Poine: a study in ancient Greek blood-vengeance

The milk, honey and wine here mentioned are the characteristic offerings in the placation of ghosts.[123] The rite was easily transferred to Demeter or Ceres, the Chthonian goddess, because of the natural tendency of Chthonianism to identify the ghost with the god. The ceremony of carrying a victim round the crops was not a symbol of atonement for moral guilt so much as an aversion of quasi-physical evil spirit which caused sterility.

Athenaeus,[124] describing the ‘purgation’ of an Arcadian city which was necessitated by the visit of certain citizens from a town which was polluted by bloodshed, says: ‘They made purgation of the city, carrying “victims” round the city territory.’ The similarity of this ceremony to the ‘aversion’ rite described by Vergil is obvious. Yet this ceremony is somewhat different from the purgation of an actual homicide, which we shall describe more fully later.[125] In the former a number of victims are slain; in the latter, only one. Now, if homicide-purgation originated in human sacrifice, and if, as Müller maintains,[126] wergeld was suggested to men by the de facto acceptance, on the part of the gods, of an animal substitute, why was the number of animals sacrificed in homicide-purgation limited to one? Why did men not offer to the gods at least the saraad or insult-price,[127] which generally consisted of a number of animals? The sacrifice of only one animal in such a ceremony cannot be explained by Müller’s hypothesis. It can, however, be made intelligible if we assume a direct derivation of the rites of homicide-purgation from the ritual which accompanied solemn oaths and reconciliations. In such a ritual, only a single victim was slain: its death was a kind of inductive symbol of the fate of its slayer, if he ever proved false to his oath. But in ceremonies of general purgation, such as Athenaeus describes, there was an element of expiation, or aversion, and hence there was no limit to the number of victims, for there was no such limit in expiatory sacrifice of any kind.

We shall see later how, in historical times, purgation for homicide was inadmissible in cases of kin-slaying, unless the dying man forgave; even then the slayer had to be exiled for one year before he could be purged in his homeland: in cases of wilful murder, purgation of the slayer in his own country was impossible at any time, but was possible, if not compulsory, abroad: in cases of manslaughter, purgation could take place at home when the conditions of exile and of the ‘appeasement’ of the slain man’s relatives had been fulfilled. From such regulations we can obviously infer that purgation was a symbol of reconciliation, but not an expiation of guilt.

The Homeric and the Tragic Erinnys

We must now contrast what we may call the Homeric Erinnys with the Erinnys of post-Homeric times and with the ‘tragic’ Erinnys. In the course of our discussion we hope to suggest some reasons, more satisfactory, even if they be more complex, than that which Müller[128] gives, for the refusal of the Erinnyes in the Oresteian legends of Attic tragedy to recognise the purgation of Orestes until they assume the rôle of Semnai Theai or Eumenides. In our view there are just two reasons for this refusal: one is the fact that the purgation-rites for homicide were a symbol of reconciliation, not with ghosts, but with gods: the other is the fact that the Erinnyes of Attic tragedy are a complex product, reflecting the attitude of the relatives of the slain at different periods, and from different points of view, in the post-Homeric era. We shall see later that there must have been several different variants of the Oresteian legend. The act of Orestes would have been approved or condemned according as social custom, at any given epoch, recognised the right of Apollo to command or to justify in advance the slaying of Clytaemnestra, or the right of a State court to approve, or at least to condone, an act which tribal society would have probably condemned.

We may thus summarise what we conceive to have been the different stages in the evolution of the ‘tragic’ Erinnyes. We must distinguish clearly between (1) the Pelasgian Erinnys; (2) the Achaean Erinnys; (3) the post-Homeric pre-Apolline Erinnys, and (4) the Apolline or historical Erinnys. In Homer there is a fusion of the first and second conceptions. In Attic tragedy there is a most disheartening confusion of all four conceptions. We must remember that the Erinnyes were not ordinary deities possessing a stereotyped cult. Having attained divinity largely through the personification or deification of an abstract cultus-epithet, their nature was liable to vary according to men’s interpretation of the meaning and origin of the epithet, and their forms could be freely fashioned by the minds of poets and of legend-makers.[129]

(1) In regard to the Pelasgian Erinnyes, we have suggested that they were divinities of different degrees of rank in the Chthonian religion. They did not visit their wrath on a murderer if he paid the tribal penalty, or even on the slayer of a kinsman, unless he remained in contact with the domestic worship of his dead relative.[130] There was no ‘purgation’ for homicide: because homicide was not yet an offence against the greater gods of the State. The exile or death of a murderer or the payment of wergeld appeased, of itself, the Erinnys of the slain: to refuse to accept wergeld was impossible, in the organisation of the tribe.

(2) The Achaean Erinnys was an eclectic product. It was not Homer who personified[131] the Erinnys because it was already personified, though in that vague collective nameless manner in which alone a cultus-epithet can be deified. The Achaeans conceived the Erinnyes as gods. For them there are only gods and men: there are no ghosts or abstractions in the galaxy of supernatural beings. The Achaean Erinnys has lost its connexion with ghost-terror, though it retains sufficient traces of its Chthonian importance to be treated with considerable respect. It is merely a subordinate deity which executes the decrees of Olympian gods, but its association with Zeus and the Moirae suggests the greater dignity which it enjoyed in Chthonian religion. The connexion of the Erinnys with curses is essentially Chthonian. All castes in Homer use the ritual of swearing, but we cannot say how far the Achaeans understood the ideas underlying the rite. The curse of a father or a mother was particularly terrible in the Pelasgian domestic religion. But we cannot suppose that the Achaean respect for parents, or their dread of curses, was as great or as profound as that of the Pelasgians. The Achaean Zeus himself hurled to Tartarus his aged father Kronos.[132] Hence the Homeric references to parents’ curses, such as are found in the stories of the Achaean Phoenix and the Achaean Meleager, indicate probably an assimilation of Pelasgian ideas.[133] But the literary heirloom which the poet of the Achaeans bequeathed to Greece helped to beget a false conception of the Achaean Erinnys in the minds of later poets. The Achaean mode of blood-vengeance and their desire of blood for blood caused later legend-makers to attribute a veritable blood-thirst to the Erinnyes of murdered Achaeans.

(3) The post-Homeric pre-Apolline Erinnys—a divine being whose nature can only be inferred by the logic of elimination—reflects in a more emphatic manner the blood-thirst of the slain. In the relaxation of Achaean military discipline which followed the Trojan war: in the great invasions and migrations, and in the demoralisation of clan-control, in a chaotic society such as Hesiod describes,[134] where force is the only law, and justice, virtue, honour, hospitality, loyalty and fraternal love have vanished from the earth, the Erinnys came to assume a diabolical aspect: murder was confused with vengeance; the anger of impotent avengers became implacable: and inexorable hatred was attributed to the Erinnyes of the slain. At this period the gods were credited with an approval of collective punishment[135] such as men themselves practised. Nemesis became a god.[136] Kronos is now said to have devoured his children, and Rhea, their mother, inflamed the Erinnyes against him.[137] The blood-offerings which from time immemorial had been laid at the tomb of the dead were now interpreted, not as a resuscitation of the dead for purposes of necromancy or for the production of fertility, but, in the case of murdered dead, as the satisfaction of an unquenched thirst for blood. Curses became more frequent and more terrible than in days when tribal law or military control rendered recourse to religious sanctions less necessary. To this period we attribute the prevalence of customs of which some survived to historical times, while others soon became obsolete: we refer to the custom of writing curses on tombstones, the custom of planting a spear in the grave,[138] and the custom of μασχαλισμός, or partial mutilation of a corpse.[139] To those days, rather than to historical Greece, apply the words of the Chorus in the Electra of Sophocles[140]:

In the Ion of Euripides[141] we are told that around the Omphalos, or Sacred Stone, were figures of the Gorgons. One editor[142] of this play remarks that these figures suggested to Aeschylus the dramatic forms of his Erinnyes. We are much more inclined to believe this, than to suppose, with Miss Harrison[143] or with Verrall,[144] that Aeschylus invented the dramatic form of the ‘tragic’ Erinnys. We shall see later[145] that Aeschylus conceived the Erinnyes as Titans, as rebels against Zeus and the Olympians. Whence came this rebel-rôle of the Erinnyes? The answer will, perhaps, be more intelligible if we explain the nature of the Apolline or ‘historical’ Erinnys.

(4) We are not concerned here with the nature of the cult of the Erinnyes in historical Greece. We seek rather to describe the Erinnyes as they were moulded in the minds of poets and of legend-makers in accordance with conceptions of homicide which were modified by the Apolline doctrine of ‘pollution’ and ‘purgation,’ and by the evolution of state-control. We must postpone to later parts of our work the details of our theory, and the more complete demonstration of its validity. We will merely give here, as it were by anticipation, a summary of our conclusions. The doctrine of ‘pollution’ which, as we think, came to Greece about 700 B.C., and which was gradually adopted in most Greek states under the rule of the ‘aristocracy of birth,’ declared the homicide to be an enemy to the gods of the State. His presence, in his native State, or in the country of the slain, brought upon the whole community plagues and pestilences and all those evils which the primitive mind attributes to divine anger. In our opinion, such a doctrine was incompatible with any further continuation of the wergeld system which had survived the age of chaos. The abolition of wergeld, at the dictate of Apollo, the national prophet-god of ‘aristocratic’ Greece, was a change which struck at the root of the great tribal principle of retribution to the relatives of the slain. Before the new doctrine acquired the prestige of traditional custom, we should expect that a feeling of revolt would have manifested itself in the sentiments of the old kindred of the clans. Such a revolt would have been reflected, in legend, as an attribute of the Erinnyes of the slain. This conception of a revolting Erinnys will explain the Titanic rôle of the Furies in Aeschylus, and their refusal to recognise the purgation of Orestes by Apollo.

