§ 3
Thus, the whole procedure at murder trials was directed rather to the satisfaction of invisible powers—the injured souls of the dead and the daimones that represent them—than of the state and its living members. In essence it was a religious act. As a result all was not at an end when the human verdict on the case had been given. On his return from exile the man guilty of involuntary homicide, besides receiving the [180] pardon of the relatives of the dead man, had still a double duty to perform; he had to be purified and to offer propitiatory sacrifice.[164] Purification from the blood of the slain was necessary even in the case of the unpunished agent of what the state regarded as justifiable homicide;[165] it restored the man, hitherto regarded as “unclean”, to participation in the religious gatherings of state and family which could not have been approached by an unpurified person without suffering defilement. The Homeric poems know nothing of any such religious purification of those who have incurred the stain of blood.[166] Analogous occurrences in the religious usage of allied peoples make it, however, almost impossible to doubt that the notion of religious uncleanness belonging to a man who has had any dealings with uncanny powers was of primeval antiquity among the Greeks, too. It can only have been suppressed in the Homeric view of the matter; just as that view also suppressed the usages of expiation. These were intended to propitiate the indignant soul of the dead and the gods who protected it, by means of solemn sacrifice; but in the Homeric picture of the world they never appear, for the ideas on which they were based had themselves been swept away.
The details of purification and expiation—the former serving the interests of the state and its religious needs, the latter intended as a final appeasement of the injured powers of the unseen world—were closely united in practice and are often confused in the accounts which have come down to us. A hard and fast distinction between them cannot be drawn. So much at all events is clear; the expiatory rites indispensable when murder had been committed had the closest possible similarity with the ritual of sacrifice to the gods of the underworld.[167] And, in fact, the deities invoked at such rites of expiation—Zeus Meilichios, Zeus Apotropaios, and the rest—belong to the underworld circle of gods.[168] To them, instead of the murderer himself, a victim was offered to appease the anger felt by them as the patrons of the departed soul. The Erinyes, too, have sacrifice made to them at expiations[169]—everything in these matters is connected with the kingdom of the dead and its inhabitants.
But it was the Delphic Oracle that saw to the details of purification and expiation after murder. The necessity of such rights was impressed on men by the example set in the story of Apollo’s own flight and purification after the slaying of the earth-spirit at Pytho. These events were symbolically enacted over again regularly every eight years.[170] At Delphi, [181] too, according to Aeschylus, Apollo himself purified Orestes the matricide from the pollution of his crime.[171] At Athens one of the oldest propitiatory sites was called after one of Apollo’s titles, the Delphinion.[172] The Oracle must often have directed its inquirers to placate not merely the Heroes, but also the angry souls of murdered (and not heroized) men by means of expiatory sacrifices: as it bade the murderers of Archilochos and the Spartan king Pausanias.[173] Propitiatory sacrifice in this sense does not belong to the Apolline cult as an exclusive possession; it belongs, also, to other, mostly lower-world, deities; but it was the Oracle of Apollo that set the seal on its sanctity. At Athens the Exegetai founded under the influence of the Delphic Oracle were the official administrators of this expiatory ritual.[174] Plato was certainly following the customs of Greek cities when in the “Laws” he declares that his state shall take its regulations for purification and propitiation from Delphi.[175]