Are murdered: deeds like these no wholesome law
Prohibits: introduce not among us
Such crimes....
we may attribute such an assertion to a mind inflamed with the jealousy which a wife feels towards a concubine rather than suppose Euripides not to have known that the horror of kin-slaying is an aboriginal universal sentiment of the human race when once it has abandoned the cave of the cannibal.
We have now concluded our inquiry into the problem of blood-vengeance in Attic tragedy. Nothing has been revealed by this inquiry which is in conflict with the hypotheses which we have sought to establish in this work, as to the various systems of blood-vengeance which existed in Greece, from Pelasgian times to the age of the orators. While Attic tragedy does not in itself contribute anything to our knowledge of these various systems, there can be little doubt that an attempt, however imperfect, to investigate the origin and nature of these systems is indispensable for a proper appreciation of these dramatic masterpieces. If our analysis of blood-vengeance in the works of the three great Attic tragedians has not, in many cases, succeeded in establishing definite clear-cut conclusions, this, we hope, will be attributed to the intrinsic difficulty and obscurity of the subject. We can never be quite certain whether any particular drama gives us (a) an antique unadulterated legend; or (b) an antique legend which in course of evolution has taken on new forms without any regard to the consistency or the historicity of the tradition; or (c) whether the drama is based upon a late invention which owing to skilful archaising takes on the garb and appearance of an antique story, betraying perhaps, here and there, by its anachronisms, the mind and atmosphere of its creator. It so happens that the attitude to homicide or to religion which the Achaeans reveal was also taken up by many individual Athenians of the Periclean age. Thus the indifference to the gods which Sophocles attributes to Ajax was common to Achaeans and to many Periclean Athenians. So the conception of homicide as a matter for ‘private settlement’ which is found in Demosthenes, and the survival, in outlying places, such as Macedonia, of family vendettas, fierce and lawless, would have suggested to the mind of the dramatist that there was no very wide gulf between the primitive and the historical Greeks. Such a fact almost invites anachronisms. Nevertheless, we frequently find in dramatic legends an atmosphere so antique, so unlike that of fifth-century Athens, that we may assume, as the most probable hypothesis, that these legends are not inventions, but have behind them a long and, often, a chequered past.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Hist. Gk. Lit. p. 224.
[2] Ib. p. 225.
[3] Ib. 228.
[4] P. 229.