Poine: a study in ancient Greek blood-vengeance

by Hubert Joseph Treston

But whether to thy thought this matricide

Be justified or no, declare thy mind

For information of those present here.

We may naturally ask: ‘Why is Apollo appealed to for judgment, when he has been cited as a witness?’ We have argued that, in Attic law, if we may trust Plato,[63] matricide could never have been legally justified. On the other hand the Apolline doctrine of pollution declared that the defaulting avenger was polluted. The pollution doctrine permitted and did not condemn ‘private execution.’ It was synoekised State power which made such execution criminal.[64] The conflict which is presented by these different points of view was too grave a matter for the decision of a human court. The command of Apollo was regarded by the legend-makers as the only solution of that conflict. The only question which a human court could be reasonably expected to decide was the question whether Apollo did actually command the act of Orestes. If the actuality of such a command was established, the acquittal of Orestes was inevitable. The only alternative possibility was a verdict of ‘responsibility for murder’[65] against Apollo! But such a verdict, in the religious atmosphere of the ancient City, would have been unthinkable.

So far therefore the legal issue in the Eumenides is comparatively intelligible. But we must call attention to the peculiar fact that in the play Orestes is represented as having been tried not at Argos but at Athens. If Orestes had slain his mother at Athens, his act would have been, in Athenian law, a case of homicide between foreigners, and such an act, though normally in Aeschylean Athens tried by the Palladium court, could quite conceivably, in pre-Solonian times, have been tried by the Areopagus. But Orestes did not slay his mother at Athens, and therefore the case would not have come before any Athenian court, unless Orestes intended to reside at Athens, and his right to reside at Athens was challenged by the relatives of the slain. Now, in Greek extradition law these relatives[66] had no right to object to the residence of the slayer ‘abroad’ unless he was guilty of wilful kin-slaying, as, for instance, of wilful matricide: for the penalty for kin-slaying in historical times was death, without the option of exile. It is precisely on such a charge of wilful matricide that the Erinnyes, in this play, prosecute Orestes. To that extent their prosecution was lawful. But the fact that the prosecution took place at Athens implies that Orestes intended to live in Athens as an exile, at least for a time. We have pointed out that, according to Greek extradition law, the relatives of the slain could have compelled the fellow-citizens of the slayer to try him or to extradite him if he fled to them for refuge. But in cases of kin-slaying it is probable that any State to which the slayer fled could have been compelled to put him on trial before they received him as an exile, or otherwise to expel or extradite him. Yet the avenging relatives were not compelled to accept a verdict of acquittal in any court as a complete restoration of the slayer to social and religious communion, just as in certain cases of kin-slaying the relatives were not compelled to admit the slayer to domestic communion, even when his own State court had permitted his return from exile. Hence, in the Oresteia, a verdict of acquittal brought in by the Athenian Areopagus in regard to a foreign Argive kin-slayer was primarily intended to legalise the residence at Athens of Orestes, but it could not have legalised his return to Argos unless the relatives of the slain accepted the verdict of the Athenian court as a final verdict of innocence, and ceased, of their own accord, from further prosecution. Now, the legends of Orestes seem to differ in their account of the ‘appeasement’ of the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra. In some legends, as in that upon which is based the Iphigenia Taurica of Euripides, the Furies do not accept the verdict of the Areopagus, and continue to pursue him over land and sea. The fact that they can drive him out of Athens is due to their divine power. In law, ordinary human relatives could not have done so. But it is clear that, in the absence of unanimity in regard to the attitude of the Erinnyes to the Areopagus, the Attic legend-makers who emphasised the connexion of Orestes with the Areopagus must have assumed that Orestes intended to reside, at least for a time, as a homicide-exile at Athens. Now there is no evidence in Homer of such an intention on the part of Orestes. In Homer, Orestes went to Athens before, not after, he slew his mother. Hence the whole basis of the Attic legends of Orestes is a pure assumption, without any historical foundation.

The main difficulty which the ancients found in the post-Homeric legends of Orestes was the interpretation of the command which Apollo gave to Orestes. Some legends, of course, such as that which we have called the ‘Argive legend,’[67] did not include any reference whatever to such a command. But in the Attic legends, which represent this command as an essential element in the story, there is no precise and definite answer to the question: ‘Did this command justify the vengeance of Orestes or was it a mere “extenuation” of his guilt?’ We have said that the conception of this command as a complete justification predominates in the Eumenides, though the Erinnyes naturally object to this interpretation. But the command may also be regarded as an abnormal psychic factor which would make it possible to interpret the act of Orestes as ‘kin-slaying in a passion,’ or extenuated kin-slaying, which is akin to involuntary homicide. It is only thus that we can explain the reference in certain forms of the legend to a penalty of one year’s exile: and to other details of punishment which are never associated with voluntary homicide. The Furies, in the Eumenides,[68] find it difficult to conceive that Orestes will ever return to his domestic religion. Now Plato[69] asserts that a son who slew his parent in a passion could not, unless the dying parent ‘forgave,’ return again to his domestic hearth, even though he could return, after a period of exile, to his native State. We cannot suppose that the Furies, in the Eumenides, represent an attitude of ‘forgiveness’ on the part of Clytaemnestra, and hence we could not expect them to accept the possibility of Orestes’ return to his native home in Argos. But the mere mention of such a detail suggests a plea of quasi-involuntary matricide. A verdict of acquittal on a plea of justifiable slaying is precisely the verdict which the Erinnyes in Aeschylus, before their ‘conversion,’ cannot recognise. But they might have accepted as an alternative to their charge of wilful matricide a charge of extenuated matricide. Such a charge, such a conception of Orestes’ guilt, is very prominent in a form of the legend which Euripides gives.[70] But even in Aeschylus this conception is not altogether absent, though it is very much suppressed, perhaps because it was inconsistent with the dominant viewpoint of the Aeschylean drama. Thus, Orestes suggests that before he came to Athens to stand his trial he had already atoned for any element of guilt which was involved in his obedience to Apollo. He says to Athene, before the trial[71]:

Sovereign Athene, sped by Phoebus’ word,

I come. Do thou with clemency receive

The outcast—not red-handed nor unpurged,