition of

things. Substituting, therefore, the dates 1100 B.C.-700 B.C. for Glotz’s

figures 800 B.C.-600 B.C. as the time-limits of the age of chaos, we may

accept as trustworthy Glotz’s description of the Dark Ages. He quotes a

Hesiodic passage to which we have already called attention.[36] ‘Rien

que désunion de père à enfants, d’hôte à hôte, d’ἑταῖρος à ἑταῖρος: plus

d’amour fraternel, comme jadis. Vite on jette l’opprobre sur les parents

qui vieillissent: on leur parle un langage dur et insultant, impie,

sans souci de la vindicte divine: on refuse à la vieillesse de parents

les vivres qu’on a reçus d’eux dans l’enfance: car on ne connaît que le

droit de la force.... Pas d’égards pour la bonne foi, la justice, la

vertu: au crime et à la violence tous les honneurs.’ Into this chaotic

condition, he says,[37] came the new religious doctrine of homicide as a

pollution. ‘La religion force la société à intervenir dans les affaires

de sang intrafamiliales, et la société agit non pas contre le coupable

mais contre la famille qui refuse d’agir.... Une idée nouvelle se fait

jour dans l’esprit des Grecs, l’idée de la souillure qui s’attache

à l’homicide ... la purification du meurtrier n’est pas une coutume

primitive ... n’était pas connue à l’époque homérique.’

In many such passages Glotz implies that in the Hesiodic age there was a

general weakening of tribal authority and of clan-law, a break-up of the

power of control exercised by the kindred, the phratry, and the tribe

over their members, in cases of homicide, and in other matters.[38] Yet

when Glotz comes to discuss the Solonian legislation, we find him still

speaking[39] of an anti-clan policy, of the desire of Solon to weaken the

clans. ‘Solon,’ he says, ‘fut nommé par la confiance de ses concitoyens

arbitre et législateur. Pour remplir cette double mission, il lui fallut

de toute nécessité affaiblir les γένη dans leur action extérieure et leur

constitution intime.... L’esprit même de la constitution solonienne est

opposé au classement des citoyens par γένη. L’Etat se met directement en

rapport avec les individus. Les groupes, il ne les détruit pas, il les

ignore.... Effet indirect des lois constitutionnelles, le démembrement

du γένος est le but immédiat et constant des lois civiles ... cette

signature de Solon, c’est l’hostilité envers les solidarités des vieux

temps.’ Again, he says[40] that at the beginning of the sixth century

B.C. ‘At a time when all cities had equally suppressed tribal or clan

responsibility (_la responsabilité familiale_) in common law, Athens

surpassed all others by the vigour of the blows which it struck at the

internal organisation and the civic action (_l’action sociale_) of the

clans.’ How can these apparently different view-points be reconciled? Can

we express the facts so that the apparent discrepancy will disappear?

We have seen that in post-Homeric times the long submerged group-system

of tribal society resumed its sway. Though the wars and migrations of

the period must for a time have weakened its power, yet ultimately, as

Thucydides says, ‘Hellas recovered tranquillity, and began to send out

colonies.’[41] The new doctrine of Apollo, which regarded homicide as a

‘pollution,’ was, we think, adopted about the seventh century, which was

pre-eminently the period of Greek colonisation. Henceforth the homicide

was conceived as an enemy not merely of the ghosts of those whom he had

slain but also of the gods of the new States which had evolved out of

chaos through synoekism. But Attica, almost alone of all Greek States,

was immune from the chaos of migrations and invasions and retained for

the most part its original inhabitants. Therefore Attica, more than

any other Greek State, required, for its political unification, a more

strenuous law-making, a more violent attack on the civic action of the

clan.

Yet we cannot suppose that the clans and tribes of the group-system were

destroyed in Attica any more than they were in other parts of Greece. All

through the historical era clans and tribes continued to exercise limited

powers and jurisdictions; the old ties of kindred and of neighbourhood

were maintained under the form of religious corporations long after the

group-system had lost its political power. All this is merely to say that

the old aristocracy of birth was replaced by plutocracy and democracy.

The various stages in this transition will be made clear if we give a

brief sketch of the political evolution of Attica, a sketch which is all

the more necessary because of the analysis which we shall have to give,

at a later stage, of blood-vengeance in Attic tragedy.

