Poine: a study in ancient Greek blood-vengeance

by Hubert Joseph Treston

Of men I have communed with without harm.

All-mellowing time makes old defilement pure.

Nothing can remove the inconsistency in this quotation. We seek merely to explain it by attributing it to a confusion of two different legends, which viewed the act of Orestes from two different legal standpoints. In this passage Aeschylus happens to emphasise a standpoint which he usually ignores, namely the conception of Orestes as a matricide of partial guilt, or as an extenuated matricide, the conception which underlies the stories of the wandering of Orestes and of his sojourn as a homicide-exile in various lands. If Aeschylus does not consistently exclude this conception from his drama, this must be attributed not only to a certain legal affinity which exists between the conception[72] of Orestes as justified, and the conception of him as partially guilty, but also to a confusion of these conceptions in pre-existing legends.

This analysis which we have given indicates, at least, the value of legal considerations for the complete intelligibility of this play. For the history of law, also, we may infer from Aeschylus, or rather from pre-Aeschylean legend, that the early Areopagus, and therefore the early Ephetae courts, adjudicated in various kinds of homicide cases. The division of labour which took place, we believe,[73] in pre-Solonian times, and which left to the Areopagus exclusive jurisdiction in cases of wilful murder, of malicious wounding, and of poisoning with intent to kill, had obviously not yet appeared at the time when this Attic legend took shape. There is thus no basis for Ridgeway’s hypothesis[74] that the place of Orestes’ trial was not the Areopagus but the Palladium. The image of Athene which Orestes embraces in the Eumenides was not, as Ridgeway thinks, the famous wooden image of the goddess at the Palladium, but was rather, as Müller points out,[75] the image of Athene on the Acropolis.

The relation between the legal and the dramatic aspects of the story of Orestes may be indicated by the following useful, if fanciful, hypothesis: Let us suppose, for the moment, that there existed in the time of Aeschylus no other legends of Orestes except that which is found in the Homeric poems. If Aeschylus wished to incorporate this legend, in the form of a tragic drama, following we may assume in his dramatic art the Horatian maxim[76]:

aut famam sequere aut sibi convenientia finge,

he could have followed one or other of two possible courses: On the one hand he could have simply dramatised the Homeric story in its original setting, thus giving us what would be called an ‘historical drama,’ or, on the other hand, he could have invented a ‘drama’ in which the facts, the names and the characters alone were Homeric, but the ideas, the viewpoints, the legal and religious atmosphere were derived from contemporary life. If Aeschylus had chosen the former course he could not have produced a trilogy such as we now possess: the Eumenides at least would have been impossible: he could, however, have written the Agamemnon, and a Choephoroe somewhat similar to, though also somewhat different from, our present play, as both these dramas are Homeric in their main outlook. Again, if we suppose that Aeschylus chose the second course, the Agamemnon would still have been possible: but the Choephoroe would have been unrecognisable—in fact, there could not have been a Choephoroe at all: Orestes could not have been regarded as the sole or proper agent of execution: if he slew his mother without trial, or without having given her the option of exile, he would have been a State criminal, liable to prosecution as a matricide or a violator of civic law. The Eumenides would also, in this hypothesis, have been very different. There could not have been any doubt regarding Orestes’ guilt or the verdict of the court: there could not have been any conflict between Apollo and the Erinnyes. There could, in short, have been no Eumenides drama worthy of the name. We may therefore, as a result of this reasoning, and from the actual nature of the extant Oresteian trilogy, infer that there must have existed a post-Homeric pre-Aeschylean legend, or legends, of Orestes which predetermined the Aeschylean presentation of the story. These legends, by combining very different reflections in the course of legal and religious developments, created the moral and the legal problems of the Oresteia. It was probably these problems which constituted, for the litigiously minded Athenian people, the main dramatic interest of the Eumenides, if not also of the Choephoroe. But that interest was purchased at the cost of obscurity and confusion. It is, for instance, quite inconsistent for Aeschylus to have represented the trial of Orestes as the first Greek trial[77] of homicide and at the same time to have conceived Orestes as guilty of bloodshed: for it was at the precise moment at which State trial and State execution came into being that Orestes became a criminal! Before that moment he was simply the normal avenger of blood. This inconsistency is, we think, a proof that the Aeschylean story was not his own invention: for if Aeschylus had invented it, it would not have contained so many inconsistencies. On the other hand, inconsistency would naturally have characterised a legend which evolved through ages of legal and religious transitions. When once it had become stereotyped in the story, Aeschylus could not, even if he would, have thought it away.

Verrall therefore is right in saying[78] ‘That a legend gave the main fact, the prosecution of Orestes by the Erinnyes before a tribunal at Athens and his acquittal there, might safely be inferred from the play and is beyond doubt.’ And Müller says[79]: ‘The transmutation of the Erinnyes into Eumenides formed in Greece an essential appurtenance to the legend of Orestes. The persecution of Orestes from country to country by his mother’s Erinnyes, in the place of human vengeance, was no invention of poet or priest but Greek national tradition.’

The ‘tragic’ Erinnyes, whom we have already encountered in the Choephoroe,[80] find in the Eumenides their real battle-ground. In this drama they have received from the hands of Aeschylus an immortality which no mere legend or even religious ritual could ever have bestowed. In the dramatisation of those Titanic shapes the genius of Aeschylus found congenial work: but what, if any, elements of the final product were ‘invented’ by him is a matter of dispute. Miss Harrison thinks that the Erinnyes, qua Erinnyes, had no special cult in Greece. This view implies that religion, or image-magic, had not created these monstrous forms. Müller,[81] however, thinks that in a chasm near the temple of the Semnai Theai beside the Areopagus there were, in all probability, carved wooden images of the Erinnyes. But these images, he holds, did not influence the Aeschylean picture. ‘In the outward and visible form of the Erinnyes,’ he says, ‘Aeschylus seems to have drawn a good deal on his invention, for the earlier poets had no definite image of the goddesses before their eyes: and though there were in the Temple at Athens old carved wooden images of the Semnai, still their figures could not be adapted for dramatic purposes. Hence it is that the Pythian priestess after having beheld the Erinnyes is only able to describe their forms without being apprised thereby of the nature of the beings she had seen.’ Pausanias[82] says that it was an innovation on the part of Aeschylus to have represented the Furies ‘with snakes in their hair.’ Müller holds that this was not an innovation, but that it was borrowed from the images of Gorgons.[83] The Furies are compared to Gorgons in the Choephoroe.[84] We have elsewhere maintained[85] that it was from the Gorgon images which, in the Ion of Euripides,[86] are depicted as sitting around the Omphalos at Delphi, that Aeschylus got his idea of the ‘tragic’ Erinnyes. But in the Eumenides the Pythian priestess definitely states that though similar to the Gorgons they are not identical with them. If they had been identical she would no doubt have recognised them: moreover, they are not Harpies, she says, because they have no wings.

Hence we are of the opinion that Aeschylus, feeling that he was not bound by any definite traditional form, conceived the Erinnyes as monsters-in-general, but with a predominantly human shape in order to prepare the way for their subsequent transformation into Semnai Theai. In a certain still extant vase-painting[87] which represents a scene from the Eumenides, the figure of the Fury could be transformed into the image of a respectable goddess by merely removing the snake which hisses at Orestes, above her head! But the nature and function of the ‘tragic’ Erinnyes are not the invention of Aeschylus. Their form, indeed, his hand defined, but their nature and their character had long been enshrined in traditional legend. We have suggested[88] the social, legal, and religious transitions which led to the birth of these quasi-diabolical monsters. While the docile Pelasgian ghosts of primeval days have many affinities with the Semnai Theai in whose forms Pausanias[89] could discern nothing terrible or dreadful, the ‘tragic’ Erinnyes, which are a product of post-Homeric times,[90] appear in the rôle of avengers so savage and so implacable that they cannot be recognised by either ghosts or gods. Thus Apollo says to Orestes[91]: