The innocent. The servants who attend
Can hardly by their vigilance prevent her
From fixing round her neck the deadly noose
Or snatch the dagger from her hand, so great
Is her affliction, and she now confesses
That she has done amiss.
In this passage death appears as the archaic penalty for attempted murder. If Neoptolemus, the husband of Hermione, permits an option of exile, it is perhaps because such an option was permitted for actual murder in historical times, and the penalties were supposed to have been identical, in cases of attempted and of actual murder, in prehistoric days. It is also possible to explain the option by reference to the fact that Andromache was a captive and that therefore her master had the right to forgo the full penalty. We have seen[324] that the Achaeans did not discriminate between voluntary and involuntary homicide, and we may regard the reference to this penalty here as a case of historical archaising, which attributed to the Achaean Neoptolemus an ignorance of the distinction between attempted murder and actual murder. But we may also suppose that there was a legend which originally contained all these details and retained them as an unadulterated tradition down the ages. In historical times attempted slaying could not have been punished by a more severe penalty than that of exile, the duration of which depended perhaps on some form of ‘appeasement.’ That such was the historical penalty may be inferred from the fact that the Palladium court tried such cases in the time of Aristotle and, we think, from Solon’s time onwards.[325] When the ‘attempt’ (βούλευσις) resulted in actual wounding or in physical injury, as in cases of attempted poisoning, the case was probably[326] tried by the Areopagus, and the sentence was perpetual exile without confiscation of property.[327] In this play, however, as in the Ion, the attempted murder of Andromache was unpunished; Neoptolemus, the natural punitive agent, did not live to hear of the attempt. Andromache herself warned Menelaus that the people of the district would put him and Hermione on trial and punish them. She says[328]:
O Menelaus, be it now supposed
I by thy daughter am already slain.
’Twill be impossible for her to ’scape