There was another factor, too, which may have helped to give vitality and realism to the rebellious rôle of the ‘tragic’ Erinnyes, especially in Euripides. We shall see[146] that the Apolline doctrine did not abolish every form of compensation. The relatives of a person involuntarily slain were entitled to ‘appeasement,’ were, perhaps, permitted under certain conditions to enter into what is known as ‘private settlement’—though usually before ‘appeasement’ a certain period of exile was necessary. Now if, as some maintain,[147] the ‘appeasement’ depended entirely on the will of the relatives, and if the relatives had to be unanimous in accepting the gifts or presents which constituted ‘appeasement,’ it is clear that one single relative could have extorted enormous sums of money, or otherwise have compelled the manslayer to abide in perpetual exile. We shall argue, later, that the regular duration of exile for manslaughter was one year, and that this custom implies the influence of local control, on the part of judges or magistrates, directed against the right to refuse ‘appeasement’ on the part of a slain man’s relatives. Such a control would naturally have produced irritation and dissatisfaction which, again, might have been reflected in men’s conception of the Erinnyes. We shall see that at least one legend of Orestes conceived his deed as involuntary kin-slaying. It was probably this legend which represented some of the Furies as still implacable when the Areopagus trial had declared Orestes ‘not guilty,’ or rather, immune from further punishment.[148]

The main difficulty connected with the ‘appeasement’ of the Oresteian Erinnyes arises from the fact that they are not unanimous in their opinions about Orestes, and that some of them—the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra—are in violent conflict with the official opinion of Apollo. At a later stage we shall be in a position to explain this difficulty more clearly. At present we will merely cite a law of Plato which is probably based on the old traditions of patriarchal tribes (as they were modified in course of time by Apollinism), and which forbids the slayer of a kinsman who slays under the influence of passion, ever to return to domestic communion with his kindred, even though he may return to his native state and undergo ‘purgation.’ We refer to this law because it is possible to interpret the act of Orestes, from Apollo’s standpoint, not as fully justified but rather as in a sense involuntary, being extenuated by a religious command, as ‘passion’ would have extenuated it. Plato says[149]: ‘If a father or a mother in a passion kills a son or daughter ... let them be exiled for three years and be “purged,” but, on return, let the husband be divorced from the wife and the wife from the husband ... and not dwell in communion with (the family) ... or share with them in sacred rites.’ Now, in the Apolline system it is probable that the murder of a husband by his wife was of equal gravity with kin-murder which was punishable with death. Coulanges points out[150] that the wife belonged to the domestic religion of her husband, even though she did not belong to his kindred. In the Pelasgian wergeld system husband and wife are ‘strangers’ in matters of homicide; but in the Apolline religious system they are members of the same hearth and home. Moreover, in historical times failure to obey the Apolline laws laid the delinquent open to a charge of impiety, for which the penalty of death might be inflicted. There is a suggestion of these legal viewpoints in Apollo’s attitude when he tells[151] the Erinnyes that Clytaemnestra, the murderess of her husband, was justly slain, and that Orestes would have merited death if he had not slain her; and in the answer of the Erinnyes concerning the act of Clytaemnestra, that ‘her slaying was not kindred bloodshed’[152]; and that Orestes, the slayer of his mother, must be pursued until he dies![153] Now, Plato suggests that in the Apolline code exclusion from domestic religion attended the ‘extenuated’ slaying of a parent by a son, even when the dying parent formally ‘forgave.’[154] Apart from the impossibility of the supposition of a formal ‘forgiveness’ of Orestes on the part of Clytaemnestra, it is clear that the Erinnyes of the Apolline era would have naturally objected to the presence of Orestes in the home of his fathers. Thus they say, in the Eumenides[155]:

But Orestes, fearing the Erinnyes of his father who naturally and legally, in the Apolline system, pursue the relative who fails to avenge, and who is ‘polluted’ almost equally with the murderer, cries out, in the Choephoroe[156]:

Thus, the Erinnyes seem to reflect the conflict of opinions and of sentiments which would frequently have arisen amongst the relatives of the slain concerning the guilt of a kinsman who had slain a kinsman. They also, unfortunately, suggest the co-existence of conceptions of blood-vengeance which are really to be attributed to different periods of time and to widely different types of civilisation.