Poine: a study in ancient Greek blood-vengeance

by Hubert Joseph Treston

In historical Greek law the plotter and the executor of bloodshed were equally criminal and culpable. To partition blood-guilt was not to remove it. Therefore, if Apollo can transfer to himself the guilt of Orestes, this can only be because there is a doubt about the nature of the guilt. But in estimating the nature or the extent of this guilt, the legends seem to have been divided, some of them regarding the case as one of justifiable matricide and others as one of extenuated matricide.[35] Similarly the Erinnyes were divided in their opinion. Sometimes they pursue Orestes in the rôle of avenging relatives clamouring for the trial or extradition of a wilful kin-slayer who had fled to a foreign State with the intention of residing there as an exile and who hoped to secure admission by a plea of ‘justifiable slaying’; but sometimes they seem to suggest that Orestes was not a matricide of full guilt, that the anger of the slain was temporary and transient, and that it would ultimately terminate in ‘forgiveness,’ because of the extenuation involved in Apollo’s command.

This latter standpoint is undoubtedly implied in several passages in the Electra: we shall find it also at the end of the Orestes,[36] for Orestes is there condemned to a period of one year’s exile from Argos and from Athens, and this penalty can only refer to involuntary or quasi-involuntary slaying, and presumes, in the event of kin-slaying, that the deed was either formally ‘forgiven’ or that, at least, it merited ‘forgiveness.’ Plato[37] assures us that in such cases the anger of the dead did not continue for more than a year. He refers to a sacred legend which described how a freeman who had been slain was angry with his slayer while his death was still a recent event, and in his anger he harassed and worried the slayer, ‘using memory as an ally.’ This picture seems to us very suggestive of the attitude of the milder group of Furies in some Oresteian legends, but the attitude of the fiercer group is more aptly illustrated by the following story from Herodotus which reveals the nature of the implacable anger of the dead. Herodotus[38] tells us how Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, was anxious to drive out of Sicyon the spirit and the cult of the Argive hero Adrastus, and how, to secure this object, he established in Sicyon the hero-worship of a certain Theban, named Melanippus, who had slain a son and a son-in-law of Adrastus in the war of the Seven against Thebes. Cleisthenes therefore anticipated that by the magical induction of the spirit of Melanippus into a Hero-tomb at Sicyon he could drive out of Sicyon the Spirit of Adrastus, because Adrastus was still so angry with the slayer of his kindred that he could not, even after the lapse of five hundred years, tolerate the presence of the Spirit of Melanippus!

The meaning of the ‘conversion’ of the Erinnyes therefore varies according to the dramatist’s conception of the rôle of the Erinnyes. In Aeschylus the Erinnyes proclaim Orestes a wilful matricide, and their ‘conversion,’ which implies that they accept his plea of justifiable matricide, must be regarded as symbolical of a transition in their attitude to the social and religious aspect of homicide.[39] But in Euripides the conversion of the Erinnyes symbolises not so much a transition as a compromise. Thus, in the Iphigenia in Tauris some of the Erinnyes refuse to be placated even when the Areopagus acquits Orestes.[40] For them the issue does not lie between wilful matricide and justifiable matricide, but between varying degrees of extenuated matricide. Hence they reject a verdict of acquittal, because they interpret it not as an indication that Orestes was justified, but as an indication that he had already suffered a sufficient penalty for his ‘extenuated’ act of matricide. Some of the Erinnyes, however, accept the acquittal, because they are satisfied that Orestes has sufficiently atoned for his guilt.

The most severe and uncompromising attitude to the guilt of Orestes which is found in any legend appears in the Orestes drama, which we shall now discuss.

The ‘Orestes’

The main theme of the Orestes is the trial of Orestes at Argos, on the charge of having slain, unjustly, his mother, Clytaemnestra. It would not be correct—it would, in fact, be misleading—to assert that, as the Euripidean Electra corresponds with the Aeschylean Choephoroe, so the Orestes corresponds with the Eumenides. The points of resemblance between these two dramas are much less important than the points in which they differ. In this play we find, very strangely, a reference to two distinct trials of Orestes, at two distinct places, in two distinct States, namely Argos and Athens. But while the Argive trial is described at great length, and forms in fact the chief topic of the play, the Athenian trial is only casually referred to, in the closing scene, as an event of the not too distant future. In the Argive trial Orestes is condemned to death as an unjust avenger, or, which is almost the same thing, as a wilful matricide. His act is conceived, we think, as an act of culpable private vengeance committed in an atmosphere of social justice. But at the end of the play, when Apollo appears on the scene, the act of Orestes is presented, according to our interpretation, as extenuated matricide, which involves a penalty of temporary exile. The words of Apollo imply that when Orestes has served a period of one year’s exile—the penalty which was prescribed by Attic law for involuntary homicide—he will be declared by the Athenian Areopagus to have sufficiently atoned for his partial degree of guilt and he will be at liberty to return forthwith to Argos. Now these two verdicts, these two conceptions, are legally incompatible. The verdict of the Argive court is not found in Sophocles or in Aeschylus, and, needless to say, it is not found in Homer; the Athenian verdict has, however, been rendered familiar by references in Aeschylus, in Sophocles, and in the Electra of Euripides.

Are we then to suppose that the Argive verdict was the invention of Euripides? Such, no doubt, is the view of the matter which Jevons and Verrall would adopt. They would probably see in the Argive trial Euripides’ own idea of how Orestes ought to have been tried, and in the use of Apollo as a deus ex machina they would see a device by which Euripides’ idea was brought into harmony with the traditional legend.

But we venture to suggest, as against such an hypothesis, that in his account of the Argive trial Euripides is not putting before us his own conception of the moral and legal position of Orestes. Euripides leaves us in no doubt that in his opinion Orestes was not a matricide (i.e. an unjust avenger) and that he was not worthy of death. Hence the attitude of the dramatist is much more in harmony with the traditional Attic legends which regard Orestes as a just avenger, or at most as an avenger of merely nominal guilt, than with the attitude of the Argives and their verdict of condemnation which is the predominant feature of the drama.

At the Argive trial all the speakers save one solitary individual are opposed to the death penalty, yet only one speaker favours complete acquittal. Now it was in the speeches that Euripides found himself least trammelled by tradition, and if he ‘invented’ the Argive episode—including the verdict—in order to provide, for an Athenian audience, a thrill which the traditional accounts of the Athenian trial of Orestes no longer possessed, why is he not consistent in attributing to the speakers the sentiments which are expressed in the verdict? How do we explain, on the ‘invention’ hypothesis, the fact that the Messenger, in his account of the trial, takes the part of Orestes and condemns the verdict? The ordinary Athenian of Euripides’ day, who regarded the matter from the standpoint of contemporary law, could not possibly have approved of the act of Orestes. Why does not Euripides express this disapproval in his speeches, since he was free to do so?