vengeance. For this co-operation she is sentenced to exile by Castor and
Pollux,[29] but we are prevented from regarding the penalty as severe by
the further decree that she must become the wife of Pylades![30] It is
true that Pylades was absent from the actual slaying of Clytaemnestra,
but a short time previously he was present at the death of Aegisthus,[31]
although he took no actual part in the slaying. From the standpoint of
historical Attic law, he was therefore as guilty (or as innocent) as
Orestes and Electra were. Hence this decree of Castor and Pollux must
be interpreted prophetically; they are speaking of the future, which,
as gods, they foresee. Therefore they regard the exile of Electra as
temporary and her guilt as that of extenuated matricide. That the death
of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus involved their slayers in some degree of
guilt, in the opinion of Castor and Pollux, is obviously suggested by the
penalties which they impose. They say to Orestes[32]:
With justice vengeance falls
On her: in thee unholy is the deed.
Such sentiments can only be rendered intelligible by assuming the
existence of what we have described[33] as the second Attic legend,
which conceived Orestes and his friends as guilty of quasi-involuntary
homicide. Castor and Pollux are compelled by their foreknowledge of
destiny to believe that, some day, a court will declare the act of
Orestes to have been either justifiable or extenuated; that Court they
know will be the Athenian Areopagus. They cannot understand, perhaps,
why the court should be Athenian, but they know it must be so! From a
legal point of view, nothing could be more strange than their decree that
Orestes, pending his acquittal at the Areopagus, must leave his native
Argos. In historical Greece an accused kin-slayer awaiting trial would
only have been debarred from the temples and the public places of his own
State; he would have been tried before a court of his own State. He would
not have been tried by a foreign court unless he fled from his own State
and sought permission to reside in a foreign State. Hence to command
Orestes to leave Argos until he was tried at Athens is legally absurd.
The only explanation which we can offer for such an absurdity is that
Euripides is following either two separate legends or a fusion of two
legends, and that he uses the dramatic device of the _deus ex machina_ to
remove, or rather to obscure, the inconsistency and the confusion.
Again, it is strange that, in this play, Castor and Pollux, who, as
divine kinsmen of the slain Clytaemnestra, should appear in a diabolical
implacable rôle clamouring for blood, content themselves with the
promulgation of Apolline decrees which they do not profess to understand.
We can only explain this fact by supposing that in the story of Orestes,
as it evolved in post-Homeric times, the influence of Apollo, the pioneer
Interpreter and Purifier, was so great that no respectable local gods
could resist his decrees; and it devolved upon the quasi-diabolical
Titanic Erinnyes to unfurl the standard of revolt.
Castor and Pollux proclaim that, at Athens, Apollo will take upon himself
the guilt of having commanded the deed[34]:
For the blame
Apollo on himself will charge, whose voice
Ordained thy mother’s death.
In historical Greek law the plotter and the executor of bloodshed were
equally criminal and culpable. To partition blood-guilt was not to remove
it. Therefore, if Apollo can transfer to himself the guilt of Orestes,
this can only be because there is a doubt about the nature of the guilt.
But in estimating the nature or the extent of this guilt, the legends
seem to have been divided, some of them regarding the case as one of
justifiable matricide and others as one of extenuated matricide.[35]
Similarly the Erinnyes were divided in their opinion. Sometimes they
pursue Orestes in the rôle of avenging relatives clamouring for the trial
or extradition of a wilful kin-slayer who had fled to a foreign State
with the intention of residing there as an exile and who hoped to secure
admission by a plea of ‘justifiable slaying’; but sometimes they seem to
suggest that Orestes was not a matricide of full guilt, that the anger
of the slain was temporary and transient, and that it would ultimately
terminate in ‘forgiveness,’ because of the extenuation involved in
Apollo’s command.
This latter standpoint is undoubtedly implied in several passages in
the _Electra_: we shall find it also at the end of the _Orestes_,[36]
for Orestes is there condemned to a period of one year’s exile from
Argos and from Athens, and this penalty can only refer to involuntary or
quasi-involuntary slaying, and presumes, in the event of kin-slaying,
that the deed was either formally ‘forgiven’ or that, at least, it
merited ‘forgiveness.’ Plato[37] assures us that in such cases the anger
of the dead did not continue for more than a year. He refers to a sacred
legend which described how a freeman who had been slain was angry with
his slayer while his death was still a recent event, and in his anger he
harassed and worried the slayer, ‘using memory as an ally.’ This picture
seems to us very suggestive of the attitude of the milder group of Furies
in some Oresteian legends, but the attitude of the fiercer group is more
aptly illustrated by the following story from Herodotus which reveals the
nature of the implacable anger of the dead. Herodotus[38] tells us how
Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, was anxious to drive out of Sicyon the
spirit and the cult of the Argive hero Adrastus, and how, to secure this
object, he established in Sicyon the hero-worship of a certain Theban,
named Melanippus, who had slain a son and a son-in-law of Adrastus in the
war of the Seven against Thebes. Cleisthenes therefore anticipated that
by the magical induction of the spirit of Melanippus into a Hero-tomb
at Sicyon he could drive out of Sicyon the Spirit of Adrastus, because
Adrastus was still so angry with the slayer of his kindred that he could
not, even after the lapse of five hundred years, tolerate the presence of
the Spirit of Melanippus!
The meaning of the ‘conversion’ of the Erinnyes therefore varies
according to the dramatist’s conception of the rôle of the Erinnyes. In
Aeschylus the Erinnyes proclaim Orestes a wilful matricide, and their
‘conversion,’ which implies that they accept his plea of justifiable
matricide, must be regarded as symbolical of a transition in their
attitude to the social and religious aspect of homicide.[39] But in
Euripides the conversion of the Erinnyes symbolises not so much a
transition as a compromise. Thus, in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ some
of the Erinnyes refuse to be placated even when the Areopagus acquits
Orestes.[40] For them the issue does not lie between wilful matricide
and justifiable matricide, but between varying degrees of extenuated
matricide. Hence they reject a verdict of acquittal, because they
interpret it not as an indication that Orestes was justified, but as an
indication that he had already suffered a sufficient penalty for his
‘extenuated’ act of matricide. Some of the Erinnyes, however, accept
the acquittal, because they are satisfied that Orestes has sufficiently
atoned for his guilt.
The most severe and uncompromising attitude to the guilt of Orestes which
is found in any legend appears in the _Orestes_ drama, which we shall now
discuss.
THE ‘ORESTES’
The main theme of the _Orestes_ is the trial of Orestes at Argos, on
the charge of having slain, unjustly, his mother, Clytaemnestra. It
would not be correct—it would, in fact, be misleading—to assert that, as
the Euripidean _Electra_ corresponds with the Aeschylean _Choephoroe_,
so the _Orestes_ corresponds with the _Eumenides_. The points of
resemblance between these two dramas are much less important than the
points in which they differ. In this play we find, very strangely, a
reference to two distinct trials of Orestes, at two distinct places, in
two distinct States, namely Argos and Athens. But while the Argive trial
is described at great length, and forms in fact the chief topic of the
play, the Athenian trial is only casually referred to, in the closing
scene, as an event of the not too distant future. In the Argive trial
Orestes is condemned to death as an unjust avenger, or, which is almost
the same thing, as a wilful matricide. His act is conceived, we think,
as an act of culpable private vengeance committed in an atmosphere of
social justice. But at the end of the play, when Apollo appears on the
scene, the act of Orestes is presented, according to our interpretation,
as extenuated matricide, which involves a penalty of temporary exile.
The words of Apollo imply that when Orestes has served a period of
one year’s exile—the penalty which was prescribed by Attic law for
involuntary homicide—he will be declared by the Athenian Areopagus to
have sufficiently atoned for his partial degree of guilt and he will be
at liberty to return forthwith to Argos. Now these two verdicts, these
two conceptions, are legally incompatible. The verdict of the Argive
court is not found in Sophocles or in Aeschylus, and, needless to say, it
is not found in Homer; the Athenian verdict has, however, been rendered
familiar by references in Aeschylus, in Sophocles, and in the _Electra_
of Euripides.
Are we then to suppose that the Argive verdict was the invention of
Euripides? Such, no doubt, is the view of the matter which Jevons
and Verrall would adopt. They would probably see in the Argive trial
Euripides’ own idea of how Orestes ought to have been tried, and in the
use of Apollo as a _deus ex machina_ they would see a device by which
Euripides’ idea was brought into harmony with the traditional legend.
But we venture to suggest, as against such an hypothesis, that in his
account of the Argive trial Euripides is not putting before us his own
conception of the moral and legal position of Orestes. Euripides leaves
us in no doubt that in his opinion Orestes was not a matricide (_i.e._ an
unjust avenger) and that he was not worthy of death. Hence the attitude
of the dramatist is much more in harmony with the traditional Attic
legends which regard Orestes as a just avenger, or at most as an avenger
of merely nominal guilt, than with the attitude of the Argives and their
verdict of condemnation which is the predominant feature of the drama.
At the Argive trial all the speakers save one solitary individual are
opposed to the death penalty, yet only one speaker favours complete
acquittal. Now it was in the speeches that Euripides found himself
least trammelled by tradition, and if he ‘invented’ the Argive
episode—including the verdict—in order to provide, for an Athenian
audience, a thrill which the traditional accounts of the Athenian trial
of Orestes no longer possessed, why is he not consistent in attributing
to the speakers the sentiments which are expressed in the verdict? How do
we explain, on the ‘invention’ hypothesis, the fact that the Messenger,
in his account of the trial, takes the part of Orestes and condemns the
verdict? The ordinary Athenian of Euripides’ day, who regarded the matter
from the standpoint of contemporary law, could not possibly have approved
of the act of Orestes. Why does not Euripides express this disapproval in
his speeches, since he was free to do so?
Again, Euripides was an Athenian democrat, and the Athenian democratic
party were anti-Spartan and pro-Argive. In the _Andromache_[41] Euripides
reveals his democratic leanings by a bitter attack upon Sparta. In the
_Orestes_ he undoubtedly exalts an Argive court above the Athenian
Areopagus, but is there not a suggestion that the Argive verdict was
barbarous and unjust?
Again, if the Argive trial episode was the invention of Euripides,
would it not have been just as easy, and more consistent, for him to
have caused the Argives to acquit Orestes? If he was not fettered by
any tradition, would he not have represented the Argive verdict as
similar to, if not identical with, the predicted verdict of the Athenian
Areopagus? It may be suggested, as an objection to this view, that an
adverse verdict at Argos was necessary as a prelude to the Athenian
trial, and that Euripides was naturally anxious to include a reference
to the Areopagus, out of respect for the legends and for the prestige
of the Areopagus. The actual _Orestes_ drama supplies the answer to
this objection, for it ignores, almost completely, the Attic legends
of Orestes, and it shows very little respect for the Areopagus court.
Moreover, a favourable verdict at Argos could still have been followed
by a trial at Athens, if we merely suppose that the Erinnyes refused
to accept an Argive acquittal, just as the verdict of the Areopagus
could have been followed by a trial among the Tauri (if these people
had developed homicide courts), since in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ the
Erinnyes refused to accept the Athenian verdict.
Again, it is not very flattering to the Argives (and Euripides was
pro-Argive) to represent them as condemning Orestes to be stoned to death
at one moment, and as accepting, twelve months afterwards, a condemned
criminal as their king, simply because a different verdict had been
brought in by an Athenian court! In fact, to suggest that Euripides
invented the conjunction of two different trials, and represented one as
overriding the decision of the other—the foreign court having the right
to dictate to the native court—is to attribute to Euripides an astounding
disregard for international Greek homicide-law. The introduction of
Apollo in order to persuade[42] the Argives to accept Orestes as their
king would not be sufficient, on this hypothesis, to remove the insult
to the Argive people which is implied in the suggestion that they are
compelled to accept Athenian arbitration.
For these reasons then, and for others which will appear in the course of
the discussion, we do not believe that the episode of the Argive trial
was invented by Euripides. We admit of course that Euripides composed the
speeches, because he wrote the play! But we believe that he was guided
and controlled by a certain tradition, by the skeleton form of an Argive
saga which supplied him with the fact of an Argive trial of Orestes, with
the nature of the verdict, and perhaps with some remarks which were made
at the trial. While there are many elements in Euripides’ account which
could have been suggested by contemporary Attic thought, we think that
the skeleton-saga reflects, and therefore probably originated in, the
early historical era. The Achaean atmosphere is missing; Orestes was an
Achaean, but he was judged, in this saga, as the Achaeans would not have
judged him.
The reason why Aeschylus ignored this legend was that it obviously could
not be reconciled with his theory that the Orestes trial was the first
homicide-trial in Greek lands, it was less complimentary to Athens than
the Attic legends were, and it was too much at variance with the Phocian
legend, in which Apollo was the central figure and Orestes was conceived
as a just avenger. It was probably for similar reasons that Aeschylus
also ignored the Arcadian stories of Orestes, of which one seems akin to
the Argive variant, for it represented Orestes as never having returned
to Argos and as having died of a snake-bite in Arcadia.[43] Euripides,
however, apparently found the Argive legend more interesting than the
others, though he condescends to mention, in passing, the Attic and
Arcadian variants.[44]
If, then, Euripides reproduces in the same drama several different
legends, without any regard for their mutual inconsistencies, this is
probably because he aimed at variety and human interest rather than
consistency, and because he felt that he could always fall back, in
the last resort, on a _deus ex machina_ to help him to maintain the
appearances, if not the realities, of consistency.
