They have no right: I am no subject here.
Which of these opinions is correct—that of Orestes or that of Pylades? We have shown[111] that, in Greek law, accused and convicted slayers were debarred from three possible States, of which one was the State of the deceased. Demosthenes says[112]: ‘The boundary-line for all homicides is exclusion from the country of the deceased ... from everything in which the deceased in his lifetime had a part.’ We cannot of course suppose that this law applied to unconvicted slayers, but we may presume that they were at least debarred from the temples and the public places of the State. Hence we can reconcile these two opinions by assuming that Orestes is referring to the public aspect and Pylades to the private aspect of residence at Argos. When Pylades asserts that he deserves to suffer at Argos,[113] he is referring to the period which follows the trial of Orestes, which involved, we presume, a condemnation of Pylades. Menelaus asks if Pylades had a share in the slaying of Helen, and leaves us in no doubt that his life is forfeit in Argos.[114] We have quoted[115] Plato in support of the assertion that strangers were liable to more serious penalties for homicide than natives were. But this assertion only applies to convicted slayers. Hence it is possible to accept the suggestion of Euripides that Pylades was not imprisoned at Argos, as Orestes was, and that he visited Phocis before the trial of Orestes.
The Problem of Orestes’ Pollution
From what has been said it will be obvious that Orestes is more ‘polluted’ in Euripides than he is in Aeschylus or in Sophocles. The ‘pollution’ of a person who was conceived as guilty of wilful and unjustified matricide was the greatest and the most horrible kind of ‘pollution,’ and it is this conception of Orestes which predominates in this Euripidean drama. At the end of the play the pollution of Orestes is miraculously diminished. This is because Orestes is here conceived not as a wilful matricide of full guilt, but as a quasi-involuntary matricide who transfers the main portion of his guilt to Apollo. In Greek law an extenuated act of homicide produced, even when the dying person ‘forgave,’ a minor temporary ‘pollution,’ which continued until the slayer had endured a minimum period of one year’s exile and had appeased the relatives of the slain. During this period of exile the slayer had to abstain from three possible States, which we have already defined. But a kin-slayer was in a peculiar position. Until the fact of involuntariness was established before a court he was liable to be regarded as polluted wherever he went. In Arcadia Orestes was not ‘polluted,’ according to Euripides, perhaps because Apollo commanded him to go there, perhaps because his residence there did not create any special anger on the part of the slain Clytaemnestra. But in Argos he would have been polluted, because Argos was his native State and could not therefore have been for him a place of exile even if he had been guilty of involuntary homicide, and not, as he was, of involuntary kin-slaying. In Athens, too, he would have been regarded as polluted until he had been tried, especially if he was accused (as he was accused, by the Erinnyes) of wilful kin-slaying; but his pollution would have been that of an untried criminal, and therefore public rather than private. We shall see in the Iphigenia in Tauris that he was, in a certain sense, polluted when he came to Athens for his trial, and the Athenians based upon this ‘pollution’ an explanation of a peculiar ritual of which the origin was obscure, namely the Feast of the Pitchers (χόες) at the Anthesteria.[116] Now in Aeschylus and in Sophocles the predominant conception of Orestes is that of an unconvicted matricide who pleads justification for his act; and if we find, in addition, the conception of Orestes as a quasi-involuntary matricide, this does not affect to any great extent the question of Orestes’ pollution, because Orestes has already atoned for the guilt of extenuated matricide. He has actually been purged by Apollo himself, and he is still, so far as Athens is concerned, untried and unconvicted, and therefore his pollution is minor and merely ‘public’—that is, he is forbidden to frequent the temples or public places but he is free to associate privately with his fellow-men. In Euripides, however, Orestes is convicted of wilful matricide by an Argive court. His pollution is therefore technically so great that no Greek city could receive him. If his pollution is subsequently reduced to the minor pollution of involuntary kin-slaying, this is only because Apollo acts not as a purifier, but as a dramatic deus ex machina who does miraculous and impossible things.
Wedd, in his edition of this play, proposes a strange explanation for the graver pollution of the Euripidean Orestes, which is based, as we think, on a false interpretation of the dramatic ideals of Euripides. ‘In Sophocles,’ he says,[117] ‘all men will honour Orestes, in Aeschylus he is welcomed as a deliverer, in Euripides the whole State rises up in horror against him ... in Aeschylus, although Orestes flies for his first purification to Apollo, many others aid in freeing him from guilt and he associates with thousands in harmless intercourse; in Euripides all doors are shut against him, all speech is denied him, none will perform the purifying rites for him; the full rigour of Athenian law, which refused to the parricide alone among murderers the right of escaping death by flight, is exercised against him ... the attitude of the whole State towards the matricide, the feeling of the murderers themselves with regard to their own act, are precisely what would be expected if in modern (? fifth century B.C.) Athens two children were induced by an oracle to take the law into their own hands and put their mother to death.’
This account of the facts is fairly accurate, but it suggests that the Euripidean Orestes is a definite unitary personality, whereas we have shown that there are at least two different conceptions of Orestes in this play. The ‘full rigour of Athenian law’ is certainly apparent in the Argive verdict, but Wedd assumes that Euripides, in this play, adopted towards Orestes an attitude which ignored Homer and the Attic legends made familiar by Aeschylus and Sophocles, and which paid no attention to Apolline decrees. In this respect the account is misleading. It is based on an erroneous conception of Euripides. According to Wedd, Aeschylus and Sophocles adopted towards Greek legends an attitude which was quite different from that which Euripides adopted. These two dramatists accepted, he thinks, the legends in their main outline and sought to reproduce them as far as possible in their archaic setting, with the least possible admixture of ‘historical’ ideas. Euripides, on the contrary, adopted a critical attitude to the myths and made it his object not to reproduce them for their own sake but to contrast them with the more enlightened feeling of his own time. This interpretation of Euripides is very similar to that of Jevons which we have already discussed.[118] The arguments which we adduced against Jevons are therefore applicable to Wedd, but we offer here an additional criticism which is more definitely concerned with the Orestes drama.
According to Wedd’s hypothesis, the trial of Orestes at Argos which is described in this play contains the Euripidean conception of the manner in which the myth should have regarded Orestes. We admit that the viewpoint of the Argive court is in the main historical; by an anachronism it identifies the world of Orestes with that of the Argives of the historical era.
But the existence of an Argive legend which despite its lack of archaism[119] was of considerable human interest would explain Euripides’ description of such a trial. The fact that at the end of the play[120] the resultant verdict of the trial is ignored and reversed suggests rather that Euripides regarded the Attic legend as more archaic and therefore more correct than the Argive legend. We have already[121] pointed out that the Messenger’s description of the trial and the opinions of some of the speakers at the trial are more suggestive of the dramatist’s own views than is the verdict of the Argive court. According to Wedd, the real myth occurs at the end of the play, and the rest of the play is the invention of Euripides. Euripides did not agree with the mythical presentation of Orestes, so he invented a new version which he deliberately set in emphatic contrast to the obsolete Attic myth! In our view, Euripides reproduces two pre-existing legends—an Attic and an Argive legend of Orestes. The Argive legend he regarded as more dramatic, the other as more orthodox but less replete with human interest. According to Wedd, the graver pollution of the Euripidean Orestes is due to the fact that Euripides conceived him as a fifth-century Athenian. For us, the different degrees of pollution in Orestes are due to different conceptions of Orestes’ guilt or to the different legal and religious attitudes of the legends which the dramatists followed. They are not to be attributed to any distinction in the attitude of the dramatists to the legends themselves. The contrast is in the legends, not in the dramatists.