Religious Aspect of Homicide
We have pointed out that in Homeric Greece there were, so to speak, two different religions, which reflected, in their main features, the social caste-differences of the Achaeans and the Pelasgians. It has been rightly said that primitive man creates his gods in his own likeness, and in the absence of any definite Homeric references to the religious aspect of homicide we must assume that the two religions of Homeric Greece adopted, towards homicide, the attitudes of the two corresponding social strata. Amongst the Achaeans, we have seen, homicide was a deed which concerned only the slayer and the nearest blood-relations of the victim; there was no co-operation of large groups, no trial, no civic interest in the execution of vengeance: it was entirely a matter for ‘private settlement’ between the relatives of the slain and the individual slayer. And this ‘settlement’ was not a payment in money or in kind: it was a payment in blood, and in blood alone. The Achaeans, as a caste, had no interest in such ‘crimes’: on the whole, they regarded bloodshed as a local misfortune, which should not be aggravated by an extension of the dispute to wider areas, and therefore they frequently adopted and protected murder-exiles. We are not then surprised to find that in Homer the Olympian gods of the Achaean caste manifest no anger against a murderer.
In the Pelasgian tribal religion we may assume that the position of the homicide was somewhat different. It required the payment of wergeld to purchase back the friendship of tribal gods. But we have seen[75] that for slaying within the kindred no payment of wergeld could be offered or accepted; and we have said[76] that the penalty of slavery or bondage was probably inapplicable and that therefore exile was the normal punishment for bloodshed within the clan. It follows that the murdered man whose body was interred in the family tomb would never have come in contact, through worship, with his kinsman who had slain him. And in this sense we may accept the dictum of Coulanges[77] that ‘the hand stained with blood could not touch sacred objects: the shedder of blood could not sacrifice.’ Hence it is perhaps significant that, in Homer, Tlepolemus who, when he had slain his maternal uncle, went into exile to Rhodes, is said to have been ‘loved by Zeus,’[78] for by exile he had atoned for his offence. In ordinary cases of homicide, however, between members of different clans, we must suppose that the gods of the phratry, of the tribe, and of the city became reconciled to the slayer if the relatives of the slain received the customary wergeld. If then Miss Harrison says[79] that ‘so long as primitive man retains the custom of the blood-feud, so long will he credit his dead kinsmen with passions like his own,’ she is compelled, by her own reasoning, to admit that the ‘ghosts’ of murdered men, in the tribal wergeld system, did not revolt at the presence of a murderer, unless he were a kinsman.[80]
Coulanges[81] implies that in addition to clan-religion there was domestic worship. Now this domestic worship was shared by a husband and wife who normally belonged to two different clans, and are we to assume that if a husband slew his wife or a wife her husband, the domestic religion would have compelled them to go into exile even when the clan could atone by wergeld? This point we cannot decide with any certainty. Clytaemnestra, in later legend, offers sacrifice at the tomb of her murdered husband: her children assert, not that it is sacrilegious, but only that it is unavailing as a placation. We think that the tribal penal code did not demand the exile penalty for homicide of this kind and would have permitted wergeld. But within the genuine kindred, and especially within the small kindred, bloodshed, particularly parricide, was from the earliest times a serious religious offence.
There remain for discussion two problems which most writers regard as intimately related—namely, the origin and evolution of the Erinnyes, and the source and significance of the ritual of homicide-purgation.
The Erinnyes and Purgation
The Greek word ἐριννύς is probably an adjective meaning ‘angry,’ and should therefore be applicable to any spirit, whether ghost or god. But Miss Harrison[82] believes that the word was originally an epithet of a ghost or ker. The following is a summary of her opinions: The Keres (κῆρες), she thinks, were primarily ghosts: they were neutral potencies who might be either quite harmless[83] or baleful bacilli, or good spirits.[84] The word Erinnys was originally probably an epithet of ker, and denoted a ghost-pest, a Poine. The Erinnys primarily is the ker of a human being unrighteously slain. It is the ker as Poine.[85] Thus, because it was a ker, the Erinnys was primarily a human ghost, but the word came, by a process of specialisation, to be applied only to such ghosts as are angry because they have been murdered.[86] In Homer, she thinks, the Erinnyes have passed beyond this stage and are ‘personified (? deified) almost beyond recognition.’ They are no longer souls, but the avengers of souls. They have even lost their exclusive connexion with souls, and are become the avengers of the moral law, vague equivalents of underworld Zeus and Persephone.[87]
Now Miss Harrison implicitly connects the Erinnyes with purgation, since she asserts that ‘purification (i.e. purgation) is the placation of ghosts.’[88] But in Homeric times the ghosts of murdered men would not, she holds, accept any purgation sacrifice save the blood of the murderer.[89] Therefore, in a certain sense homicide could be purged, and in another sense it could not be purged in Homeric times!
Homer,[90] she says, does not understand the mystery of Bellerophon and the Aleïan plain, but Apollodorus[91] reveals the fact that Bellerophon slew his brother unwittingly and that he was purified by Proetus. Apollodorus, she thinks, is unhistorical in speaking of the purification of Bellerophon: in those old days, she says,[92] he could not be purified. But as murder was a physical infection, Bellerophon had to go to the Aleïan plain, an alluvial deposit which had recently been recovered from the sea and which was not therefore included in the ‘earth’ which was polluted by his deed of blood. The fallacies of this interpretation will become evident in the course of our reasoning. At present we will merely point out (1) that there is no evidence for the assertion that murder was a ‘physical infection’ in the Homeric age. Everything that we have said about the Pelasgian wergeld system and the Achaean protection of murder-exiles proves the contrary; (2) the plain of wandering, if that is what Homer meant by Ἀλήϊον, (it may have been a local place-name which conveyed to him no special meaning,) does not imply an alluvial deposit of any kind, but possibly a special place which known murderers, condemned to perpetual exile, were wont to frequent; (3) Apollodorus may be unhistorical, in speaking of the purgation of Bellerophon, but so is every Greek writer of the historical period who attributed purgation to Achaean heroes, as Aeschylus, for instance, does, to Orestes; (4) to explain the absence of references to purgation in Homer by suggesting that the death of the murderer was the only purgation of his crime, and to imply that Bellerophon was fleeing from purgation when he fled from death to the Aleïan plain, is equivocal and misleading. For a murderer was either purged or he was not purged; and if a murderer was put to death in sacrifice, no one could logically speak of him as ‘purged.’
F. de Coulanges seems also to connect the purgation rites for homicide with the worship of the dead. In the primitive family group, he says,[93] ‘there were domestic morals. The shedder of blood was no longer allowed to sacrifice or to offer libations or prayer or to offer the sacred repast.... The hand stained with blood could no longer touch sacred objects. To enable a man to renew his worship and to regain possession of his god, he was required at least to purify himself by an expiatory ceremony.’ This opinion implies that such rites were as old as the domestic religion of the Family. The most serious objection to this implication is that Homer has no genuine reference to any such ceremony.