EVOLUTION OF THE ATTIC STATE

We need not allow ourselves to be detained by the obscure and conflicting

legends which centre round the birth of the Attic nation. Coulanges[42]

refers to the traditions concerning local kings of Attica before the

time of Cecrops. Pausanias refers to a kind of religious amalgamation

which was doubtless the concomitant of political synoekism: ‘Sacred to

Athene,’ he says, ‘is all the rest’[43] of Athens and similarly all

Attica; although they worship different gods in different townships,

none the less do they honour Athene generally. He points out that four

villages at Marathon were still in his time united in a local worship of

Apollo, and that legend attributed to Cecrops a federation of Attica into

twelve different states.[44] While Coulanges accepts the legend which

attributes to Theseus the political unification of Attica, he thinks[45]

that Plutarch[46] and Thucydides[47] are in error in supposing that

Theseus abolished the local prytanies and magistracies. ‘If he attempted

this,’ he says, ‘he certainly did not succeed; for a long while after him

we still find the local worships, the assemblies, and the kings of the

tribes.’

In theory the four tribes of ancient Attic society were Ionian tribes

which, in the days of oligarchic power, imposed their will upon the rest

of Attica. Müller[48] points out that there is a distinct change in Attic

mythology when we come to the Ionian Kings, Aegeus and Theseus. But Leaf

thinks it possible that the adoption of the four Ionian tribes in Attica

does not represent an Ionian conquest, but was due to the fictitious

self-inclusion of Attica in the Ionian race.[49] Bury holds[50] that ‘the

statesmen who united Attica sought their method of organisation from one

of those cities of Asia Minor which Athens came to look upon as her

own daughters’: that the names of the four Attic tribes,[51] Geleontes,

Aigikoreis, Argadeis and Hopletes, were borrowed from Ionian Miletus: and

that Attica was united into a single state in the period of what is known

as the life-regency (1088 B.C.-753 B.C.)

The tribal continuity of Attic life is most clearly indicated in the

excellent analysis of F. de Coulanges. The people of Attica, at the

birth of the Attic State, were governed, he says,[52] by noble clans

called Eupatridae who had abolished, about 1050 B.C., the power of an

hereditary monarchy. Some three hundred years later, these same noble

clans limited the power of the life-regent (a member of the royal family)

by insisting on an election being held every ten years. About 700 B.C.

annual election was in force, and the royal family was represented by

only one member in a government of nine archons elected from the Eupatrid

caste. These Eupatridae, who dwelt in scattered groups in Attica,[53]

created a united Attic State when they formed a confederation for the

purpose of defence and common worship. But the absence of sustained

danger from abroad and the development of mutual rivalry and internal

feuds diminished, at length, their pristine vigour.[54] Non-privileged

classes, herded together in towns and hamlets, saw in Eupatrid weakness

their own opportunity.[55] The introduction of coinage in the seventh

century and the expansion of trade and commerce led to the presence,

in Attic ports and cities, of a new nobility of wealthy merchants who

could not[56] aspire to enrolment in the exclusive Eupatrid tribes,

who could not be permitted to worship at the altars of tribal gods,

who were not, in fact, recognised as a functional element of the civic

organism. Naturally, these merchants imported new worships; they seized

on Oriental cults which, like Buddhism, excluded no caste. Conscious of

the barriers which confronted them, they often had recourse to armed

revolt.[57] The conflict ended at length upon the appointment of a

legislator who was expected to revise and to codify the laws. Dracon, the

first great Athenian legislator, certainly codified the laws, or some of

them at least. But being too loyal a Eupatrid, he failed to remove the

grievances of plebeian _nobiles_. Solon, a Eupatrid by birth, had the

advantage of being a merchant by occupation.[58] He first attacked the

large domains of the Eupatrids and their political power.[59] He assailed

their monopoly of judicial authority[60] by setting up a timocratic,

if not a plutocratic, Areopagus, as an alternative to the aristocratic

Ephetae courts, and by the institution of popularly elected Heliastic

juries which possessed at first, appellant, and later, universal

jurisdiction in Attic law. But it was only in the time of Cleisthenes,

about 510 B.C., that the four patriarchal tribes of Attica were removed

from the pedestal on which they had stood so long and which was the basis

of their political existence. Ten new tribes were created, on an entirely

novel principle of local segregation: new hero-cults arose: new priests

offered sacrifice, who were liable to annual election: and the four

Ionian tribes ceased to have any political meaning.

