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]:
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]:
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:
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:
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]:
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]:
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]:
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]:
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.
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 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]: