There is a considerable variety and conflict of opinions about the religious aspect of homicide in Homeric Greece. We have already explained by quotations from Glotz[1] and Bury[2] the theory which conceives the shedding of human blood as a deed which, in those days, did not touch the gods or draw down the anger of the gods on the community. On the other hand, Leaf, who indicates a clear and emphatic distinction between the religious beliefs and customs of the Achaeans and the Pelasgians, holds that the Achaeans ignored and the Pelasgians respected[3] ‘the most sacred of all taboos which forbids the shedding of kindred blood’: for the Pelasgians retained the ‘primitive family system, with all its rites and taboos’[4] and possessed, therefore, the foundations of primitive society and religion.’[5] Again, Fustel de Coulanges, in his analysis of the primeval domestic religion of the Ancient City, says[6] that ‘the shedder of blood was no longer able to sacrifice: the hand stained with blood could not touch sacred objects.’ He believes, however, that[7] the manslayer could be purified by an expiatory ceremony. Miss Harrison holds a somewhat similar view[8]: ‘Purification,’ she says, ‘is the placation of ghosts and, unknown to the Olympians (i.e. Achaeans), was the keynote of the lower stratum (i.e. Pelasgians).’ ... ‘The extreme need of primitive man for placation is from bloodshed: this is at first obtained by offering the blood of the murderer; later, by the blood of a surrogate victim applied to him.’ ... ‘So long as primitive man preserves the custom of the blood feud, so long will he credit his dead kinsman with passions like his own.’[9] So, Müller maintains[10] that the religious rites of expiation and purification are derived from the remotest times of Greek antiquity and were designed to reinstate the slayer in religious communion with his family and his comrades. Purgation ceremonies are, he thinks,[11] based upon the idea that the manslayer must atone with his own life, but that this life may be bought off by vicarial substitution, by a sacrificial victim symbolical of such substitution. Our own views upon these subjects will appear in the course of the discussion: we shall point out, amongst other things, the distinction between expiation (ἱλασμός) and purgation (καθαρμός), and while refusing to accept on the one hand the views of Müller and of Miss Harrison, and indicating, on the other hand, the inaccuracies in the views of Glotz, Bury and the generality of writers, we shall develop and expand a theory which is suggested by Leaf’s[12] general position and which distinguishes carefully between the religious attitude of the Pelasgians and the Achaeans. To achieve this purpose it will, however, be necessary, even at the cost of a digression, to give a brief account of the evolution of early Greek religion.

Analysis of Early Greek Religion

To the scientific mind of a modern European living in the atmosphere of a highly secularised society, nothing can appear more curious and incomprehensible than the almost universal belief in ubiquitous supernatural forces which is revealed in ancient literature. Such a belief is not, however, a symbol of savagery or barbarism; it is merely a symptom of the absence of scientific knowledge. The general principle that men in all ages attribute to occult forces every effect of which the cause is unknown or mysterious, is clearly expressed by Lucretius[13]:

It was natural then, in an age of unscientific mentality, that plagues and pestilences, and diseases of all kinds, lunacy and sterility, the failure of harvests, misfortune in peace or war, adverse winds, volcanoes, inherited characteristics, the activities of genius, emotion and desire, birth, growth, death and decay—almost everything that crosses the threshold of human consciousness—should be ascribed to the ubiquitous and perpetual operation of supernatural agents. The literature of ancient Greece and Rome is permeated with such beliefs. We will quote just one characteristic passage from the Eumenides of Aeschylus. When the avenging Erinnyes of the slain Clytaemnestra threaten to hurl the shafts of their wrath upon the Attic land because it has harboured Orestes, whom they regard as the murderer of his kin, Athene, who has caused a murder-court to declare him free from guilt, apparently on a plea of justifiable homicide, commands the Erinnyes to be appeased, and says: ‘Hurl you not the weight of your wrath upon Attica; be not indignant, nor cause barrenness by sending down the blighting drops that come from Spirits, the cruel bitter destroyers of our seed.[14] ... Fling not upon earth the fruit of thy wild curse, causing all things not to prosper.[15] ... Sow not within my boundaries those spurs to bloodshed that ruin young men’s hearts, maddened by a frenzy not born of wine[16] ... but (send) blessings from earth and from the waters of the deep, and from the sky wind-breezes that blow with kindly sunshine over earth: (send) fruit of the soil and of things that live, flowing with untiring vigour to my citizens, and of man’s seed a safe deliverance at the birth.’[17] The Erinnyes, in consenting to be appeased, reply: ‘With kindly prophecy we pray for you here, that the radiant sunlight may bring forth with speed from earth the blessings of your life[18] ... never—such is my boon—may the trees feel the hurtful wind or the scorching fire that robs them of their buds ... or blight creep over them eternally that blasts their fruitfulness: and may Pan bring to full growth the prosperous flocks that will bear from wombs a twofold fruit, and in due season may the produce of rich earth present you with the good gods’ gift of fortune[19]: ... on the young men I forbid to fall the stroke of death untimely: and that the lovely maids find each her husband—do ye grant it, O ye who reign, and ye, O Fates divine![20]... May the roar of Faction, thirsting for evil, never in this place be heard, nor the dust that drinks the dark blood of fellow-citizens bring to the State, from passion for revenge, the doom of retaliation. But may the citizens rejoice one another with a common love and hate only in union as one man.’[21]

The modern European, taught in childhood to accept the Christian doctrine of the divine creation of the world, must exert himself considerably if he is to realise that in Greek religion the notion of such a creation is not found before the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and even then it existed only in the atmosphere of a pious philosophic sect. To the ancient Greek mind, the earth was not created; it had been from everlasting: it was itself divine. Gilbert Murray rightly says[22] that the chief objects of primitive man’s emotional activity are the food-supply and the tribe-supply. By a well-known confusion of cause and effect characteristic of the primitive mind, the earth became the object of universal worship, because of its association with the production of food.