But they did not, therefore, cease to exist.[61] Obscure and hidden,

they still lived on. Clan-courts still sat to decide disputes regarding

property, adoption, and inheritance.[62] In the time of Demosthenes[63]

such courts imposed fines for the embezzlement of property. Homicide, in

particular, which from the eighth century onwards assumed a ‘religious,’

which is to say, a theocratic or patriarchal aspect, was in historical

times ‘purged’ and in certain cases ‘judged’ by the Ephetae and the

Exegetae who were chosen[64] from Eupatrid families.

We shall now proceed to consider the advent in Greece of that new

religious doctrine which for the first time declared the murderer to be

a sinner against the gods and debarred him for ever from his country and

his home.

SECTION II

RELIGIOUS AND LEGAL TRANSITIONS

The evidence of mythology and archaeology points so clearly to frequent

and continuous intercourse between the early Greeks and their non-Aryan

neighbours of Egypt and Asia Minor that up to quite recent years it

was possible to maintain that early Greek civilisation was derived

from African and Asiatic sources. Thus—to quote a writer easily

accessible—Mahaffy[65] held that to the Phoenicians and to the Egyptians

is to be traced ‘the prehistoric culture of Argos, Mycenae, Orchomenus

and Crete.’ There are, he thought,[66] Oriental, Assyrian and Syrian

influences in Mycenaean remains. Egypt, especially, was regarded as the

home of wealth and culture.[67] It is only in more recent years when

the explorations in Crete have shown, for example, that ‘compared with

the palace of Cnossus, the palaces of the Pharaohs were but hovels of

painted mud,’[68] that the early Aegean culture came to be regarded as

derived from an indigenous Cretan civilisation, and Minoans received

the honour which was previously accorded to the Phoenicians. It is now

recognised that the great period of Asiatic intercourse with Greece was

the post-Minoan period. The fall of the Minoan thalassocracy opened the

Aegean Sea to Asiatic traders. ‘The Phoenicians,’ says Bury,[69] ‘had

marts here and there on coast or island, but there is no reason to think

that Canaanites made homes for themselves on Greek soil.... Their ships

were ever winding in and out of the Aegean isles from north to south,

bearing fair naperies from Syria, fine wrought bowls and cups from

the workshops of Sidonian and Cypriot silversmiths, and all manner of

luxuries and ornaments: this constant commercial intercourse ... is amply

sufficient to account for all the influence that Phoenicia exerted upon

Greece.... The briskest trade was perhaps driven with the thriving cities

of Ionia, and the Phoenicians adopted the Ionian name ... as the general

designation of all the Greeks.’ In Ionia, Bury thinks,[70] occurred that

fusion of Semitic consonants with Greek vowel symbols which produced the

Greek alphabet. In close contact with the Ionian Greeks were the Lydians,

who were the first people to coin money (about 700 B.C.[71]) and who

transmitted the discovery to the Greeks and to other Asiatic peoples.

Needless to say, this discovery was of great commercial importance, and

incidentally rendered possible an accumulation of non-landed wealth. Now

Greek coinage, as Bury points out,[72] ‘was marked from the beginning

by religious associations, and it has been supposed that the priests of

the temples had an important share in initiating the introduction of

coinage. It was in the shrines of their gods that men were accustomed to

store their treasures for safe-keeping.... Every coin which a Greek State

issued bore upon it a reference to some deity.’

From these facts alone, apart from general considerations, it will be

evident how easy and natural it was that the Greeks should also have

received religious inspirations from their Asiatic neighbours.

It is very significant that the first mention, in Greek literature,

of the religious purgation of homicide occurs in an epic poem, the

_Aethiopis_, by Arctinus of Miletus,[73] who lived in the last half

of the eighth century (750-700 B.C.). In this poem we are told that

Achilles, having slain Thersites because he had ridiculed his tears

for the death of an Amazonian queen, went to Lesbos to be purified.

