It is Orestes’ fear of such titanic monsters waiting to inflict on him unspeakable punishment that makes him cry out in this Euripidean drama:

And again:

The conflicting attitudes of the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra and the Erinnyes of Agamemnon which we found in the Choephoroe of Aeschylus are also revealed in this play. Speaking of his father’s Erinnyes, Orestes says[127]:

We shall meet the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra in a somewhat similar rôle in the Iphigenia in Tauris. But in that play the Erinnyes are not united in their conception of Orestes as they are here. Those Erinnyes who refuse to accept the ‘acquittal’ of Orestes by the Areopagus continue to pursue him to the Tauric Chersonese. When Orestes sees them he cries out[128]:

The important thing to remember about the Euripidean Erinnyes is that they are real goddesses, not mental fictions. The Furies of the ‘Argive Scene’ are the Furies who pursue the criminal convicted of wilful matricide. For him there is no cleansing. To him no land can offer the shelter of its protection. ‘Alone, he has arrayed against him the universe.’[129] Sooner or later he will be put to death and will be delivered into the hands of the Erinnyes. But in the Attic legend Orestes is not a wilful matricide. Hence the Erinnyes of the Iphigenia drama are not so implacable as the Erinnyes of the Orestes. They are placated by the simple device of transferring an image of Artemis from the Tauric land to Athens!

The ‘Iphigenia in Aulide’ and ‘Iphigenia in Tauris’

A comparison of these two dramas reveals at first sight a rather obvious inconsistency. The Aulid play centres round Agamemnon’s sacrificial slaying of his daughter at Aulis, while in the Tauric play the victim reappears as a priestess of Artemis amongst the Tauri! It is generally maintained that the last scene of the Aulid play, which describes the substitution of a stag for the maiden by a miraculous intervention, is not the work of Euripides. But in the Orestes Apollo intervenes to preserve the life of Helen, though he can do so only by deifying her! In the Aulid play, also, Iphigeneia is said to have been saved from death by deification.[130] In the Tauric drama, however, the daughter of Agamemnon has once more assumed a mortal form and appears as a priestess of Artemis among the Tauri. Nowhere else in Euripides can we find such a magical atmosphere. If the human Iphigeneia was really saved, would we not expect that her father and her mother should have been informed of her deliverance? But they both believe that she is dead.[131] The plea which Clytaemnestra advances in the Electra of Euripides,[132] namely that the death of Agamemnon was a revenge for the death of her daughter, is based upon the reality of her death. Hence we think that Euripides reproduced both these legends of Iphigeneia simply because of their human interest and dramatic merit, without any special concern for their consistency. It is clear that Euripides did not invent the Aulid story, since it is found in Aeschylus[133] and in an epic poem,[134] entitled the Cypria, of post-Homeric date. The Tauric story is not found in any previous author, but we do not think that it was invented by Euripides. Both legends suggest a similar source. Two hundred years before Euripides[134] it was said that Iphigeneia was made immortal by Artemis, who brought her from Aulis to the Tauri, and substituted for her a stag-victim. As soon as Iphigeneia became a goddess she could, like other goddesses, be easily transferred from place to place by a simple transference of images. Herodotus says[135] that the goddess to whom the Tauri sacrificed was Iphigeneia the daughter of Agamemnon. The word ‘Iphigeneia’ was apparently a cultus epithet of Artemis[136] which signified her connexion with fertility and her influence on the birth of men and animals. The real as distinct from the legendary deification of Iphigeneia was therefore due to the abstraction and personification of a cultus epithet. The existence of a temple of Artemis-Iphigeneia at Aulis, whence Agamemnon sailed to Troy, and the similarity of the name Iphigeneia with Iphianassa (the Homeric name for a daughter of Agamemnon), led to a belief in the deification of Iphianassa at Aulis. Moreover, the survival at Halae, in Attica, in historical times of a mock ritual of human sacrifice to Artemis induced the further idea that Iphianassa had been deified through sacrifice at Aulis. The existence at Halae of a statue of Artemis believed to have been brought from the Tauric land, and the existence there of a temple to ‘the maiden’ at which real rites of human sacrifice were enacted, explain the origin of the Tauric belief which is referred to by Herodotus. Iphianassa, identified with Iphigeneia, becomes a goddess among the Tauri, and Iphigeneia is worshipped as the daughter of Agamemnon! The final transition to the stage in which Iphigeneia returns to life as a priestess of Artemis at Tauri is explained by reference to the ancient tendency to identify the priest with the god and by the ritual of resurrection or re-birth which is found in ancient fertility-religion. England[137] thinks that this stage was probably pre-Euripidean but that the story of Orestes’ visit to the Tauri was invented by Euripides. We do not think that even this story was of Euripidean origin. It belongs rather, we think, to the legends of the wandering of Orestes, which conceived him as guilty of extenuated or quasi-involuntary matricide which was ultimately ‘forgiven.’ When Iphigeneia was conceived as a priestess of Artemis and at the same time as the sister of Orestes, the evolution of a story which described Orestes’ visit to the Tauri does not, we think, require the genius of Euripides. Again, the inconsistencies of this story with the Aulid story which he has dramatised, with arguments which he introduces in the Electra[138] and with other legends of Orestes, such as the Arcadian legend, and, moreover, the insult to Apollo, the degradation of Athene, and the exaltation of Artemis which this story involves—all suggest a local origin for the story and the inspiration of theocratic legend-makers rather than the invention of a dramatist.

In the Iphigenia in Aulide the sacrifice of Iphigeneia is condemned as murder not only by Clytaemnestra[139] but also by Achilles,[140] whose promised marriage with Iphigeneia was the bait by which legend lured her from her Argive home. This view, we have said,[141] belongs to an age which has rejected human sacrifice and which interprets all the traditional systems of blood-vengeance as unrestricted hereditary vendetta. It belongs therefore to the border-line between the Dark Ages of Greece and the civilised historical era. From the legal point of view Clytaemnestra’s plea has no validity; we see in it rather a counterpart to the plea of justification which Orestes based on the command of Apollo. If Orestes claims the command of Apollo as a justification and if this claim is disputed, then the command of Artemis to Agamemnon may also be impugned. Artemis has the same right to obedience as Apollo has. If the Furies of the dead Clytaemnestra rejected the Apolline oracle, it was natural that the living Clytaemnestra should have repudiated the justice of the decree of Artemis at Aulis.

The Iphigenia in Tauris merits special consideration from our present point of view. As the general dénouement of the plot is sufficiently familiar, we shall proceed in medias res. We may confine our comments to the speech delivered by Orestes to Iphigeneia after their mutual recognition. Omitting for the moment Orestes’ reference to the Athenian custom of using separate drinking-cups on the Libation-day of the Anthesteria festival, we will give first Orestes’ description of his trial at Athens and of its immediate sequel. It will be noted that he has already served a period of exile before he reaches Athens and that the verdict of the Areopagus is not accepted by all the Erinnyes. We have suggested[142] that the Erinnyes symbolise in this legend the attitude of the relatives of the slain and that the Areopagus acts as a court of reconciliation rather than as an ordinary homicide court. We have seen that the relatives had always a theoretical right to refuse to accept ‘appeasement’ in cases of involuntary homicide, according to the Draconian law, ἁπάντας ἢ τὸν κωλύοντα κρατεῖν: ‘let all be appeased or let one objector hold the field.’[143] We cannot suppose that the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra in this play assume the same attitude to Orestes as they assume in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, for in Aeschylus the conversion of the Erinnyes signifies acceptance of the plea of justifiable matricide. Neither is their attitude to be compared to that of the Erinnyes of the Argive scene in the Orestes, for there they conceive Orestes as guilty of wilful matricide. Their attitude here is rather that of the ‘second Attic legend,’ in which Orestes is conceived as a matricide of partial guilt—his crime being conceived as extenuated by Apollo’s command. According to this assumption we can explain the conflict of opinion which characterises the Erinnyes. It is derived from a legendary conception of the Erinnyes as the symbols of the relatives of the slain Clytaemnestra who are presumed to have refused ‘appeasement’ and to have resisted the verdict of the Areopagus, which was conceived as a court of reconciliation rather than as a high State court adjudicating with full authority on questions of guilt or innocence. Orestes says:

