First of all, there was the original Homeric story, to which we have already referred.[2] In this account, Orestes slew his mother and Aegisthus in strict accordance with the Achaean system of vendetta. His act was not murder but just revenge. There is no suggestion of an ancestral curse, of an indefinite series of murders continuing from generation to generation. Blood has been shed; blood is avenged by blood. It was the Achaean principle, whether for strangers or for kinsmen. There is no trace of divine interference or of social justice. Apollo has no place or part in the story: there is no trial or official execution. We cannot discover even the element of psychological conflict. The Achaeans were soldiers, trained in the stern school of war. Neither emotion nor family religion stood between passion and its satisfaction.
But the legend or legends which are found in Aeschylus present very obvious and important points of difference. Are we to suppose that Aeschylus was not aware of any other tradition save that which Homer gives, that all the non-Homeric elements in the Aeschylean account are Aeschylus’ own invention, and that in this invention he was guided by the laws and the atmosphere of his own time? This is not our view of the matter. The Homeric legend, in our opinion, had a long and varied career before Aeschylus was born. It came down through many centuries, reflecting, as it came, many different atmospheres, and assimilating many different points of view, as it took shape in various localities.
Thus there was, we maintain, an Arcadian legend which told how Orestes came as an exile—a murder-exile—to Azania and to the town called Oresteum,[3] and how he died there as the result of snake-bite.[4] It is impossible to reconcile this version of the story with another which represented him as having married Hermione[5] and as having reigned as King of Sparta; and with another story of his reign as King of Argos.[6]
Again, we shall see that there probably was an Argive legend, which mentioned a trial of Orestes at Argos at which he was condemned to death. From a legal point of view, this is the most important variant of the Homeric saga. Euripides gives it due prominence in the Orestes, but Aeschylus and Sophocles ignore it altogether.
Again, in what we conceive to have been the Attic forms of the legend, there must have been at least two variations. In our analysis of the Attic law concerning justifiable homicide,[7] we pointed out that at one point the conception of homicide as justifiable may be very closely related to the conception of homicide as extenuated. The short duration of the exile penalty in cases of manslaughter or of slaying in a ‘passion’ when the act is ‘forgiven’ indicates a very slight legal difference between these two standpoints. Yet they cannot of course be regarded as identical, and they cannot even be fused or blended without a considerable indifference to consistency. In the transition from the Homeric age to historical times it was inevitable that Apollo, the champion and founder of the ‘pollution’ doctrine and of homicide-purgation rites in Greek lands, should have been drawn into the story. He is ignored, as we shall see later, in the Argive legend of Orestes. But he is found in all the other variants. Yet his rôle is not simple and definite. He purges Orestes certainly: but what was the nature of the guilt which he has purged? Was the act of Orestes justifiable or extenuated? In Homer the act was justifiable from the Achaean standpoint; but the legend-makers of the ‘pollution’ era could not accept that solution. For them, the immunity of Orestes could only be explained by the direct intervention of Apollo in advance. But this intervention was at one stage conceived as a complete justification, at another as a mere extenuation of the vengeance of Orestes. We shall find traces of both these conceptions in Aeschylus. In Sophocles the conception of Orestes’ act as justifiable matricide is predominant: in Euripides it does not appear at all. The interpretation of Orestes’ act as extenuated matricide does indeed appear in Euripides, but it is subordinated to another viewpoint which is quite incompatible with this—namely, the viewpoint of the Argive legend which ignores Apollo and regards Orestes as a common matricide who is worthy only of death.
One or two other minor variations may be traced in the Oresteian legends. Thus we read of a sentence which is very suggestive of perpetual exile in the Electra of Euripides,[8] while in other plays there is a reference to the penalty of exile for the duration of a single year, a penalty which is elsewhere extended by a decree of Apollo so as to permit Orestes to embark upon a second expedition—this time to the Tauric Chersonese![9] Again, the story which was invented to explain the Athenian Pitcher-Feast, and which is mentioned in the Iphigenia Taurica of Euripides,[10] is quite inconsistent with the Aeschylean legends, for in the former case Orestes was represented as ‘polluted’ when he came to Attica, while in the latter he is said to have been already ‘purged.’
The legal aspect of the Oresteia is further complicated by what we may term archaic assumptions. We hope to show presently that the Attic legends of Orestes would have been legally unintelligible if the Athenian legend-makers had not assumed that Orestes came to Athens as an exile after he had slain his mother, and not, as Homer said, before. Again, if they had not assumed that the Areopagus court, which in historical times did not normally judge cases of homicide between strangers, did judge such cases in early times, and that its verdict of acquittal, which was ordinarily a proof of the innocence of the accused, could at one time have been applied to a person who admitted the fact but pleaded justification, the legal analysis of this legend would have been impossible. We have seen[11] that before Solon the Areopagus court adjudicated in all kinds of homicide cases. The attribution of such functions to the Areopagus by Attic legend is therefore an archaism, even though it is an ‘historical’ archaism. We cannot be certain whether the archaism was transmitted from the sixth century onwards or whether it was ‘invented’ by later minds by a process which is described as ‘conscious archaising.’ Again, according to the legend which conceived Orestes’ act as extenuated matricide, he had already served a period of exile before he reached Athens. In this account, therefore, the Areopagus merely decreed him immune from further penalties. But such a decree was never associated with the historical Areopagus! Thus it is clear that the Oresteian legends sometimes contain ‘unhistorical’ archaisms. We must now consider in detail the Aeschylean presentation of the story.