Poine: a study in ancient Greek blood-vengeance

by Hubert Joseph Treston

Miss Harrison is, we think, mistaken—she seems to admit it in a later work[47]—in assuming that the Achaeans are to be associated with Olympian ritual, and the Pelasgians with Chthonian ritual, and that there is a rigid line of distinction between the two castes. Just as the Olympian rites which are so common amongst Homeric Achaeans were, we think, practised also by Minoan kings and Pelasgian nobles, so the Chthonian rites of the tillers of soil were practised, on occasions, by the Achaeans, and would perhaps have been more frequently practised if there had not existed within the two castes differences of dogma, such as we shall presently indicate. In our analysis of the social and judicial aspect of Homeric homicide we were enabled to differentiate clearly between the Achaeans and Pelasgians, for their social organisations were different and distinct. In a religious analysis, however, the gulf cannot with equal clearness be indicated, if we suspect that the practice of common rites and the eclectic conception of common gods may have modified the differences which are otherwise maintained. Leaf is aware of the complexity of the problem, which he aptly describes as a ‘tangled skein.’[48] We do not, however, agree with Leaf’s opinion[49] that ‘there is no trace in Homer of any Chthonian religion,’ if the word ‘Chthonian’ carries its usual significance. Leaf implies that the Achaeans, before they came to Greece, were worshippers of the dead. The absence of such worship in Homer is, he says,[50] due to the severance of the military adventurer from the tombs of his fathers. ‘It is impossible to pay due rites to the departed when their tombs have been left far behind in the course of long migrations.’ We have seen[51] that the Achaeans were long enough settled in Greece, at the time of the Trojan war, to have produced relations extending to second and third cousins once removed. Surely the habit of ancestor-worship could easily have been renewed in the course of so many generations. We believe that the Achaean conception of a spirit land and their practice of cremation are a clear indication of the absence of the primitive ideas of ghost-raising, ghost-laying and fertility worship, which are the regular[52] concomitants of the cult of the dead. The dogmas which underlie these different burial rites cannot, we think, be fused. They can only combine by the evolution of an eclectic doctrine. Had such a doctrine evolved in Homer? The only passage in the Homeric poems which can help us to decide is the Nekuia[53] of the Odyssey.

The Nekuia of the Odyssey.

Ridgeway’s theory[54] of the difference between the Pelasgian and the Achaean cults of the dead is now well known. The former, he maintains, buried their dead, honoured them with periodical offerings of food and drink, and believed that the dead lived in a subconscious state in the tomb; the latter, however, cremated their dead, practised no regular tomb offerings (χοαί), and believed that the souls of the dead flitted away through the air to a place called Hades in the west. The curious thing about the Nekuia is that the souls of the dead in Hades are represented as anxious for food and drink, and when Odysseus sacrifices there, the ghosts come forth to lick up the blood of the victim. Further, it is only when they have drunk the blood that they regain their memory and recognise their friends again.[55] Odysseus thus describes the scene at the entrance to Hades to which he has been miraculously permitted to descend: ‘There (i.e. at the entrance to Hades) Perimedes and Eurylochus held the victims and I drew my sharp sword ... and dug a pit ... and about it poured a drink-offering to all the dead ... mead and sweet wine and water ... and I took the sheep and cut their throats over the trench and the dark blood flowed forth and lo! the spirits of the dead came out of Erebus ... and they flocked together from every side about the trench.[56] First came Elpenor that had not yet been buried ...[57] (who said) “Leave me not unwept and unburied ... burn me and pile me a barrow on the shore....”[58] Anon came the soul of the Theban Teiresias ...[59] (who said) “Whomsoever of the dead thou shalt suffer to approach the blood, he shall prophesy truthfully ...”[60]: my mother too drew nigh and drank the dark blood and at once she knew me.’[61]

Miss Harrison seeks to explain the difficulty which is presented by this unique passage concerning the Homeric cult of the dead by maintaining that it is a fusion of Chthonian and Olympian ritual.[62] On the assumption which underlies the reasoning in ‘Themis,’ namely, that the Homeric poems assumed their final form and their characteristic theological setting in the time of Pisistratus,[63] it is surprising that we have not more frequent instances of such a fusion in the Homeric poems! Those poems contain many references to Chthonian deities, e.g. to the Erinnyes, to Ge, and to Hades. But in the Nekuia there is question not of gods but of ghosts—ghosts, too, conceived in a predominantly Achaean way, as living together in a western spirit-land. Other Chthonian rites are frequently mentioned in Homer, but not the placation of ghosts. Thus, in the Iliad[64] Agamemnon swears a solemn oath in a manner which is essentially Chthonian. With sword in hand and a boar prepared for sacrifice, he prays (or curses) thus: ‘Be Zeus before all witness ... and Earth and Sun and the Erinnyes who under Earth take vengeance upon men who forswear themselves, that I ... and if aught that I swear be false, may the gods give me all sorrows manifold....’ ‘He spake and cut the boar’s throat with the pitiless knife: and the body Talthybius whirled and threw into the great wash of the hoary sea.’[65] The reason for the action of Talthybius in this passage is that, in Chthonian ritual the animal which was slain to symbolise the hypothetical destruction of the swearer if certain promises were not carried out, could not be eaten and hence was thrown into the sea.

Ridgeway, who believes that the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey was composed before 1000 B.C.[66] and who has done so much to differentiate Achaean and Pelasgian burial customs, finds in the Nekuia a fusion of Achaean and Pelasgian ideas. ‘Such a blending of religious ideas,’ he says, ‘is but the natural concomitant of the intermixture of two different races and cultures.’[67] But Ridgeway is still not quite accurate if he means to imply that any real blending of ideas had occurred. We have said that the ideas underlying these different rites could never be really fused, but they could amalgamate in the form of an eclectic religion. We may regard it as a confirmation of our view that Ridgeway has to confess that the fusion of Achaean and Pelasgian ritual of which there is a solitary suggestion in the Nekuia does not seem to have established itself in Greece very long before the time of Aeschylus.[68] He says: ‘According to the Homeric doctrine, once the body was burned, the spirit returned no more from its dwelling place with the dead. But on this point Aeschylus held a very different view. It is evident that by the time of Aeschylus an eclectic doctrine had been evolved. The Homeric belief in a separate abode for disembodied spirits was adopted, but at the same time the ancient doctrine of the constant presence of the soul in the grave of its body was retained, the gulf between both doctrines being bridged over by the theory that even though the body was burned, the soul could return to its ashes in the grave.’ Now the tomb-offerings made by Odysseus in the Nekuia do not take place at a tomb, but at the entrance to Hades. The inference from this fact is not that there was a blending of Achaean and Pelasgian ideas, in the cult of the dead, but that it was possible for Achaeans who practised other forms of Chthonian ritual to perform such rites when commanded to do so in the realm of Hades, the only place where their dogmas made such rites intelligible. If the Achaeans had believed in the Pelasgian doctrine of the presence of the soul in the tomb, they would normally have made Chthonian offerings at their tombs. Believing, as they did, that the souls of the dead lived in Hades, they could only find meaning in such a rite if they came, as Odysseus came, to the realm of Hades. We have seen that the Achaeans, and Odysseus in particular, were familiar with Pelasgian beliefs, and had, in common with their subjects, certain Chthonian rites. The Nekuia therefore, instead of proving a fusion of beliefs, seems to us to suggest, on the contrary, that such a fusion had not taken place in Homeric Greece.

In the Odyssey[69] Circe instructs Odysseus in the rites which he must perform when he goes to the ‘dank house of Hades.’ The fact that he has to be instructed in this matter suggests that it was not a normal procedure in his domestic life. The same may be said about the command of Circe in regard to Teiresias. Circe bids Odysseus, when he performs the Chthonian rite in Hades, to promise that on his return to Ithaca he will offer up in his home ‘a barren heifer’ and fill a pyre with treasures, and ‘sacrifice apart, to Teiresias alone, a black ram without blemish.’ The burning of a mock-pyre, and the sacrifice of a barren heifer, may be an Achaean rite. The motive is the placation of the dead, but the rite is quite different from that regular feeding of the dead which is so frequent in necromantic magic and in ancestor-worship.[70] The offering of a black ram to Teiresias is, however, somewhat different. It is Chthonian, but we connect it especially with the worship of ‘prophets.’ Teiresias was a prophet of the old Pelasgian religion. He belongs to a stage in the evolution of prophecy which is akin to necromancy and witchcraft and which preceded prophetic colleges, ‘magical secret societies,’[71] or divination by direct inspiration. This latter divination retained indeed traces of the older rites. Thus in the Ion of Euripides[72] the pilgrims to Apollo at Delphi are required before consulting the oracle to sacrifice a πέλανος, a Chthonian offering of meal, honey, and oil. So in Vergil’s story of the visit of Aristaeus to the underworld, we find that Cyrene tells Aristaeus to offer, nine days after his return, a Chthonian sacrifice to an offended prophet, Orpheus:

inferias Orphei Lethaea papavera mittes

et nigram mactabis ovem lucumque revises.[73]

We do not therefore agree with H. Seebohm[74] when he says that the placation of Teiresias proves that offerings to the dead were regularly made by the Achaeans in their ordinary domestic life.