Similarly, animals came to be regarded as sacred, though different races adopted different viewpoints in regard to their sacred character. In some instances a certain animal was ‘sacred’ simply because it was eaten: in others it was ‘sacred’ because it was ‘tabu’ or sinful to eat it. We shall see that the animal slain in certain Chthonian rites could not be eaten,[23] but it was ‘sacred’ all the same. The ancient notion, which has survived so long in witchcraft, of the magical power of placation by images or effigies led to the widespread construction of those animal images which are so familiar to the students of primitive religion.[24] When divinities in human form, when anthropomorphic sacra, take precedence of the animal god, traces of a fusion in image-magic are clearly visible. Whether by accident, or by reason of some traditional connexion, certain human gods came to be associated with certain species of animals. The sacrifice of such animals was regarded as particularly pleasing to such gods, and it is therefore arbitrary to assume that the sacrifice of animals was originally accepted as a substitute for a previous human sacrifice. Herodotus says[25] that the image of Isis in Egypt was that of a woman with cow’s horns: that a statue of Zeus in Egypt showed the figure of a man with the face of a ram. When the people of Egyptian Thebes sacrificed, annually, a ram to Zeus, they covered the statue of Zeus with the skin of the ram.[26] We know that the worshippers of the orgiastic Dionysus clothed themselves in fawn-skins,[27] and that the satyric choruses from which, we may suppose, Greek tragedy developed,[28] were dressed, to some extent, as goats. The goat and the snake, as well as the bull and the ram, seem to have been worshipped in early times as symbols at once of the fertility of the soil and of the fertility of the race. The serpents which gaze at us so terribly from the heads of the Aeschylean Erinnys are probably, in origin,[29] derived from the belief that the souls of the dead are connected with the fertility of the earth.[30] Herodotus tells us that offerings were regularly made to an imaginary serpent which was supposed to reside in the temple of Athene Polias at Athens.[31] This serpent symbolised, like the undying fire of the Roman Vesta,[32] the immortal progenitor of the race.

Anthropomorphism and the Olympians

In regard to the origin of anthropomorphic religion in Greece, we can only say that we prefer the opinion of F. de Coulanges,[33] which derives it from the ancestor worship of the early Pelasgian peoples, to that of Miss Harrison which, in its latest form, attributes it to a political anti-Persian reaction of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.[34] Coulanges believes that when once the idea of human gods took shape, it tended at once to personify and humanise all the various objects of worship.[35] It is significant that the Persians, who had no ancestor worship, did not conceive their gods in human form.[36] Amongst the Greeks, however, who worshipped dead ancestors from the dawn of their history, the ‘ghost’ gave its form to the god.

Assuming, then, Coulanges’ theory of the evolution of anthropomorphism, we must regard as absurd the opinion of some ancient writers who maintained that Homer and Hesiod not only told false stories about the gods but gave them, moreover, the manners and shapes of men.[37] The precise contribution of such poets as Homer to ancient religion is difficult to define, but we believe that it was not so much constructive as destructive. The poet gave a certain immortality to the conceptions which he expressed: the effect of a Bible in religious evolution is essentially conservative. It tends to stereotype for all men and for all time the religious opinions of its day. Now Homer was the poet of the Achaeans, and the Achaeans, as Leaf says,[38] conceived the gods as typical Achaeans of the other world. Whether they brought new human gods[39] to Greece or merely gave a personal interpretation to the Pelasgian gods, we need not at the moment decide. The gods of the Achaeans were conceived as kings and rulers like themselves. If they do not create the universe, they at least divide it into realms or dominions.[40] Moreover, they are presented as related to one another by blood, or connected by intermarriage, as the Achaeans were. They naturally have their quarrels, their disputes, their rivalries and their jealousies, as the Achaeans had. The stamp of the Achaean caste marks the Homeric pantheon. But apart from the great Olympian gods, there are a number of minor deities who suggest the existence of a less privileged social and religious caste. It is in this caste that we believe that we can find the source of supply or the materials for the creation of the Olympic Pantheon. Such a Pantheon could never have been the exclusive creation of Homer. If the Achaeans created it, they were limited, surely, by the nature of the materials at their disposal. Their creative power was restricted and directed, as we believe, by a pre-Achaean evolution of grades of divine greatness within the galaxy of Pelasgian divinities[41]: an evolution which attributed to elemental forces and to national ancestor-gods a power to which no mere local ‘ghost’ could aspire to attain. The Pelasgians and Minoans in their tribal villages, and particularly in their city-religion, had, we think, evolved the distinction between the greater and the lesser gods, between the gods of the upper air, and those of the sea and of the earth below, which was so characteristic a feature of later Greek religion. True, many of their ‘deities’ were nameless, as Herodotus[42] seems to have heard that they were at Dodona, and as the ancestral spirits of historical times still were, since they were addressed as Keres at the Athenian Anthesteria.[43] But the old tribal and city gods must have had names. It would have been otherwise impossible to distinguish them from one another in the multitudinous deifications of an ancestor-worshipping and nature-worshipping peninsula. Coulanges[44] holds that the local gods of primitive peoples often carry the same name even when they are really different in form and ritual. But here we think that we can detect the influence of Homer and the Achaeans. The Homeric god is stereotyped in form and character as in name. The form and character was created, we believe, by the military Achaean caste, while the name was in most if not all cases a Pelasgian product. It was all the more possible for the Achaeans to give character and personality to the gods, if there had been local variations in the Pelasgian types. Moreover, the Achaeans drew, so to speak, a line of demarcation around the gods of their choice. They created a Pantheon of an exclusive type, which, by its prestige in later years, checked the Pelasgian tendency to increase the number of the greater gods, and compelled the Greeks to accept, instead, the worship of Heroes.[45] The creation of such a Pantheon presupposes, we think, the existence of an identity of type within some widespread organised society. No mere local poet or city-state could have created it. As we have no evidence of the existence in pre-Homeric days of a national union or federation of Minoan kings, or of a national Amphictyony, such as we meet with in later times, we naturally attribute to the ubiquitous Achaean caste and their poet-Royal the creation of that Pantheon which was the mainstay of Achaean religion. But this Pantheon was created out of pre-existing Pelasgian materials. We do not agree with Leaf and Chadwick in the view that the Achaeans were the creators of Greek anthropomorphic religion.[46]

Achaean-Pelasgian Religious Fusions

Many of the difficulties presented by Homeric religion are to be attributed to the fact that that religion was an eclectic product. If we compare the beliefs and customs of the Achaeans and the Pelasgians, it will be obvious that despite the circumstance of their social coexistence, a complete blending or fusion in dogma or in ritual would have been impossible. Yet it is equally impossible to suppose that both Pelasgians and Achaeans preserved their religious rites and conceptions unadulterated and pure.

Miss Harrison is, we think, mistaken—she seems to admit it in a later work[47]—in assuming that the Achaeans are to be associated with Olympian ritual, and the Pelasgians with Chthonian ritual, and that there is a rigid line of distinction between the two castes. Just as the Olympian rites which are so common amongst Homeric Achaeans were, we think, practised also by Minoan kings and Pelasgian nobles, so the Chthonian rites of the tillers of soil were practised, on occasions, by the Achaeans, and would perhaps have been more frequently practised if there had not existed within the two castes differences of dogma, such as we shall presently indicate. In our analysis of the social and judicial aspect of Homeric homicide we were enabled to differentiate clearly between the Achaeans and Pelasgians, for their social organisations were different and distinct. In a religious analysis, however, the gulf cannot with equal clearness be indicated, if we suspect that the practice of common rites and the eclectic conception of common gods may have modified the differences which are otherwise maintained. Leaf is aware of the complexity of the problem, which he aptly describes as a ‘tangled skein.’[48] We do not, however, agree with Leaf’s opinion[49] that ‘there is no trace in Homer of any Chthonian religion,’ if the word ‘Chthonian’ carries its usual significance. Leaf implies that the Achaeans, before they came to Greece, were worshippers of the dead. The absence of such worship in Homer is, he says,[50] due to the severance of the military adventurer from the tombs of his fathers. ‘It is impossible to pay due rites to the departed when their tombs have been left far behind in the course of long migrations.’ We have seen[51] that the Achaeans were long enough settled in Greece, at the time of the Trojan war, to have produced relations extending to second and third cousins once removed. Surely the habit of ancestor-worship could easily have been renewed in the course of so many generations. We believe that the Achaean conception of a spirit land and their practice of cremation are a clear indication of the absence of the primitive ideas of ghost-raising, ghost-laying and fertility worship, which are the regular[52] concomitants of the cult of the dead. The dogmas which underlie these different burial rites cannot, we think, be fused. They can only combine by the evolution of an eclectic doctrine. Had such a doctrine evolved in Homer? The only passage in the Homeric poems which can help us to decide is the Nekuia[53] of the Odyssey.

The Nekuia of the Odyssey.

Ridgeway’s theory[54] of the difference between the Pelasgian and the Achaean cults of the dead is now well known. The former, he maintains, buried their dead, honoured them with periodical offerings of food and drink, and believed that the dead lived in a subconscious state in the tomb; the latter, however, cremated their dead, practised no regular tomb offerings (χοαί), and believed that the souls of the dead flitted away through the air to a place called Hades in the west. The curious thing about the Nekuia is that the souls of the dead in Hades are represented as anxious for food and drink, and when Odysseus sacrifices there, the ghosts come forth to lick up the blood of the victim. Further, it is only when they have drunk the blood that they regain their memory and recognise their friends again.[55] Odysseus thus describes the scene at the entrance to Hades to which he has been miraculously permitted to descend: ‘There (i.e. at the entrance to Hades) Perimedes and Eurylochus held the victims and I drew my sharp sword ... and dug a pit ... and about it poured a drink-offering to all the dead ... mead and sweet wine and water ... and I took the sheep and cut their throats over the trench and the dark blood flowed forth and lo! the spirits of the dead came out of Erebus ... and they flocked together from every side about the trench.[56] First came Elpenor that had not yet been buried ...[57] (who said) “Leave me not unwept and unburied ... burn me and pile me a barrow on the shore....”[58] Anon came the soul of the Theban Teiresias ...[59] (who said) “Whomsoever of the dead thou shalt suffer to approach the blood, he shall prophesy truthfully ...”[60]: my mother too drew nigh and drank the dark blood and at once she knew me.’[61]