In the beginning of the play Electra describes, though naturally she
does not accept, the prevailing attitude of the Argives to the vengeance
of Orestes. This attitude is post-Draconian. Orestes is conceived, not
as an Homeric Achaean, but as an Argive citizen of the historical era.
He is of course ‘polluted’ even before trial, and so also is Electra. A
preliminary decree of social boycott has been issued against them and the
sentence of death is foreshadowed as ultimately inevitable. Thus, Electra
says[45]:
Meantime the State of Argos hath decreed
That shelt’ring roof and fire and conference
Be interdicted to us matricides.
And this decisive day the State pronounces
Our doom, to die, crushed with o’erwhelming stones,
Or by th’ avenging sword plunged in our breasts.
It is strange that Helen, the sister of Clytaemnestra, who would
naturally have been expected to assume an attitude of stern condemnation,
assures Electra that she regards Orestes and herself as innocent, and
that she transfers the guilt to Phoebus:
With thee conversing I am not polluted,
Charging the crime on Phoebus.[46]
There is a suggestion of the Attic rather than of the Argive legend in
this attitude of Helen. Her words are very similar to those spoken by
Castor and Pollux in the _Electra_ in a dialogue with Orestes and the
Chorus[47]:
_Chorus_: O sons of Jove, may we presume t’ approach
And converse with you be allowed to hold?
_Castor_: You may: no curse this blood derives on you.
_Orestes_: May I address you, sons of Tyndareus?
_Castor_: Thou mayst: to Phoebus this dire deed I charge.
This confusion may be attributed to a conflation of ideas which had
already affected the Argive legend prior to the time of Euripides, or it
may be merely due to a lack of consistent discrimination, on the part
of the dramatist, between the divergent viewpoints of the Attic and the
Argive legends. In historical times a person accused of homicide was
not debarred from private social intercourse. He was merely prohibited
from frequenting the temples and public places. Plato asserts[48] that
there were degrees of pollution corresponding to degrees of guilt and
in proportion to the certainty of guilt. In this case, therefore, the
‘pollution’ of Orestes and Electra was of a minor character, since they
were both as yet untried and unconvicted.
Orestes naturally interprets his guilt from the standpoint of the Attic
and the Phocian legends, but he does not distinguish very clearly[49]
between justification and extenuation. He says to Menelaus[50]:
Yet have we where to charge our miseries ...
Phoebus, by whose command I slew my mother.
Again, he says to Tyndareus[51]:
See’st thou Apollo, who to mortal ears
Sounds from his central cave the voice of truth?
Him we obey in all that he commands:
Obeying his commands I slew my mother:
Drag him then to your bar, put him to death:
The guilt is his, not mine. What should I do?
The guilt on him transferred, is not the god
Sufficient to absolve me? Where shall man
Find refuge if the god, at whose command
I did it, will not now save me from death?
But the attitude of Tyndareus and Menelaus towards Orestes’ act which is
revealed in their conversation with Orestes is fundamentally different.
This attitude discloses a condemnation of private vengeance from the
standpoint of social justice. As we conceive it, this attitude would
normally have been adopted by Greek States, not only in Euripidean
times but also in Draconian times. We have suggested that Euripides
is following, in the play, a post-Draconian Argive legend—we use the
term ‘post-Draconian’ merely to indicate that the legend presumes
the existence of State interference in the trial and punishment of
homicide. This legend was therefore, as we conceive it, so historical, so
‘modern’—in a sense—that it demanded little or no conscious archaising on
the part of Euripides. Tyndareus says to Menelaus[52]:
If virtuous and dishonourable deeds
Are plain to all, who more unwise than he?
Deaf to the call of justice, he infringed
The firm authority of the public laws:
For when beneath my daughter’s murd’ring axe
Th’ imperial Agamemnon bowed his head,
A horrid deed, which never shall I praise,
He ought t’ have called the laws, the righteous laws,
T’ avenge the blood, and by appeal to them
Have driven his mother from the royal house:
Thus ’midst his ills calm reason had borne rule,
Justice had held its course, and he been righteous.
But the same Fury which had seized his mother
Had now seized him; and with ungoverned rage,
Justly abhorrent of her impious deed,
He did a deed more impious, slew his mother.
In this passage the historical Greek system of State trial and the
historical penalty of exile for wilful murder are clearly indicated.
We need not point out how inapplicable such an attitude is to Homeric
Achaeans.
The manner in which social justice abolished the evils of vendetta is
thus described[53]:
For, let me ask thee, should the faithless wife
Bathe in the husband’s blood her murd’rous hands,
And should th’ avenging son the mother slay,
His son retaliate by deed of blood,
What bound shall the progressive mischief know?
The wisdom of our ancestors ordained
That he who had the guilt of blood upon him
Be not allowed the sight, the walks of men,
By banishment atoning, not by death:
Else one must always be to death devote
Who hath the last pollution on his hands.
It was natural that the Greeks of the ‘pollution’ era—that is, the
historical period—should have referred to the chaotic vendetta which
their ‘fathers’ had abolished. But the Achaean vengeance-system was not
a chaotic vendetta, because Achaean military discipline and Achaean
public opinion were able to maintain a distinction between murder and
just revenge.[54] We have said[55] that it was only in the Dark Ages of
chaos and migration—that is, from 1000 B.C. to 700 B.C.—when the control
of tribal chieftains, of phratry-assemblies, and of clan-courts, and
the public co-operation of organised groups were paralysed and rendered
impotent, that the instinct and habit of vendetta was awakened from
its slumber. In the seventh century the doctrine of pollution and the
evolution of State power restored equilibrium by the institution of
the historical system of homicide law. But it was erroneously supposed
that the vendetta system which was thus abolished had always existed in
prehistoric Greece.
If in historical Greece Clytaemnestra had slain her husband, she would
have been tried by a regular State-court, and, as her husband was not
a kinsman, she would have been permitted, as Tyndareus here implies,
the option of exile. But Tyndareus does not correctly visualise the
Achaean mode of vengeance. He argues as if trials for homicide had
been always and everywhere operative. This anachronism, at least, is
absent in Aeschylus, who could not have attributed such an attitude to
his characters, since, in his view, the trial of Orestes was the first
Greek murder-trial.[56] Hence it is that the condemnation of ‘private
vengeance’ from the standpoint of social justice does not appear in
Aeschylus—nor, we may add, in Sophocles.[57]
Further, the suggestion of Tyndareus that Clytaemnestra could have been
sent into exile is an additional anachronism. In historical Greece a
wilful murderer usually went into exile. But the autocratic Homeric
Clytaemnestra remained in the royal palace with Aegisthus! Thus Tyndareus
again fails to reproduce the essential elements of the Homeric story.
Now Euripides elsewhere, as we shall see, frequently reproduces quite
correctly the Homeric atmosphere. If then he attributes here[58] to
Tyndareus a non-Homeric standpoint, it is not because he was incapable of
correctly archaising, but because he deliberately depicted a non-Homeric
Oresteian legend and attributed a non-Homeric attitude to the Argives.
The views which he attributes to Tyndareus are quite consistent with the
subsequent verdict of the Argive court, and with the sentence of death
for unjustifiable kin-slaying, which is pronounced against Orestes and
Electra.
There is a very archaic—an almost Homeric—tone in the words with which,
we are told, the herald ushered in the Argive trial[59]:
Soon as th’ assembly sate, the herald’s voice
Proclaimed free speech to all who wished to speak,
Whether Orestes for his mother slain
Should die or not.
In historical times such a proclamation could only be associated with
a trial which was known as an ἄγων τιμητός, concerning offences for
which the penalty was not fixed by law, and for which, therefore, the
penalty had to be determined by the court, as, for instance, the crime of
Impiety.[60] We have argued[61] that there were no homicide-indictments
(γραφαί φόνου) at Athens, but even if there had been there could not
have been any assessment of penalties in such cases, since the penalties
for homicide were fixed by law from time immemorial. It is therefore, we
believe, from the Homeric ἀγορά rather than from the Athenian Heliastic
courts that Euripides received his inspiration for such a proclamation.
Moreover, his description of the composition and of the general procedure
of this Argive court is very Homeric, and reminds us very forcibly of
other archaic pictures in Greek drama, such as the Council of Achaean
chieftains in the _Ajax_ of Sophocles,[62] and the Assembly of the Greeks
who condemn to death Helen[63] and Polyxena.[64] It is a herald who
conveys the death-sentence pronounced by the Greeks against Astyanax,
in the _Troades_[65] of Euripides. Thus we have in this play a strange
mixture of the archaic and the historical. We sometimes feel as if the
Achaean atmosphere had momentarily reappeared in the Draconian age, as
if Homeric heroes had been suddenly transformed into historical Argives,
without, however, having completely divested themselves of their Homeric
usages.
Pollux assures us[66] that at the Athenian Areopagus it was not permitted
to appeal to pity or to indulge in rhetorical persuasion, but it was
necessary for the plaintiff and the defendant to confine themselves
to the issues of guilt or innocence. Similarly, we may assume, at the
Delphinium court no discussion of general principles would have been
admitted, but merely evidential statements of fact. But at the Argive
trial in this play there is no attempt at an investigation of facts. The
speeches are entirely concerned with general principles. It is impossible
to maintain that Euripides is explaining, in this trial, his ideas, based
on contemporary practice, of the manner in which Orestes ought to have
been tried.
Talthybius, the ubiquitous herald, sets his sails to the wind, but he
cannot, unfortunately, decide how the wind is going to blow. He does
not approve of the vengeance of Orestes, because, he says,[67] it
establishes a bad precedent in regard to parents. This viewpoint ignores
the distinction between murder and vengeance. Orestes is conceived as a
matricide, pure and simple, and being a matricide his guilt is greater
than that of Clytaemnestra. It is regrettable, of course, that Agamemnon
was slain, but Clytaemnestra, his slayer, was not his daughter, but only
his wife! The Erinnyes, in Aeschylus,[68] advance a similar argument, but
in the _Orestes_ such reasoning is more logical because the Argive court
interprets the vengeance of Orestes as an act of barbarous vendetta and
assumes that such a mode of vengeance was already obsolete and unlawful
in his time. It is only by assuming that Orestes and Clytaemnestra were
both criminals that one can logically compare the act of Clytaemnestra
with that of Orestes and maintain that the act of Orestes was, because
of blood relationship, more criminal than that of Clytaemnestra. It is
thus that Hesiod,[69] living in an age of chaotic vendetta, would have
singled out for special condemnation the shedding of kindred blood. In
the Aeschylean drama, on the other hand, and therefore, as we think,
in the Attic legends of Orestes, ‘private vengeance’ is not definitely
and dogmatically assumed to have been obsolete and unlawful in the time
of Orestes. There is of course a doubt about the matter such as would
naturally have arisen amongst legend-makers of the transitional seventh
century. This doubt is, naturally enough, availed of by the Erinnyes of
the slain. But Apollo has no doubt about the matter. In the interests of
justice he commands a ‘private’ avenger to avenge.
After Talthybius, Diomedes utters a speech[70] in which he attributes
the guilt of matricide not only to Orestes but also to Electra, and
proposes not indeed that they should be put to death, but that they
should be banished from the city of Argos. He suggests, very curiously,
that the death penalty would be impious! It is difficult to find any
legal justification for this view. It is quite possible that Euripides
is depicting for dramatic purposes, with a complete disregard for law, a
variety of possible penalties. In Attic law a criminal who was convicted
in a matter of grave import was punished by a general penalty of ἄτιμία,
or loss of citizen rights; in some cases, such as parent-slaying,
this degradation of civic status involved death and confiscation of
property: in other cases, such as sacrilege, it involved death without
confiscation; in ordinary wilful murder, it involved either death or
banishment and confiscation, and in cases of malicious wounding the
penalty of ἄτιμία denoted simple banishment without confiscation. It may
be, then, that Euripides is applying such a gradation of penalties[71] to
a period when the penalties for crime were not rigidly fixed.
If we suppose that in this speech of Diomedes Euripides is consciously
archaising, his archaism is not very felicitous. For kin-slaying amongst
Pelasgian clans, we have seen,[72] the normal penalty was exile: for
kin-slaying amongst the Achaeans, the penalty was death. In historical
times, when private vengeance gave place to State execution, the
penalty was invariably death. Hence, Diomedes’ reference to impiety can
become legally intelligible only if it is interpreted according to the
standpoint of the tribal renaissance of post-Achaean days, when the
group-system resumed its sway. From such a standpoint the act of the
Achaean Orestes would have been viewed as matricide by the Elders of
the tribe and in the public opinion of the clans. If a tribal court sat
in judgment on Orestes in, say, the year 1000 B.C. and discussed the
penalty which his act deserved, it would have been natural to suggest the
exile penalty which was the normal punishment for kin-slayers. If then
Euripides has been so very subtle in his archaising as to have attributed
this proposal to the Argive Diomedes, he might at least have selected
for the mouth-piece of this utterance someone whose name was not so
inextricably connected with the Achaean domination!
After Diomedes, there rises up a bold bad man whom the messenger
describes as ‘an Argive who was not an Argive’[73] and who is generally
supposed to typify, in Euripides’ view, the Athenian demagogue
Cleophon.[74] His speech, we are told,[75] had been previously prepared
for him by Tyndareus, who, though the nearest kinsman of the slain
Clytaemnestra, does not speak at all at this assembly! His nameless
subordinate, however, proposed[76] that Orestes and Electra should
be stoned to death. This was the opinion which in a modified form
the assembly ultimately adopted,[77] though only one speaker actually
proposed it. Orestes succeeded in obtaining his request that he, together
with his sister Electra, should be allowed to end their own lives in a
respectable manner.
The penalty of death by stoning is not mentioned in Homer, in Attic law,
or in Plato’s laws. Was it, then, mentioned in an Argive legend or did
Euripides invent it? The penalty may have existed in the antique system
of tribal vengeance. Plato assures us[78] that the slayer of a parent or
a kinsman was stoned, _after death_, by the judges and the magistrates.
This custom was probably a survival of the more primitive custom of
stoning criminals to death. If the Argive legend of Orestes did not
mention such a penalty, Euripides is either archaising on the basis of
this survival or is importing into the drama an idea which he derived
from the crude customs of outlying ‘barbarian’ lands.
The sentence of the Argive court permitted suicide as an alternative to
execution. We do not know of any legal basis for this option. We have no
reason to doubt that suicide was always in practice, if not in theory,
accepted as an alternative for execution in historical Greece. Here,
however, the theory is accepted by a homicide-tribunal.
Before the verdict of the court was given, a nameless man, for whom
Euripides clearly feels much admiration,[79] a small farmer by
occupation, proposed to crown Orestes because he avenged his father by
slaying his impious mother, whose adulterous criminality was fatal, he
said, to the interests of a martial or militaristic society. We have
said[80] that the legal aspect of the vengeance of Orestes is complicated
to some degree by the fact that his mother was an adulteress. We have
argued[81] that death was not the regular penalty for adultery in Greek
tribal life, and we do not think that the Achaeans, like the German
tribes, followed a sterner code. It is difficult to derive any deductions
either in regard to homicide or to adultery from this argument, because
adultery and murder are mentioned in conjunction. The following words of
the nameless speaker[82] seem, however, to imply that adultery required
a more serious punishment than that which custom sanctioned:
For who in distant fields, at honour’s call,
Would wield his martial arms if in his absence
Pollution stains his wife and his pure bed
Be made a foul sty of adulterous lust?
A similar conjunction of murder and adultery is revealed in the words
of Orestes,[83] who poses as a pioneer in the application of the death
penalty to adultery:
Ye illustrious Argives ... to vindicate your honour,
Not less than to avenge my father’s death,
I did this deed. For should the husband’s blood
Leave on the wife’s hand no foul stain, full soon
The purple tide would flow, or you must sink—
O shame to manhood!—vile slaves to your wives.
Now she that to my father’s bed was false
Hath died for it. If you require my life,
The law hath lost its force: and who shall say
His own life is secure, as these bold deeds
From frequency draw force and mock at justice?
In Aeschylus and in Sophocles the only plea of justification which
Orestes advances is the command of Apollo. But in the Euripidean account
of the Argive trial Apollo is not mentioned at all. We cannot explain
this strange fact by supposing that it would have been unprofitable
to refer to him because at the end of the play the decree of Apollo
is accepted without question by the Argives. We cannot suppose that
Euripides, in his conscious archaising, is trying to visualise a
pre-Apolline Court, as he would probably, in such a case, have ignored
Apollo completely and avoided all references to pollution. The most
satisfactory and, to our mind, the most obvious explanation of the
absence of any reference to Apollo at the Argive trial is this: Apollo
appears in the Oresteian legends in the rôle of justifier and purifier.
Such a rôle is consistent only with the conception of Orestes as an
avenger of partial guilt or as an entirely justified avenger. It is quite
irreconcilable with the theory that Orestes was a wilful matricide of
full guilt. Now, the verdict of the Argive court conceived Orestes as a
guilty matricide worthy of death. The only speaker who approves of his
act does so not because he was a just avenger, but because his mother was
an adulteress. To introduce Apollo into a court of this kind would have
been to expose him to ridicule and contempt. Hence the attitude of the
Argives to Orestes, whether invented by Euripides or, more probably, as
we think, enshrined in an Argive legend, made it impossible to connect
Apollo with this Argive trial.
In the above quotation Orestes poses as a pioneer in the stern punishment
of adultery. We have already[84] suggested what we consider to have
been the evolution of the penalties of adultery in Greece. We have
quoted Pausanias[85] for the view that, at first, adultery was leniently
treated. A certain Hyettus, he says, first punished it by death, and
Dracon finally legalised the death penalty, but only for adultery
_in flagrante delicto_. We believe that this plea of Orestes was the
invention of Euripides. Seeing that he could not permit any reference
to Apollo at the Argive trial, he had to invent a new plea. But ancient
law shows no regard for pioneers. Until the law is changed the pioneer
reformer is a criminal. In our opinion, Greek law never adopted the
penalty for adultery which, according to Orestes, it ought to have
adopted.
In this quotation Orestes refers[86] to a law upon which he seems to
rely for his acquittal. ‘If you require my life,’ he says, ‘the law hath
lost its force.’ It is obvious that he is not referring to any law which
the Argives recognise, for otherwise they would have acquitted him. Yet
he suggests that such a law exists somewhere. We cannot suppose that he
is referring to an actual law which prescribed the death-penalty for
adultery, since he is definitely represented, like the nameless farmer,
as endeavouring to persuade the Argives to adopt a code of penalties
for adultery which would be more conducive to martial efficiency than
the existing system. In the _Troades_ the Achaean army conferred on
Menelaus the right to slay the adulterous Helen. But this fact implies
that no existing law would have justified such a slaying. Moreover,
there was nothing in contemporary Attic law or social custom to suggest
to Euripides that murder and adultery in conjunction could be legally
punished by death. Yet the law which Orestes mentions implies the
legality of such a punishment somewhere. We cannot suppose that Euripides
is indicating a contrast between Athenian and Argive legislation, for,
so far as murder is concerned, we believe that their laws were similar.
The explanation which we propose to offer for this peculiar reference is
an alternative one, such as we have suggested in regard to the speech
of Diomedes in the play. We believe that the law which Orestes mentions
is either a pure fabrication of Euripides’ mind, derived from the
supposition that archaic penalties were more severe than the penalties
of contemporary law, or an instance of conscious archaising, in which
Euripides attributes to an Homeric Achaean a discrimination in certain
cases between murder and just revenge. The former alternative is rendered
somewhat improbable by the fact that the Argives do not recognise the
legality of this ‘archaic penalty.’ The latter alternative is therefore
the more probable and suggests, if it is correct, that Euripides
could sometimes be very subtle and, at the same time, successful in
his archaising. According to this theory, Orestes suggests that he is
justified by a law of the Achaean caste. But the Argives, who reflect the
viewpoint of historical social law, reject a plea of justification which
would compel them to recognise the legality of private vengeance.
Between the conclusion of this trial of Orestes at Argos and the
appearance of Apollo as a _deus ex machina_ at the end of the play there
occur some exciting incidents, such as the seizure of Hermione as a
hostage and the murder of Helen[87] by Orestes. Apart from the fact that
Menelaus, her husband, is very angry and vindictive, no one else seems
to take much interest in the death of that famous woman who lived (and
died!) in so many places.[88] The argument used by Pylades to Orestes
in urging the death of Helen is very unscrupulous.[89] ‘Slay Helen,’ he
says, ‘and people will forget that you slew your mother.’ The slaying
of Helen was really murder, but Apollo ignores it. Legally, it does not
exist. Legally, its presence in the _Orestes_ is a grotesque anomaly.
But it has at least this value: it shows us how little Euripides cared
for the legal aspect of a story as compared with its dramatic vitality.
When Apollo comes on the scene, Orestes is in the act of setting fire
to the royal palace at Argos. Orestes’ threats of incendiarism, his
use of Hermione as a hostage, and the murder of Helen have delayed the
doom which was pronounced by the Argives until Apollo comes! But when
he comes,[90] how different is the picture! The conception of Orestes’
vengeance is completely altered. In an instant we pass from wilful
matricide to quasi-involuntary matricide. We breathe once more the
atmosphere of the Attic legend which we find in the _Electra_. Apollo is
not consulted about the problem which had occupied, throughout the play,
the attention of the Argive court, namely the question whether Orestes
pursued an obsolete course of unlawful vendetta and obeyed the dictates
of an Achaean system of vengeance which a later system of social justice
had superseded, or whether he did not. The only problem which confronts
Apollo is the question how he will most easily persuade the Argives, and
the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra, to recognise the fact that he, Apollo,
commanded Orestes to slay his mother and that, therefore, Orestes’ act
was either justified or at least extenuated.
The contrast in this drama between the attitude which Apollo adopts
in regard to Orestes and the attitude which the Argives adopt is so
obvious and important that the legends which incorporated these attitudes
could never have been reconciled. No Athenian with an interest in legal
problems could ever have thought of them together without mentally
contrasting them. But these legends, namely what we have called the
Argive and the Attic legends, are both found in juxtaposition in this
drama, and Euripides is naturally compelled to make use of Apollo as a
_deus ex machina_ in order to produce a nominal appearance of dramatic
unity. Euripides could not have ignored altogether the Attic legend. He
was an Athenian, not an Argive. The _Electra_ could have been written
without any reference to the Areopagus, but the _Iphigenia in Tauris_
could not. Thus, whether he is condemned or acquitted at Argos, Orestes
must in either event go to Athens! But before he goes to Athens, Orestes
must go into exile for a year in Arcadia.[91] Two problems now arise:
(1) Why is one year the limit of the exile-period? (2) Why is this exile
spent in Arcadia? The first question can only be solved by a reference
to the _Laws_ of Plato. In the _Laws_[92] Plato assures us that there
was a fixed penalty of one year’s exile which was applicable only to the
following homicide cases: (1) involuntary homicide; (2) slaying in a
passion (in which we include quasi-involuntary or extenuated homicide),
if the dying person ‘forgave’ his slayer; and (3) quasi-involuntary
kin-slaying, if the slayer was ‘forgiven.’ Of these three possible
cases, only the last can be relevantly[93] applied to the slaying of
Clytaemnestra by Orestes. Legally therefore it is necessary to regard
the act of Orestes as quasi-involuntary matricide if we wish to explain
the penalty which Apollo decrees at the end of the play. When Orestes
has served a period of one year’s exile, he will be ‘acquitted’ by
the Areopagus.[94] We cannot interpret this acquittal as a verdict of
‘not guilty,’ since on this assumption the preliminary penalty of one
year’s exile becomes either meaningless or unjust. It is a curious kind
of ‘acquittal,’ since it is intended to imply that a certain degree
of guilt has now been sufficiently atoned. In the Attic homicide-code
there is no reference to an acquittal of this kind, but Plato mentions
something which suggests that such an acquittal was a legal possibility.
Speaking of extenuated homicide, Plato says[95] that ‘when the period
of exile shall have expired, it is right to send twelve judges to the
borders of the State that ... they may judge of the pity to be shown and
of the return (of the exiles to their home-land).’ Now Apollo in this
play says[96] that Orestes will be tried by gods, not by men, at Athens.
Demosthenes gives the tradition more explicitly when he says[97] that
‘the twelve gods judged between Orestes and the Erinnyes.’
We have said that there were two Attic legends of Orestes, that one of
these represented him as tried by the Areopagus on a plea of justifiable
matricide, and the other, on a plea of quasi-involuntary matricide. There
is some difficulty involved in connecting the Areopagus with either of
these pleas. In regard to the first we must assume that the Areopagus in
early times tried pleas of homicide between strangers which were normally
tried by the Delphinium. In regard to the second plea, we suggest that it
is necessary to suppose that the ancient Areopagus would have tried pleas
of involuntary and quasi-involuntary homicide which normally came under
the jurisdiction of the Palladium court and of minor local courts. It is
therefore, we must assume, in the unusual rôle of a reconciling court
that the Athenian Areopagus ‘acquitted’ Orestes in the ‘second Attic
legend.’ That he was not satisfactorily ‘acquitted’ will be manifest[98]
when we discuss the _Iphigenia in Tauris_. Orestes had to leave Athens
and to undergo still further wanderings as an exile, because all the
Erinnyes did not recognise his ‘acquittal.’ We have already suggested[99]
that the Erinnyes in the Oresteian legend frequently symbolise the
conflict of opinions which sometimes preceded the consent of the
relatives of the slain to accept ‘appeasement’ in cases of involuntary
and quasi-involuntary homicide. The court to which Plato refers in the
passage cited above was a ‘court of reconciliation.’ The ‘twelve judges’
whom Plato mentions may have been suggested by the ‘twelve gods’ who
judged between the Erinnyes and Orestes. Such myths and such ‘courts of
reconciliation’ made it possible, we believe, for the creators of the
‘second Attic legend’ to connect Orestes with the Areopagus.
