Poine: a study in ancient Greek blood-vengeance

by Hubert Joseph Treston

In the first passage (Iliad ix. 632-7) the scene is the tent of Achilles before Troy. Owing to the secession of Achilles from the Greek fighting-line the Trojans had been rapidly gaining the upper hand and the Greeks were only saved from destruction by the sudden approach of night.[27] An embassy is sent from Agamemnon to Achilles to induce him to waive his wounded pride in the interest of the Achaeans, and promising not only the restoration of his concubine Briseis but also a grant of seven cities in the Peloponnese and many splendid gifts. Achilles rejects every possible ‘satisfaction’[28] and implies that the insult offered to him was so great that nothing short of the destruction of Agamemnon and his army would assuage his wrath. Odysseus and Phoenix having failed to bend his haughty spirit, the third member of the embassy, Ajax, son of Telamon, who was certainly an Achaean, reproached him with his indifference to the fate of his Achaean comrades, who loved him, and reminded him of the self-control possessed by other men in directing their passion for revenge, even when afflicted by a much graver injury—that of murder. ‘Yet,’ he says, ‘doth a man accept payment (ποινή) from the murderer of his brother or for the slaying of his son: and the manslayer abideth in his home-land when he hath paid a goodly price, and the man’s heat and proud spirit is restrained when he hath accepted the payment—but for thee the gods have put within thy breast an evil and implacable spirit.’ When Ajax delivered this speech, he had already despaired of the success of the embassy[29]: and he mentioned the act of the receiver of wergeld, not as the act of a normal Achaean hero—the Achaeans of the Homeric age are of a very different type—but as an act which was characteristic of a well-known kind of temperament, an act which, he thought, might serve to emphasise the extreme abnormality of Achilles’ desire for vengeance. If Achilles had had a son or a brother who was murdered, and if he were on the point of crushing a whole village in revenge, the argument of Ajax would have been more relevant to the case, but even then it could not be taken to imply that either Ajax or Achilles was a member of a society in which wergeld was a recognised penalty. It is significant also that Achilles, in his reply, makes no reference whatsoever to this argument. Viewing Homer as a whole, it seems more than probable that this almost solitary instance of wergeld was introduced by the poet, who[30] was aware of the existence of the wergeld system, but was not concerned with its details. We need not call attention to the non-factual nature of recorded speeches even in Greek prose writers, and a fortiori in the epic poets who reconstructed speeches more or less as a historical novelist would at the present day. It is in a similarly casual way that Homer gives us his one solitary reference to a common tillage field[31]—a reference which Ridgeway makes a basis for very wide generalisations as to Homeric land-tenure. No Achaean uses the words: they are the poet’s own: hence they can easily be applied to conditions of tenure with which the poet was himself acquainted, but which were not necessarily adopted by the Achaeans during their domination in Greece. In regard to the wergeld passage, Glotz suggests that, while the verses themselves would lead one to suppose that a certain ‘superior force’ constrained the kinsman of the victim to forgo blood-vengeance by accepting a blood-price, still they do not prove that there was any ‘social justice’ to intervene and impose a settlement or to indicate the amount of the wergeld.[32] This view we cannot accept. There is no explicit[33] reference, of course, to any ‘social justice,’ but the temperament which forgoes blood-vengeance and accepts wergeld is the product of a social system which restricts and controls the human passion for revenge. The Achaeans were above and outside such a system: the Pelasgians, we think, were born and bred in it,—perhaps for centuries. Allegiance to his tribal or civic unit and its laws alone could restrain primitive man—especially in Southern climes where passion dies very hard—from following the promptings of his natural blood-thirst. In course of time individual members of a settled agricultural tribe would inevitably develop a restrained temperament, through their fear of violating those unwritten laws of which Antigone said[34] that they ‘are not of to-day or yesterday, but no man knows the time which gave them birth.’ The Achaeans, who lived in every-day contact with such types of men, must have observed even though they did not imitate their self-restraint, and all the more because it was a quality which the Achaean caste-atmosphere could not produce.

The second of the two genuine wergeld passages in Homer is found in the description of the Shield of Achilles.[35] This passage raises many problems and causes serious difficulties to Homeric scholars. Ridgeway, who holds that the Achaean shield was of a round shape, and who assumes that the Shield of Achilles was therefore round, still finds nothing in Homer’s description to suggest that the Achaeans manufactured this particular shield. ‘It is probable,’ he says,[36] ‘that whilst the shape of the shield and the style or ornament are derived from central Europe, its technique discloses the native Mycenaean craftsman employing for his Achaean lords the method seen in Mycenaean daggers.’ Monro[37] also points out that ‘in choice of subjects and in the manner of treatment there is a remarkable agreement between the Mycenaean remains and the Shield of Achilles.’ All the pictures, he observes, are taken from incidents of every-day life, and the absence of any references to commerce or seafaring life suggests the antiquity of the picture.[38] Leaf, in his translation of the Iliad (1883),[39] makes the following comment: ‘The whole passage is clearly archaic, but the difficulty lies in the fact that no parallel, so far as we know, is to be found in the procedure of any primitive races which throws any light upon this passage. Homer so constantly represents the kings as the keepers of the “traditions,” and therefore sole judges, that he must have been consciously moving in some different world when he depicted the Shield: a world, too, in which there is no mythology and no sacrifice and nothing distinctly Hellenic.’ In his Companion to the Iliad[40] (1892) and in his latest edition of the Iliad (1902) he has proposed a solution[41] of the problems raised by this passage. He suggests that the passage does not refer to a murder-trial, nor yet to an inquiry into the question of payment of wergeld (as he held in his translation[42] of the Iliad), but that it is an account of the establishment of a new murder-code, which abolishes private vendetta and substitutes a compulsory ‘wergeld’ system. We will now quote the portion of this famous passage which relates to homicide—and we will offer a solution of the difficulty.

On the Shield are depicted, amongst other things, two cities, one of which is in a state of siege, the other in a condition of peace. It is with the latter city that we are here concerned. In this city two ‘events’ are described: the first is a wedding, concerning which we need only say that it is an event of common occurrence, which is not in the least degree novel or abnormal; the second event[43] is a dispute about the ransom of a slain man, which takes place in the ἀγορά of the city, in the presence of the Elders, of the sacred heralds, and of a cheering crowd of people. Leaf’s original translation (1883) (some of which he has since abandoned, not, as we think, wisely) is as follows: ‘But the folk were gathered in the assembly-place; for there a strife was arisen, two men striving about the blood-price of a slain man: the one avowed that he had paid all ... but the other denied that he had received aught, manifesting it to the people: and each was fain to obtain consummation on the word of his witness[44]: and the folk were cheering both, as they took part on either side. And heralds kept order among the folk, while the Elders on polished stones were sitting in the sacred circle and holding in their hands staves from loud-voiced heralds. Then before the people they rose up and gave judgment each in turn. And in the midst lay two talents of gold to be given unto him who should plead among them most righteously.’

This is the traditional view, which regards the scene as an investigation by the Elders of the city as to whether a recognised wergeld has or has not been paid. It is followed by Glotz, who proposes however some curious explanations of details, which we shall presently discuss. It is the view which we shall adopt when we have explained more precisely the exact nature of the ‘court.’

There is however a second view, adopted by Leaf in 1887, 1892 and 1902, first propounded by Müncher (1829), and supported by other scholars,[45] which regards the scene as describing the first interference on the part of some higher authority with the chaotic blood-feuds of savages.

Thirdly, there is the view of Lipsius that the trial was a genuine murder-trial, and that the two talents of gold referred to by the poet represented a genuine wergeld. This view is now generally rejected and we shall see presently the objections which militate against it: but our first duty is to formulate the arguments which will induce us to accept the first and to reject the second hypothesis.

First of all, we have already protested against the opinion which represents the early Greeks as cannibals living in a state of barbarism. In our view, the only period of Greek history to which such a conception may, with any justice, be applied is the period of the Dark Ages which succeeded the Trojan war, when continual migrations and the breakdown of tribal solidarity gave a temporary reality to the picture which is drawn for us by Hesiod. The Pelasgian, Minoan, and Achaean periods, however, present to our minds societies enjoying a civilisation which was regular and orderly, and a culture which was real and distinctive, even though it was also primitive. Again, the arguments which Leaf bases on the linguistic interpretation of one or two verbs in this passage are not only inconclusive for his hypothesis, as Glotz rightly holds,[46] but suggest, we think, the opposite deduction. In 1883 Leaf translated the words ὀ μὲν εὔχετο πάντ’ ἀποδοῦναι ... ὁ δ’ ἀναίνετο μηδὲν ἑλέσθαι as ‘the one avowed that he had paid all ... the other denied that he had received aught’: but in his latest edition of the Iliad (1902) he translates them (to suit his changed hypothesis) thus: ‘the one offered to pay all ... the other refused to accept aught.’ He admits, of course, that the verbs can have the meaning which he gave to them in 1883. But he omits to note the solitary word πάντα which we consider a decisive factor. If a man is said to ‘pay all’ surely that ‘all’ must have been a sum fixed by a traditional arrangement. We can find no parallel, in wergeld-paying communities, for a judicial decision on the part of the tribe which compels a relative of the victim to accept the wergeld which the tribe of which he is a member has traditionally recognised as the complete payment of the debt. It is only if payment is in default or dispute that the tribe would assert itself to prevent a feud of blood. When Homer adds, after the clause ὁ δ’ ἀναίνετο μηδὲν ἑλέσθαι, the words δήμῳ πιφαύσκων, surely this means ‘declaring it to the people’ rather than ‘manifesting it to the people,’ for it is absurd to suppose that the actual wergeld was included in the scene, since such a payment, as we have shown, usually consisted of cattle and sheep.

Again, we may mention what we consider a very serious weakness in Leaf’s later position. He has to assume that the scene in question is not a single scene, but two scenes. He thus describes the affair in his Companion to the Iliad[47] (1892). ‘A man has been slain: the homicide has offered a money payment in commutation of the death, but the next of kin refuses to accept it. Both parties come into the public place attended by their friends and dispute. This scene ends here. The next scene shows us the dispute referred to the Elders, the King’s Council, who are to decide what course is to be taken. The importance of this double scene lies in the fact that it shows us criminal law in its very birth. No criminal law can be said to exist when it is a matter for private arrangement between the homicide and the next of kin to settle the offence, if they like, by a money payment, instead of by the normal blood revenge, which means the exile of the homicide if he is not killed. But criminal law begins when the people claim to have a voice in the question and to say that the money shall be accepted.’ We will merely say, by way of comment, that this two-scene theory not only is artistically improbable but finds no support whatever in the text of Homer.

A period of thirteen years separated the date of the Companion from that of the publication of Homer and History. Though in this latter work he does not mention the Shield of Achilles, still we feel that if Leaf had applied his later theory of the distinction between Achaeans and Pelasgians to the solution of his earlier problem, he could have thrown considerable light on the question. In 1883 it was the absence of a king in the trial that troubled him. But is it not now clear that the ‘Kings’ of Greece from 1300 B.C. to 1100 B.C. were Achaeans, bellicose war-lords, who held in their hands the ‘sceptres’ and dealt out dooms to the people, but who took little interest in local disputes, who did not understand, perhaps, and probably did not adopt, many of the Pelasgian ‘dooms’?[48] Hence, if we suppose that the Elders in this scene are not Achaeans but Pelasgian chiefs of clans and tribes, we can quite easily understand the absence of the Achaean king or over-lord.