And curses on their race who banished me.
There is reference in this quotation to a shrine of the Semnai Theai in the deme Colonus. It was at this shrine that Oedipus appeared as a suppliant for asylum and it was here that he had to submit to a ceremonial of ‘cleansing’ which we have already referred to[68] as a minor local purgation. This ceremonial was probably applied to all foreign homicide exiles who claimed the privilege of residing in a State. Orestes does not require it when he arrives at Athens, because he has not yet been tried and convicted, because Apollo has commanded him to go to Athens, and because Apollo has purged him of his guilt. The purgation ceremony in the Oedipus Coloneus was similar to that which Croesus administered to the Phrygian kin-slayer, as Herodotus[69] records. We have said[70] that, in cases of kin-slaying, some kind of inquiry, an informal trial, was held to investigate the question of guilt. The Athenians[71] here do not at first accept the plea of Oedipus, but refer the matter to the decision of Theseus, King of Athens. It is ultimately upon the word of Apollo that Theseus grants him protection.[72]
Within the precincts of the shrine of the Semnai Theai, there was, in the time of Pausanias, a tomb which was called the tomb of Oedipus. Pausanias[73] does not believe the story of Sophocles that Oedipus died and was buried in Attic soil. Does not Homer,[74] he argues, prove that Oedipus was buried at Thebes? Yet the tomb of Oedipus was to be seen in the shrine of the Semnai! Pausanias inquired about this curious contradiction, and he discovered, as he thinks, the solution. The bones of Oedipus were, he says, transferred from Thebes to Athens! Nothing could better illustrate the credulity of the ancients and their want of historical logic. Oedipus was, in all probability, buried at Thebes. According to Homer,[75] he never left that city. But the doctrine of pollution, which was applied retrospectively to Oedipus, insisted that he did leave Thebes and that he could never return to it. Plato implies that a person who was stained with kindred bloodshed—even extenuated kin-slaying—could never be buried in the tomb of his fathers. To Corinth Oedipus did not return. To Phocis he could not go, for it was there that the deed of blood was wrought, and we have seen[76] that a foreign slayer could never return, whether his act was voluntary or involuntary, to the State in which the act occurred. As a blind exile could not be expected to go very far from home, the natural place for the exile of Oedipus was the Attic land beyond Cithaeron. Thither legend brought him, to constitute a further link in the eternal friendship between Thebes and Athens! In the time of Demosthenes,[77] just before the battle of Chaeronea, the Athenian reception of Oedipus was put forward as an argument for the alliance of Thebes and Athens. In Attica legend said that he was buried, and his tomb was there for everyone to see. But he could not have been buried in Attica, since, according to Homer, he was buried at Thebes. To reconcile Homer with later legend, it was necessary therefore to suppose that the bones of Oedipus were transferred from Thebes to Athens. Pausanias, however, unfortunately failed to see that, according to this hypothesis, the whole structure which post-Homeric legends of the ‘pollution’ era built round the name of Oedipus topples to the ground. The explanation lies in the evolution of the legend. The legend which Sophocles followed is absolutely incompatible with Homer; and this was the ordinary and, so far as we know, the only legend of the death of Oedipus which existed in post-Homeric days.
The ‘Antigone’
In the Antigone drama, which is rightly famous not only for its dramatic art, but also for the problems which it presents and the conflicts of human passion which dominate it, there is no plain, direct and obvious matter for the student of homicide law. But there are points of interest on the borderland of homicide which cannot be entirely omitted. It is easy for the adverse critic to assert that in this play we find reference to civil war, to suicide, to judicial execution, and to quarrels about burial, but we find no reference to homicide. We venture to suggest that fratricide in civil war, judicial executions of which the justice is called in question, and suicide, are very closely related to homicide by the similarity, if not the community, of their nature. Lysias[78] tells how, in the political crises at Athens, men were prosecuted, sentenced, and executed as murderers who had merely acted as informers, or as we should say ‘secret service’ agents, in regard to that vague political crime which is called treason. According to Pausanias,[79] the Athenians accepted as a foundation legend for the Delphinium homicide-court the story that Theseus pleaded justification for having slain, in civil war, Pallas and his sons who were his kinsmen. Again, suicide and homicide, as they appear in drama, may be closely related, since Teucer was punished by his father, Telamon, because of the suicide of his half-brother, Ajax.[80] He was even said to have been tried for this deed, for the story of his trial is solemnly told by Pausanias[81] when he is describing the origin of the Attic murder-court Phreatto. In the Antigone the judicial execution of Antigone by Kreon is assailed as murder by his son, Haemon. The messenger describes how Haemon attempted to slay Kreon in revenge[82]:
But with savage eyes the youth
Glared scowling at him, and without a word
Plucked forth his two-edged blade. The father then
Fled and escaped: but the unhappy boy,
Wroth with himself, even where he stood, leant heavily