Miss Harrison seeks to explain the difficulty which is presented by this unique passage concerning the Homeric cult of the dead by maintaining that it is a fusion of Chthonian and Olympian ritual.[62] On the assumption which underlies the reasoning in ‘Themis,’ namely, that the Homeric poems assumed their final form and their characteristic theological setting in the time of Pisistratus,[63] it is surprising that we have not more frequent instances of such a fusion in the Homeric poems! Those poems contain many references to Chthonian deities, e.g. to the Erinnyes, to Ge, and to Hades. But in the Nekuia there is question not of gods but of ghosts—ghosts, too, conceived in a predominantly Achaean way, as living together in a western spirit-land. Other Chthonian rites are frequently mentioned in Homer, but not the placation of ghosts. Thus, in the Iliad[64] Agamemnon swears a solemn oath in a manner which is essentially Chthonian. With sword in hand and a boar prepared for sacrifice, he prays (or curses) thus: ‘Be Zeus before all witness ... and Earth and Sun and the Erinnyes who under Earth take vengeance upon men who forswear themselves, that I ... and if aught that I swear be false, may the gods give me all sorrows manifold....’ ‘He spake and cut the boar’s throat with the pitiless knife: and the body Talthybius whirled and threw into the great wash of the hoary sea.’[65] The reason for the action of Talthybius in this passage is that, in Chthonian ritual the animal which was slain to symbolise the hypothetical destruction of the swearer if certain promises were not carried out, could not be eaten and hence was thrown into the sea.

Ridgeway, who believes that the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey was composed before 1000 B.C.[66] and who has done so much to differentiate Achaean and Pelasgian burial customs, finds in the Nekuia a fusion of Achaean and Pelasgian ideas. ‘Such a blending of religious ideas,’ he says, ‘is but the natural concomitant of the intermixture of two different races and cultures.’[67] But Ridgeway is still not quite accurate if he means to imply that any real blending of ideas had occurred. We have said that the ideas underlying these different rites could never be really fused, but they could amalgamate in the form of an eclectic religion. We may regard it as a confirmation of our view that Ridgeway has to confess that the fusion of Achaean and Pelasgian ritual of which there is a solitary suggestion in the Nekuia does not seem to have established itself in Greece very long before the time of Aeschylus.[68] He says: ‘According to the Homeric doctrine, once the body was burned, the spirit returned no more from its dwelling place with the dead. But on this point Aeschylus held a very different view. It is evident that by the time of Aeschylus an eclectic doctrine had been evolved. The Homeric belief in a separate abode for disembodied spirits was adopted, but at the same time the ancient doctrine of the constant presence of the soul in the grave of its body was retained, the gulf between both doctrines being bridged over by the theory that even though the body was burned, the soul could return to its ashes in the grave.’ Now the tomb-offerings made by Odysseus in the Nekuia do not take place at a tomb, but at the entrance to Hades. The inference from this fact is not that there was a blending of Achaean and Pelasgian ideas, in the cult of the dead, but that it was possible for Achaeans who practised other forms of Chthonian ritual to perform such rites when commanded to do so in the realm of Hades, the only place where their dogmas made such rites intelligible. If the Achaeans had believed in the Pelasgian doctrine of the presence of the soul in the tomb, they would normally have made Chthonian offerings at their tombs. Believing, as they did, that the souls of the dead lived in Hades, they could only find meaning in such a rite if they came, as Odysseus came, to the realm of Hades. We have seen that the Achaeans, and Odysseus in particular, were familiar with Pelasgian beliefs, and had, in common with their subjects, certain Chthonian rites. The Nekuia therefore, instead of proving a fusion of beliefs, seems to us to suggest, on the contrary, that such a fusion had not taken place in Homeric Greece.

In the Odyssey[69] Circe instructs Odysseus in the rites which he must perform when he goes to the ‘dank house of Hades.’ The fact that he has to be instructed in this matter suggests that it was not a normal procedure in his domestic life. The same may be said about the command of Circe in regard to Teiresias. Circe bids Odysseus, when he performs the Chthonian rite in Hades, to promise that on his return to Ithaca he will offer up in his home ‘a barren heifer’ and fill a pyre with treasures, and ‘sacrifice apart, to Teiresias alone, a black ram without blemish.’ The burning of a mock-pyre, and the sacrifice of a barren heifer, may be an Achaean rite. The motive is the placation of the dead, but the rite is quite different from that regular feeding of the dead which is so frequent in necromantic magic and in ancestor-worship.[70] The offering of a black ram to Teiresias is, however, somewhat different. It is Chthonian, but we connect it especially with the worship of ‘prophets.’ Teiresias was a prophet of the old Pelasgian religion. He belongs to a stage in the evolution of prophecy which is akin to necromancy and witchcraft and which preceded prophetic colleges, ‘magical secret societies,’[71] or divination by direct inspiration. This latter divination retained indeed traces of the older rites. Thus in the Ion of Euripides[72] the pilgrims to Apollo at Delphi are required before consulting the oracle to sacrifice a πέλανος, a Chthonian offering of meal, honey, and oil. So in Vergil’s story of the visit of Aristaeus to the underworld, we find that Cyrene tells Aristaeus to offer, nine days after his return, a Chthonian sacrifice to an offended prophet, Orpheus:

We do not therefore agree with H. Seebohm[74] when he says that the placation of Teiresias proves that offerings to the dead were regularly made by the Achaeans in their ordinary domestic life.

Religious Aspect of Homicide

We have pointed out that in Homeric Greece there were, so to speak, two different religions, which reflected, in their main features, the social caste-differences of the Achaeans and the Pelasgians. It has been rightly said that primitive man creates his gods in his own likeness, and in the absence of any definite Homeric references to the religious aspect of homicide we must assume that the two religions of Homeric Greece adopted, towards homicide, the attitudes of the two corresponding social strata. Amongst the Achaeans, we have seen, homicide was a deed which concerned only the slayer and the nearest blood-relations of the victim; there was no co-operation of large groups, no trial, no civic interest in the execution of vengeance: it was entirely a matter for ‘private settlement’ between the relatives of the slain and the individual slayer. And this ‘settlement’ was not a payment in money or in kind: it was a payment in blood, and in blood alone. The Achaeans, as a caste, had no interest in such ‘crimes’: on the whole, they regarded bloodshed as a local misfortune, which should not be aggravated by an extension of the dispute to wider areas, and therefore they frequently adopted and protected murder-exiles. We are not then surprised to find that in Homer the Olympian gods of the Achaean caste manifest no anger against a murderer.

In the Pelasgian tribal religion we may assume that the position of the homicide was somewhat different. It required the payment of wergeld to purchase back the friendship of tribal gods. But we have seen[75] that for slaying within the kindred no payment of wergeld could be offered or accepted; and we have said[76] that the penalty of slavery or bondage was probably inapplicable and that therefore exile was the normal punishment for bloodshed within the clan. It follows that the murdered man whose body was interred in the family tomb would never have come in contact, through worship, with his kinsman who had slain him. And in this sense we may accept the dictum of Coulanges[77] that ‘the hand stained with blood could not touch sacred objects: the shedder of blood could not sacrifice.’ Hence it is perhaps significant that, in Homer, Tlepolemus who, when he had slain his maternal uncle, went into exile to Rhodes, is said to have been ‘loved by Zeus,’[78] for by exile he had atoned for his offence. In ordinary cases of homicide, however, between members of different clans, we must suppose that the gods of the phratry, of the tribe, and of the city became reconciled to the slayer if the relatives of the slain received the customary wergeld. If then Miss Harrison says[79] that ‘so long as primitive man retains the custom of the blood-feud, so long will he credit his dead kinsmen with passions like his own,’ she is compelled, by her own reasoning, to admit that the ‘ghosts’ of murdered men, in the tribal wergeld system, did not revolt at the presence of a murderer, unless he were a kinsman.[80]

Coulanges[81] implies that in addition to clan-religion there was domestic worship. Now this domestic worship was shared by a husband and wife who normally belonged to two different clans, and are we to assume that if a husband slew his wife or a wife her husband, the domestic religion would have compelled them to go into exile even when the clan could atone by wergeld? This point we cannot decide with any certainty. Clytaemnestra, in later legend, offers sacrifice at the tomb of her murdered husband: her children assert, not that it is sacrilegious, but only that it is unavailing as a placation. We think that the tribal penal code did not demand the exile penalty for homicide of this kind and would have permitted wergeld. But within the genuine kindred, and especially within the small kindred, bloodshed, particularly parricide, was from the earliest times a serious religious offence.

There remain for discussion two problems which most writers regard as intimately related—namely, the origin and evolution of the Erinnyes, and the source and significance of the ritual of homicide-purgation.

The Erinnyes and Purgation

The Greek word ἐριννύς is probably an adjective meaning ‘angry,’ and should therefore be applicable to any spirit, whether ghost or god. But Miss Harrison[82] believes that the word was originally an epithet of a ghost or ker. The following is a summary of her opinions: The Keres (κῆρες), she thinks, were primarily ghosts: they were neutral potencies who might be either quite harmless[83] or baleful bacilli, or good spirits.[84] The word Erinnys was originally probably an epithet of ker, and denoted a ghost-pest, a Poine. The Erinnys primarily is the ker of a human being unrighteously slain. It is the ker as Poine.[85] Thus, because it was a ker, the Erinnys was primarily a human ghost, but the word came, by a process of specialisation, to be applied only to such ghosts as are angry because they have been murdered.[86] In Homer, she thinks, the Erinnyes have passed beyond this stage and are ‘personified (? deified) almost beyond recognition.’ They are no longer souls, but the avengers of souls. They have even lost their exclusive connexion with souls, and are become the avengers of the moral law, vague equivalents of underworld Zeus and Persephone.[87]

Now Miss Harrison implicitly connects the Erinnyes with purgation, since she asserts that ‘purification (i.e. purgation) is the placation of ghosts.’[88] But in Homeric times the ghosts of murdered men would not, she holds, accept any purgation sacrifice save the blood of the murderer.[89] Therefore, in a certain sense homicide could be purged, and in another sense it could not be purged in Homeric times!

Homer,[90] she says, does not understand the mystery of Bellerophon and the Aleïan plain, but Apollodorus[91] reveals the fact that Bellerophon slew his brother unwittingly and that he was purified by Proetus. Apollodorus, she thinks, is unhistorical in speaking of the purification of Bellerophon: in those old days, she says,[92] he could not be purified. But as murder was a physical infection, Bellerophon had to go to the Aleïan plain, an alluvial deposit which had recently been recovered from the sea and which was not therefore included in the ‘earth’ which was polluted by his deed of blood. The fallacies of this interpretation will become evident in the course of our reasoning. At present we will merely point out (1) that there is no evidence for the assertion that murder was a ‘physical infection’ in the Homeric age. Everything that we have said about the Pelasgian wergeld system and the Achaean protection of murder-exiles proves the contrary; (2) the plain of wandering, if that is what Homer meant by Ἀλήϊον, (it may have been a local place-name which conveyed to him no special meaning,) does not imply an alluvial deposit of any kind, but possibly a special place which known murderers, condemned to perpetual exile, were wont to frequent; (3) Apollodorus may be unhistorical, in speaking of the purgation of Bellerophon, but so is every Greek writer of the historical period who attributed purgation to Achaean heroes, as Aeschylus, for instance, does, to Orestes; (4) to explain the absence of references to purgation in Homer by suggesting that the death of the murderer was the only purgation of his crime, and to imply that Bellerophon was fleeing from purgation when he fled from death to the Aleïan plain, is equivocal and misleading. For a murderer was either purged or he was not purged; and if a murderer was put to death in sacrifice, no one could logically speak of him as ‘purged.’

F. de Coulanges seems also to connect the purgation rites for homicide with the worship of the dead. In the primitive family group, he says,[93] ‘there were domestic morals. The shedder of blood was no longer allowed to sacrifice or to offer libations or prayer or to offer the sacred repast.... The hand stained with blood could no longer touch sacred objects. To enable a man to renew his worship and to regain possession of his god, he was required at least to purify himself by an expiatory ceremony.’ This opinion implies that such rites were as old as the domestic religion of the Family. The most serious objection to this implication is that Homer has no genuine reference to any such ceremony.

Bury, who rightly attributes the origin of purgation rites for homicide to post-Homeric times, nevertheless connects those rites with the worship of the Erinnyes and of the Chthonian deities. ‘Gradually,’ he says,[94] ‘as the worship of the souls of the dead and of the deities of the underworld developed, the belief gained ground that he who shed blood was impure and needed cleansing. Accordingly, when a murderer satisfied the kinsfolk of the murdered man by paying a fine, he had also to submit to a process of purification and to satisfy the Chthonian gods and the Erinnyes or Furies who were, in the original conception, the souls of the dead clamouring for vengeance.’ The validity of this conception of the origin of the Erinnyes will be examined presently. We hope also to show, at a later stage, that wergeld and ‘pollution’ were mutually destructive.

O. Müller holds[95] that the religious rites of expiation and purification were derived from the remotest times of Grecian antiquity and were designed to reinstate the slayer in community of worship with his people. Confronted with the difficulty that such rites are not mentioned in our Homeric text, Müller argues,[96] firstly, that the reading ἁγνιτέω (= purifier) instead of ἀφνειοῦ (= rich man) in a passage in the Iliad[97] was the reading of the original text of Homer. He quotes a scholiast’s opinion to the effect that there is an anachronism in the verse. Secondly, he holds that the absence of Homeric references to purgation for homicide is not surprising, because the poet’s hearers would have taken it for granted as a matter of course! We must leave our readers to weigh for themselves the value of this argument. The opinion of the scholiast, if it proves anything, proves that there was an obviously false reading interpolated in the text.

Müller conceives[98] purgation (καθαρμός) as a form of expiation (ἱλασμός) which is closely related to the worship of the dead and the Erinnyes, and believes that it originated in the idea that the life of the manslayer (and sometimes the lives of all his clansmen) must be sacrificed in atonement for homicide. Such a sacrifice, he thinks, came to be obviated in course of time, either (1) by the substitution of a surrogate victim, or (2) by the degradation of the murderer to a state of servitude, or (3) by wergeld, which was originally suggested by the new religious custom of accepting the sacrifice of an animal in lieu of the death of the slayer.[99] Regarding the Erinnyes as Chthonian deities to whom this expiation is offered, he is surprised to find that, in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the purgation of Orestes does not lay to rest the wrath of the Erinnyes. To obviate this difficulty he falls back on the obviously absurd assumption that Aeschylus, for dramatic purposes, presents Orestes as not completely purified.[100] The text of Aeschylus and the text of Homer furnish the best refutations of such hypotheses.

Glotz is quite definitely of the opinion, and in this we agree with him, that purgation for homicide was unknown to the Greeks of Homeric times. In Homer, he says,[101] we find traces of a purely physical cleansing which is required as a preliminary to sacrifice: but such words as μιαίνω, μιαρός and μιαίφονος refer to the victim, not to the slayer.[102] Homicide is not a religious offence: the murder exile, received without scruple,[103] eats at the same table as other guests, and takes part in libations and in prayers. The first genuine instance of purgation for homicide occurs in the Aethiopis of Arctinus of Miletus (750-700 B.C.), and the practice continued to develop until it reached its complete systematisation in the time of Dracon.[104] ‘Its development,’ says Glotz, ‘coincides with the disappearance of patriarchal clans and the progress of city life.’ The purgation-system mediated the transition from ‘private vengeance’ to ‘social justice.’ It was derived, he thinks,[105] from the Semites. Before its advent in Greece, the Greeks had long practised Chthonian rites, upon which, so to speak, it was easily grafted, such rites, for instance, as that which accompanied cursing or swearing, a rite in which ‘purging’ water was thrown over the hands of those about to swear,[106] or that which was associated with solemn reconciliations after feuds or enmities.[107] Hence, says Glotz, it came about, by a natural transition, that in historical times the preliminary pleas on oath of the accuser and the accused in cases of homicide were taken at the altar of the Erinnyes, and it was at this altar that sacrifice was offered by the defendant acquitted of murder by the Areopagus and by the returned exile who had paid the penalty of involuntary homicide.[108]

Returning to Miss Harrison’s theory of the Erinnyes, we are of the opinion that the epithet ἐριννύς was originally equally applicable to all supernatural beings, whether ghosts or gods, but that before the time of Homer the epithet came to be limited to such divinities as were, for some reason, difficult to placate by the ordinary magic of placation.[109] The elemental forces which were deified, as we think, before the advent of the Achaeans, developed, under Achaean influence, a neutral and capricious nature, varying in moods of sun and shower, of calm and storm, like ‘typical men of the other world.’ Like men, they could be placated by gifts and by hospitable entertainment. But the ghost-worship which characterised the Pelasgian stratum was of a much more gloomy and terrible nature. Miss Harrison thinks[110] that Homer exalted the Olympians but caused the bad aspect of Chthonian deities and ghosts to be unduly emphasised. Though the Erinnyes are relegated by Homer to Erebus, yet he does not think of them as ghosts, but as minor deities who carry out instructions from their superiors. They are connected with Zeus (of the underworld), with Ge (the Earth), with the Sun (who, like Zeus, has an underworld aspect, for he too goes down every evening to Hades in the west), and with the Moirae who, though originally agricultural personifications of the Seasons, rapidly became synonymous with Destiny itself, and in Homer are superior even to Zeus.[111] It is especially in the ceremonies of cursing and of swearing that these Chthonian powers are invoked in Chthonian ritual. We have already[112] indicated Miss Harrison’s error in associating the Achaeans exclusively with Olympian, and the Pelasgians with Chthonian ritual. She is, we think, equally mistaken in assuming that the pre-Achaean Erinnys was an irrational being, predominantly animal in form, which had to await the coming of the humanising Achaeans before it assumed a respectable ‘personified’ shape. We think the Pelasgians retained quite faithfully the original anthropomorphic conception of the Erinnyes, while the Achaeans merely regarded them as minor deities who obediently submitted to ‘Olympian’ authority. The precise nature of the Pelasgian cult of the Erinnyes in Homeric Greece is rather difficult to define. In the Pelasgian religion there was but a small and indescribable difference between ghosts and gods, between minor deities and greater deities. It is probable that the Pelasgians practised, occasionally, Olympian ritual—for instance, at public festivals and in civic worship; but in the local domestic worship of the clan, the phratry, and the tribe, their placation of ancestors gave a predominantly Chthonian tone to their whole religious outlook. Hence their Erinnyes, also, though originally spirits which were angry but placable, easily became spirits, whether ghosts or gods, whose wrath was almost implacable. But the Achaeans did not realise the nature of these Erinnyes: and hence in Homer they almost assume the role of ministering spirits, sent to warn or to punish. They are not wicked and malicious, like the Harpies or the Sirens. Thus they are much more human and less, so to speak, diabolical than the real Pelasgian Erinnyes, and this is, perhaps, what Miss Harrison meant to convey when she said[113] that ‘in Homer they are personified beyond recognition.’ The Achaeans could not appreciate the terrible potentialities of the angry ghost-god of the Pelasgians, for the simple reason that they did not worship the ghosts of departed ancestors or any kind of ghosts.

It would, however, be a serious error to suppose that the Pelasgian Erinnyes were as formidable and as implacable as the Erinnyes of post-Homeric times. Moreover, it is gratuitous to assume that ghosts were primarily and necessarily angry because they had been murdered. There is no evidence that homicide in Pelasgian times generated implacable Erinnyes. We admit, with Miss Harrison,[114] that primitive man credits his dead kinsman with passions like his own. But we have already pointed out[115] that if the passions of primitive man are checked and controlled by a tribal society which tramples upon individual instincts, and acts in a collective capacity, if wergeld, according to tribal and early civic law, permits a slayer to remain at home and guarantees him immunity from vengeance while his hands are still wet with blood, we cannot reasonably ascribe to ‘dead kinsmen’ a fierce and implacable desire for vengeance.

How comes it then, we may ask, that so many writers regard the evolution of early Greek blood-vengeance, and a corresponding evolution in the blood-thirst of the Erinnyes, as a transition from the wild to the tame, from the fierce to the gentle, from the barbarously savage to the rationally civilised? The reason is twofold. First of all, previous writers have not distinguished between the tribally controlled Pelasgians and the bellicose Achaeans, and have therefore misinterpreted the text of Homer. Secondly, many writers have regarded the dark age of chaos of post-Homeric Hesiodic days as a valid picture for early Greece as a whole. This confusion has not only affected modern writers, but it also affected the Greeks of historical times. The various legends of post-Homeric times came to be regarded as a proper medium for the interpretation of Homeric saga. The Athenians of the Periclean age were compelled to regard as barbarians their forebears of pre-Draconian times. It is most important to bear this point in mind, in view of our subsequent analysis of homicide in Attic tragedy. We do not assert that all the legends of Attic tragedy are ‘unhistorical.’ We shall see that in Euripides many legends suggest a reference to a period which we may describe as Homeric or, at least, pre-Hesiodic, and are so faithful a reproduction of that age that they must be either attributed to the most skilful conscious archaising on the part of the dramatist, or regarded as genuine legends which had been transmitted with the least possible adulteration. But most of the legends which we find in the Attic tragedians and in the later epic and prose writers are either adulterated saga, or inventions framed in imitation of such saga. To base a theory of social or religious evolution on such legends is obviously to build upon sand.

As an illustration of the confusion which may thus arise, we will cite the legend of the Boeotian Athamas which is given by Herodotus[116] and by Pausanias.[117] Pausanias says that Athamas, King of Orchomenus, slew his son Learchus after having made an abortive attempt to sacrifice his son Phrixus to Zeus Laphistius on a neighbouring mountain. Herodotus, however, says that Phrixus was slain by Athamas, and that, as a punishment for this act, an oracle decreed that the Achaeans of Thessaly, to whom Athamas had fled, should purge their country by slaying Athamas in sacrifice. When they were on the point of offering up Athamas, as a ‘scapegoat’ for their sins, Cytissorus, son of Phrixus, arrived from Colchis and saved him! The natural avenger of Phrixus became the deliverer of his slayer, even in defiance of the oracle! The gods, now seriously annoyed, forbade the descendants of Cytissorus to enter the Prytaneum of the city, and a mock human sacrifice was regularly offered to make amends to the gods for their loss. We believe that this legend is merely an attempt to explain two mock human sacrifices which survived, in Boeotia and in Thessaly, in historical times, and that the fact of their contiguity led to the association of Athamas with Phrixus in the legend.

Stories of this kind have suggested the theory that the rites of homicide-purgation originated in human sacrifice: but they are merely aetiological. Moreover the survival, in historical times, in barbarous countries on the outskirts of Greece, of actual human sacrifice, and the mock sacrifices of human beings which were offered at certain festivals in various places, helped to confirm what stories of actual human sacrifice in post-Homeric legend, and stories of bloodshed which could be interpreted as human sacrifices in the Homeric poems, all seemed to suggest, namely, the opinion that all the Greeks of pre-Draconian days practised human sacrifice and were only induced to cease from the practice by the device of a surrogate victim. But there is no trace of real human sacrifice in Homer, certainly no trace of the sacrifice of a murderer’s life to gods who demanded it.

We shall see later that, in the Apolline code, death was probably the invariable penalty for kin-slaying,[118] and there was no ‘purgation’: but in other cases purgation was possible, and in the purgation ceremony an animal was slain. The conclusion which is suggested prima facie by these facts, namely, that at one time human sacrifice was the only purgation for homicide, is not necessarily correct. We believe it is incorrect. We agree with Glotz[119] in deriving the purgation rite from Chthonian sacrifice in its general aspect. In such sacrifice, originally, human beings were probably offered, prior to, contemporarily with, and even subsequent to, the adoption of animal sacrifice. We cannot legitimately assume that the latter supplanted the former. Glotz points out that religion, being conservative, tends to preserve in ritual elements which civilisation has abandoned. Hence arose the mock-rites of human sacrifice which took place in historical times.

The belief that homicide-purgation originated in the sacrificial slaying of the murderer was encouraged by the similarity which existed between the rites of homicide-purgation and the ordinary ritual of Chthonian expiation. We shall see later that, in the ceremonial of purification which was applied to persons guilty of homicide, from the seventh century B.C. onwards, the blood of a slain animal was poured over the hands of the slayer, and allowed to flow away into the sea or into a running stream. Thus, homicide-purgation (καθαρμός) easily came to be regarded as a kind of expiation (ἱλασμός); but it differs fundamentally in meaning from expiation, inasmuch as it is symbolical of the fact that a social or religious obligation has been discharged, rather than of the fact that it is being thereby discharged. The sacrifice of an ox or a sheep or a ram to a god or a ghost was in itself a payment or a retribution. But homicide-purgation (καθαρμός) was never permitted until the slayer had re-established his normal social equilibrium, had suffered the penalty prescribed by law, namely exile, temporary or perpetual, and was ready to resume religious communion with his fellow-men. Since, therefore, homicide-purgation was rather a symbol of reconciliation than a medium of expiation, it was more closely allied to the rites which accompanied the swearing of oaths,[120] the giving of pledges and the making of contracts. The animal on which an oath was sworn could not be eaten: so, too, the pig or the lamb by whose blood a murderer was ‘cleansed’ could not be eaten. Now it is unfortunate that such ceremonies, which were really symbolic of reconciliation, should have been so similar to the general ritual of religious expiation that they could easily be confused. There is a vast difference in meaning between reconciliation and the aversion of evil, yet all these ideas were confused in the general system of Chthonian ritual. As an illustration of this confusion we may cite a passage from Vergil, in which is described a rite which is really an ‘aversion of evil,’ a kind of purgation by anticipation. Urging the farmer to be religious in the interest of his crops, he says[121]: