Poine: a study in ancient Greek blood-vengeance

by Hubert Joseph Treston

possunt ac fieri divino numine rentur.

It was natural then, in an age of unscientific mentality, that plagues and pestilences, and diseases of all kinds, lunacy and sterility, the failure of harvests, misfortune in peace or war, adverse winds, volcanoes, inherited characteristics, the activities of genius, emotion and desire, birth, growth, death and decay—almost everything that crosses the threshold of human consciousness—should be ascribed to the ubiquitous and perpetual operation of supernatural agents. The literature of ancient Greece and Rome is permeated with such beliefs. We will quote just one characteristic passage from the Eumenides of Aeschylus. When the avenging Erinnyes of the slain Clytaemnestra threaten to hurl the shafts of their wrath upon the Attic land because it has harboured Orestes, whom they regard as the murderer of his kin, Athene, who has caused a murder-court to declare him free from guilt, apparently on a plea of justifiable homicide, commands the Erinnyes to be appeased, and says: ‘Hurl you not the weight of your wrath upon Attica; be not indignant, nor cause barrenness by sending down the blighting drops that come from Spirits, the cruel bitter destroyers of our seed.[14] ... Fling not upon earth the fruit of thy wild curse, causing all things not to prosper.[15] ... Sow not within my boundaries those spurs to bloodshed that ruin young men’s hearts, maddened by a frenzy not born of wine[16] ... but (send) blessings from earth and from the waters of the deep, and from the sky wind-breezes that blow with kindly sunshine over earth: (send) fruit of the soil and of things that live, flowing with untiring vigour to my citizens, and of man’s seed a safe deliverance at the birth.’[17] The Erinnyes, in consenting to be appeased, reply: ‘With kindly prophecy we pray for you here, that the radiant sunlight may bring forth with speed from earth the blessings of your life[18] ... never—such is my boon—may the trees feel the hurtful wind or the scorching fire that robs them of their buds ... or blight creep over them eternally that blasts their fruitfulness: and may Pan bring to full growth the prosperous flocks that will bear from wombs a twofold fruit, and in due season may the produce of rich earth present you with the good gods’ gift of fortune[19]: ... on the young men I forbid to fall the stroke of death untimely: and that the lovely maids find each her husband—do ye grant it, O ye who reign, and ye, O Fates divine![20]... May the roar of Faction, thirsting for evil, never in this place be heard, nor the dust that drinks the dark blood of fellow-citizens bring to the State, from passion for revenge, the doom of retaliation. But may the citizens rejoice one another with a common love and hate only in union as one man.’[21]

The modern European, taught in childhood to accept the Christian doctrine of the divine creation of the world, must exert himself considerably if he is to realise that in Greek religion the notion of such a creation is not found before the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and even then it existed only in the atmosphere of a pious philosophic sect. To the ancient Greek mind, the earth was not created; it had been from everlasting: it was itself divine. Gilbert Murray rightly says[22] that the chief objects of primitive man’s emotional activity are the food-supply and the tribe-supply. By a well-known confusion of cause and effect characteristic of the primitive mind, the earth became the object of universal worship, because of its association with the production of food.

Similarly, animals came to be regarded as sacred, though different races adopted different viewpoints in regard to their sacred character. In some instances a certain animal was ‘sacred’ simply because it was eaten: in others it was ‘sacred’ because it was ‘tabu’ or sinful to eat it. We shall see that the animal slain in certain Chthonian rites could not be eaten,[23] but it was ‘sacred’ all the same. The ancient notion, which has survived so long in witchcraft, of the magical power of placation by images or effigies led to the widespread construction of those animal images which are so familiar to the students of primitive religion.[24] When divinities in human form, when anthropomorphic sacra, take precedence of the animal god, traces of a fusion in image-magic are clearly visible. Whether by accident, or by reason of some traditional connexion, certain human gods came to be associated with certain species of animals. The sacrifice of such animals was regarded as particularly pleasing to such gods, and it is therefore arbitrary to assume that the sacrifice of animals was originally accepted as a substitute for a previous human sacrifice. Herodotus says[25] that the image of Isis in Egypt was that of a woman with cow’s horns: that a statue of Zeus in Egypt showed the figure of a man with the face of a ram. When the people of Egyptian Thebes sacrificed, annually, a ram to Zeus, they covered the statue of Zeus with the skin of the ram.[26] We know that the worshippers of the orgiastic Dionysus clothed themselves in fawn-skins,[27] and that the satyric choruses from which, we may suppose, Greek tragedy developed,[28] were dressed, to some extent, as goats. The goat and the snake, as well as the bull and the ram, seem to have been worshipped in early times as symbols at once of the fertility of the soil and of the fertility of the race. The serpents which gaze at us so terribly from the heads of the Aeschylean Erinnys are probably, in origin,[29] derived from the belief that the souls of the dead are connected with the fertility of the earth.[30] Herodotus tells us that offerings were regularly made to an imaginary serpent which was supposed to reside in the temple of Athene Polias at Athens.[31] This serpent symbolised, like the undying fire of the Roman Vesta,[32] the immortal progenitor of the race.