Glotz points out that the presence of Achilles at a sacrifice before

his purgation implies that the doctrine was not, at that time, fully

developed or understood.

Again, it is very significant that Herodotus[74] attributes to the

Lydians rites of homicide-purgation which, he says, are almost the same

as those which the Hellenes used. According to the historian, there

came to Croesus, King of Lydia, about the year 550 B.C., ‘a man, in

wretched plight, whose hands were not clean, a Phrygian by race, of

royal blood.’ ‘Having reached,’ he says, ‘the house of Croesus, this

man asked to have himself purified according to the customs of the

place, and Croesus purified him.’ After the ceremony Croesus asked his

visitor who it was that he had slain: the stranger replied that he had

involuntarily slain his brother and that, in consequence, he had been

expelled by his father and deprived of all his privileges. We shall see

presently[75] that involuntary kin-slaying could be purged abroad, in

the Greek purgation-system. We cannot conclude, because Croesus made no

inquiries prior to the ceremony as to the details of the deed of blood,

that therefore all kinds of homicide could be purged amongst the Lydians.

The very fact that the slayer requested purgation would, in the religious

atmosphere of the time, have been taken as sufficient evidence that his

deed was at least capable of being purged.

The conception of homicide as a pollution or religious offence is known

to have existed at an early date amongst the Hebrews, and we may hazard

the conjecture, though we find no express reference to the fact, that

a system of purgation was practised by the Hebrews, at least for minor

degrees of guilt. The penalties exacted for homicide amongst the Hebrews,

as amongst the Romans, were much more severe than those which prevailed

amongst the Greeks. We have seen[76] that in the normal operation of

homicide-purgation no religious ‘cleansing’ was valid while the civic

penalty remained unpaid. In Roman law, death was the penalty prescribed

for murder and for manslaughter: but for justifiable or justifiably

accidental homicide[77] there was no punishment, and religious expiation

could immediately take place. Amongst the Hebrews, a similar penalty was

exacted for murder and manslaughter. ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man

shall his blood be shed’ is the general principle[78]; and again: ‘He

that smiteth a man so that he die[79] shall surely be put to death: if

a man slays presumptuously with guile, take him from my altar that he

may die.’[80] For accidental or justifiable slaying, however, we find

that a mode of escape from the avengers of blood was provided: ‘If God

delivers a man into his hands,[81] I will appoint thee a place whither

he shall flee[82] ... and ye shall not take compensation for him that is

fled to the City of Refuge that he should come home before the death of

the high-priest. So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are.’[83]

We may assume, with some degree of probability, that in this class of

homicide, some form of purgation ceremony was customary. We mention the

Hebrew custom here merely to show the general trend of Asiatic thought in

regard to homicide.

We may, therefore, regard as highly probable the view which connects the

origin of the post-Homeric Greek notion of homicide as a ‘pollution’

with the Semites and Asiatic peoples. Glotz merely states his view of

this matter without giving reasons in support of his statement.[84]

‘Alors,’ he says, ‘les Grecs prendront aux Sémites les rites dramatiques

de leurs cérémonies purificatoires.’ There were, however, some important

differences between the original Semitic doctrine and the matured Greek

adaptation of it, as will be evident from a brief explanation of the

precise nature of the Greek ‘pollution’ doctrine.

THE GREEK POLLUTION DOCTRINE

At first, we think, there came to Greece a vague rumour of the doctrine

through the medium of the Cyclic poets. Greek priesthoods in Asia had

already adopted it because of their proximity to Asiatic races who had

developed it. But originating, as it did, in the centralised theocracies

which then existed amongst these races, the doctrine could be accepted

only in a modified form by the Greek people whose predominant political

institution was the city-state.

Traces of the doctrine in its early phase, prior to its formal adoption

in Greece, appear in the story of Alcmaeon. Thucydides,[85] in his

account of the islands known as the Echinades, in western Greece, which

were gradually, owing to the silting up of the river Achelous, becoming

part of the mainland, mentions the following legend: ‘when Alcmaeon,

son of Amphiaraus, was wandering over the earth after the murder of his

mother, he was told by Apollo that here he should find a home, the oracle

intimating that he would never find deliverance from his terrors until

he discovered some country which was not yet in existence and not seen

by the Sun at the time when he slew his mother; there he might settle,

but the rest of the earth was accursed to him. He knew not what to do

till at last, as the story goes, he espied the deposit of earth made by

the Achelous, and he thought that a place sufficient to support life must

have accumulated in the long time during which he had been wandering

since his mother’s death.’ This conception of pollution is very Semitic,

and reminds us of the Biblical allusion to Cain[86] as ‘cursed from the

face of the earth,’ but it is also to a certain extent Greek, since there

was not in historical Greece any purgation for wilful matricide or, if

we may trust Plato,[87] for wilful kin-slaying. In the Apolline era

Greek kin-slaying was punished, according to Plato,[87] by death, and it

was so punished in a later Israelite penal code. In the Pelasgian era,

kin-slayers, condemned to perpetual exile, were often compelled to wander

for years and years. Their wandering must have been almost proverbial,

yet its meaning was understood. But the picture of a kin-slayer wandering

till he finds an unpolluted piece of earth can only be attributed to the

fanciful interpretation of a novel religious law which as yet was not

fully comprehended. We have already discussed[88] Miss Harrison’s views

in regard to Bellerophon and the ‘plain of wandering.’ Apollodorus tells

us[89] that Bellerophon was purified by Proetus. Miss Harrison says[90]

‘in those old days he could not be purified.’ We agree that he could not

be purged in Homeric times, because the rite was unknown: if in later

times he was said to have been purged, it became necessary to suppose

that the crime which he committed was involuntary. But Homer says nothing

of Bellerophon’s kin-slaying.[91] It was probably an invention of later

minds intended to explain the Homeric reference to the ‘Aleïan plain’

which was interpreted as ‘the plain of wandering,’ after the analogy of

the ‘wandering’ in the legend of Alcmaeon.

We hope to show presently that this religious doctrine, which declared

in effect that homicide brought down the anger of the gods upon the

community which neglected to punish it, took definite shape in historical

Greece under the aegis of Apollo and his priesthoods and Amphictyonies.

In our view, the final form of the doctrine was a fusion or compromise

between the severer Semitic conception, on the one hand, and, on the

other, the tribal traditions of Greek homicide-customs, weakened

and disorganised, as they were, in the Hesiodic age of chaos, but

unmistakably local in their outlook, and reflecting still the attitude

adopted by the relatives and attributed to the victim. The Apollo of

the Greek race could not accept in its entirety the Asiatic doctrine

of pollution but had to modify it at the bidding of customs which were

sanctified by time. As we believe that the Draconian homicide-laws were

merely an eclectic codification of the seventh-century unwritten laws of

the aristocracies of birth, it would clearly anticipate our whole account

of the Draconian legislation if we were to explain at this stage the

detailed operation of the Apolline pollution system. We shall then give

here only an outline of the Asiatic-Greek compromise which we believe to

have arisen in the eighth or seventh century B.C.

In the first place wergeld was abolished, as amongst the Hebrews, for

wilful murder. This was the greatest concession which the new doctrine

extorted from tribalism. The new provision which declared the property

of the wilful man-slayer confiscated to the State when the slayer had

gone into perpetual exile we attribute to a third factor—the evolution

of State power: wergeld in the strict sense was also abolished for

manslaughter, but the slayer was allowed and commanded, after a period

of exile, to ‘appease’ by ‘presents’ the relatives of the slain. In this

we can clearly detect a concession wrung from what we call Apollinism by

the tribes. It is usually held[92] that in the case of manslaughter, and

Glotz holds[93] that even in the case of murder, ‘private settlement’

without trial was legal in historical Athens. We hope to show[94] at a

later stage that these opinions are incorrect, except in regard to one

special and rare contingency.

Secondly, there was a religious compromise which is reflected in the

ritual of purgation. In the Semitic doctrine of pollution, murder and

manslaughter could only be ‘purged’ by the blood of the slayer, which

meant, in practice, that the slayer could never be purged at all: but

the ancient traditions of the tribes and their capacity for discerning

the varying degrees of homicide-guilt led to a peculiar compromise, by

which Apollo and other State gods consented to accept the sacrifice of

a surrogate victim, when the atonement which the law prescribed had been

paid, the actuality of the atonement being _symbolised_, as it were, by

this Chthonian sacrifice of ‘reconciliation.’