It is not easy to explain why Euripides selected Arcadia as the place of
exile for Orestes. First of all, there seems to have existed an Arcadian
variant of the Oresteian legend which associated Orestes with Arcadia
and maintained that he actually died there.[100] One of the Arcadian
towns was called, from Orestes, ‘Oresteum.’ Again, it is possible to
suppose that Euripides, who, in this drama, reveals a certain desire for
originality, should have selected Arcadia because Aeschylus and Sophocles
had exalted the association with Orestes of Athens and of Phocis, and
had entirely ignored Arcadia. But there may also have been a religious
or quasi-legal fact behind this idea of Euripides. We have seen that,
in Attic law,[101] a homicide-exile was debarred (_a_) from his native
place, (_b_) from the country of the slain, (_c_) from the State in which
the deed took place. The basis of these legal facts was sentimental or
religious. It was supposed that the spirit of the slain was not merely
intolerant of the presence of the slayer in civic proximity to his
burial-place, but was also indignant at the thought that the slayer
should be enjoying himself, as it were, and not suffering any real
hardships as a punishment for his crime.[102] Now, Argos was of course
forbidden ground to the exiled Orestes. But one legend said that he had
lived in Athens, another that he had lived in Phocis, before he slew his
mother. In these places he had made friends and companions. In these
places exile would not have involved for him sufficient hardship and
suffering. Arcadia, however, held no attraction for Orestes, and hence it
was to Arcadia that the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra desired that he should
go.
We can therefore, in the light of these conclusions, understand in their
full meaning the words of Apollo to Orestes[103]:
Thou, Orestes,
Quitting this country, in Parrhasia’s plains
For one revolving year thy dwelling fix,
And give the place thy name: that honour share
With Azan and with Arcas. Pass from thence
To Athens: there against the Furies urge
Thy plea; acquit thee of thy mother’s blood:
There in that awful court the gods shall sit
Thy judges; and thy just cause shall prevail.
After the lapse of a single year and after his ‘acquittal’ by the
Areopagus, Orestes may again return to the city of Argos. This return is
announced prophetically by Apollo to Menelaus, when he says[104]:
Thou, Menelaus, yield that Orestes reign
In Argos: haste to Sparta, reign thou there....
It shall be mine t’ appease the State to him,
Compelled by my command to slay his mother.
THE PROBLEM OF PYLADES
We may now consider a problem concerning Pylades which is presented by
this drama. As in Aeschylus and in Sophocles, so in Euripides, Pylades
co-operates with Orestes in avenging Agamemnon. But in Euripides the
guilt of Pylades is more clearly emphasised. Hence, we hear for the first
time that he is punished. He tells Orestes[105]:
My father in his rage hath banished me.
We saw that in Greek law the plotter, the co-operator, was as guilty
as the actual slayer.[106] Hence the problem of Pylades’ guilt depends
on that of Orestes’ guilt. If therefore Strophius, the King of the
Phocian land, punishes Pylades _pendente lite_,[107] we attribute this
to the autocratic power of a king on the one hand, and on the other to
the general principle of Greek law that an accused person was presumed
to be guilty until he had established his innocence.[108] Now, in the
_Electra_[109] Castor and Pollux declare that Electra will marry Pylades
and that he will take her to his home, but there is a suggestion that a
brief period of time, probably one year, must elapse before this event
takes place. We presume that he would be permitted by his father to
return, in obedience to the divine decree. In the _Orestes_ he is still
an exile from his home, as the guilt which he shares with Orestes has not
yet been atoned by exile. But has he any legal right to remain in Argos?
Orestes warns him that his life is in danger there, but Pylades replies
that the Argives have no power to punish him[110]:
They have no right: I am no subject here.
Which of these opinions is correct—that of Orestes or that of Pylades? We
have shown[111] that, in Greek law, accused and convicted slayers were
debarred from three possible States, of which one was the State of the
deceased. Demosthenes says[112]: ‘The boundary-line for all homicides is
exclusion from the country of the deceased ... from everything in which
the deceased in his lifetime had a part.’ We cannot of course suppose
that this law applied to unconvicted slayers, but we may presume that
they were at least debarred from the temples and the public places of
the State. Hence we can reconcile these two opinions by assuming that
Orestes is referring to the public aspect and Pylades to the private
aspect of residence at Argos. When Pylades asserts that he deserves
to suffer at Argos,[113] he is referring to the period which follows
the trial of Orestes, which involved, we presume, a condemnation of
Pylades. Menelaus asks if Pylades had a share in the slaying of Helen,
and leaves us in no doubt that his life is forfeit in Argos.[114] We
have quoted[115] Plato in support of the assertion that strangers were
liable to more serious penalties for homicide than natives were. But
this assertion only applies to convicted slayers. Hence it is possible
to accept the suggestion of Euripides that Pylades was not imprisoned at
Argos, as Orestes was, and that he visited Phocis before the trial of
Orestes.
THE PROBLEM OF ORESTES’ POLLUTION
From what has been said it will be obvious that Orestes is more
‘polluted’ in Euripides than he is in Aeschylus or in Sophocles. The
‘pollution’ of a person who was conceived as guilty of wilful and
unjustified matricide was the greatest and the most horrible kind of
‘pollution,’ and it is this conception of Orestes which predominates in
this Euripidean drama. At the end of the play the pollution of Orestes
is miraculously diminished. This is because Orestes is here conceived
not as a wilful matricide of full guilt, but as a quasi-involuntary
matricide who transfers the main portion of his guilt to Apollo. In Greek
law an extenuated act of homicide produced, even when the dying person
‘forgave,’ a minor temporary ‘pollution,’ which continued until the
slayer had endured a minimum period of one year’s exile and had appeased
the relatives of the slain. During this period of exile the slayer had to
abstain from three possible States, which we have already defined. But a
kin-slayer was in a peculiar position. Until the fact of involuntariness
was established before a court he was liable to be regarded as polluted
wherever he went. In Arcadia Orestes was not ‘polluted,’ according to
Euripides, perhaps because Apollo commanded him to go there, perhaps
because his residence there did not create any special anger on the part
of the slain Clytaemnestra. But in Argos he would have been polluted,
because Argos was his native State and could not therefore have been for
him a place of exile even if he had been guilty of involuntary homicide,
and not, as he was, of involuntary kin-slaying. In Athens, too, he would
have been regarded as polluted until he had been tried, especially if he
was accused (as he was accused, by the Erinnyes) of wilful kin-slaying;
but his pollution would have been that of an untried criminal, and
therefore public rather than private. We shall see in the _Iphigenia
in Tauris_ that he was, in a certain sense, polluted when he came to
Athens for his trial, and the Athenians based upon this ‘pollution’
an explanation of a peculiar ritual of which the origin was obscure,
namely the Feast of the Pitchers (χόες) at the Anthesteria.[116] Now in
Aeschylus and in Sophocles the predominant conception of Orestes is that
of an unconvicted matricide who pleads justification for his act; and if
we find, in addition, the conception of Orestes as a quasi-involuntary
matricide, this does not affect to any great extent the question of
Orestes’ pollution, because Orestes has already atoned for the guilt of
extenuated matricide. He has actually been purged by Apollo himself, and
he is still, so far as Athens is concerned, untried and unconvicted,
and therefore his pollution is minor and merely ‘public’—that is, he is
forbidden to frequent the temples or public places but he is free to
associate privately with his fellow-men. In Euripides, however, Orestes
is convicted of wilful matricide by an Argive court. His pollution is
therefore technically so great that no Greek city could receive him.
If his pollution is subsequently reduced to the minor pollution of
involuntary kin-slaying, this is only because Apollo acts not as a
purifier, but as a dramatic _deus ex machina_ who does miraculous and
impossible things.
Wedd, in his edition of this play, proposes a strange explanation for
the graver pollution of the Euripidean Orestes, which is based, as we
think, on a false interpretation of the dramatic ideals of Euripides.
‘In Sophocles,’ he says,[117] ‘all men will honour Orestes, in Aeschylus
he is welcomed as a deliverer, in Euripides the whole State rises up in
horror against him ... in Aeschylus, although Orestes flies for his first
purification to Apollo, many others aid in freeing him from guilt and
he associates with thousands in harmless intercourse; in Euripides all
doors are shut against him, all speech is denied him, none will perform
the purifying rites for him; the full rigour of Athenian law, which
refused to the parricide alone among murderers the right of escaping
death by flight, is exercised against him ... the attitude of the whole
State towards the matricide, the feeling of the murderers themselves
with regard to their own act, are precisely what would be expected if
in modern (? fifth century B.C.) Athens two children were induced by
an oracle to take the law into their own hands and put their mother to
death.’
This account of the facts is fairly accurate, but it suggests that the
Euripidean Orestes is a definite unitary personality, whereas we have
shown that there are at least two different conceptions of Orestes in
this play. The ‘full rigour of Athenian law’ is certainly apparent in the
Argive verdict, but Wedd assumes that Euripides, in this play, adopted
towards Orestes an attitude which ignored Homer and the Attic legends
made familiar by Aeschylus and Sophocles, and which paid no attention
to Apolline decrees. In this respect the account is misleading. It
is based on an erroneous conception of Euripides. According to Wedd,
Aeschylus and Sophocles adopted towards Greek legends an attitude
which was quite different from that which Euripides adopted. These two
dramatists accepted, he thinks, the legends in their main outline and
sought to reproduce them as far as possible in their archaic setting,
with the least possible admixture of ‘historical’ ideas. Euripides, on
the contrary, adopted a critical attitude to the myths and made it his
object _not_ to reproduce them for their own sake but to contrast them
with the more enlightened feeling of his own time. This interpretation
of Euripides is very similar to that of Jevons which we have already
discussed.[118] The arguments which we adduced against Jevons are
therefore applicable to Wedd, but we offer here an additional criticism
which is more definitely concerned with the _Orestes_ drama.
According to Wedd’s hypothesis, the trial of Orestes at Argos which
is described in this play contains the Euripidean conception of the
manner in which the myth should have regarded Orestes. We admit that
the viewpoint of the Argive court is in the main historical; by an
anachronism it identifies the world of Orestes with that of the Argives
of the historical era.
But the existence of an Argive legend which despite its lack of
archaism[119] was of considerable human interest would explain Euripides’
description of such a trial. The fact that at the end of the play[120]
the resultant verdict of the trial is ignored and reversed suggests
rather that Euripides regarded the Attic legend as more archaic and
therefore more correct than the Argive legend. We have already[121]
pointed out that the Messenger’s description of the trial and the
opinions of some of the speakers at the trial are more suggestive of the
dramatist’s own views than is the verdict of the Argive court. According
to Wedd, the _real myth_ occurs at the end of the play, and the rest of
the play is the invention of Euripides. Euripides did not agree with the
mythical presentation of Orestes, so he invented a new version which he
deliberately set in emphatic contrast to the obsolete Attic myth! In
our view, Euripides reproduces two pre-existing legends—an Attic and an
Argive legend of Orestes. The Argive legend he regarded as more dramatic,
the other as more orthodox but less replete with human interest.
According to Wedd, the graver pollution of the Euripidean Orestes is due
to the fact that Euripides conceived him as a fifth-century Athenian. For
us, the different degrees of pollution in Orestes are due to different
conceptions of Orestes’ guilt or to the different legal and religious
attitudes of the legends which the dramatists followed. They are not to
be attributed to any distinction in the attitude of the dramatists to the
legends themselves. The contrast is in the legends, not in the dramatists.
THE ERINNYES IN EURIPIDES
The conception of the Erinnyes in this play is naturally different from
the Aeschylean and Sophoclean conceptions. It is similar to but not
identical with the picture of these goddesses which we shall find in the
_Iphigenia in Tauris_.[122] It is, however, erroneous to suppose that
the Furies who in this play assail Orestes are conceived by the dramatist
as the subjective delusions of a madman. In our opinion, the Erinnyes in
Euripides, though not actually brought upon the stage, are as real and as
vital as the Erinnyes of Aeschylus.[123] If the psychical effect which
these goddesses produce upon Orestes is greater in Euripides, this is
because the Erinnyes stand, so to speak, like vultures beside their prey,
since the Argives are about to condemn him to death, and because Orestes
is conceived as irremediably polluted, a victim already ‘devoted’ to the
Erinnyes. Hence, naturally, at Argos Orestes feels that he is powerless
to struggle against the Erinnyes; his insight into the immediate future
and his contemplation of his approaching fate deprives him, temporarily,
of sanity and self-control. We must not suppose that a more tender or
more civilised and ‘modern’ Orestes realises his guilt more keenly
than does the archaic Orestes of Aeschylus, nor must we imagine that
this feeling of remorse and self-contempt produces the mental insanity
which creates a more hideous Erinnys. On the contrary, Orestes is here,
as elsewhere, subjectively innocent. He admits no moral guilt. If the
legend insists that he is guilty, if the public opinion of the Argives
decides to punish him with death, he does not admit the validity of this
conception or of the decision, but nevertheless his fear of the Erinnyes
naturally increases, since in death even more than in life can these
titanic monsters torture the slayer. Aeschylus makes them say[124]:
It is our fate to track the steps of men
By murderous wantonness polluted, till
Beneath the earth they pass, nor yet for them
Can death grant freedom from our power.
It is Orestes’ fear of such titanic monsters waiting to inflict on him
unspeakable punishment that makes him cry out in this Euripidean drama:
Ah! mother, do not set thy Furies on me.
See how their fiery eyeballs glare in blood,
And wreathing snakes hiss in their horrid hair!
There, where they stand, ready to leap upon me....[125]
And again:
O Phoebus, they will kill me, those dire forms,
These Gorgon-visaged ministers of hell.[126]
The conflicting attitudes of the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra and the
Erinnyes of Agamemnon which we found in the _Choephoroe_ of Aeschylus are
also revealed in this play. Speaking of his father’s Erinnyes, Orestes
says[127]:
Had I in silence tamely borne her deeds,
Would not the murdered, justly hating me,
Have roused the Furies to torment my soul?
Or hath she only her assisting fiends
And he no fav’ring power t’ avenge his wrongs?
We shall meet the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra in a somewhat similar rôle
in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_. But in that play the Erinnyes are not
united in their conception of Orestes as they are here. Those Erinnyes
who refuse to accept the ‘acquittal’ of Orestes by the Areopagus continue
to pursue him to the Tauric Chersonese. When Orestes sees them he cries
out[128]:
Dost thou behold her, Pylades,
Dost thou not see this dragon fierce from hell—
Rushing to kill me, and against me rousing
Her horrid vipers? See this other here
Emitting fire and slaughter from her vests,
Sails on her wings, my mother in her arms
Bearing, to hurl this mass of rock upon me!
Ah, she will kill me! Whither shall I fly?
The important thing to remember about the Euripidean Erinnyes is that
they are real goddesses, not mental fictions. The Furies of the ‘Argive
Scene’ are the Furies who pursue the criminal convicted of wilful
matricide. For him there is no cleansing. To him no land can offer
the shelter of its protection. ‘Alone, he has arrayed against him the
universe.’[129] Sooner or later he will be put to death and will be
delivered into the hands of the Erinnyes. But in the Attic legend Orestes
is not a wilful matricide. Hence the Erinnyes of the _Iphigenia_ drama
are not so implacable as the Erinnyes of the _Orestes_. They are placated
by the simple device of transferring an image of Artemis from the Tauric
land to Athens!
THE ‘IPHIGENIA IN AULIDE’ AND ‘IPHIGENIA IN TAURIS’
A comparison of these two dramas reveals at first sight a rather obvious
inconsistency. The Aulid play centres round Agamemnon’s sacrificial
slaying of his daughter at Aulis, while in the Tauric play the victim
reappears as a priestess of Artemis amongst the Tauri! It is generally
maintained that the last scene of the Aulid play, which describes the
substitution of a stag for the maiden by a miraculous intervention, is
not the work of Euripides. But in the _Orestes_ Apollo intervenes to
preserve the life of Helen, though he can do so only by deifying her!
In the Aulid play, also, Iphigeneia is said to have been saved from
death by deification.[130] In the Tauric drama, however, the daughter of
Agamemnon has once more assumed a mortal form and appears as a priestess
of Artemis among the Tauri. Nowhere else in Euripides can we find such
a magical atmosphere. If the human Iphigeneia was really saved, would
we not expect that her father and her mother should have been informed
of her deliverance? But they both believe that she is dead.[131] The
plea which Clytaemnestra advances in the _Electra_ of Euripides,[132]
namely that the death of Agamemnon was a revenge for the death of her
daughter, is based upon the reality of her death. Hence we think that
Euripides reproduced both these legends of Iphigeneia simply because of
their human interest and dramatic merit, without any special concern for
their consistency. It is clear that Euripides did not invent the Aulid
story, since it is found in Aeschylus[133] and in an epic poem,[134]
entitled the _Cypria_, of post-Homeric date. The Tauric story is not
found in any previous author, but we do not think that it was invented
by Euripides. Both legends suggest a similar source. Two hundred years
before Euripides[134] it was said that Iphigeneia was made immortal by
Artemis, who brought her from Aulis to the Tauri, and substituted for
her a stag-victim. As soon as Iphigeneia became a goddess she could,
like other goddesses, be easily transferred from place to place by a
simple transference of images. Herodotus says[135] that the goddess to
whom the Tauri sacrificed was Iphigeneia the daughter of Agamemnon. The
word ‘Iphigeneia’ was apparently a cultus epithet of Artemis[136] which
signified her connexion with fertility and her influence on the birth
of men and animals. The real as distinct from the legendary deification
of Iphigeneia was therefore due to the abstraction and personification
of a cultus epithet. The existence of a temple of Artemis-Iphigeneia
at Aulis, whence Agamemnon sailed to Troy, and the similarity of the
name Iphigeneia with Iphianassa (the Homeric name for a daughter of
Agamemnon), led to a belief in the deification of Iphianassa at Aulis.
Moreover, the survival at Halae, in Attica, in historical times of a
mock ritual of human sacrifice to Artemis induced the further idea that
Iphianassa had been deified through sacrifice at Aulis. The existence
at Halae of a statue of Artemis believed to have been brought from the
Tauric land, and the existence there of a temple to ‘the maiden’ at which
real rites of human sacrifice were enacted, explain the origin of the
Tauric belief which is referred to by Herodotus. Iphianassa, identified
with Iphigeneia, becomes a goddess among the Tauri, and Iphigeneia is
worshipped as the daughter of Agamemnon! The final transition to the
stage in which Iphigeneia returns to life as a priestess of Artemis at
Tauri is explained by reference to the ancient tendency to identify
the priest with the god and by the ritual of resurrection or re-birth
which is found in ancient fertility-religion. England[137] thinks that
this stage was probably pre-Euripidean but that the story of Orestes’
visit to the Tauri was invented by Euripides. We do not think that even
this story was of Euripidean origin. It belongs rather, we think, to
the legends of the wandering of Orestes, which conceived him as guilty
of extenuated or quasi-involuntary matricide which was ultimately
‘forgiven.’ When Iphigeneia was conceived as a priestess of Artemis and
at the same time as the sister of Orestes, the evolution of a story which
described Orestes’ visit to the Tauri does not, we think, require the
genius of Euripides. Again, the inconsistencies of this story with the
Aulid story which he has dramatised, with arguments which he introduces
in the _Electra_[138] and with other legends of Orestes, such as the
Arcadian legend, and, moreover, the insult to Apollo, the degradation
of Athene, and the exaltation of Artemis which this story involves—all
suggest a local origin for the story and the inspiration of theocratic
legend-makers rather than the invention of a dramatist.
In the _Iphigenia in Aulide_ the sacrifice of Iphigeneia is condemned
as murder not only by Clytaemnestra[139] but also by Achilles,[140]
whose promised marriage with Iphigeneia was the bait by which legend
lured her from her Argive home. This view, we have said,[141] belongs
to an age which has rejected human sacrifice and which interprets all
the traditional systems of blood-vengeance as unrestricted hereditary
vendetta. It belongs therefore to the border-line between the Dark Ages
of Greece and the civilised historical era. From the legal point of view
Clytaemnestra’s plea has no validity; we see in it rather a counterpart
to the plea of justification which Orestes based on the command of
Apollo. If Orestes claims the command of Apollo as a justification and if
this claim is disputed, then the command of Artemis to Agamemnon may also
be impugned. Artemis has the same right to obedience as Apollo has. If
the Furies of the dead Clytaemnestra rejected the Apolline oracle, it was
natural that the living Clytaemnestra should have repudiated the justice
of the decree of Artemis at Aulis.
The _Iphigenia in Tauris_ merits special consideration from our present
point of view. As the general _dénouement_ of the plot is sufficiently
familiar, we shall proceed _in medias res_. We may confine our comments
to the speech delivered by Orestes to Iphigeneia after their mutual
recognition. Omitting for the moment Orestes’ reference to the Athenian
custom of using separate drinking-cups on the Libation-day of the
Anthesteria festival, we will give first Orestes’ description of his
trial at Athens and of its immediate sequel. It will be noted that he
has already served a period of exile before he reaches Athens and
that the verdict of the Areopagus is not accepted by all the Erinnyes.
We have suggested[142] that the Erinnyes symbolise in this legend the
attitude of the relatives of the slain and that the Areopagus acts as a
court of reconciliation rather than as an ordinary homicide court. We
have seen that the relatives had always a theoretical right to refuse
to accept ‘appeasement’ in cases of involuntary homicide, according to
the Draconian law, ἁπάντας ἢ τὸν κωλύοντα κρατεῖν: ‘let all be appeased
or let one objector hold the field.’[143] We cannot suppose that the
Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra in this play assume the same attitude to
Orestes as they assume in the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, for in Aeschylus
the conversion of the Erinnyes signifies acceptance of the plea of
justifiable matricide. Neither is their attitude to be compared to that
of the Erinnyes of the Argive scene in the _Orestes_, for there they
conceive Orestes as guilty of wilful matricide. Their attitude here is
rather that of the ‘second Attic legend,’ in which Orestes is conceived
as a matricide of partial guilt—his crime being conceived as extenuated
by Apollo’s command. According to this assumption we can explain the
conflict of opinion which characterises the Erinnyes. It is derived from
a legendary conception of the Erinnyes as the symbols of the relatives of
the slain Clytaemnestra who are presumed to have refused ‘appeasement’
and to have resisted the verdict of the Areopagus, which was conceived as
a court of reconciliation rather than as a high State court adjudicating
with full authority on questions of guilt or innocence. Orestes says:
When vengeance from my hands o’ertook
My mother’s deed—foul deed which let me pass
In silence—by the Furies’ fierce assaults
To flight I was impelled: to Athens then
Apollo sent me, that, my cause there heard,
I might appease the vengeful powers whose names
May not be uttered. The tribunal there
Is holy, which for Mars when stained with blood,
Jove in old times established ...[144]
... when to the tribunal on the mount
Of Mars I came, one stand I took, and one
The Eldest of the Furies opposite:
The cause was heard touching my mother’s blood,
And Phoebus saved me by his evidence;
Equal, by Pallas numbered, were the votes,
And I from doom of blood victorious freed
Such of the Furies as there sate, appeased
By the just sentence, nigh the court resolved
To fix their seat: _but others whom the law_
_Appeased not, with relentless tortures still_
_Pursued me_, till I reached the hallowed soil
Of Phoebus.[145]
But Orestes’ visit to Delphi merely suspends, it does not terminate,
the pursuit of the Erinnyes. At this point the religious rather than
the legal aspect of the Erinnyes comes into prominence, and what may be
described as a magical mode of appeasement is indicated by Apollo when he
commands Orestes to visit the temple of Artemis among the Tauri, to bring
back with him the image of the Tauric Artemis and to deposit it in an
Attic temple. Orestes says to Iphigeneia:
From the golden tripod burst
The voice divine, and sent me to this shore,
Commanding me to bear the image hence
Which fell from Jove, and in th’ Athenian land
To fix it.... If we obtain
The statue of the goddess, I no more
With madness will be tortured.[146]
Here we breathe the atmosphere of religious expiation rather than of
legal atonement. The origin of this oracular command may be attributed
to Attic priests of Artemis, for in the temple at Halae there was an
image which was believed to have been brought from the Tauri.[147] This
expiation was not in any real sense ‘purgation,’ but it was sufficiently
similar in character to be readily confused with it.[148] We are reminded
of the expiatory sacrifice offered at the altar of the Erinnyes or
the Semnai Theai at the Areopagus by persons who had been acquitted
of homicide at the Areopagus court and by involuntary slayers who had
returned from exile.[149] We may recall also the expiatory festival
which Medea instituted at Corinth after she had slain her children and
put to death the King of Corinth and his daughter.[150] In this play a
mock ceremonial of purgation is performed in connexion with Orestes by
Iphigeneia. She says[151]:
The strangers come, the sacred ornaments,
The hallowed lambs, for I with blood must wash
This execrable blood away, the light
Of torches, and what else my rites require
To purify these strangers to the goddess.
It will seem curious that Thoas, a barbarian king, should admit the
necessity for such a ceremony, seeing that in the _Andromache_[152]
Hermione is made to say
Such is the whole abhorred barbarian race.
... friends by their dearest friends
Are murdered: deeds like these no wholesome law
Prohibits.
We shall see presently[153] that this sentiment was the outcome of
Hermione’s emotional attitude to the Trojan Andromache.
ORESTES AND THE PITCHER FEAST
The suggestion of Orestes that his ‘pollution,’ when he reached the
Attic land, was the origin of the Attic rite which prescribed the use of
separate cups on the second day of the Anthesteria is of interest as an
illustration of what is known as the aetiological myth. Orestes says to
Iphigeneia[154]:
There arrived,
None willingly received me, by the gods
As one abhorred: and they, who felt the touch
Of shame, the hospitable board alone
Yielded, and though one common roof beneath,
Their silence showing they disdained to hold
Converse with me, I took from them apart
A lone repast; to each was placed a bowl
Of the same measure: this they filled with wine,
And bathed their spirits in delight. Unmeet
I deemed it to express offence at those
Who entertained me, but in silence grieved,
Showing a cheer as though I marked it not,
And sighed for that I shed my mother’s blood.
A feast, I hear, at Athens is ordained
From this my evil plight, e’en yet observed,
In which the equal-measured bowl then used
Is by that people held in honour high.
Euripides is not our only authority for such a myth. Its existence is
confirmed by Athenaeus[155] and by Suidas.[156] It is not probable that
Euripides himself invented it. At the Libation-feast which was known
as the ‘Cups’ (χόες) an unusual custom decreed that each man should
drink from a separate goblet and forbade any suggestion of collective
drinking such as attached to the ordinary wine-bowl. The Athenians did
not understand the real origin of this rite. In the strange blending
of joy and sorrow which characterised this Dionysiac festival, they
overlooked the connexion which existed between the public civic offering,
at this festival, of libations to dead ancestors of the citizens as a
whole and the primitive tomb-offerings (χοαί) of tribal ancestor-worship.
Coulanges has indicated[157] the private, individual, or domestic nature
of such tomb-offerings. He goes so far as to suggest that the origin
of private ownership in land is to be attributed to the exclusive and
non-communistic character of primitive ancestor-worship. Even in Solon’s
time the laws defined rigidly the limit of relationship to the deceased
which permitted a relative’s presence at the funeral.[158] The worship
of Dionysus had many affinities with the worship of the dead. It is in
such affinities that we must seek, in the last resort, the explanation
of the gloom and morbid mourning which permeates all Greek tragedy. But
we cannot suppose that the Dionysiac festival was able to import an
aspect of civic communism into the essentially local and tribal ritual
of tomb-libations. Hence, we believe a compromise was accepted in which
men were permitted to drink together at a public libation-festival but
were compelled to drink from separate vessels and to sit at separate
tables! Such, we believe, was the real origin of this strange rite. But
the Athenians, who were ignorant of its true origin, sought to find for
it at least an intelligible explanation. They knew from the Attic legends
of Orestes that this Argive prince had come to Athens for his trial. They
knew that a kin-slayer who had not yet been tried and declared innocent
was ‘polluted’ with a minor kind[159] of pollution wherever he went. His
purgation by Apollo was legally valid for Phocis if an Apolline court
had declared him innocent. But in the Attic legends he was untried and
therefore unpurged. They argued therefore that when Orestes came to
Athens to submit to trial on a charge of kin-slaying, he was prohibited
from public civic and religious communion with Athenian citizens. It does
not matter in this connexion whether the plea of Orestes was justifiable
matricide or extenuated matricide. As he had been proclaimed as an unjust
slayer by the avengers, who in this case were the Erinnyes, he was
‘polluted’ until he had either established his innocence or indicated
the completion of his atonement to a court of reconciliation. Now
‘pollution’ was regarded by the ancients as a disease of a quasi-physical
nature. Murder courts had to be held, even by night, in the open air.
The ‘polluted’ man could not enter the temples or the market-place. He
could not eat at anyone’s table. He was isolated from public life. His
civic existence was suspended. If, then, it be supposed that Orestes
arrived for his trial at Athens during the Anthesteria festival, he
could not have been received into civic or religious communion. Hence
the creators of this myth could quite naturally have conceived that a
compromise was agreed upon by which the Athenians preserved, on the one
hand, their reputation for hospitality, and respected, on the other, the
religion of pollution. They admitted Orestes to the public feast, but
they insisted that he should sit apart and drink from a separate vessel!
It was thus that the Athenians explained the origin of this rite: nor is
the explanation to be regarded as ‘anomalous’ or ‘artificial,’ as Miss
Harrison suggests.[160] To people who were ignorant of the real origin
of the Pitcher Feast, this was at least a respectable and intelligible
aetiology.
Orestes says to Iphigeneia that he had some difficulty in refraining
from rebuking his hosts on this occasion.[161] Miss Harrison’s
explanation[162] of this statement is that Orestes was mad! But we
are convinced that Orestes was not mad, either at Athens or amongst
the Tauri, though he may have been temporarily insane amongst the
Argives.[163]
We have seen that there were conflicting opinions concerning the guilt of
Orestes in different legends. The predominant opinion in Aeschylus and in
the legend (probably Phocian) which referred to his purgation by Apollo
suggests that his act was justified. The Argive legend which we have met
in the _Orestes_ of Euripides conceived his act as wilful matricide which
involved an eternal pollution. But the prevailing conception of Orestes’
act which we find in the legends of post-Homeric times regards him as
guilty of matricide extenuated through Apollo’s command. The dramatic
attempt to unify these various legends is the source of the complexity of
the problem of Oresteian blood-vengeance in Euripides. It is impossible
to analyse successfully the legal and religious position of a hero who
is tried and who is at the same time untried, who is eternally and who
is at the same time temporarily polluted, in one and the same drama! But
the myth of the Pitcher Feast was based on a well-defined tradition. It
ignored the Argive and the Phocian legends, it ignored also what we have
called the first Attic legend, and it considered only the second Attic
legend from which the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ drama was ultimately derived.
The surprise which Orestes feels at the partial social boycott which
confronts him in Athens is, we think, to be attributed to the coexistence
of the Attic and the Phocian legends. In the Phocian legend Orestes was
tried and purged, therefore he could visit any Greek city with impunity.
But the Attic legend suggested that this purgation, though valid for
Phocis, could not be accepted by the Athenians, so long as the avenging
Erinnyes pursued, until Orestes had been acquitted by an Athenian court.
This conflict of legendary view-points explains, we believe, the
divergence of opinions which is suggested by these words.
THE ‘PHOENICIAN MAIDENS’ AND THE ‘SUPPLIANTS’
The homicide-problems of the _Phoenissae_ and of the _Supplices_ may be
simultaneously discussed, as both these dramas are concerned with the
war of the Seven against Thebes. The dramas correspond in their general
atmosphere and in regard to the problems which they present with the
_Septem_ of Aeschylus or the _Antigone_ of Sophocles. We also find an
incidental reference[164] to the punishment of Oedipus which recalls the
_Oedipus at Colonus_ and the _King Oedipus_ of Sophocles. Euripides,
in his account of the conflict which took place between Polyneices and
Eteocles and of the war between the Argives and the Thebans is, from
a legal point of view, more satisfactory than his brother dramatists,
inasmuch as he makes a clear distinction between the different aspects
of the problem of burial in both cases. Polyneices may or may not have
been a fratricide and a traitor,[165] but the Argives at least were
legitimate belligerents. In the _Antigone_ these two issues seem to have
been deliberately confused. The burial of the Argives was a question for
Greek international law, the violation of which brought down upon the
offenders the anger of the gods. The burial of Polyneices was a more
delicate question, upon which the gods might adopt divergent attitudes.
Teiresias, in the _Antigone_, does not differentiate very clearly between
the religious aspects of these two problems. The gods were angry—about
that there was no doubt. But might not this anger have been mainly, if
not entirely, due to the non-burial of the Argives? Here are the words
addressed by Teiresias to Kreon[166]:
And this evil state
Is come upon the city from thy will:
Because our altars—yea, our sacred hearths,
Are everywhere infected from the mouths
Of dogs or beak of vulture that hath fed
On Oedipus’ unhappy slaughtered son.
Kreon is unmoved by this declaration, which he regards as the outcome of
bribery and political corruption.[167] But Teiresias now utters words
which strike terror into Kreon’s heart[168]:
A little while, and thine own palace-halls
Shall flash the truth upon thee with loud noise
Of men and women, shrieking o’er the dead,
And all the cities whose unburied sons,
Mangled and torn, have found a sepulchre
In dogs or jackals or some ravenous bird
That stains their incense with polluted breath,
Are forming leagues in troublous enmity.
Now, Euripides, on the other hand, keeps these two questions clearly
distinct. The burial of the Argives, being an international question, is
referred by Adrastus to Theseus,[169] King of Athens. At first Theseus
refuses to intervene, and rightly, since Athens was merely one of a
number of Greek States, and she did not wish to undertake single-handed
a war which was properly an Amphictyonic war. But ultimately Theseus,
yielding to the persuasion of his mother and of Adrastus, fought and
defeated the Theban army under the command of Kreon, and handed over
the bodies of the Argives to their relatives for burial.[170] That in
refusing burial to the Argives Kreon had violated a Greek international
law is clear from many passages in the _Suppliants_. Thus Aethra
says[171]:
The mothers now of these,
Spear-slain, are fain to lay them in the grave,
Wherefrom the victors let them, and refuse
The corpses, setting the gods’ laws at nought;
and Theseus says[172]:
But lifeless bodies—harming not your State, ...
I claim to bury: lo! all Hellas’ law
Do I uphold.
The Messenger thus describes the words of the herald[173]:
Silence, ye people! Hush, ye ranks of Cadmus!
Hearken—we come but for the corpses’ sake,
To bury them and keep all Hellas’ law
Inviolate.
The problem of the burial of Polyneices has two distinct aspects in
Euripides, as it has in Sophocles. In both accounts Polyneices was
ultimately buried, as it was necessary for legend to insist that he
should be, in view of the existence of tombs in Thebes which were
said to contain the bones of all the seven Argive leaders.[174] But
whereas in Sophocles it is religious fear which causes Kreon to consent
to the burial of Polyneices, in Euripides we feel that it is rather
the victorious intervention of Theseus which is the cause of this
_dénouement_. Eteocles and Polyneices are represented by Euripides as
having foreseen the conflict which would rage over their burial when they
had mutually slain each other. Thus, Eteocles solemnly binds Kreon to
refuse burial to Polyneices[175]:
But I, on the city
And thee, O Kreon, this injunction lay:
If I prove stronger, suffer not the corse
Of Polyneices in this Theban realm
To be interred: let death be the reward
Of him who scatters dust o’er his remains,
Although he be the dearest of my friends.
Again, Polyneices is said to have commanded, as he lay dying, his mother
and Antigone to bury him in Theban soil[176]:
But bury me, O thou who gav’st me birth,
And my loved sister, in my native land,
Your mediation to appease the city
Uniting, that of my paternal soil
Enough for a poor grave I may obtain,
Though I have lost the empire.
Thus Euripides conceives in a twofold aspect the act of Polyneices.
Subjectively, he thinks, Polyneices was justified in attacking and in
slaying his brother[177]: objectively, however, or technically, he was a
traitor and a fratricide because _prima facie_ he was the aggressor.[178]
But the sympathetic intuition of Antigone looks beyond the superficial
enactments of a political justice of which the obscure and oscillating
dictates cannot compete with her love for her brother in life, with her
grief for him in death, and with her reverence for the solemn injunction
which his dying lips had uttered.
The punishment of Oedipus which is mentioned in the _Phoenissae_ is
based, we believe, on the conception of his fatal act as voluntary
homicide,[179] but it also takes into account the facts of the Homeric
narrative. The Homeric[180] story of the continued rule of Oedipus
‘over the Cadmeans’ was not in harmony with Achaean principles of
blood-vengeance. Homer does not understand it. Perhaps this is because,
in Boeotia, as Leaf points out,[181] the Achaeans had not established
their power. It is possible that Oedipus enjoyed immunity from
punishment because of his position as a Minoan autocrat, but as there
existed in legendary story many capable and willing avengers it is
better to attribute his immunity to a discrimination between degrees in
homicide-guilt which we have associated with Pelasgian tribal custom, and
to interpret the Homeric reference as a Pelasgian ‘reminiscence.’[182]
In Homer, Oedipus lives, dies, and is buried in Thebes. But post-Homeric
legend, under the influence of the pollution doctrine, could not accept
these facts. Even if the plea of quasi-involuntary homicide which Oedipus
himself put forward had been accepted he would still have had to go into
exile for at least a period of years, and even then he could not have
returned to his domestic religion or have been buried in the tomb of his
fathers. The duration of exile for extenuated or involuntary slaying
in historical times, and therefore presumably[183] in the pollution
era, depended on the will of the relatives of the slain. One single
objector could have extended the exile period indefinitely, at least in
theory, according to the law ‘let all consent to be appeased or let
one objector hold the field.’[184] But in the post-Homeric story of
Oedipus, as Sophocles gives it, the plea of Oedipus was not accepted.
He was regarded as a voluntary homicide and sent into exile. It is true
that when Polyneices himself was banished, for political reasons, from
Thebes, he naturally relented, and in his altered mood he offered to
restore Oedipus to his home.[185] But in order to restore Oedipus it was
necessary that Kreon and Eteocles should be either killed or exiled, and
this contingency had not been realised. In Euripides the unhappy king
ultimately suffers the same fate. Kreon says to Oedipus[186]:
But to my words, O Oedipus, attend:
Eteocles, thy son, hath to these hands
Consigned the sceptre of the Theban realm, ...
I for this cause no longer can allow thee
Here to reside: for in the clearest terms
Teiresias has pronounced that, while thou dwell’st
In these domains, Thebes never can be blest.
Therefore depart. Nor through a wanton pride,
Nor any hate I bear thee, do I hold
Such language, but because I justly dread
Thy evil genius will destroy this land.
And Oedipus refers to the Apolline oracle which foretold that he would
die in Athens (an oracle which Sophocles also mentions[187]) when he
says[188]:
The oracle of Phoebus is fulfilled ...
That in Athens an exile I shall die.
But in Euripides it is clear that Oedipus is not banished before the
death of Eteocles and Polyneices. A number of years is known to have
elapsed during which he still lived in Thebes. But he was imprisoned all
the time, and, as this suggestion is not implied in the Homeric story, we
must suppose that some legend invented this novel device by which part
at least of the Homeric facts could be brought into harmony with the
requirements of the post-Homeric doctrine of ‘pollution.’ It supposed
that Oedipus continued to live in Thebes, not however as a king or as a
free citizen with full civic rights, but as an imprisoned criminal who
by the very fact of his imprisonment did not pollute the State. Jocasta,
who, in accordance with the Homeric narrative, is represented as living
in Thebes for many years after the crimes[189] of Oedipus were committed,
says:
Soon as he learned
That I whom he had wedded was his mother,
The miserable Oedipus, o’erwhelmed
With woes accumulated, from their sockets
Tore with a golden clasp his bleeding eyes.
But since the beard o’ershaded my sons’ cheeks
Their sire they in a dungeon have confined,
The memory of this sad event t’ efface,
For which they needed every subtle art.
Within those mansions he still lives, but sick
With evil fortunes, on his sons pours forth
The most unholy curses, that this house
They by the sword may portion out.
