From these facts alone, apart from general considerations, it will be evident how easy and natural it was that the Greeks should also have received religious inspirations from their Asiatic neighbours.
It is very significant that the first mention, in Greek literature, of the religious purgation of homicide occurs in an epic poem, the Aethiopis, by Arctinus of Miletus,[73] who lived in the last half of the eighth century (750-700 B.C.). In this poem we are told that Achilles, having slain Thersites because he had ridiculed his tears for the death of an Amazonian queen, went to Lesbos to be purified. Glotz points out that the presence of Achilles at a sacrifice before his purgation implies that the doctrine was not, at that time, fully developed or understood.
Again, it is very significant that Herodotus[74] attributes to the Lydians rites of homicide-purgation which, he says, are almost the same as those which the Hellenes used. According to the historian, there came to Croesus, King of Lydia, about the year 550 B.C., ‘a man, in wretched plight, whose hands were not clean, a Phrygian by race, of royal blood.’ ‘Having reached,’ he says, ‘the house of Croesus, this man asked to have himself purified according to the customs of the place, and Croesus purified him.’ After the ceremony Croesus asked his visitor who it was that he had slain: the stranger replied that he had involuntarily slain his brother and that, in consequence, he had been expelled by his father and deprived of all his privileges. We shall see presently[75] that involuntary kin-slaying could be purged abroad, in the Greek purgation-system. We cannot conclude, because Croesus made no inquiries prior to the ceremony as to the details of the deed of blood, that therefore all kinds of homicide could be purged amongst the Lydians. The very fact that the slayer requested purgation would, in the religious atmosphere of the time, have been taken as sufficient evidence that his deed was at least capable of being purged.
The conception of homicide as a pollution or religious offence is known to have existed at an early date amongst the Hebrews, and we may hazard the conjecture, though we find no express reference to the fact, that a system of purgation was practised by the Hebrews, at least for minor degrees of guilt. The penalties exacted for homicide amongst the Hebrews, as amongst the Romans, were much more severe than those which prevailed amongst the Greeks. We have seen[76] that in the normal operation of homicide-purgation no religious ‘cleansing’ was valid while the civic penalty remained unpaid. In Roman law, death was the penalty prescribed for murder and for manslaughter: but for justifiable or justifiably accidental homicide[77] there was no punishment, and religious expiation could immediately take place. Amongst the Hebrews, a similar penalty was exacted for murder and manslaughter. ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed’ is the general principle[78]; and again: ‘He that smiteth a man so that he die[79] shall surely be put to death: if a man slays presumptuously with guile, take him from my altar that he may die.’[80] For accidental or justifiable slaying, however, we find that a mode of escape from the avengers of blood was provided: ‘If God delivers a man into his hands,[81] I will appoint thee a place whither he shall flee[82] ... and ye shall not take compensation for him that is fled to the City of Refuge that he should come home before the death of the high-priest. So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are.’[83] We may assume, with some degree of probability, that in this class of homicide, some form of purgation ceremony was customary. We mention the Hebrew custom here merely to show the general trend of Asiatic thought in regard to homicide.
We may, therefore, regard as highly probable the view which connects the origin of the post-Homeric Greek notion of homicide as a ‘pollution’ with the Semites and Asiatic peoples. Glotz merely states his view of this matter without giving reasons in support of his statement.[84] ‘Alors,’ he says, ‘les Grecs prendront aux Sémites les rites dramatiques de leurs cérémonies purificatoires.’ There were, however, some important differences between the original Semitic doctrine and the matured Greek adaptation of it, as will be evident from a brief explanation of the precise nature of the Greek ‘pollution’ doctrine.
The Greek Pollution Doctrine
At first, we think, there came to Greece a vague rumour of the doctrine through the medium of the Cyclic poets. Greek priesthoods in Asia had already adopted it because of their proximity to Asiatic races who had developed it. But originating, as it did, in the centralised theocracies which then existed amongst these races, the doctrine could be accepted only in a modified form by the Greek people whose predominant political institution was the city-state.
Traces of the doctrine in its early phase, prior to its formal adoption in Greece, appear in the story of Alcmaeon. Thucydides,[85] in his account of the islands known as the Echinades, in western Greece, which were gradually, owing to the silting up of the river Achelous, becoming part of the mainland, mentions the following legend: ‘when Alcmaeon, son of Amphiaraus, was wandering over the earth after the murder of his mother, he was told by Apollo that here he should find a home, the oracle intimating that he would never find deliverance from his terrors until he discovered some country which was not yet in existence and not seen by the Sun at the time when he slew his mother; there he might settle, but the rest of the earth was accursed to him. He knew not what to do till at last, as the story goes, he espied the deposit of earth made by the Achelous, and he thought that a place sufficient to support life must have accumulated in the long time during which he had been wandering since his mother’s death.’ This conception of pollution is very Semitic, and reminds us of the Biblical allusion to Cain[86] as ‘cursed from the face of the earth,’ but it is also to a certain extent Greek, since there was not in historical Greece any purgation for wilful matricide or, if we may trust Plato,[87] for wilful kin-slaying. In the Apolline era Greek kin-slaying was punished, according to Plato,[87] by death, and it was so punished in a later Israelite penal code. In the Pelasgian era, kin-slayers, condemned to perpetual exile, were often compelled to wander for years and years. Their wandering must have been almost proverbial, yet its meaning was understood. But the picture of a kin-slayer wandering till he finds an unpolluted piece of earth can only be attributed to the fanciful interpretation of a novel religious law which as yet was not fully comprehended. We have already discussed[88] Miss Harrison’s views in regard to Bellerophon and the ‘plain of wandering.’ Apollodorus tells us[89] that Bellerophon was purified by Proetus. Miss Harrison says[90] ‘in those old days he could not be purified.’ We agree that he could not be purged in Homeric times, because the rite was unknown: if in later times he was said to have been purged, it became necessary to suppose that the crime which he committed was involuntary. But Homer says nothing of Bellerophon’s kin-slaying.[91] It was probably an invention of later minds intended to explain the Homeric reference to the ‘Aleïan plain’ which was interpreted as ‘the plain of wandering,’ after the analogy of the ‘wandering’ in the legend of Alcmaeon.
We hope to show presently that this religious doctrine, which declared in effect that homicide brought down the anger of the gods upon the community which neglected to punish it, took definite shape in historical Greece under the aegis of Apollo and his priesthoods and Amphictyonies. In our view, the final form of the doctrine was a fusion or compromise between the severer Semitic conception, on the one hand, and, on the other, the tribal traditions of Greek homicide-customs, weakened and disorganised, as they were, in the Hesiodic age of chaos, but unmistakably local in their outlook, and reflecting still the attitude adopted by the relatives and attributed to the victim. The Apollo of the Greek race could not accept in its entirety the Asiatic doctrine of pollution but had to modify it at the bidding of customs which were sanctified by time. As we believe that the Draconian homicide-laws were merely an eclectic codification of the seventh-century unwritten laws of the aristocracies of birth, it would clearly anticipate our whole account of the Draconian legislation if we were to explain at this stage the detailed operation of the Apolline pollution system. We shall then give here only an outline of the Asiatic-Greek compromise which we believe to have arisen in the eighth or seventh century B.C.
In the first place wergeld was abolished, as amongst the Hebrews, for wilful murder. This was the greatest concession which the new doctrine extorted from tribalism. The new provision which declared the property of the wilful man-slayer confiscated to the State when the slayer had gone into perpetual exile we attribute to a third factor—the evolution of State power: wergeld in the strict sense was also abolished for manslaughter, but the slayer was allowed and commanded, after a period of exile, to ‘appease’ by ‘presents’ the relatives of the slain. In this we can clearly detect a concession wrung from what we call Apollinism by the tribes. It is usually held[92] that in the case of manslaughter, and Glotz holds[93] that even in the case of murder, ‘private settlement’ without trial was legal in historical Athens. We hope to show[94] at a later stage that these opinions are incorrect, except in regard to one special and rare contingency.