Showing a cheer as though I marked it not,
And sighed for that I shed my mother’s blood.
A feast, I hear, at Athens is ordained
From this my evil plight, e’en yet observed,
In which the equal-measured bowl then used
Is by that people held in honour high.
Euripides is not our only authority for such a myth. Its existence is confirmed by Athenaeus[155] and by Suidas.[156] It is not probable that Euripides himself invented it. At the Libation-feast which was known as the ‘Cups’ (χόες) an unusual custom decreed that each man should drink from a separate goblet and forbade any suggestion of collective drinking such as attached to the ordinary wine-bowl. The Athenians did not understand the real origin of this rite. In the strange blending of joy and sorrow which characterised this Dionysiac festival, they overlooked the connexion which existed between the public civic offering, at this festival, of libations to dead ancestors of the citizens as a whole and the primitive tomb-offerings (χοαί) of tribal ancestor-worship. Coulanges has indicated[157] the private, individual, or domestic nature of such tomb-offerings. He goes so far as to suggest that the origin of private ownership in land is to be attributed to the exclusive and non-communistic character of primitive ancestor-worship. Even in Solon’s time the laws defined rigidly the limit of relationship to the deceased which permitted a relative’s presence at the funeral.[158] The worship of Dionysus had many affinities with the worship of the dead. It is in such affinities that we must seek, in the last resort, the explanation of the gloom and morbid mourning which permeates all Greek tragedy. But we cannot suppose that the Dionysiac festival was able to import an aspect of civic communism into the essentially local and tribal ritual of tomb-libations. Hence, we believe a compromise was accepted in which men were permitted to drink together at a public libation-festival but were compelled to drink from separate vessels and to sit at separate tables! Such, we believe, was the real origin of this strange rite. But the Athenians, who were ignorant of its true origin, sought to find for it at least an intelligible explanation. They knew from the Attic legends of Orestes that this Argive prince had come to Athens for his trial. They knew that a kin-slayer who had not yet been tried and declared innocent was ‘polluted’ with a minor kind[159] of pollution wherever he went. His purgation by Apollo was legally valid for Phocis if an Apolline court had declared him innocent. But in the Attic legends he was untried and therefore unpurged. They argued therefore that when Orestes came to Athens to submit to trial on a charge of kin-slaying, he was prohibited from public civic and religious communion with Athenian citizens. It does not matter in this connexion whether the plea of Orestes was justifiable matricide or extenuated matricide. As he had been proclaimed as an unjust slayer by the avengers, who in this case were the Erinnyes, he was ‘polluted’ until he had either established his innocence or indicated the completion of his atonement to a court of reconciliation. Now ‘pollution’ was regarded by the ancients as a disease of a quasi-physical nature. Murder courts had to be held, even by night, in the open air. The ‘polluted’ man could not enter the temples or the market-place. He could not eat at anyone’s table. He was isolated from public life. His civic existence was suspended. If, then, it be supposed that Orestes arrived for his trial at Athens during the Anthesteria festival, he could not have been received into civic or religious communion. Hence the creators of this myth could quite naturally have conceived that a compromise was agreed upon by which the Athenians preserved, on the one hand, their reputation for hospitality, and respected, on the other, the religion of pollution. They admitted Orestes to the public feast, but they insisted that he should sit apart and drink from a separate vessel! It was thus that the Athenians explained the origin of this rite: nor is the explanation to be regarded as ‘anomalous’ or ‘artificial,’ as Miss Harrison suggests.[160] To people who were ignorant of the real origin of the Pitcher Feast, this was at least a respectable and intelligible aetiology.
Orestes says to Iphigeneia that he had some difficulty in refraining from rebuking his hosts on this occasion.[161] Miss Harrison’s explanation[162] of this statement is that Orestes was mad! But we are convinced that Orestes was not mad, either at Athens or amongst the Tauri, though he may have been temporarily insane amongst the Argives.[163]
We have seen that there were conflicting opinions concerning the guilt of Orestes in different legends. The predominant opinion in Aeschylus and in the legend (probably Phocian) which referred to his purgation by Apollo suggests that his act was justified. The Argive legend which we have met in the Orestes of Euripides conceived his act as wilful matricide which involved an eternal pollution. But the prevailing conception of Orestes’ act which we find in the legends of post-Homeric times regards him as guilty of matricide extenuated through Apollo’s command. The dramatic attempt to unify these various legends is the source of the complexity of the problem of Oresteian blood-vengeance in Euripides. It is impossible to analyse successfully the legal and religious position of a hero who is tried and who is at the same time untried, who is eternally and who is at the same time temporarily polluted, in one and the same drama! But the myth of the Pitcher Feast was based on a well-defined tradition. It ignored the Argive and the Phocian legends, it ignored also what we have called the first Attic legend, and it considered only the second Attic legend from which the Iphigenia in Tauris drama was ultimately derived.
The surprise which Orestes feels at the partial social boycott which confronts him in Athens is, we think, to be attributed to the coexistence of the Attic and the Phocian legends. In the Phocian legend Orestes was tried and purged, therefore he could visit any Greek city with impunity. But the Attic legend suggested that this purgation, though valid for Phocis, could not be accepted by the Athenians, so long as the avenging Erinnyes pursued, until Orestes had been acquitted by an Athenian court. This conflict of legendary view-points explains, we believe, the divergence of opinions which is suggested by these words.