Poine: a study in ancient Greek blood-vengeance

by Hubert Joseph Treston

We may thus summarise what we conceive to have been the different stages in the evolution of the ‘tragic’ Erinnyes. We must distinguish clearly between (1) the Pelasgian Erinnys; (2) the Achaean Erinnys; (3) the post-Homeric pre-Apolline Erinnys, and (4) the Apolline or historical Erinnys. In Homer there is a fusion of the first and second conceptions. In Attic tragedy there is a most disheartening confusion of all four conceptions. We must remember that the Erinnyes were not ordinary deities possessing a stereotyped cult. Having attained divinity largely through the personification or deification of an abstract cultus-epithet, their nature was liable to vary according to men’s interpretation of the meaning and origin of the epithet, and their forms could be freely fashioned by the minds of poets and of legend-makers.[129]

(1) In regard to the Pelasgian Erinnyes, we have suggested that they were divinities of different degrees of rank in the Chthonian religion. They did not visit their wrath on a murderer if he paid the tribal penalty, or even on the slayer of a kinsman, unless he remained in contact with the domestic worship of his dead relative.[130] There was no ‘purgation’ for homicide: because homicide was not yet an offence against the greater gods of the State. The exile or death of a murderer or the payment of wergeld appeased, of itself, the Erinnys of the slain: to refuse to accept wergeld was impossible, in the organisation of the tribe.

(2) The Achaean Erinnys was an eclectic product. It was not Homer who personified[131] the Erinnys because it was already personified, though in that vague collective nameless manner in which alone a cultus-epithet can be deified. The Achaeans conceived the Erinnyes as gods. For them there are only gods and men: there are no ghosts or abstractions in the galaxy of supernatural beings. The Achaean Erinnys has lost its connexion with ghost-terror, though it retains sufficient traces of its Chthonian importance to be treated with considerable respect. It is merely a subordinate deity which executes the decrees of Olympian gods, but its association with Zeus and the Moirae suggests the greater dignity which it enjoyed in Chthonian religion. The connexion of the Erinnys with curses is essentially Chthonian. All castes in Homer use the ritual of swearing, but we cannot say how far the Achaeans understood the ideas underlying the rite. The curse of a father or a mother was particularly terrible in the Pelasgian domestic religion. But we cannot suppose that the Achaean respect for parents, or their dread of curses, was as great or as profound as that of the Pelasgians. The Achaean Zeus himself hurled to Tartarus his aged father Kronos.[132] Hence the Homeric references to parents’ curses, such as are found in the stories of the Achaean Phoenix and the Achaean Meleager, indicate probably an assimilation of Pelasgian ideas.[133] But the literary heirloom which the poet of the Achaeans bequeathed to Greece helped to beget a false conception of the Achaean Erinnys in the minds of later poets. The Achaean mode of blood-vengeance and their desire of blood for blood caused later legend-makers to attribute a veritable blood-thirst to the Erinnyes of murdered Achaeans.

(3) The post-Homeric pre-Apolline Erinnys—a divine being whose nature can only be inferred by the logic of elimination—reflects in a more emphatic manner the blood-thirst of the slain. In the relaxation of Achaean military discipline which followed the Trojan war: in the great invasions and migrations, and in the demoralisation of clan-control, in a chaotic society such as Hesiod describes,[134] where force is the only law, and justice, virtue, honour, hospitality, loyalty and fraternal love have vanished from the earth, the Erinnys came to assume a diabolical aspect: murder was confused with vengeance; the anger of impotent avengers became implacable: and inexorable hatred was attributed to the Erinnyes of the slain. At this period the gods were credited with an approval of collective punishment[135] such as men themselves practised. Nemesis became a god.[136] Kronos is now said to have devoured his children, and Rhea, their mother, inflamed the Erinnyes against him.[137] The blood-offerings which from time immemorial had been laid at the tomb of the dead were now interpreted, not as a resuscitation of the dead for purposes of necromancy or for the production of fertility, but, in the case of murdered dead, as the satisfaction of an unquenched thirst for blood. Curses became more frequent and more terrible than in days when tribal law or military control rendered recourse to religious sanctions less necessary. To this period we attribute the prevalence of customs of which some survived to historical times, while others soon became obsolete: we refer to the custom of writing curses on tombstones, the custom of planting a spear in the grave,[138] and the custom of μασχαλισμός, or partial mutilation of a corpse.[139] To those days, rather than to historical Greece, apply the words of the Chorus in the Electra of Sophocles[140]:

The curse hath found, and they in earth who lie

Are living powers to-day.

Long dead, they drain away

The streaming blood of those who made them die.

In the Ion of Euripides[141] we are told that around the Omphalos, or Sacred Stone, were figures of the Gorgons. One editor[142] of this play remarks that these figures suggested to Aeschylus the dramatic forms of his Erinnyes. We are much more inclined to believe this, than to suppose, with Miss Harrison[143] or with Verrall,[144] that Aeschylus invented the dramatic form of the ‘tragic’ Erinnys. We shall see later[145] that Aeschylus conceived the Erinnyes as Titans, as rebels against Zeus and the Olympians. Whence came this rebel-rôle of the Erinnyes? The answer will, perhaps, be more intelligible if we explain the nature of the Apolline or ‘historical’ Erinnys.