We have said[190] that ‘pollution’ was conceived by the Greeks as
a quasi-physical reality which resembled a contagious disease. In
historical times a ‘polluted’ murderer was isolated by imprisonment. A
law of Dracon, which is confirmed by Plato and by Demosthenes, prescribed
that a convicted murderer _en rupture de ban_ could be arrested and
imprisoned, instead of being put to death, by the first person who
encountered him.[191] But imprisonment was never regarded, in Attic law,
as a permanent method of isolation for a murderer, simply because it was
not a recognised legal penalty for homicide. Oedipus therefore would have
been justified, from the standpoint of historical law, in uttering curses
against his relatives who imprisoned him. Hence we suggest that this
story of the imprisonment of Oedipus was invented by some legend-maker
of the pre-Draconian age, in an attempt to harmonise the Homeric story
of the continued life of Oedipus at Thebes with the post-Homeric
atmosphere which regarded him as ‘polluted’ and debarred from civil and
religious communion with his fellow-citizens. Euripides implies[192]
that ultimately the Apolline oracle was fulfilled and that Oedipus died
as an exile at Athens. In view of the general acceptance of this oracle
by traditional legends and of the ‘established fact’[193] of the burial
of Oedipus at Athens, Euripides appears to have abandoned the Homeric
account of the burial of Oedipus at Thebes. In this he reveals more
intelligence and a greater insight into the meaning of the post-Homeric
legend than did Pausanias and his authorities who believed that the
bones of Oedipus were transferred from Thebes to Athens.[194] For either
Oedipus was ‘polluted’ or he was not. If he was, he could not have been
buried at Thebes, since he was regarded as a wilful murderer: if he was
not, then he need not have come to Athens as a homicide-exile at all.
The statement of Jocasta[195] that Oedipus was imprisoned in order that
his disgrace might be forgotten, and that of Kreon[196] that Oedipus had
to be exiled for ever because he was ‘polluted,’ are inconsistent; but we
may infer from these statements, which Euripides himself composed, that
he did not quite understand the origin and motive of the story of the
imprisonment of Oedipus. For whoever invented this story did so with a
definite purpose, namely, to reconcile religious doctrine with historical
fact. The inventor knew the meaning and purpose of his invention. Hence
the statement of Jocasta to which we have referred cannot have originated
with the inventor of the story, for otherwise she would have said that
Oedipus was imprisoned to avoid pollution.
Nevertheless we think that here again Euripides sought to achieve
dramatic interest by introducing an antique variant of the story which
Sophocles had ignored. In Sophocles, Oedipus dies before the clash of
arms takes place between the Argives and the Thebans. In Euripides he
lives to see the realisation of his own curses, and becomes more easily
reconciled to his own sad fate when he finds that Destiny has avenged
him in his turn, as Laius was avenged, and that in leaving Thebes he has
removed from his life the local anger of ghosts and gods.
THE ‘MAD HERCULES’
The theme of this drama is one of the multitudinous episodes which are
associated with the life of Hercules. Now the legends of Hercules have
this much in common with such legends as we have examined concerning
Orestes and Oedipus, that they refer to the deeds of a great man who has
died. In Greek religion, apart from the Olympian Pantheon of the Achaean
caste, every great man assumed a divine nature when he died. But the
Olympian religion did not recognise the right of man to become divine,
and therefore whenever legend attributes human acts to such Olympian
gods as Apollo or Athene (of whose mortal life there was no record) we
must assume that at the time of such acts these gods have temporarily
assumed a human form. But Hercules never was an Olympian. In Homer,
Hercules is mentioned in a manner which suggests that he had been living
quite recently upon this earth, and living moreover a normal human life.
We find him in Hades, like all other dead men, though, curiously, he
retains some of his old vitality, for he is married to Hebe, the goddess
of eternal youth.[197] We hear of his maternal uncles living ordinary
human lives in Argos or in Thebes,[198] and his grandsons actually fought
in the Trojan war! We will not here attempt to discuss the origin of
the Grecian cult of Hercules. Müller, of course, connects him with the
Dorians. He thinks that Hercules and Apollo, in their respective rôles of
hero and of god, satisfied the normal wants of Dorian religiousness.[199]
We admit that the exaltation of Hercules as a divinity was of
post-Homeric origin; but it is futile, we believe, to seek to distinguish
the historical from the fictitious strata in Heraclean legends. At the
dawn of European literature the human life of Hercules, if there ever
was such a man, was a thing of the past, and it is therefore more than
probable that all the post-Homeric legends of Hercules are equally
fictitious. The main point which we wish to emphasise here is that most
of the legends of Hercules are based on the assumption that he had not
yet died: that he was a mortal man, who obeyed, on most occasions, the
laws of social humanity, not a god who had condescended to take human
form and who was superior to the operation of natural laws. We agree
that in the legends of Hercules there is a certain element of magic,
such as is found in the legends of Medea, or Jason, or Iphigeneia. This
element imports into Heraclean legends a certain degree of lawlessness
or of chaos. But, so far as homicide at least is concerned, we will
assume that Hercules is a man; not indeed an ordinary man, subject to
every ordinary law, but nevertheless a man, whose actions, however
archaically they may be conceived, can nevertheless be explained. The
difficulties which are presented by the Heraclean legends are due in
part to their archaic setting, but still more to their almost infinite
variety—a variety which we may attribute to the multitude of localities
in which this Hero-god was worshipped. The greater the number of shrines
which a god or hero possessed, the greater was the variety of the myths
which grew up around him, because ancient myths—which are not like
modern fairy tales, but which were rather sacred commemorations of
religious events—could be transferred from one Hero to another. Herodotus
tells[200] how Cleisthenes of Sicyon transferred the ‘tragic choruses’
which commemorated the sorrows of Adrastus to the cult of Dionysus. Thus
too must Hercules have had attributed to him the joyful exploits as well
as the sorrowful events of the ‘lives’ of local Heroes. For this reason,
and because of the tendency of myths to become more and more fanciful, we
believe that the legends of Hercules as of most gods are ‘fictitious.’
In the Euripidean drama, the _Mad Hercules_, we are told that Hercules,
in a fit of madness, slew his wife, Megara, and his children.[201] He
was deluded by the goddess Hera[202] into believing that he was thereby
inflicting death upon the children of his taskmaster, Eurystheus. We
may recall a somewhat similar delusion which was sent in a Sophoclean
drama by Athene upon Ajax. But whereas in the _Ajax_ no actual homicide
occurs, here we have actual bloodshed, and, worst of all, kin-slaying.
From a legal point of view, the position of Hercules is therefore quite
different from that of Ajax. It is, we think, more akin to that of
Oedipus. Hercules slays his children without knowing that they are his
children. We may omit, for purposes of legal analysis, the death of
Megara, his wife, for this death is obscured by the more heinous slaying
of his kindred. Like Oedipus, Hercules discovers the truth; like Ajax,
he contemplates suicide. He gives expression to sentiments regarding the
punishment of kin-slaying which are suggestive of historical Attic law;
though he forgets, for the moment, that his act was involuntary, when he
says[203]:
Ah! why lengthen out
A guilty life, when of my dearest children
I am become the murderer? Why delay
To leap from the high rock or with a sword
Transpierce this bosom, on myself their blood
Avenging? or t’avert that infamy
Which waits me, shall I rush into the flames?
Presently he begins to feel that he should not be considered fully
culpable[204]; yet he sees that it will be difficult for him to establish
‘extenuation’ as a plea.[205] The fit of madness which Hera had sent upon
him was indeed a grim reality, but it would be difficult to prove it in
a court of justice. Moreover, in the Euripidean account Hercules is an
alien in Thebes. His native State is Argos.[206] We have said that exile
was not permitted as a penalty for voluntary kin-slaying in historical
Greece. We have quoted[207] Plato for the law that even involuntary
slaying between aliens was punished by perpetual exile. If Hercules was
an alien at Thebes, so also were his children. In Homer[208] Thebes is
the birthplace of Hercules, but this Homeric fact is not accepted by
Euripides. In the following passage Hercules regards exile rather than
death as his correct and proper punishment, but owing to the difficulty
of proving involuntariness he fears that no city will receive him.
Thebes, he says, he must leave. To Argos, his native home, he cannot
return, because, as he says,[209] he has been already banished from that
State owing to his feud with Eurystheus. In other places he will indeed
be called a kin-slayer, and if he cannot prove his innocence he may be
banished. This statement lends support to our theory that in historical
Greece exile was not permitted for voluntary kin-slaying.[210] He
says[211]:
My fate is such
That in my native Thebes I must not dwell:
But if I here continue, to what temple
Or friends can I repair? for by such curses
I now am visited, that none will dare
To speak to me. To Argos shall I go?
How can I, when my country drives me forth?
To any other city should I fly,
The consequence were this: with looks askance
I should be viewed as one well-known, and harassed
With these reproaches by malignant tongues:
‘Is not this he, the son of Jove, who murdered
His children and his consort? from this land
Shall not th’accursed miscreant be expelled?’
But the archaic atmosphere of the ‘life’ of Hercules furnishes a solution
for this problem. Theseus arrives from Athens! Apparently we are now
living in the days which preceded the institution of citizen juries or
even of Ephetae courts! As Theseus, the autocratic King-judge, tried
Oedipus at the shrine of the Semnai,[212] so also, in a similarly
informal manner, he tries Hercules. He knows already, without being told
of it, that Hera is to blame. Therefore, he says[213]:
... This mischief
Springs from no god except the wife of Jove....
Hence he says to Hercules[214]:
From Thebes retire
Since thus the laws ordain: and follow me
To Pallas’ city: when thy hands are there
Cleansed from pollution, I to thee will give
A palace, and with thee divide my wealth.
What, we may ask, is the law to which Theseus here refers?
Wilamowitz[215] rightly says that the law is that which prohibits
his continuance at Thebes. We believe, however, that this was not a
specifically Theban law. If it had been, the fact would have been more
clearly indicated. The law in question is, we believe, an international
law, which declared that when an alien slew an alien, even without
intent, he must be debarred for ever from the State in which the deed
occurred. This law we have already quoted from Plato.[216] Hercules
therefore left Thebes and went to Athens,[217] and we are told that when,
in course of time, he dies in Athens he will receive the worship of a
Hero![218] The similarity of this _dénouement_ to that of the _Oedipus
Coloneus_ of Sophocles needs no comment. Both these consummations are
based, perhaps, on the existence of Hero-shrines in Attic soil. But
the legend-makers were careful not to give us legal impossibilities.
Hercules had shrines everywhere in Greece. Yet Hercules could not go to
Argos, for the simple reason that he had been exiled from that city. He
could not return to Thebes because of ‘the law.’ It was fortunate then
for Hercules that he found a king such as Theseus who admitted without
question the element of extenuation in his act. In historical Greece a
wilful kin-slayer could not have been accepted as an exile in any State.
The law which is referred to by Theseus cannot therefore have reference
to wilful slaying, for it permitted him to leave Thebes. If he had slain
his children wilfully, it would not have allowed him the option of exile.
If he is allowed this option, it is because his deed was viewed, either
by the dramatist or by the legend-maker, or by both, as extenuated or
quasi-involuntary kin-slaying. Such slaying in Greek law prescribed a
period of exile, temporary or perpetual, pending the appeasement of the
kinsmen.
Owing to the important differences which exist between the Euripidean
conception of the native state of Hercules and Homer’s conception, we
must assume that Euripides has abandoned Homer and is following an Argive
legend concerning Hercules. This conclusion is strengthened by the
account which Euripides gives, in this play, of Amphitryon, the father
of Hercules. Euripides makes Amphitryon say[219] that he is an exile
from Argos living at Thebes, because he had slain Electryon. Now, if
Euripides conceived Amphitryon as a Theban by birth, he could not legally
have presented him, since he was a man-slayer, as a resident in Thebes.
We have seen[220] that homicide-exiles were debarred from three possible
places of residence, namely (1) the State of the slayer, (2) the State of
the victim, and (3) the State in which the deed of blood took place.
Pausanias also refers[221] to this legend of Amphitryon. The Thebans of
his time pointed out a ruined house in Thebes, ‘where they say Amphitryon
dwelt when he fled from Tiryns owing to the death of Electryon.’ As
Tiryns was a city within the boundary of the historical Argive State
it is frequently confused with Argos in the legends. Electryon was the
father-in-law and the uncle of Amphitryon. That the slaying of Electryon
was not wilful is suggested by certain facts. Thus, the return of
Amphitryon to Argos is said to depend on the will of Eurystheus and the
labours of Hercules are regarded as the necessary ‘appeasement.’[222] We
need not suppose that there is any reference to the Pelasgian wergeld
system in the story of the ‘recompense’ which was demanded by Eurystheus.
This ‘recompense’ is more akin to the ‘appeasement’ of relatives in the
pollution system. It was the father of Eurystheus, Sthenelus, the brother
of Electryon, who had driven Amphitryon into banishment. Euripides
concedes this much to the claim of Thebes to be regarded as the home
of Amphitryon, in so far as he makes Amphitryon say[223] that he has
settled there as an exile. But legally he could not have lived there as a
homicide-exile if he had been a citizen of Thebes. Hence Euripides calls
him ‘the Argive Amphitryon.’ His hopes of an ultimate return to Argos and
of the ‘appeasement’ of Eurystheus suggest that his act was involuntary,
or quasi-involuntary. The very fact of his exile points to the same
conclusion.
The attempt of Lycus, King of Thebes, to murder Amphitryon, Megara, and
the children of Hercules, is also described in the play. The motive of
Lycus was political. Hercules had married Megara, daughter of Kreon,
the Regent of Thebes, and his family was therefore a dangerous rival in
the matter of dynastic succession. Hercules, as soon as he heard of the
plot, put Lycus to death.[224] This penalty, we have suggested,[225]
was a normal penalty for attempted murder (βούλευσις) in Achaean or
quasi-Achaean[226] society. We have discussed this penalty in our
analysis of the _Ajax_ of Sophocles. Whether there was an antique legend
which referred to this penalty, or whether the dramatist is consciously
archaising, it is difficult to decide. The Chorus, at least, have no
doubt that the penalty was just and Amphitryon takes the same view.[227]
The Chorus say to him as he dies[228]:
Others have perished by that bloody hand.
... the retribution thou endur’st ... is just.
THE ‘CHILDREN OF HERCULES’
Of the Heracleidae, another family of Hercules, Pausanias says[229]:
‘When Hercules fled from Eurystheus at Tiryns, he went to his friend
Ceyx, the King of Trachis. But when Hercules left the society of
men[230] Eurystheus demanded his children, and Ceyx sent them to Athens,
suggesting that Theseus should protect them. And coming to Athens, they
caused the first war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians, as
Theseus would not give them up to Eurystheus.’
In this Euripidean play, also, the children of Hercules are represented
as dwelling in the city of Athens, in the charge of Iolaus and
Alcmene,[231] and the war between Eurystheus and Theseus for their
extradition is the main theme. The presence of Iolaus in the drama is
probably, we think, derived from the legend of an expedition which the
Athenians made under his leadership to Sardinia.[232] The chief point
which we wish to emphasise here is that the demand for the extradition
of the Heracleidae has no connexion with homicide. Amphitryon had slain
Electryon. Hercules had sought in vain to ‘appease’ Eurystheus. It is
now evident that Eurystheus has refused all ‘appeasement,’ as the sons
of Oedipus refused it, _for political reasons_. In Greek law homicide
could not continue to afflict the children of a slayer unto the fourth
generation. With the death of Amphitryon, the homicide episode is
closed. In this drama, the extradition demand is therefore entirely
political. Upon this point our play is quite explicit. Eurystheus says to
Alcmene[233]:
For well I knew thy son
Was no mere cipher, but a man indeed:
Though strong my hate, on him will I confer
The praise he merits from his valiant deeds.
But after he was dead, was I not forced,
Because I was a foe to these his sons,
And knew what bitter enmity ’gainst me
They from their sire inherited, to leave
No stone unturned, to slay, to banish them
And plot their ruin? Could I have succeeded
In these designs, my throne had stood secure.
Demophon, son of Theseus, refuses to give up the sons of Hercules and
uses as a pretext the right of suppliants.[234] We recall the statement
of Pausanias[235] that Demophon was the first Athenian who was tried
at the Palladium court—a court which regularly tried cases of homicide
between strangers.[236] The words which Demophon speaks to the herald of
Eurystheus[237]—
Therefore, go thou back
To Argos, and this message to Eurystheus
Deliver: tell him, too, if there be ought
Which ’gainst our guests he can allege, the laws[238]
Are open: but thou shalt not drag them thence—
imply that the right of suppliant was not potent to protect offenders
but was only potent to secure for them a respite from merited
punishment; moreover they imply that Eurystheus has no right to demand
the extradition of offenders without the option of a trial.[239] We
have already admitted that the right of sanctuary helped to determine
the locality of certain courts, but we have maintained[240] that it
had no essential connexion with the origin of the principle of trials
for homicide, and that its connexion with murder courts is quite
accidental. We have suggested that[241] in historical Greece trial
was a possible option for extradition in case of homicide. Hence the
refusal of Eurystheus to accept trial suggests what Demophon definitely
asserts,[242] that the ‘offence’ of the Heracleidae was not criminal but
political.
But if the Heracleidae are innocent, what shall we say of Eurystheus? Is
he not as culpable as Lycus is in the _Mad Hercules_? Is he not guilty of
plotting murder for political ends? If he is not yet αἴτιος φόνου, is he
not guilty of βούλευσις? For this crime, we have said, in early Greece,
the penalty was probably death.[243] It is, then, significant that in
this play Eurystheus is put to death by the servants of Alcmene.[244]
Both the penalty and its mode of execution are archaic. Either legend
retained these elements unadulterated in their transition down the ages,
or Euripides deliberately imported into the myth an archaic atmosphere.
In neither case is Euripides giving us the ideas of his own time, for in
historical Greece βούλευσις was not punishable by death.
Eurystheus was captured alive in the battle and hence he claims the right
of a captive warrior and demands the protection of the Athenians![245]
Alcmene, however, insists that he should be given up to her for
execution![246] What a nice legal problem was this for a litigious
Athenian audience! How replete it is with that intense human interest
which was so dear to Euripides! The conflict is skilfully depicted in
the dialogue which takes place between Alcmene and the messenger (or
the Chorus?) after the battle.[247] Eurystheus’ appeal to the ‘laws
of Greece’[248] implies the existence of international legislation
concerning the rights of war-captives, but he himself had previously
shown very little regard for the international status of exiles. In vain
does he advance the plea of self-defence against these harmless but
dangerous children! The Athenians decide to take no action. They cannot
put to death a captive taken in war. But Alcmene claims that Eurystheus
is a murderer. According to ancient practice, it is her privilege to
avenge! Moreover, so far as Alcmene is concerned, she will not bury a
man whom she believes to be a criminal.[249] But unfortunately there
was an oracle of Apollo that Eurystheus should be buried in Athens.[250]
The Athenians therefore are disposed to bury him.[251] At first Alcmene
says[252] that she will not object to the burial of Eurystheus by the
Athenians, but this assertion is incompatible with the command which
she gives to her attendants later, to deliver the dead Eurystheus to
the dogs. We may perhaps assume that she performed a mock ritual of
‘exposure’ of the dead, that she cast the body of Eurystheus beyond the
boundaries, and that afterwards his relatives removed him for sepulture.
Such is the attempt which Euripides seems to make to solve the deadlock
between two elements of Greek law, namely that which permitted the burial
of an enemy,[253] and that which forbade the burial of a murderer.[254]
In the archaic atmosphere of the play, homicide and attempted
homicide[255] are equated as identical. In the words of Eurystheus, who
declares in vain that his death will cause pollution to his slayer, we
discern at once the failure of Euripides to be consistently archaic and
the failure of a dead man’s ghost to impose ‘pollution’ in the teeth of
civic law and international religion.
THE ‘MEDEA’
In regard to the origin and the evolution of the story of Medea which is
the subject of this drama, we cannot do better than summarise the account
which Verrall gives in his edition of the play. Verrall thinks[256] that
Medea was a Phoenician moon-goddess who was worshipped at Corinth at an
early period, and to whom were offered, in sacrifice, human victims,
including children; that these rites, which in course of time assumed a
more civilised form, (when a mock ritual of human sacrifice was accepted
in the place of ancient realities,) were ‘transferred’ to the goddess
Hera; that sacred legend retained indeed a memory of Medea, but the
evolution of Corinthian religion degraded to the level of a priestess
the Medea who once had been a goddess; and that hence arose the fiction
that Medea had once slain children—in sacrifice! Later, Verrall thinks,
this Corinthian story was expanded under the influence of eastern Greek
colonisation, and legend traced in the route from the Euxine to Iolcos
the natural course of Medea’s introduction to Greek lands. Weird Asiatic
notions of sorcery and witchcraft clustered round her name; to her were
attributed the atrocities which legend-memory recorded of the Aeolidae at
Iolcos. Thus was Medea degraded not only from a goddess to a priestess,
but also from a priestess to a sorceress, and from a sorceress to the
vilest murderess whom Grecian legends knew.
If the creators of the story of Medea were ignorant of her original
character, so also naturally was Euripides. For him, Medea is not a
goddess who has assumed the form of a woman, but a woman who has not yet
put off this mortal coil, and who as yet has done little to deserve that
she should, after death, attain to divinity! As a woman, she is, despite
her magic, subject to social laws. Her deeds of blood must be regarded
from a legal standpoint, whether that standpoint is applicable to one era
or to another. Let us consider how the deeds of Medea were avenged.
First of all, she slew her brother, Apsyrtus, in Colchis, to prevent
his pursuit.[257] For this crime she paid no penalty, if we except the
exile which destiny had, in any event, decreed for her. It was quite
unnecessary for the legend-maker to invent this additional atrocity of
fratricide, for to Colchis Medea was never to return! But as exile was an
archaic Pelasgian penalty for wilful kin-slaying, this conception bears
an antique stamp which is attributable either to the antiquity of the
story or to the archaising of later minds.
Again, Medea caused the daughters of Pelias to put to death their aged
father by deluding them into the belief that by cutting him in pieces and
boiling him with certain magic potions, they would restore him to youth
and vigour.[258] Here Medea acts as the ‘plotter and contriver’[259]
of murder. In primitive as in historical[260] times, such a deed was
regarded as equally culpable with that of an actual slayer—indeed, in
the special circumstances of the case she was the real if not the actual
murderer of Pelias, and the daughters of Pelias were guilty, at most, of
involuntary slaying. We cannot of course attribute to Medea the guilt
of kin-slaying, as she was not akin to Pelias. It is more probable that
she would have been regarded, for purposes of punishment, as an ordinary
murderess. In actual fact, she and Jason were expelled from Thessaly.
Even so, in the play,[261] she still fears the vengeance of Acastus, the
son of Pelias. This fact does not imply that she was conceived as guilty
of kin-slaying, which in historical Greece was punishable by death. We
believe that the Thessalian story of Medea was not conceived from the
standpoint of historical law.
In this story there are complications of blood-vengeance which suggest
an Achaean, or rather what we may call a quasi-Achaean atmosphere.
While, in Homer,[262] Pelias, son of Poseidon, rules over Iolcos like an
Achaean, by divine right, later legend revealed that he had previously
defrauded his half-brother Aeson of the kingdom and put him to death, and
that Jason the son of Aeson had himself narrowly escaped death at his
hands. Hence it was natural that Jason, the one-sandalled hero of the
oracle,[263] should command Medea to put Pelias to death. That is the
real reason why Jason, together with Medea, was banished from Thessaly
by Acastus. This quasi-Achaean exile is therefore similar to the Achaean
‘flight from death,’ and hence it is that Medea still fears the vengeance
of Acastus.[264] When Jason arrived at Corinth, he became affianced to
the king’s daughter, just as the Achaean Tydeus became the son-in-law
of Adrastus.[265] No pollution was involved in an alliance with a
kin-slayer! The presence of such Achaean episodes in Euripides, side by
side with episodes which bear a later stamp, suggests either a marvellous
capacity for archaising on the part of the dramatist or, more probably,
the unadulterated transmission of an antique legend.[266]
The main plot of this drama reveals two further atrocities which were
perpetrated by Medea. She plots the death of her husband, of his
intended wife, Glauce, of his intended father-in-law, Kreon, King of
Corinth, and of her own two children, whom she had borne to Jason. Her
murderous plot proved successful, except in regard to Jason. Her children
she slew deliberately with her own hand. It happened, previously, that
Aegeus, King of Athens, arrived at Corinth. Medea, well aware of the
consequences of the murderous plot which she had planned, and being, in
addition, under an edict of banishment from Corinth, entreated Aegeus to
give her protection at Athens.[267] He promised to do so, but she was not
content with a promise. She bound Aegeus under a solemn oath:
Swear by the earth on which we tread, the sun,
Thy grandsire and by all the race of gods ...
That from your land you never will expel,
Nor while you live consent that any foe
Shall tear me thence.[268]
One or two problems are suggested by this quotation. If Medea had not
succeeded in securing this solemn contract on the part of Aegeus, would
she have carried out her plot? And was Aegeus bound by the oath when he
discovered the sequel? In this section of the story—which is the main
theme of our play—homicide is conceived as a ‘pollution,’[269] and in the
pollution system exile was not permitted for voluntary kin-slaying.[270]
The murder of her children was by far the most serious offence which
Medea committed, since they were her kindred. For the other deeds of
blood she could have legally sought asylum at Athens, as she was not a
citizen of that State, and the deeds had not been perpetrated there.
Medea seems to be well aware of these facts, for she utters no hint to
Aegeus of her dreadful plans. But it was her intention of slaying her
children which led her to extract from Aegeus this solemn oath. If he
had refused to swear, she would, we believe, have slain all her intended
victims, but she would then have committed suicide.
But was the oath which Aegeus swore binding in Greek international law?
Apparently Medea thought so, and Euripides seems to think so, too. The
Chorus, however, do not understand how Medea can find a refuge at Athens.
But it is only in the slaying of the children that they seem to find a
difficulty. They say[271]:
For its holy streams renowned
Can that city, can that State
Where Friendship’s generous train are found
Shelter thee from public hate,
When, defiled with horrid guilt,
Thou thy children’s blood hast spilt?
Think on this atrocious deed
Ere the dagger aim the blow.
But at the end of the play the Sun-god, the grandfather of Medea,
places his chariot at her disposal in order to facilitate her journey
to Athens,[272] the Corinthian gods accepting, as an expiation, the
establishment by blood-stained hands of a festival and mystic rites![273]
Jason is foredoomed to death,[274] and we are told that Medea will escape
the Erinnyes of her children![275]