But Orestes’ visit to Delphi merely suspends, it does not terminate, the pursuit of the Erinnyes. At this point the religious rather than the legal aspect of the Erinnyes comes into prominence, and what may be described as a magical mode of appeasement is indicated by Apollo when he commands Orestes to visit the temple of Artemis among the Tauri, to bring back with him the image of the Tauric Artemis and to deposit it in an Attic temple. Orestes says to Iphigeneia:

Here we breathe the atmosphere of religious expiation rather than of legal atonement. The origin of this oracular command may be attributed to Attic priests of Artemis, for in the temple at Halae there was an image which was believed to have been brought from the Tauri.[147] This expiation was not in any real sense ‘purgation,’ but it was sufficiently similar in character to be readily confused with it.[148] We are reminded of the expiatory sacrifice offered at the altar of the Erinnyes or the Semnai Theai at the Areopagus by persons who had been acquitted of homicide at the Areopagus court and by involuntary slayers who had returned from exile.[149] We may recall also the expiatory festival which Medea instituted at Corinth after she had slain her children and put to death the King of Corinth and his daughter.[150] In this play a mock ceremonial of purgation is performed in connexion with Orestes by Iphigeneia. She says[151]:

It will seem curious that Thoas, a barbarian king, should admit the necessity for such a ceremony, seeing that in the Andromache[152] Hermione is made to say

We shall see presently[153] that this sentiment was the outcome of Hermione’s emotional attitude to the Trojan Andromache.

Orestes and the Pitcher Feast

The suggestion of Orestes that his ‘pollution,’ when he reached the Attic land, was the origin of the Attic rite which prescribed the use of separate cups on the second day of the Anthesteria is of interest as an illustration of what is known as the aetiological myth. Orestes says to Iphigeneia[154]:

Euripides is not our only authority for such a myth. Its existence is confirmed by Athenaeus[155] and by Suidas.[156] It is not probable that Euripides himself invented it. At the Libation-feast which was known as the ‘Cups’ (χόες) an unusual custom decreed that each man should drink from a separate goblet and forbade any suggestion of collective drinking such as attached to the ordinary wine-bowl. The Athenians did not understand the real origin of this rite. In the strange blending of joy and sorrow which characterised this Dionysiac festival, they overlooked the connexion which existed between the public civic offering, at this festival, of libations to dead ancestors of the citizens as a whole and the primitive tomb-offerings (χοαί) of tribal ancestor-worship. Coulanges has indicated[157] the private, individual, or domestic nature of such tomb-offerings. He goes so far as to suggest that the origin of private ownership in land is to be attributed to the exclusive and non-communistic character of primitive ancestor-worship. Even in Solon’s time the laws defined rigidly the limit of relationship to the deceased which permitted a relative’s presence at the funeral.[158] The worship of Dionysus had many affinities with the worship of the dead. It is in such affinities that we must seek, in the last resort, the explanation of the gloom and morbid mourning which permeates all Greek tragedy. But we cannot suppose that the Dionysiac festival was able to import an aspect of civic communism into the essentially local and tribal ritual of tomb-libations. Hence, we believe a compromise was accepted in which men were permitted to drink together at a public libation-festival but were compelled to drink from separate vessels and to sit at separate tables! Such, we believe, was the real origin of this strange rite. But the Athenians, who were ignorant of its true origin, sought to find for it at least an intelligible explanation. They knew from the Attic legends of Orestes that this Argive prince had come to Athens for his trial. They knew that a kin-slayer who had not yet been tried and declared innocent was ‘polluted’ with a minor kind[159] of pollution wherever he went. His purgation by Apollo was legally valid for Phocis if an Apolline court had declared him innocent. But in the Attic legends he was untried and therefore unpurged. They argued therefore that when Orestes came to Athens to submit to trial on a charge of kin-slaying, he was prohibited from public civic and religious communion with Athenian citizens. It does not matter in this connexion whether the plea of Orestes was justifiable matricide or extenuated matricide. As he had been proclaimed as an unjust slayer by the avengers, who in this case were the Erinnyes, he was ‘polluted’ until he had either established his innocence or indicated the completion of his atonement to a court of reconciliation. Now ‘pollution’ was regarded by the ancients as a disease of a quasi-physical nature. Murder courts had to be held, even by night, in the open air. The ‘polluted’ man could not enter the temples or the market-place. He could not eat at anyone’s table. He was isolated from public life. His civic existence was suspended. If, then, it be supposed that Orestes arrived for his trial at Athens during the Anthesteria festival, he could not have been received into civic or religious communion. Hence the creators of this myth could quite naturally have conceived that a compromise was agreed upon by which the Athenians preserved, on the one hand, their reputation for hospitality, and respected, on the other, the religion of pollution. They admitted Orestes to the public feast, but they insisted that he should sit apart and drink from a separate vessel! It was thus that the Athenians explained the origin of this rite: nor is the explanation to be regarded as ‘anomalous’ or ‘artificial,’ as Miss Harrison suggests.[160] To people who were ignorant of the real origin of the Pitcher Feast, this was at least a respectable and intelligible aetiology.

Orestes says to Iphigeneia that he had some difficulty in refraining from rebuking his hosts on this occasion.[161] Miss Harrison’s explanation[162] of this statement is that Orestes was mad! But we are convinced that Orestes was not mad, either at Athens or amongst the Tauri, though he may have been temporarily insane amongst the Argives.[163]

We have seen that there were conflicting opinions concerning the guilt of Orestes in different legends. The predominant opinion in Aeschylus and in the legend (probably Phocian) which referred to his purgation by Apollo suggests that his act was justified. The Argive legend which we have met in the Orestes of Euripides conceived his act as wilful matricide which involved an eternal pollution. But the prevailing conception of Orestes’ act which we find in the legends of post-Homeric times regards him as guilty of matricide extenuated through Apollo’s command. The dramatic attempt to unify these various legends is the source of the complexity of the problem of Oresteian blood-vengeance in Euripides. It is impossible to analyse successfully the legal and religious position of a hero who is tried and who is at the same time untried, who is eternally and who is at the same time temporarily polluted, in one and the same drama! But the myth of the Pitcher Feast was based on a well-defined tradition. It ignored the Argive and the Phocian legends, it ignored also what we have called the first Attic legend, and it considered only the second Attic legend from which the Iphigenia in Tauris drama was ultimately derived.

The surprise which Orestes feels at the partial social boycott which confronts him in Athens is, we think, to be attributed to the coexistence of the Attic and the Phocian legends. In the Phocian legend Orestes was tried and purged, therefore he could visit any Greek city with impunity. But the Attic legend suggested that this purgation, though valid for Phocis, could not be accepted by the Athenians, so long as the avenging Erinnyes pursued, until Orestes had been acquitted by an Athenian court. This conflict of legendary view-points explains, we believe, the divergence of opinions which is suggested by these words.

The ‘Phoenician Maidens’ and the ‘Suppliants’

The homicide-problems of the Phoenissae and of the Supplices may be simultaneously discussed, as both these dramas are concerned with the war of the Seven against Thebes. The dramas correspond in their general atmosphere and in regard to the problems which they present with the Septem of Aeschylus or the Antigone of Sophocles. We also find an incidental reference[164] to the punishment of Oedipus which recalls the Oedipus at Colonus and the King Oedipus of Sophocles. Euripides, in his account of the conflict which took place between Polyneices and Eteocles and of the war between the Argives and the Thebans is, from a legal point of view, more satisfactory than his brother dramatists, inasmuch as he makes a clear distinction between the different aspects of the problem of burial in both cases. Polyneices may or may not have been a fratricide and a traitor,[165] but the Argives at least were legitimate belligerents. In the Antigone these two issues seem to have been deliberately confused. The burial of the Argives was a question for Greek international law, the violation of which brought down upon the offenders the anger of the gods. The burial of Polyneices was a more delicate question, upon which the gods might adopt divergent attitudes. Teiresias, in the Antigone, does not differentiate very clearly between the religious aspects of these two problems. The gods were angry—about that there was no doubt. But might not this anger have been mainly, if not entirely, due to the non-burial of the Argives? Here are the words addressed by Teiresias to Kreon[166]:

Kreon is unmoved by this declaration, which he regards as the outcome of bribery and political corruption.[167] But Teiresias now utters words which strike terror into Kreon’s heart[168]:

Now, Euripides, on the other hand, keeps these two questions clearly distinct. The burial of the Argives, being an international question, is referred by Adrastus to Theseus,[169] King of Athens. At first Theseus refuses to intervene, and rightly, since Athens was merely one of a number of Greek States, and she did not wish to undertake single-handed a war which was properly an Amphictyonic war. But ultimately Theseus, yielding to the persuasion of his mother and of Adrastus, fought and defeated the Theban army under the command of Kreon, and handed over the bodies of the Argives to their relatives for burial.[170] That in refusing burial to the Argives Kreon had violated a Greek international law is clear from many passages in the Suppliants. Thus Aethra says[171]:

and Theseus says[172]:

The Messenger thus describes the words of the herald[173]:

The problem of the burial of Polyneices has two distinct aspects in Euripides, as it has in Sophocles. In both accounts Polyneices was ultimately buried, as it was necessary for legend to insist that he should be, in view of the existence of tombs in Thebes which were said to contain the bones of all the seven Argive leaders.[174] But whereas in Sophocles it is religious fear which causes Kreon to consent to the burial of Polyneices, in Euripides we feel that it is rather the victorious intervention of Theseus which is the cause of this dénouement. Eteocles and Polyneices are represented by Euripides as having foreseen the conflict which would rage over their burial when they had mutually slain each other. Thus, Eteocles solemnly binds Kreon to refuse burial to Polyneices[175]:

Again, Polyneices is said to have commanded, as he lay dying, his mother and Antigone to bury him in Theban soil[176]:

Thus Euripides conceives in a twofold aspect the act of Polyneices. Subjectively, he thinks, Polyneices was justified in attacking and in slaying his brother[177]: objectively, however, or technically, he was a traitor and a fratricide because prima facie he was the aggressor.[178] But the sympathetic intuition of Antigone looks beyond the superficial enactments of a political justice of which the obscure and oscillating dictates cannot compete with her love for her brother in life, with her grief for him in death, and with her reverence for the solemn injunction which his dying lips had uttered.

The punishment of Oedipus which is mentioned in the Phoenissae is based, we believe, on the conception of his fatal act as voluntary homicide,[179] but it also takes into account the facts of the Homeric narrative. The Homeric[180] story of the continued rule of Oedipus ‘over the Cadmeans’ was not in harmony with Achaean principles of blood-vengeance. Homer does not understand it. Perhaps this is because, in Boeotia, as Leaf points out,[181] the Achaeans had not established their power. It is possible that Oedipus enjoyed immunity from punishment because of his position as a Minoan autocrat, but as there existed in legendary story many capable and willing avengers it is better to attribute his immunity to a discrimination between degrees in homicide-guilt which we have associated with Pelasgian tribal custom, and to interpret the Homeric reference as a Pelasgian ‘reminiscence.’[182]

In Homer, Oedipus lives, dies, and is buried in Thebes. But post-Homeric legend, under the influence of the pollution doctrine, could not accept these facts. Even if the plea of quasi-involuntary homicide which Oedipus himself put forward had been accepted he would still have had to go into exile for at least a period of years, and even then he could not have returned to his domestic religion or have been buried in the tomb of his fathers. The duration of exile for extenuated or involuntary slaying in historical times, and therefore presumably[183] in the pollution era, depended on the will of the relatives of the slain. One single objector could have extended the exile period indefinitely, at least in theory, according to the law ‘let all consent to be appeased or let one objector hold the field.’[184] But in the post-Homeric story of Oedipus, as Sophocles gives it, the plea of Oedipus was not accepted. He was regarded as a voluntary homicide and sent into exile. It is true that when Polyneices himself was banished, for political reasons, from Thebes, he naturally relented, and in his altered mood he offered to restore Oedipus to his home.[185] But in order to restore Oedipus it was necessary that Kreon and Eteocles should be either killed or exiled, and this contingency had not been realised. In Euripides the unhappy king ultimately suffers the same fate. Kreon says to Oedipus[186]:

And Oedipus refers to the Apolline oracle which foretold that he would die in Athens (an oracle which Sophocles also mentions[187]) when he says[188]:

But in Euripides it is clear that Oedipus is not banished before the death of Eteocles and Polyneices. A number of years is known to have elapsed during which he still lived in Thebes. But he was imprisoned all the time, and, as this suggestion is not implied in the Homeric story, we must suppose that some legend invented this novel device by which part at least of the Homeric facts could be brought into harmony with the requirements of the post-Homeric doctrine of ‘pollution.’ It supposed that Oedipus continued to live in Thebes, not however as a king or as a free citizen with full civic rights, but as an imprisoned criminal who by the very fact of his imprisonment did not pollute the State. Jocasta, who, in accordance with the Homeric narrative, is represented as living in Thebes for many years after the crimes[189] of Oedipus were committed, says:

We have said[190] that ‘pollution’ was conceived by the Greeks as a quasi-physical reality which resembled a contagious disease. In historical times a ‘polluted’ murderer was isolated by imprisonment. A law of Dracon, which is confirmed by Plato and by Demosthenes, prescribed that a convicted murderer en rupture de ban could be arrested and imprisoned, instead of being put to death, by the first person who encountered him.[191] But imprisonment was never regarded, in Attic law, as a permanent method of isolation for a murderer, simply because it was not a recognised legal penalty for homicide. Oedipus therefore would have been justified, from the standpoint of historical law, in uttering curses against his relatives who imprisoned him. Hence we suggest that this story of the imprisonment of Oedipus was invented by some legend-maker of the pre-Draconian age, in an attempt to harmonise the Homeric story of the continued life of Oedipus at Thebes with the post-Homeric atmosphere which regarded him as ‘polluted’ and debarred from civil and religious communion with his fellow-citizens. Euripides implies[192] that ultimately the Apolline oracle was fulfilled and that Oedipus died as an exile at Athens. In view of the general acceptance of this oracle by traditional legends and of the ‘established fact’[193] of the burial of Oedipus at Athens, Euripides appears to have abandoned the Homeric account of the burial of Oedipus at Thebes. In this he reveals more intelligence and a greater insight into the meaning of the post-Homeric legend than did Pausanias and his authorities who believed that the bones of Oedipus were transferred from Thebes to Athens.[194] For either Oedipus was ‘polluted’ or he was not. If he was, he could not have been buried at Thebes, since he was regarded as a wilful murderer: if he was not, then he need not have come to Athens as a homicide-exile at all.

The statement of Jocasta[195] that Oedipus was imprisoned in order that his disgrace might be forgotten, and that of Kreon[196] that Oedipus had to be exiled for ever because he was ‘polluted,’ are inconsistent; but we may infer from these statements, which Euripides himself composed, that he did not quite understand the origin and motive of the story of the imprisonment of Oedipus. For whoever invented this story did so with a definite purpose, namely, to reconcile religious doctrine with historical fact. The inventor knew the meaning and purpose of his invention. Hence the statement of Jocasta to which we have referred cannot have originated with the inventor of the story, for otherwise she would have said that Oedipus was imprisoned to avoid pollution.

Nevertheless we think that here again Euripides sought to achieve dramatic interest by introducing an antique variant of the story which Sophocles had ignored. In Sophocles, Oedipus dies before the clash of arms takes place between the Argives and the Thebans. In Euripides he lives to see the realisation of his own curses, and becomes more easily reconciled to his own sad fate when he finds that Destiny has avenged him in his turn, as Laius was avenged, and that in leaving Thebes he has removed from his life the local anger of ghosts and gods.

The ‘Mad Hercules’

The theme of this drama is one of the multitudinous episodes which are associated with the life of Hercules. Now the legends of Hercules have this much in common with such legends as we have examined concerning Orestes and Oedipus, that they refer to the deeds of a great man who has died. In Greek religion, apart from the Olympian Pantheon of the Achaean caste, every great man assumed a divine nature when he died. But the Olympian religion did not recognise the right of man to become divine, and therefore whenever legend attributes human acts to such Olympian gods as Apollo or Athene (of whose mortal life there was no record) we must assume that at the time of such acts these gods have temporarily assumed a human form. But Hercules never was an Olympian. In Homer, Hercules is mentioned in a manner which suggests that he had been living quite recently upon this earth, and living moreover a normal human life. We find him in Hades, like all other dead men, though, curiously, he retains some of his old vitality, for he is married to Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth.[197] We hear of his maternal uncles living ordinary human lives in Argos or in Thebes,[198] and his grandsons actually fought in the Trojan war! We will not here attempt to discuss the origin of the Grecian cult of Hercules. Müller, of course, connects him with the Dorians. He thinks that Hercules and Apollo, in their respective rôles of hero and of god, satisfied the normal wants of Dorian religiousness.[199] We admit that the exaltation of Hercules as a divinity was of post-Homeric origin; but it is futile, we believe, to seek to distinguish the historical from the fictitious strata in Heraclean legends. At the dawn of European literature the human life of Hercules, if there ever was such a man, was a thing of the past, and it is therefore more than probable that all the post-Homeric legends of Hercules are equally fictitious. The main point which we wish to emphasise here is that most of the legends of Hercules are based on the assumption that he had not yet died: that he was a mortal man, who obeyed, on most occasions, the laws of social humanity, not a god who had condescended to take human form and who was superior to the operation of natural laws. We agree that in the legends of Hercules there is a certain element of magic, such as is found in the legends of Medea, or Jason, or Iphigeneia. This element imports into Heraclean legends a certain degree of lawlessness or of chaos. But, so far as homicide at least is concerned, we will assume that Hercules is a man; not indeed an ordinary man, subject to every ordinary law, but nevertheless a man, whose actions, however archaically they may be conceived, can nevertheless be explained. The difficulties which are presented by the Heraclean legends are due in part to their archaic setting, but still more to their almost infinite variety—a variety which we may attribute to the multitude of localities in which this Hero-god was worshipped. The greater the number of shrines which a god or hero possessed, the greater was the variety of the myths which grew up around him, because ancient myths—which are not like modern fairy tales, but which were rather sacred commemorations of religious events—could be transferred from one Hero to another. Herodotus tells[200] how Cleisthenes of Sicyon transferred the ‘tragic choruses’ which commemorated the sorrows of Adrastus to the cult of Dionysus. Thus too must Hercules have had attributed to him the joyful exploits as well as the sorrowful events of the ‘lives’ of local Heroes. For this reason, and because of the tendency of myths to become more and more fanciful, we believe that the legends of Hercules as of most gods are ‘fictitious.’

In the Euripidean drama, the Mad Hercules, we are told that Hercules, in a fit of madness, slew his wife, Megara, and his children.[201] He was deluded by the goddess Hera[202] into believing that he was thereby inflicting death upon the children of his taskmaster, Eurystheus. We may recall a somewhat similar delusion which was sent in a Sophoclean drama by Athene upon Ajax. But whereas in the Ajax no actual homicide occurs, here we have actual bloodshed, and, worst of all, kin-slaying. From a legal point of view, the position of Hercules is therefore quite different from that of Ajax. It is, we think, more akin to that of Oedipus. Hercules slays his children without knowing that they are his children. We may omit, for purposes of legal analysis, the death of Megara, his wife, for this death is obscured by the more heinous slaying of his kindred. Like Oedipus, Hercules discovers the truth; like Ajax, he contemplates suicide. He gives expression to sentiments regarding the punishment of kin-slaying which are suggestive of historical Attic law; though he forgets, for the moment, that his act was involuntary, when he says[203]: