Poine: a study in ancient Greek blood-vengeance

by Hubert Joseph Treston

In the scepticism of Talthybius regarding the existence of the gods, we have an anachronism which is strictly applicable only to the rationalists of fifth-century Athens. The comparative indifference of the Achaeans to religion left the road open for this anachronism on the part of Euripides.

When the son of Achilles is sacrificing Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles, he says to the spirit of Achilles[347]:

Son of Peleus,

My father, the propitiatory drops

Of these libations which invite the dead

Accept. O come and quaff the crimson blood

Of this pure virgin whom to thee all Greece

And I devote.

For this placation of the dead by human sacrifice we have perhaps a precedent in the sacrifice by Achilles of twelve Trojan youths to the shade of Patroclus. But the suggestion that the dead man came to the tomb to drink the blood offering indicates a fusion of Pelasgian and Achaean beliefs such as Ridgeway assumes to have taken place before the time of Aeschylus.[348] Already in the Odyssey, however, there is evidence of the tendency to a fusion of ritual and beliefs, which reached maturity before the historical period.[348] Such words as Euripides here attributes to Achilles could never have been spoken by the Homeric Achilles. For the Achaeans, the dead, once they were buried, could never leave Hades, and they did not, like Pelasgian ghosts, drink blood offerings at the tomb. This, then, is an anachronism, which was perhaps derived from a misinterpretation by Euripides of the Nekuia in the Odyssey. Hecuba naturally objects to the sacrifice of her daughter,[349] but incidentally she objects to human sacrifice in general, save in the case of a real enemy. Polyxena, she argues, was not an enemy to Achilles. His ghost therefore could not be placated by her sacrifice. This attitude of Hecuba suggests that a post-Homeric Thracian legend contained a reference to a barbarous blood-thirst on the part of the dead, which we have attributed to the Hesiodic age of chaos. Euripides elsewhere attributes the sacrifice of Polyxena to the expressed desire of the ghost of Achilles![350] We cannot be certain whether a post-Homeric legend embodied these conceptions, or whether Euripides invented them in his desire to add to the horrors of the story another grim idea.