When, in later times, the Roman poet Ovid makes Althaea say, as the Achaean avenger of a brother’s death would naturally say, mors morte pianda est, he implies, what the Homeric story of the ‘curse’ compels us to assume, that Althaea regarded her brother’s death as culpable kin-slaying, which required atonement. The curse of Althaea indicates her conviction that the death of Thestius was a crime and also her inability to avenge it at the time. But, in the general opinion, there was a doubt about the guilt of Meleager, and Meleager was sufficiently important to get the benefit of the doubt. There are, then, two conclusions which may be indirectly derived from this passage: (a) that kin-slaying, within the Achaean caste, was regarded as a crime which merited serious punishment, such as death; and (b) that the distinction between justifiable and unjustifiable slaying was in certain circumstances admitted and upheld by the Achaeans.[46]
Our next quotation has reference to Tydeus, the brother of Meleager. Homer[47] tells us that Tydeus left his native Calydon, and ‘roaming thence settled at Argos, (for thus did Zeus and other gods decree,) and married there a daughter of Adrastus.’ In this connexion Leaf[48] points out that ‘Homer does not tell of any actual homicide, yet the picture he gives of the family feuds in Tydeus’ time is such as to make family bloodshed far from improbable.’ From later legends[49] we learn what Homer has not mentioned, namely, that Tydeus was a kin-slayer. We know that Tydeus was an Achaean, and his action in fleeing from Calydon and settling at Argos was a typical Achaean procedure. His ‘exile’ was really a flight from death, and such a flight suggests that even in the case of kin-slaying the Achaeans, unlike the Pelasgians, did not accept ‘exile’ as a penalty for bloodshed. This has already been demonstrated in connexion with the flight of Theoclymenus.[50] The alliance of Tydeus, by marriage, with Adrastus, King of Argos, helped to preclude the possibility of blood-vengeance at the hands of Calydonian avengers.
A clear and cogent illustration of the Achaean system of avenging bloodshed is to be found in the punishment inflicted by Orestes on his mother and her paramour in revenge for the slaying of Agamemnon. It is not of course a matter of absolute certainty that Orestes slew his mother or that she slew her husband, in the Homeric story, but it can, we think, be inferred with the greatest probability. Homer says[51] that, after the Trojan war, Menelaus wandered about with his ships ‘amongst men of strange speech’ for seven years: that meanwhile ‘Aegisthus planned baneful deeds at home: and for seven years ruled over rich Mycenae, having wrought the death of the son of Atreus, and subdued unto himself the people: but in the eighth year goodly Orestes came back from Athens as a retribution and slew the man guilty of his father’s blood (πατροφονῆα), Aegisthus of crafty counsel, who had wrought his father’s death. Now when he had slain him, he held a funeral feast with the Argives for his hateful mother and for Aegisthus powerless in defence (ἀνάλκιδος).’ In this rendering of the text, we have deliberately avoided translating κτείνειν as ‘to slay,’ since it can also mean ‘to seek to slay’[52] or, which is almost equivalent, ‘to plot the death of.’ From the point of view of homicide-guilt and retribution, the plotter and the perpetrator were probably equally culpable whether in the Homeric epoch or in historical times.[53] Hence it is that in other passages Homer presents Clytaemnestra as the plotter and Aegisthus as the executor. In both cases, of course, the guilt of bloodshed is aggravated by the additional stigma of adultery. In the Odyssey[54] Zeus tells how he warned Aegisthus not to kill Agamemnon or to woo his wife, for Agamemnon would be avenged by Orestes. Again,[55] we are told that Aegisthus brought Clytaemnestra to his house—‘a willing lover and a willing lady.’ In another passage[56] we hear of the famous scout whom Aegisthus placed in a tower, to watch for the homecoming of Agamemnon. This scout had been watching for the space of a year[57] when Agamemnon arrived. Immediately upon his arrival, he accepted an invitation to a feast in the house of Aegisthus, who had prepared an ambush to destroy him in the event of his refusal.[58] After the feast he was slain ‘as one slayeth an ox at the stall’; but not without a struggle. ‘None of the “companions” of the son of Atreus who attended him survived, nor any of the “companions” of Aegisthus, but they were slain in the house.’[59] We have pointed out that Clytaemnestra was living in this house with her paramour. The reference to the time of the deed—‘after the feast’—and to the manner of the slaying—‘as one slayeth an ox’—suggests the use of the axe and the fatal bath of Agamemnon which has been made so familiar by the Attic tragedians. We are definitely informed[60] that Clytaemnestra was an active agent in the terrible bloodshed which took place. The ghost of Agamemnon speaking to Odysseus in Hades says: ‘Aegisthus contrived my death and doom and slew me, aided by my accursed wife ... most pitiful of all I heard was the voice of Cassandra, daughter of Priam, whom, close to me, the guileful Clytaemnestra slew. As I was dying I strove to raise my hands to avert (or grasp)[61] the sword, but let them fall to the ground again, and that shameless woman turned her back, nor could she bring herself, even when I was going to the house of Hades, to close my eyes or my mouth with her hands! Surely there is nought more horrible and shameless than a woman since she planned a foul deed, and wrought the death of her wedded lord.’ Aeschylus, then, as we think, has kept very closely to the Homeric narrative, when, in the Agamemnon, he makes Clytaemnestra the actual slayer of her husband, and represents Aegisthus as concerning himself only with an ambush and a battle against the retainers of Agamemnon. In Homer, Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra were equally guilty. Orestes, therefore, slays them both, and gains renown among all men.[62] In the clan-system, Aegisthus, a first cousin of Agamemnon, would not have been slain, if he had gone into exile, nor would wergeld have been payable, as he was akin to the victim. Clytaemnestra’s kindred might have compensated the crime by a wergeld paid to the kindred of Agamemnon. How strange it seems that the children of Aegisthus would have received a share! In historical Athens, Aegisthus would most probably have been put to death without the option of exile, since he was a kin-slayer, while Clytaemnestra could have gone into exile on the second day of the trial.[63] To the minds of post-Homeric legend-makers it would have been necessary for Orestes,[64] if he wished to be unimpeachably correct, to obtain authority from the war-council of the chieftains, as Menelaus did in the case of Helen[65]; but in Homer Orestes is the natural avenger of a crime which would otherwise have gone unpunished. The slaying of Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra was not murder, but just revenge, so far as that distinction was admitted and sanctioned by the traditions and public opinion of the Achaean caste. If there had been any tendency to revolt at the abhorrent nature of Orestes’ act in slaying two of his kindred—one of them the dearest of kin—this feeling would have perished on the recollection that Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra were not only murderers but adulterers. We find evidence of a strong public opinion against this twofold moral stigma in Homer. In the Odyssey,[66] for instance, Athene urges Telemachus to slay the suitors and quotes the act of Orestes as a parallel. The point of the comparison lies in the suggestion of adultery which attaches to the presence of the suitors in the home of Odysseus. ‘Hast thou not heard,’ says Athene, ‘what renown the goodly Orestes gat him among all men in that he slew the slayer of his father?... thou, too, my friend ... be valiant, that even men unborn will praise thee.’ But as we have elsewhere argued[67] that adultery alone would not justify, in private vengeance, the death of the offender, we must conclude that the justification for Orestes’ act consisted essentially in the fact that he avenged the murder of his father. From this episode we may, then, also conclude that the Achaeans, in certain circumstances, admitted the distinction between justified and unjustified homicide.[68]
We have now adduced sufficient evidence from the Homeric poems to justify the theory which we have propounded as to the nature of Achaean blood-vengeance, and to illustrate the contrast which it is necessary to make between the attitude to homicide adopted by a temporary dominant caste of a military quasi-feudal type and that of the tribal village communities in which we believe the Pelasgian subject-race to have lived. It remains for us to conclude this chapter by some brief remarks on certain questions which we have already raised and partly answered: e.g., whether there existed, in the Achaean caste, (a) the distinction between murder and manslaughter, (b) the distinction between justified and unjustified slaying, (c) the practice of collective and hereditary vendetta.
In regard to the first question, we have argued[69] that a legend as old as Homer must have presented as ‘involuntary’ the slaying of Laius by Oedipus. By this we mean that Oedipus neither intended to kill the old man whom he met at the ‘crossing of the three roads,’ nor was aware that the man whom he slew was his father. If we now assume that the Achaeans recognised no distinction between voluntary and involuntary slaying, and that Homer lived in such an atmosphere, though the language and the social system of the Pelasgian people who lived around him were familiar with this distinction, we can more easily understand the astonishment which the poet seems to feel at the sojourn of Oedipus at Thebes after the gods ‘made known these things to men.’ We can also, on this assumption, more easily explain[70] the protest which is implicit in the words of the dead Patroclus to Achilles when he describes his flight from death ‘on the day when’ he slew the son of Amphidamas, ‘being a mere stripling and not intending (to kill) and being angered over (a game of) dice.’ If we add to these probabilities the fact that the Achaeans were men of a proud and haughty spirit, men of quick passions, and accustomed to bloodshed, men who knew no restraint beyond that of a temporary military discipline, and no fear of any greater punishment than that of expulsion from a fortress or from the councils of a military clique, we shall conclude that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary slaying was not recognised by the Achaeans. Such a conclusion incidentally explains the general view of modern scholars[71] that in the Homeric epoch no such distinction was admissible.
In regard to the second question, concerning the distinction between just and unjust slaying amongst the Achaeans, we have indicated some evidence for this distinction in the public approval which greeted the vengeance of Orestes,[72] in the sentiments of the Aetolians concerning Meleager,[73] in the scruples felt by one of the suitors in regard to a conspiracy against the life of Telemachus,[74] in the approval given by Eupeithes,[75] and also, apparently, by the goddess Athene,[75] to the vengeance plotted for the slaying of the suitors. A distinction between the indiscriminate slaying of enemies which was permitted in war and the personal vendetta which was restricted to the person of the murderer, in peace, is illustrated by the contrast with normal modes of vengeance exhibited by the act of Akamas who avenged his brother’s death on Promachos, and not on Ajax, the actual slayer.[76] Pausanias[77] says that before the time of Theseus, and the establishment of the Delphinium court, there was no distinction between just and unjust slaying, and that ‘every manslayer had to flee for his life.’ This statement does not altogether harmonise with our conception of Homeric Greece. It does not take into account the control of Pelasgian tribes and the influence of public opinion amongst the Achaeans. His remarks are, we think, much more appropriate to the post-Homeric period when society was in a state of disintegration. Yet in regard to the Achaeans, we must point out that their sentiments or ideals of vengeance may not always have coincided with their acts. The arbitrariness of military control, the presence of subjects outside the caste, the necessity felt by the Achaeans of supporting their own side in every dispute, make the period of their domination an epoch to which the words of Pausanias are not entirely inapplicable.
Finally, if one asks whether the Achaeans practised a collective and hereditary vendetta, we may reply that the nature of the Achaean system of life, their consciousness of the paucity of their numbers in the midst of potentially hostile people, would have hindered any tendency to such a practice within the Achaean caste. An insult inflicted from without provoked, of course, the most savage retaliation. ‘Frightfulness,’ no less than military skill and strategic control, was one of the pillars of the Achaean fabric of power. But we have seen how Athene interfered to prevent the Achaean feud in the realm of Odysseus; in this rôle of peace-maker she may be regarded as a symbol of the restraining influence of military discipline and group-consciousness amongst the Achaeans. From certain passages in Homer,[78] in which there appears a kind of proverb, namely that a man is lucky to have a son or brother to avenge his fall, we may conclude that the danger of collective hypervengeance occurring amongst the Achaeans was much less probable than the danger of not being avenged at all. Similarly, in the Odyssey[79] we are told that an Achaean murderer had no fear that vengeance would fall upon his children. Thus, it is only in post-Homeric times, we think, that the Greeks lapsed into savagery and practised on a large scale a collective and hereditary vendetta. This will be still more manifest when we come to give an account of the Hesiodic society. From such a state of chaos the Greeks were saved by the seventh-century Apolline doctrine of pollution, which we shall describe in our Second Book, and also by the evolution of democratic civic government. When the State assumed responsibility for the trial and execution of criminals, including murderers, the lust of vengeance was gradually subdued. But all the more must we admire the comparative absence of collective and hereditary vendetta in the Homeric epoch, when, for Achaeans as well as for Pelasgians, the execution of vengeance devolved upon the relatives of the slain.