Their connection with Aides and Persephone.
Where the Erinuës touch upon the province of other deities at all, it is upon that of Persephone and of Aïdes. If Homer associated Persephone, as I believe he did, with the Eastern nursery of his race, it was natural enough that, as has been the case, this part of his theo-mythology should remain comparatively untainted. And certainly the Homeric relation between the Erinuës and the sovereigns of the nether world is a close one. When, in the Ninth Iliad, Althea, grasping the earth in her vehemence, as if to lay the strong hand upon the object of her prayer, invoked Aidoneus and Persephone to put her son to death, the Poet proceeds to say that the Erinūs heard her: the Erinūs who stalks in the darkness heard her, and heard her out of Erebus[575]. In the case of Phœnix and Amyntor we have exactly the converse. Here the Erinūs was invoked, and it was Aides with Persephone that answered the prayer. In both these instances it must moreover be remembered, that the question is about present and even immediate, not about posthumous retribution. We cannot, then, refuse to admit, that in this manner Persephone with Aidoneus is placed in an intimate relation with the administration of retributive justice on earth, and during the course of human life there: and if the Erinuës are to be considered as abstractions, having their basis only in some ulterior impersonation, Persephone and Aidoneus offer the only objects on whom we can suppose them to depend. It seems to me, however, that they are not reciprocally identified, although they are profoundly connected, and although we read in the connection a very ancient testimony to a primitive conviction in mankind, that they must look to the powers of the other world to redress the deranged balances of this.
Conformably to these ideas, we find that, in the Nineteenth Iliad, the abode of the Erinuës is fixed ὑπὸ γαῖαν: and it is made clear from the passage (259, 60,) that their avenging office, which is so commonly exercised in this world, reaches also to the other.
From the character of the Erinuës, as vindicators of an order having deeper foundations than those which any volition could either lay or shake, there arises that natural association of them with Destiny, which we see expressed in the speech of Agamemnon[576]. Both have in common this idea, that they are not dependent on mere volition. They differ in these points; that Destiny prescribes and effectuates action, while the Erinuës only punish transgression; and that Destiny is but feebly moral, whereas the Erinuës are profoundly charged with ethical colouring. They represent that side of the idea of Destiny which alone can, after being resolutely scrutinized, retain a hold upon our interest.
Their operation upon man.
All the residue of the threads will, I think, run out easily. It follows from what has been said, that in their aspect towards man, the Erinuës are not indeed administrators of the moral laws themselves, but administrators of their sanctions. So they punish the infraction of the rights inhering in all natural relations: the rights of the poor, as Ulysses protests to Antinous; of a father, as in the case of Amyntor; of a mother, as in the case of Penelope. But they do much more than punish the infraction of the rights of persons; it is the infraction of right as right, which they resent as a substantive offence. Let us accordingly notice the function of the Erinūs in those cases where there has been fault on both sides. An offender is not therefore secure, because the person who invokes the Erinūs upon him is an offender too. The father of Phœnix gave the original occasion to his offence, by an offence of his own: but Phœnix is punished at his instance notwithstanding, because the thing which he implores is not a personal favour, but is a vindication of the ὑψίποδες νόμοι[577], violated by the incest of his son; a thing right to be done, whether asked or not. The case of Althea and Meleager illustrates this truth in a manner still more lively. When she obtained the intervention of the Erinūs, she at once suffered by it. The city of Œneus was all but subjected to the horrors of capture: she was brought, in bitter humiliation, to supplicate the aid of the son, on whose head she had just invoked the stroke of doom. From this we must conclude, which indeed is not difficult, that the Poet regarded her prayer as in itself unnatural and cruel; so that the fulfilment of it involved immediate suffering to herself. But, on the other hand, Meleager had offended too, in the slaughter of a near relative. Therefore, although his pride might well be gratified when he saw king, priest, and people, with his humbled mother, at his feet, and proffering their choicest gift in order to appease him, yet for that original offence, and for his obstinately refusing to arm until fire was in the city, he must receive his punishment likewise, in vindication of the moral laws; accordingly, after he had repulsed the enemy, he never received the demesne[578].
The case of Meleager assists to illustrate that of Œdipus and Epicaste. Both of these unhappy persons had offended against the moral laws, though it was unwittingly (ἀϊδρείῃσι νόοιο); one, the mother-bride, was immediately put out of the way: the survivor was still pursued by the μητρὸς Ἐρινύες. We see here how insufficient the idea of a curse, invoked at will, is to explain the action of these remarkable Powers; for it does not appear that there was any mother’s curse in the case: but, because the natural laws were broken in a matter where the mother was the occasion, therefore, while both suffer, the sufferings of the son are attributed to the Erinuës of the mother; the defenders, because the avengers, of the sanctity of a mother’s place in relation to her son.
In the case of Melampus, it appears that his undertaking to obtain the cows of Iphicles or Phylacus was an ἄτη βαρεῖα, a grave error, beginning in a temptation suggested to him by the Erinūs, and ending in calamity. The seizure of these animals would probably be regarded as no moral offence: and if so, any error that could lie in the engagement to seize them would be, according to Homeric estimate, in the nature of folly rather than of crime. We seem to see, then, in this place, that the range of Erinūs, like that of Atè, embraced at a certain point the prudential as well as the strictly moral laws: nor is there involved in this idea any violent departure from the true standard, for great imprudences are most commonly, and almost invariably, in near connection with some form of moral defect.
It is however also to be observed, that in this place the Erinūs suggests the ἄτη. The idea lying at the root of this representation appears to be the profound one, that the exercise of an evil will is in itself penal: and that when the mind is already disposed to offend, retributive justice may take the form of a permission, encouragement, or incitement, to commit the offence. We have already seen a very remarkable development of this idea in the hardening agency of Minerva upon the Suitors[579].