Since Greece, unlike Israel, was a conglomeration of local civic

groups, and as tribal custom had accepted exile in default of wergeld

and prescribed different periods of exile according to varying degrees

of guilt, therefore, when the issue was knit between the new Semitic

doctrine of ‘pollution’ and the ancient tribal laws, the resultant

compromise produced a new law which decreed perpetual exile for all cases

of wilful homicide, including, we believe, originally, even kin-slaying.

The law of historical times which condemned the kin-slayer inevitably to

death was not, we have reason to believe, a product of the Asiatic-Greek

compromise. Like the law which decreed the confiscation of a murderer’s

property, it is, we think, to be attributed to the evolution of

centralised State government. In regard to manslaughter different periods

of exile were, no doubt, decreed according to the different degrees of

guilt: the despotic doctrine of theocratic Asia had, in this, to respect

the long traditions of tribal Greece: accidental and justifiable slaying

probably required no civic atonement. Apollo was compelled to admit

such slayers to immediate ‘purgation.’ In other cases, ‘purgation’ was

accepted when the prescribed atonement had been made.

Our account of this compromise in the Greek doctrine of pollution is

complicated by the presence of a third factor which had become more

and more important as Greek States increased in size and power, and

which must be indirectly attributed to the doctrine of ‘pollution,’

namely, the conception of homicide as an insult to the State gods and

to the State, not merely to the Sun, or to the Delphian Apollo, or to

some still more distant Orphic deity in the underworld. This conception

of homicide raises it at once from the position which it held in the

system of ‘private vengeance’: the murderer, like the traitor and the

man stained with sacrilege, now stands forth, if not as a criminal in

the modern sense, at least as a quasi-criminal, a vile being who has

jeopardised by his act the prosperity and the destiny of the State. He

is henceforth liable to ἄτιμία,—he must be degraded from citizenship: if

he waits for the verdict which declares him a State criminal, he must

die. If he flees, his property must be confiscated to the State, as was

the property of all ‘degraded’ exiles. Retribution to the relatives,

which is the basis of tribal wergeld, has vanished into the air, but the

murderer cannot now be buried in the tomb of his fathers: he can never

frequent the temples of his gods: he cannot even attend the public games

of all the Greeks lest the contact of his presence should pollute his

fellow citizens or the gods who no longer can tolerate his presence.

But, provided he avoids certain areas and festivals, he may live without

fear. A law of Dracon[95] declares that to slay such an exile was murder.

Thus we see how the old tribal custom which accepted exile as a complete

atonement, (not, as it was amongst Achaean militarists, a mere flight

from death,) was respected despite doctrinal innovations, because it had

been sanctified by time.

Glotz holds[96] that this immunity in foreign states of exiles who were

guilty of wilful murder in their home-land was due to occasional treaties

of ἀσυλία between Greek States. We shall see that such immunity was

more probably derived from Greek extradition law, and such law implies

international authorisation. It was precisely because such laws could be

made and enforced that Greek homicides required no ‘cities of Refuge.’

Thus, the Greek pollution-doctrine bears on the face of it the stamp of a

compromise between tribe and State, between local gods and international

religion.

But there was a further compromise, which we must also indicate, namely,

that which inevitably took place between the ghosts of the slain and

the purifying gods, the καθάρσιοι θεοί. We have argued[97] that the

chaotic centuries which followed the Achaean domination produced a much

more monstrous and bloodthirsty conception of the Erinnyes than that

which existed in the Homeric age. We have suggested that the revolt

of the clansmen against Apolline innovations which abolished material

retribution for homicide may have rendered still more ferocious and

implacable the Erinnyes of the slain. Yet when the Greek Apolline

doctrine of pollution was finally accepted by Hellenic tribes and States,

the Erinnyes, like the Titans, were subdued, and became so mild that they

could be identified with the Semnai Theai and called Eumenides! They

could live in peace again, as in Homer, with the Olympian gods whom they

had learned to loathe.

They had succeeded at least in imposing many old Pelasgian traditions

upon the autocrat of Delphi. In historical Greece, at least before the

third century B.C.,[98] the State could never take the initiative in

a direct prosecution for homicide, as modern States do. It could, of

course, bring a charge of Impiety against delinquent relatives of the

slain[99]: but the initiative rested in theory with those relatives.

The wish of a dying man who had been fatally wounded was expressed in

a formal ‘charge’ which he gave to his relatives, and this very often

determined the course of subsequent proceedings. ‘Forgiveness’ by the

dying man precluded a charge of murder. If a Greek of the historical

era, who had been fatally wounded, thus ‘released’ his slayer before

he died, the relatives were not bound to prosecute[100]: they could be

persuaded to refrain from prosecution by what is known as a ‘private

settlement’ with the slayer and his relatives. This, of course, was not

a genuine wergeld; and even if it was, we could not infer that pollution

could coexist with wergeld, for ‘pollution’ did not arise, in any real

sense of the word, as the Greeks interpreted it, when the dying man

forgave. Now we cannot conceive such considerations as these affecting

the theocratic ‘pollution’ doctrine of the Hebrews. The law which decreed

by divine command that: ‘Ye shall not pollute my land wherein ye are:

for blood defileth the land,’ takes little account of the wishes of the

dying or of the relatives of the slain. We must, of course, distinguish

‘release’ from ‘forgiveness’ in Greek law. ‘Release’ implies the absence

of any ‘charge’ by the dying man. In cases of involuntary homicide,

unless the dying man commanded his relatives to prosecute, no trial

or formal proceedings were necessary[101]: ‘private settlement’ was

permitted. Whenever therefore a trial for involuntary homicide took place

in historical Greece, we must assume either that the accused denied

the guilt and refused ‘private’ compensation or that the dying man

charged his relatives to prosecute. In this latter case the slayer was

polluted and had to undergo purgation when the civic atonement had been

made. Hence we may truly say that, within certain limitations, Greek

‘pollution’ depended on the will of the victim and of his relatives.

In the light of these details we can more easily explain the peculiar

fact that a man who had no relatives—and it was sometimes possible that a

metic, or a stranger, or a casual vagrant should have no relatives—could

not be avenged if he were slain. In the _Euthyphro_ of Plato[102] we

are told how a poor freeman who had killed a slave was put in chains by

his employer—it was a kind of informal arrest—till the verdict of the

Exegetae should be heard. The freeman died. It was not wilful murder, but

there was a certain degree of guilt, a certain amount of neglect on the

part of his captor, a certain ἀφυλαξία which laid the employer open to a

charge of manslaughter. Euthyphro, a son of the employer, feeling that he

was ‘polluted’ by the fact of living with his father, proposed to charge

him before the Archon Basileus at Athens; Socrates asks Euthyphro in the

dialogue if he was a relative of the slain. Euthyphro replies that he

does not see what difference it makes whether one is a relative of the

deceased or not; the important thing is that he is polluted unless he

accuses his father. Socrates implies that such an accusation is impious.

We can only regret that Plato does not tell us the sequel of this

fanciful drama. We think that Plato is sophistically exposing, if not

covertly sneering at, the inconsistency[103] of the pollution doctrine.

He objects, apparently, to the law which made prosecution the prerogative

of the relatives of the deceased, a law which was derived, we think, from

tribal traditions of ‘private vengeance,’ just as in other passages he

objects to the legends of the gods which more primitive generations had

created.[104]

We have said that ‘pollution’ was not confined to the murderer, but

extended, as if by contagion, to all persons who harboured or protected

him or neglected to punish him. Thus Plato says,[105] in regard to

kin-slaying: ‘The relative of deceased as far as cousins, male and

female, who does not prosecute ... shall take upon himself the pollution

and the anger of the gods.’ In this we see an aspect of the Greek

‘pollution’ doctrine which expressed the autocratic will of Delphi and of

State-gods in alliance with Delphi. But if the dying man ‘forgave’ or, in

certain cases, did not solemnly ‘charge’ his relatives to prosecute, this

autocratic will could be ignored. Thus, the Erinnys of a slain man had

a determining effect on the obligation of prosecution and on the nature

of the penalty. In the Oresteian legends as they were staged by Attic

dramatists, this twofold aspect of ‘pollution’ is never quite forgotten;

but there are complications in these legends which prevent us from

dwelling at any length upon them here.