His deeds were dreadful: dreadful hath he felt
Your vengeance. With great power is Justice armed.
Orestes tells Electra that, since Aegisthus was a murderer, his body cannot be buried[24]:
... his lifeless corse
I bring thee: treat it as thy soul inclines;
Cast it by rav’nous beasts to be devoured,
Or to the birds, the children of the air;
Fix it, impaled, a prey.
We have already quoted Plato for the custom of refusing burial to murderers. We presume that it was a legally prescribed custom in historical Greece. The precise origin of the custom cannot be determined with any degree of certainty, but we associate it with the doctrine of pollution and the evolution of State power in the seventh century. In Homer,[25] of course, Aegisthus was duly and formally buried, even though the people of that age regarded burial as a passport to eternal repose in the Spirit-land. It is perhaps because of this Homeric fact that, at the end of the Electra,[26] the deities Castor and Pollux decree that the body of Aegisthus must be buried. Thus we find Euripides making use of the deus ex machina to reconcile two divergent viewpoints, and probably, therefore, two inconsistent legends.[27]
Euripides is distinctly non-Homeric in attributing to Orestes a psychological conflict as the dread moment approached in which he was to slay his mother and his cousin Aegisthus. Such a conflict would have been natural, in Pelasgian tribalism, if a kin-slayer refused to go into exile; but the conflict would not have been confined to a single avenger: it would have been diminished by the group-consciousness of an avenging clan. Nor could such a conflict have arisen in historical times, for the punishment of kin-slayers had, as we maintain,[28] been assumed by the State. Hence we must regard this tragic conflict as a piece of unhistorical conscious archaising on the part of Euripides. The fact that the picture is unhistorical is no doubt to be condoned in view of its dramatic value.