Anthropomorphism and the Olympians

In regard to the origin of anthropomorphic religion in Greece, we can only say that we prefer the opinion of F. de Coulanges,[33] which derives it from the ancestor worship of the early Pelasgian peoples, to that of Miss Harrison which, in its latest form, attributes it to a political anti-Persian reaction of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.[34] Coulanges believes that when once the idea of human gods took shape, it tended at once to personify and humanise all the various objects of worship.[35] It is significant that the Persians, who had no ancestor worship, did not conceive their gods in human form.[36] Amongst the Greeks, however, who worshipped dead ancestors from the dawn of their history, the ‘ghost’ gave its form to the god.

Assuming, then, Coulanges’ theory of the evolution of anthropomorphism, we must regard as absurd the opinion of some ancient writers who maintained that Homer and Hesiod not only told false stories about the gods but gave them, moreover, the manners and shapes of men.[37] The precise contribution of such poets as Homer to ancient religion is difficult to define, but we believe that it was not so much constructive as destructive. The poet gave a certain immortality to the conceptions which he expressed: the effect of a Bible in religious evolution is essentially conservative. It tends to stereotype for all men and for all time the religious opinions of its day. Now Homer was the poet of the Achaeans, and the Achaeans, as Leaf says,[38] conceived the gods as typical Achaeans of the other world. Whether they brought new human gods[39] to Greece or merely gave a personal interpretation to the Pelasgian gods, we need not at the moment decide. The gods of the Achaeans were conceived as kings and rulers like themselves. If they do not create the universe, they at least divide it into realms or dominions.[40] Moreover, they are presented as related to one another by blood, or connected by intermarriage, as the Achaeans were. They naturally have their quarrels, their disputes, their rivalries and their jealousies, as the Achaeans had. The stamp of the Achaean caste marks the Homeric pantheon. But apart from the great Olympian gods, there are a number of minor deities who suggest the existence of a less privileged social and religious caste. It is in this caste that we believe that we can find the source of supply or the materials for the creation of the Olympic Pantheon. Such a Pantheon could never have been the exclusive creation of Homer. If the Achaeans created it, they were limited, surely, by the nature of the materials at their disposal. Their creative power was restricted and directed, as we believe, by a pre-Achaean evolution of grades of divine greatness within the galaxy of Pelasgian divinities[41]: an evolution which attributed to elemental forces and to national ancestor-gods a power to which no mere local ‘ghost’ could aspire to attain. The Pelasgians and Minoans in their tribal villages, and particularly in their city-religion, had, we think, evolved the distinction between the greater and the lesser gods, between the gods of the upper air, and those of the sea and of the earth below, which was so characteristic a feature of later Greek religion. True, many of their ‘deities’ were nameless, as Herodotus[42] seems to have heard that they were at Dodona, and as the ancestral spirits of historical times still were, since they were addressed as Keres at the Athenian Anthesteria.[43] But the old tribal and city gods must have had names. It would have been otherwise impossible to distinguish them from one another in the multitudinous deifications of an ancestor-worshipping and nature-worshipping peninsula. Coulanges[44] holds that the local gods of primitive peoples often carry the same name even when they are really different in form and ritual. But here we think that we can detect the influence of Homer and the Achaeans. The Homeric god is stereotyped in form and character as in name. The form and character was created, we believe, by the military Achaean caste, while the name was in most if not all cases a Pelasgian product. It was all the more possible for the Achaeans to give character and personality to the gods, if there had been local variations in the Pelasgian types. Moreover, the Achaeans drew, so to speak, a line of demarcation around the gods of their choice. They created a Pantheon of an exclusive type, which, by its prestige in later years, checked the Pelasgian tendency to increase the number of the greater gods, and compelled the Greeks to accept, instead, the worship of Heroes.[45] The creation of such a Pantheon presupposes, we think, the existence of an identity of type within some widespread organised society. No mere local poet or city-state could have created it. As we have no evidence of the existence in pre-Homeric days of a national union or federation of Minoan kings, or of a national Amphictyony, such as we meet with in later times, we naturally attribute to the ubiquitous Achaean caste and their poet-Royal the creation of that Pantheon which was the mainstay of Achaean religion. But this Pantheon was created out of pre-existing Pelasgian materials. We do not agree with Leaf and Chadwick in the view that the Achaeans were the creators of Greek anthropomorphic religion.[46]

Achaean-Pelasgian Religious Fusions

Many of the difficulties presented by Homeric religion are to be attributed to the fact that that religion was an eclectic product. If we compare the beliefs and customs of the Achaeans and the Pelasgians, it will be obvious that despite the circumstance of their social coexistence, a complete blending or fusion in dogma or in ritual would have been impossible. Yet it is equally impossible to suppose that both Pelasgians and Achaeans preserved their religious rites and conceptions unadulterated and pure.