Even thy son, Amphidamas, whom unwittingly of life I reft
In a brainish moment, foolishly, when we quarrelled o’er the dice;
Then the horseman, Peleus, kindly took me to his house, and kindly
Reared me with his son, and bade me be thy comrade to the end;
So my bones, when they are gathered, place where thine shall also be,
In the two-eared golden urn which gracious Thetis gave to thee.”
In these verses, we see the common practice of the heroic ages in Greece, with regard to manslaughter. No matter how slight the occasion might be out of which the lethal quarrel arose; how innocent soever of all hostile intention the unhappy offender; the only safety to him from the private revenge of the kinsman of the person unwittingly slain, was to flee to a country that acknowledged some foreign chief, and find both a friend and a country in a distant land. All this, too, in an era of civilization, when courts of law and regular judges (as from various passages of Homer is apparent) were not altogether unknown; but nature is stronger than law, and passion slow to yield up its fiery right of summary revenge, for the cold, calculating retribution of an impartial judge.
The person on whom the duty of avenging shed blood, according to the heroic code of morals, fell, was the nearest of kin to the person whose blood had been shed; and accordingly we find (as stated more at large by Gesenius and Michaelis[f2]) that in the Hebrew language, the same word means both an avenger of blood and a kinsman, while in the cognate Arabic the term for an avenger means also a survivor—that is, the surviving kinsman. In the same way, when Clytemnestra, as we have just seen in the previous drama, had treacherously murdered her husband Agamemnon, the code of social morality then existing laid the duty of avenging this most unnatural deed on the nearest relation of the murdered chieftain, viz.—his son, Orestes; a sore duty indeed, in this case, as the principal offender was his own mother: so that in vindicating one feeling of his filial nature the pious son had to do violence to another; but a duty it still remained; and there does not appear the slightest trace that it was considered one whit the less imperative on account of the peculiar relation that existed here between the dealer of the vengeful blow and the person on whom it was dealt. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed was the old patriarchal law on the subject, proclaimed without limitation and without exception; and the cry of innocent blood rose to Heaven with peculiar emphasis when the sufferer was both a father and a king.
“Good, how good, when one who dies unjustly leaves a son behind him
To avenge his death!”—Odyss. iii. 196,