Bury, who rightly attributes the origin of purgation rites for homicide to post-Homeric times, nevertheless connects those rites with the worship of the Erinnyes and of the Chthonian deities. ‘Gradually,’ he says,[94] ‘as the worship of the souls of the dead and of the deities of the underworld developed, the belief gained ground that he who shed blood was impure and needed cleansing. Accordingly, when a murderer satisfied the kinsfolk of the murdered man by paying a fine, he had also to submit to a process of purification and to satisfy the Chthonian gods and the Erinnyes or Furies who were, in the original conception, the souls of the dead clamouring for vengeance.’ The validity of this conception of the origin of the Erinnyes will be examined presently. We hope also to show, at a later stage, that wergeld and ‘pollution’ were mutually destructive.
O. Müller holds[95] that the religious rites of expiation and purification were derived from the remotest times of Grecian antiquity and were designed to reinstate the slayer in community of worship with his people. Confronted with the difficulty that such rites are not mentioned in our Homeric text, Müller argues,[96] firstly, that the reading ἁγνιτέω (= purifier) instead of ἀφνειοῦ (= rich man) in a passage in the Iliad[97] was the reading of the original text of Homer. He quotes a scholiast’s opinion to the effect that there is an anachronism in the verse. Secondly, he holds that the absence of Homeric references to purgation for homicide is not surprising, because the poet’s hearers would have taken it for granted as a matter of course! We must leave our readers to weigh for themselves the value of this argument. The opinion of the scholiast, if it proves anything, proves that there was an obviously false reading interpolated in the text.
Müller conceives[98] purgation (καθαρμός) as a form of expiation (ἱλασμός) which is closely related to the worship of the dead and the Erinnyes, and believes that it originated in the idea that the life of the manslayer (and sometimes the lives of all his clansmen) must be sacrificed in atonement for homicide. Such a sacrifice, he thinks, came to be obviated in course of time, either (1) by the substitution of a surrogate victim, or (2) by the degradation of the murderer to a state of servitude, or (3) by wergeld, which was originally suggested by the new religious custom of accepting the sacrifice of an animal in lieu of the death of the slayer.[99] Regarding the Erinnyes as Chthonian deities to whom this expiation is offered, he is surprised to find that, in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the purgation of Orestes does not lay to rest the wrath of the Erinnyes. To obviate this difficulty he falls back on the obviously absurd assumption that Aeschylus, for dramatic purposes, presents Orestes as not completely purified.[100] The text of Aeschylus and the text of Homer furnish the best refutations of such hypotheses.
Glotz is quite definitely of the opinion, and in this we agree with him, that purgation for homicide was unknown to the Greeks of Homeric times. In Homer, he says,[101] we find traces of a purely physical cleansing which is required as a preliminary to sacrifice: but such words as μιαίνω, μιαρός and μιαίφονος refer to the victim, not to the slayer.[102] Homicide is not a religious offence: the murder exile, received without scruple,[103] eats at the same table as other guests, and takes part in libations and in prayers. The first genuine instance of purgation for homicide occurs in the Aethiopis of Arctinus of Miletus (750-700 B.C.), and the practice continued to develop until it reached its complete systematisation in the time of Dracon.[104] ‘Its development,’ says Glotz, ‘coincides with the disappearance of patriarchal clans and the progress of city life.’ The purgation-system mediated the transition from ‘private vengeance’ to ‘social justice.’ It was derived, he thinks,[105] from the Semites. Before its advent in Greece, the Greeks had long practised Chthonian rites, upon which, so to speak, it was easily grafted, such rites, for instance, as that which accompanied cursing or swearing, a rite in which ‘purging’ water was thrown over the hands of those about to swear,[106] or that which was associated with solemn reconciliations after feuds or enmities.[107] Hence, says Glotz, it came about, by a natural transition, that in historical times the preliminary pleas on oath of the accuser and the accused in cases of homicide were taken at the altar of the Erinnyes, and it was at this altar that sacrifice was offered by the defendant acquitted of murder by the Areopagus and by the returned exile who had paid the penalty of involuntary homicide.[108]
Returning to Miss Harrison’s theory of the Erinnyes, we are of the opinion that the epithet ἐριννύς was originally equally applicable to all supernatural beings, whether ghosts or gods, but that before the time of Homer the epithet came to be limited to such divinities as were, for some reason, difficult to placate by the ordinary magic of placation.[109] The elemental forces which were deified, as we think, before the advent of the Achaeans, developed, under Achaean influence, a neutral and capricious nature, varying in moods of sun and shower, of calm and storm, like ‘typical men of the other world.’ Like men, they could be placated by gifts and by hospitable entertainment. But the ghost-worship which characterised the Pelasgian stratum was of a much more gloomy and terrible nature. Miss Harrison thinks[110] that Homer exalted the Olympians but caused the bad aspect of Chthonian deities and ghosts to be unduly emphasised. Though the Erinnyes are relegated by Homer to Erebus, yet he does not think of them as ghosts, but as minor deities who carry out instructions from their superiors. They are connected with Zeus (of the underworld), with Ge (the Earth), with the Sun (who, like Zeus, has an underworld aspect, for he too goes down every evening to Hades in the west), and with the Moirae who, though originally agricultural personifications of the Seasons, rapidly became synonymous with Destiny itself, and in Homer are superior even to Zeus.[111] It is especially in the ceremonies of cursing and of swearing that these Chthonian powers are invoked in Chthonian ritual. We have already[112] indicated Miss Harrison’s error in associating the Achaeans exclusively with Olympian, and the Pelasgians with Chthonian ritual. She is, we think, equally mistaken in assuming that the pre-Achaean Erinnys was an irrational being, predominantly animal in form, which had to await the coming of the humanising Achaeans before it assumed a respectable ‘personified’ shape. We think the Pelasgians retained quite faithfully the original anthropomorphic conception of the Erinnyes, while the Achaeans merely regarded them as minor deities who obediently submitted to ‘Olympian’ authority. The precise nature of the Pelasgian cult of the Erinnyes in Homeric Greece is rather difficult to define. In the Pelasgian religion there was but a small and indescribable difference between ghosts and gods, between minor deities and greater deities. It is probable that the Pelasgians practised, occasionally, Olympian ritual—for instance, at public festivals and in civic worship; but in the local domestic worship of the clan, the phratry, and the tribe, their placation of ancestors gave a predominantly Chthonian tone to their whole religious outlook. Hence their Erinnyes, also, though originally spirits which were angry but placable, easily became spirits, whether ghosts or gods, whose wrath was almost implacable. But the Achaeans did not realise the nature of these Erinnyes: and hence in Homer they almost assume the role of ministering spirits, sent to warn or to punish. They are not wicked and malicious, like the Harpies or the Sirens. Thus they are much more human and less, so to speak, diabolical than the real Pelasgian Erinnyes, and this is, perhaps, what Miss Harrison meant to convey when she said[113] that ‘in Homer they are personified beyond recognition.’ The Achaeans could not appreciate the terrible potentialities of the angry ghost-god of the Pelasgians, for the simple reason that they did not worship the ghosts of departed ancestors or any kind of ghosts.
It would, however, be a serious error to suppose that the Pelasgian Erinnyes were as formidable and as implacable as the Erinnyes of post-Homeric times. Moreover, it is gratuitous to assume that ghosts were primarily and necessarily angry because they had been murdered. There is no evidence that homicide in Pelasgian times generated implacable Erinnyes. We admit, with Miss Harrison,[114] that primitive man credits his dead kinsman with passions like his own. But we have already pointed out[115] that if the passions of primitive man are checked and controlled by a tribal society which tramples upon individual instincts, and acts in a collective capacity, if wergeld, according to tribal and early civic law, permits a slayer to remain at home and guarantees him immunity from vengeance while his hands are still wet with blood, we cannot reasonably ascribe to ‘dead kinsmen’ a fierce and implacable desire for vengeance.
How comes it then, we may ask, that so many writers regard the evolution of early Greek blood-vengeance, and a corresponding evolution in the blood-thirst of the Erinnyes, as a transition from the wild to the tame, from the fierce to the gentle, from the barbarously savage to the rationally civilised? The reason is twofold. First of all, previous writers have not distinguished between the tribally controlled Pelasgians and the bellicose Achaeans, and have therefore misinterpreted the text of Homer. Secondly, many writers have regarded the dark age of chaos of post-Homeric Hesiodic days as a valid picture for early Greece as a whole. This confusion has not only affected modern writers, but it also affected the Greeks of historical times. The various legends of post-Homeric times came to be regarded as a proper medium for the interpretation of Homeric saga. The Athenians of the Periclean age were compelled to regard as barbarians their forebears of pre-Draconian times. It is most important to bear this point in mind, in view of our subsequent analysis of homicide in Attic tragedy. We do not assert that all the legends of Attic tragedy are ‘unhistorical.’ We shall see that in Euripides many legends suggest a reference to a period which we may describe as Homeric or, at least, pre-Hesiodic, and are so faithful a reproduction of that age that they must be either attributed to the most skilful conscious archaising on the part of the dramatist, or regarded as genuine legends which had been transmitted with the least possible adulteration. But most of the legends which we find in the Attic tragedians and in the later epic and prose writers are either adulterated saga, or inventions framed in imitation of such saga. To base a theory of social or religious evolution on such legends is obviously to build upon sand.
As an illustration of the confusion which may thus arise, we will cite the legend of the Boeotian Athamas which is given by Herodotus[116] and by Pausanias.[117] Pausanias says that Athamas, King of Orchomenus, slew his son Learchus after having made an abortive attempt to sacrifice his son Phrixus to Zeus Laphistius on a neighbouring mountain. Herodotus, however, says that Phrixus was slain by Athamas, and that, as a punishment for this act, an oracle decreed that the Achaeans of Thessaly, to whom Athamas had fled, should purge their country by slaying Athamas in sacrifice. When they were on the point of offering up Athamas, as a ‘scapegoat’ for their sins, Cytissorus, son of Phrixus, arrived from Colchis and saved him! The natural avenger of Phrixus became the deliverer of his slayer, even in defiance of the oracle! The gods, now seriously annoyed, forbade the descendants of Cytissorus to enter the Prytaneum of the city, and a mock human sacrifice was regularly offered to make amends to the gods for their loss. We believe that this legend is merely an attempt to explain two mock human sacrifices which survived, in Boeotia and in Thessaly, in historical times, and that the fact of their contiguity led to the association of Athamas with Phrixus in the legend.
Stories of this kind have suggested the theory that the rites of homicide-purgation originated in human sacrifice: but they are merely aetiological. Moreover the survival, in historical times, in barbarous countries on the outskirts of Greece, of actual human sacrifice, and the mock sacrifices of human beings which were offered at certain festivals in various places, helped to confirm what stories of actual human sacrifice in post-Homeric legend, and stories of bloodshed which could be interpreted as human sacrifices in the Homeric poems, all seemed to suggest, namely, the opinion that all the Greeks of pre-Draconian days practised human sacrifice and were only induced to cease from the practice by the device of a surrogate victim. But there is no trace of real human sacrifice in Homer, certainly no trace of the sacrifice of a murderer’s life to gods who demanded it.