From both thy hands a row of olive twigs
Counting thrice nine in all—and add this prayer—
Oed. That is the chief thing—that I long to hear.
It may be said that we have not here a genuine instance of homicide-purgation. There is no animal sacrifice, no ‘cleansing’ by a bath of blood. Water and honey were regular offerings to the dead, and the express prohibition of wine-libations reminds us very forcibly of the sacrifice to the Erinnyes made by Clytaemnestra in the Eumenides of Aeschylus.[118] Has Sophocles in mind, then, a local rite of placation to the Erinnys of Oedipus at Colonus, which he interprets as a commemoration of purgation rites? We have seen how easily such rites may be confused. Or are we to assume that the purgation rite for involuntary or extenuated homicide was different from the rites by which a wilful murderer could be purged ‘abroad’ or from those by which a justifiable slayer was purged at home? Was the sacrifice which was offered to the Erinnyes or the Semnai Theai[119] by involuntary slayers after their return from exile, and by accused persons who were acquitted by the Areopagus, a regular purgation rite? These questions we find it difficult to answer either in the affirmative or in the negative. Plato’s references[120] to greater and lesser ‘cleansings’ according to different degrees of guilt imply that the average Greek did not understand the exact nature or purpose of ‘purgation’ and that the secrets of this magic art of reconciliation were the exclusive privilege of theocratic nobles whose interest it was to obscure rather than to clarify the details of the system. The passage we have quoted from the Oedipus Coloneus possibly points to variations in the ‘purgation’ ritual according to degrees of guilt—variations which suggest moreover the ambition and the power of local deities and priesthoods to retain their distinctive peculiarities in the execution of a central Apolline doctrine.[121]
In the Iphigenia Taurica of Euripides[122] we find a mock purgation ceremony arranged by Iphigeneia to save the lives of Orestes and of Pylades. The image of Artemis is said (it was a fiction invented by a loving sister) to have turned in its seat and to have closed its eyes when the blood-stained Argive cousins entered the temple! Iphigeneia proposes to ‘cleanse’ the pollution by the blood of young lambs shed in solitude by the sea and such other things as she has ordered as purifications. King Thoas, not being himself appealed to, leaves the whole question of purgation entirely in the hands of the priestess of Artemis.
From the legend that Bellerophon was cleansed by his host Proetus,[123] the king of Tiryns, we might be inclined to argue that the purgation rites for certain forms of kin-slaying were performed by private non-sacerdotal individuals. But every king was a High Priest in primitive religion; and, further, we have already seen that Proetus could not have performed the post-Homeric ceremony which is attributed to him. It is however possible that Croesus personally ‘purged’ the Phrygian homicide mentioned by Herodotus.[124]
It is probable that in Greece the ‘cleansers’ of homicide-guilt were always ‘priests’ of some kind. Epimenides of Crete purged the city of Athens on a famous occasion, yet not from murder but rather from sacrilege[125]; moreover, Müller points out[126] that he was a native of Phaestus in Crete where there was a very ancient cult of Apollo; hence Epimenides was more than probably a member of an Apolline sacerdotal guild. Müller is, however, we think mistaken in regarding purgation for homicide as the exclusive privilege of Apolline priests. The Euripidean reference to purgation by a priestess of Artemis which we have just cited,[127] Athene’s interpretation[128] of the supplication of Orestes as a supplication for purgation, in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, and many passages in the Laws of Plato,[129] reveal the error of this opinion.
The purgation of Orestes by Apollo is described by Aeschylus in the Eumenides. It is no priest or priestess of Olympian or Chthonian gods, but Apollo himself,[130] the chief of the καθάρσιοι θεοί, who performs the rite. We cannot interpret the ceremony as the purgation of a wilful matricide ‘abroad,’ as we think that such purgation was impossible, at least in historical times.[131] It is the ‘purging’ rather of a deed which is either justified or extenuated by Apollo’s express command, a ‘purging’ which would normally take place in the slayer’s home-land but which is here attributed to a divine Delphian purifier either because Apollo was the patron of the Greek ‘purgation’ system or because the deed was such that no one could have cleansed it save the god who had commanded it, or because a Phocian legend made Phocis, not Athens, the place to which Orestes fled after the slaying of his mother. Orestes tells[132] Athene that he is not a suppliant for purgation at Athens, because he has been already ‘purged.’ We may infer from this that a homicide-exile had not to be ‘purged’ more than once in his changes of residence abroad, but we think it probable that such ‘extern’ purgation did not dispense with the need for ‘domestic’ purgation if the exile was ever permitted to return to his home.[133] Orestes says[134]: ‘There is a law that the shedder of blood is debarred from human intercourse until at the hands of a man who purifies from bloodshed the blood of a young animal has been poured upon him. Long ago have I been thus made clean by others who live elsewhere, by animal victims beside running water.’
From this passage, and from the reference which we have cited from Euripides’ Iphigenia Taurica, as well as from more general considerations we conclude that homicide-purgation normally included the shedding of animal blood when some element of guilt was admitted. It is possible, therefore, that the rite described by Sophocles, in the Oedipus Coloneus,[135] was not conceived as a genuine purgation-rite but rather as an exceptional local procedure which was intended to supplement a presumed anterior purgation.[136] That Attica was noteworthy for its scruples regarding ‘pollution’ may be inferred from the remarks of the Corinthian Chorus in the Medea of Euripides.[137]
We are entirely on the side of Müller[138] and Philippi[139] in the view that purgation, in historical Greece, was applied to the authors of justifiable bloodshed.[140] This we may regard as a further confirmation of our opinion that homicide-purgation was not a placation of ghosts or an expiation offered to gods, but a solemn and sacred symbol of reconciliation between the slayer and his native gods.[141]