In later times the pursuit and punishment of homicide was organized in accordance with quite different principles. The State recognized its interest in the reprisals made for such a breach of the peace: we may take it as certain that in Greek cities generally the state took a share in the regular investigation and punishment of murder in its courts of justice,[145] though here, too, it is only in the case of Athenian law that we have precise information. At Athens, in accordance with the ancient code dealing with the legal prosecution of murder (which never fell into disuse after Drakon had established it by his penal legislation), the exclusive right—and the unavoidable duty—of prosecuting the murderer belonged to the next of kin of the murdered man. (In special cases only it was extended to include the more distant relatives, and even the members of the phratria to which he had belonged.) It is clear that this duty of making an accusation which fell upon the next of kin, preserves a relic of the ancient duty of the blood-feud which has been transformed by the requirements of the public welfare. It is the same narrow circle of relationship, extending to the third generation, united by a strict religious bond, to which alone belonged the right to inherit property and the duty of performing the cult of the dead. This circle of relatives is here again called upon to “succour” the unfortunate who has been violently done to death.[146] The reason for this duty—a duty evidently derived from the ancient blood-feud—is easy to understand: it, too, is a department of the cult of the dead which was binding as a duty upon exactly that circle of relatives. It was no mere abstract “right”, but a quite definite personal claim, made by the dead man himself, that the surviving relatives were required to satisfy. At Athens even in the fourth and fifth centuries the belief still survived in undiminished vigour that the soul of one violently done to death, until the wrong done to him was avenged upon the doer of it, would wander about finding no rest,[147] full of rage at the violent act, and wrathful, too, against the relatives [177] who should have avenged him, if they did not fulfil their duty. He himself would become an “avenging spirit”; and the force of his anger might be felt throughout whole generations.[148] Implacable revenge is the sacred duty of those—his representatives and executors—who are specially called upon to fulfil the needs of the dead soul. The state forbids them to take the law into their own hands; but it commands them to seek redress at the tribunals of justice. It will take over the duties of judge and executioner itself; but a decided consideration will be shown to the relatives of the murdered man at the hearing of the case. In duly conducted criminal procedure the courts specially appointed for this purpose will decide whether the deed is to be considered one of wilful murder, unintentional manslaughter, or justifiable homicide. In making these distinctions the state has struck a blow at that older code of the blood-feud in which the right of vengeance belonged entirely to the family of the murdered man. According to that code, as we cannot but conclude from Homer, nothing but the fact of the violent death of a relative was considered, not the character or motive of the deed itself. Now, however, the murderer is liable to a death penalty which he can avoid before the verdict is given by going into voluntary and perpetual exile. He disappears and leaves the country—at the boundaries of the country the state’s authority ceases, and so does the power of the indignant spirit of the dead, which is bound to its native soil—like that of all local deities, whose influence is confined to the place where they are worshipped. If, by such flight over the frontier, “the doer of the deed withdraws himself from the person injured by him—i.e. the angry soul of the dead man”[149]—his life is thereby saved, even if he himself is not justified. This alone is meant by the permission of such voluntary exile. Involuntary homicide[150] is punished by banishment for a limited period, after the expiration of which the relations of the dead man are to grant a pardon to the murderer on his return to his native land.[151] If they voted for it unanimously[152] they could even do this before he went into banishment, in which case this would not take place at all. There can be no doubt that this pardon had to be granted by them in the name of the dead man as well, of whose rights they were the representatives; indeed, the man himself lying mortally wounded could before his death, even in the case of wilful murder, pardon his assailant and thereby excuse his relatives the duty of prosecution;[153] to such an extent was the injured soul’s wish for vengeance the only point at issue, [178] even in the legal procedure of a constitutionally governed state, and not in the least the lawless act of the murderer as such. When there is no desire for vengeance on the part of the victim requiring to be satisfied, the murderer goes unpunished. When he suffers punishment, he suffers it for the satisfaction of the soul of the murdered man. He is no longer slain as a sacrifice to his victim; but when the relations of the dead exact vengeance from him by legally constituted processes, that, too, is a part of the cult offered to the soul of the dead.
§ 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]
§ 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]
§ 4
The Oracle, then, of the omniscient God sanctified and recommended these rites of expiation; the state regulated its judicial procedure in murder cases on the lines of the old family blood-feud. It was natural, then, that the ideas on which these religious and political institutions were based—the conviction of a continued existence enjoyed by the murdered man’s soul and of his consciousness and knowledge of what occurred among the living who survived, his anger and his powers—that these ideas should attain to something like the position of an article of faith. The confidence with which these beliefs were held still manifests itself to us in the speeches at murder trials in which Antiphon, suiting his language to his real or imagined public, tries to arouse terror and awe, as at the presence of indubitable realities, by calling upon the angry soul of the dead man and the spirits that avenge the dead.[176] About the souls of murdered men indeed, regarded as more than other spirits unable to find rest, a strange and ghostly mythology grew up, of which we shall have some specimens later on. How primitive such beliefs could be we may gather with startling clearness from occasional records of purely savage customs[177] which are derived from them—customs which cannot possibly have been freshly invented in the Greece of this enlightened period, and must be either primitive Greek savagery come to light again, or else barbarisms only too easily welcomed from less civilized neighbours. In any case they imply the most materialistic view of the survival [182] of the murdered man, and of the revenge that might be taken by his soul.
It is evident that what men believed about the souls of murdered men must have had an important influence upon the general belief in a future life as it took shape in the mind of the people. But the extent of such an influence can be more exactly measured in the story which Xenophon tells about the dying Kyros; as the strongest grounds for the hope that an after-life will be the portion of all souls after their separation from the body, the dying king points to the unquestioned facts which, as all admit, prove a special after-life for the souls “of those who have suffered injustice”. In addition to this he lays stress on the argument that the worship of the dead would not have been preserved intact to his own time if their souls had been entirely deprived of all active power.[178] Thus we see how the cult of the souls of the dead was the chief source of the belief in a continued life after death.