§ 2
It is true that the state directs the blood-feud required of the relatives of the dead man along constitutional channels that shall not contravene the laws of the community; but it does not in the least intend to abolish the fundamental idea of the ancient family vendetta. It reasserts the original claim to vengeance of the victim violently done to death—a claim closely bound up with the cult of the dead—by forbidding the old custom, common in Homeric times, of buying off the blood-guiltiness of the murderer by a compensatory payment made to the relatives of the dead man.[154] It does not destroy the religious character of the whole transaction; it uses its own processes to secure the fulfilment of the requirements of religion. That is why the head of all criminal jurisdiction is the King Archon, the constitutional Administrator of all the religious functions of the ancient royal government. The religious basis of the oldest Athenian criminal jurisdiction is particularly evident. It has its seat on the Areiopagos, the hill of the Curse-Goddesses, over the sacred chasm in which they themselves, the “Venerable Ones”, have their dwelling. The judicial office is closely bound up with the service of the goddesses.[155] At the commencement of the proceedings both parties take an oath in the name of the Erinyes.[156] Each of the three days at the end of the month, upon which legal proceedings in these courts took place,[157] was sacred to one of the three goddesses.[158] To them sacrifice was made by those who were acquitted in those courts;[159] for it is the goddesses who have given them absolution just as it is the goddesses who demand the punishment of the guilty. They still do it, as once they had done in the typical case of Orestes, in which they themselves had been the accusers.[160] In this Athenian worship the Erinyes had not vet entirely lost their true and original character. They had not become the mere guardians of law in general, as which they were sometimes [179] represented by poets and philosophers who thus extended and weakened immeasurably their once much narrower significance. They are formidable daimones, dwelling in the depths of the earth from which they are conjured up by the curses and maledictions of those who have no earthly avenger left. Hence they are more particularly the avengers of murder committed within the family itself; they punish the man who has slain the very person whom he would have been called upon to avenge, if that person had fallen at the hand of another murderer than himself. When the son has slain his father or mother, who shall then carry out the blood-feud incumbent upon the nearest relation of the dead? This nearest relation is the murderer himself. It is the Erinys of the father or the mother who sees to it that the dead shall still receive due satisfaction. She breaks out from the kingdom of the dead to seize the murderer. She is ever at his heels in pursuit, leaving him no rest night or day. Vampire-like she sucks his blood:[161] he is her destined victim.[162] Even in the judicial procedure of the fully organized state it is the Erinyes who demand revenge for murder at the courts of law. Their absolute power extends in widening circle to all murder, even when it is committed outside the limits of the family; though it was only the imagination of the poetically or philosophically minded that ever transformed them completely to champions of justice of all kinds, in heaven and upon earth. In the cult and beliefs proper to individual cities they remained the auxiliaries attached to the souls of murdered men. These gruesome daimones had their origin in the worship of the dead, and they lived on in connexion with the undying worship of which they were a part. Indeed, if we examine closely the sources of information at our disposal, we can see even through their inadequacy and obscurity that the Erinys was nothing else but the soul itself of the murdered man, indignant at its fate and seizing its revenge for itself—till later ages substituted for this the conception of the ghost from hell taking over to itself the rage of the dead man’s soul.[163]