Chapter III: Euripides (1)

The extant dramas of Euripides are permeated with references to homicide. It will be necessary to examine seventeen out of the nineteen extant plays. We need not discuss the _Cyclops_ or the _Rhesus_. The Oresteian dramas will be our first concern. In attempting a legal analysis of Euripides we are confronted with a difficulty which is present only in a minor degree in the case of Aeschylus and of Sophocles, namely the difficulty of deciding how far Euripides followed mythological tradition, or how far he ignored this tradition and invented characters and plots which reflect mainly his own mental outlook and the ideas of his time. Owing to the prominence which he gives to the prologue and to the _deus ex machina_, and owing to the frequency of his allusions to contemporary ideas and developments, it is often maintained that the main elements of Euripidean drama are derived from fifth-century Athenian life, and that, therefore, the plots and the scenes are incongruous and impossible. Thus Jevons says[1]: ‘If Sophocles laid his scenes in “a past which never was present,” he at any rate adhered to his imaginary period with fidelity. But Euripides lays his scenes in a time which is neither past nor present, but an incongruous and impossible epoch, in which Theseus defends the republican institutions of Athens and Hecuba regrets the high price of Sophists’ lectures’; and again[2]: ‘The motive seems to have been to give as little time as possible to the myth as traditionally related, in order to concentrate attention on the incidents and situations of Euripides’ own making. Euripides could not throw off the myths altogether, but he got rid of them as much as possible by relegating them to the prologue and to the _deus ex machina_’.... ‘Compelled[3] by the tradition of the tragic art to take his subjects from mythology, Euripides was impelled by his instinct as an artist to draw his characters from real life: and to present the heroes of mythology acting from everyday motives and with everyday feelings was to attempt in most cases an impossible fusion. The slaying of Clytaemnestra by Orestes is a proper subject for the art of Sophocles or Aeschylus, but is wholly unsuited to the new form of art which Euripides was making for.... The discords[4] which exist in Euripides’ plays between his character-drawing and his situations, between his sentiments and his mythical subjects ... are discords which Sophocles avoided and Euripides could not or would not convert into harmonies.’ On this subject, Verrall also holds a similar view.[5]

It would be obviously impossible for us to discuss this matter with any degree of completeness, but we must point out that we do not agree with this interpretation of Euripides. In Attic drama, as we conceive it, it was customary for the poet to derive the skeleton of his plots and situations from traditional myth. In clothing that skeleton with vitality and movement and with organic unity, the dramatist was compelled to translate himself into the past, to reconstruct from his data the details of speech, of action, and of character. In a word, he consciously archaised. Now we admit that in this vital point of ancient dramatic art Euripides is not so correct, so unimpeachable, as Sophocles or as Aeschylus. He could not always shake off the influences of his time. But to suggest that Euripides deliberately set himself to create a new form of drama admittedly incongruous, unhistorical and unreal, seems to us, as far as we can judge, as nonsensical as to suppose that Pheidias could have created a statue of Olympian Zeus with an Asiatic turban on its head and ‘barbarian slippers’[6] on its feet. In our view, Euripides followed traditional legend not only in the prologue and in the epilogue, but also in the dramatic ‘episodes.’ To depart from tradition, it would have been necessary and, for a dramatist with new and advanced ideas, it would have been easy to invent new characters, new names, new situations. In such an event, Euripides could at least have been consistent. But since in actual fact we find that he concerned himself less with questions of consistency than with situations involving surprise and horror, with problems of human passion, and with incidents of human interest, we must attribute his inconsistencies to the fact that he was fettered by traditional legend and that he overreached himself in his desire to give to the characters of mythology a really living personality. He was, of course, aware of variations in the legend. Like Sophocles and Aeschylus, he had to become an ‘eclectic,’ to choose certain elements from different stories for dramatic purposes, and to ignore other elements. But whereas the eclecticism of Sophocles and also to a great extent of Aeschylus is dominated by the canon of consistency, that of Euripides is dominated mainly by a less orthodox canon which is more conducive to human interest and which we may call the canon of psychic hedonism. Judged by the criterion of the Horatian maxim

aut famam sequere aut sibi convenientia finge,[7]

Euripides stands condemned if the latter alternative is applicable to the former. But if the maxim be interpreted to mean ‘Follow tradition and if there are variations in the story do not trouble about consistency[8] provided that every character and every situation has a traditional basis, but if you abandon tradition consistency is absolutely necessary,’ then Euripides is canonical. Of the real meaning of this maxim we cannot be certain, but to our mind it seems to mean: ‘Consistency is the aim of all literary art, but tragedians must be guided by traditional myth, and therefore in tragedy consistency, though desirable, is not indispensable, whereas in all other domains of art consistency is essential.’ Miss Harrison and Gilbert Murray[9] have suggested a theory of the origin of Greek tragedy which supposes, in effect, that its forms or characteristic ‘events’ were derived from an ancient ritual of the Year Spirit, while its actual ‘content,’ its characters, situations, episodes, were derived from Homeric saga. This theory we need not now discuss, but we must point out that Homer was not the only source of ancient mythology. When Horace says[10]:

rectius Iliacum carmen deducis in actus
quam si proferres ignota indictaque primus,

he merely mentions the _Iliad_ as an example of traditional story, not as the boundary of its extent. In many instances—as, for example, in the case of Orestes—we have suggested that there were several variants in the post-Homeric myths.

Aristotle says[11] of Sophocles and Euripides, Σοφοκλής ἔφη αὐτὸς μὲν οἵους δεῖ ποιεῖν, Εὐριπίδην δὲ οἷοι εἰσίν. This much-controverted statement is usually interpreted to mean that Sophocles reproduced the antique mythological atmosphere in his characters and in his plots, whereas Euripides imported contemporary types into the legendary background. But we find it very difficult to believe that Euripides conceived Orestes, Hercules, Menelaus and other heroic characters as ordinary fifth-century Athenians.[12] The context in which this statement of Aristotle occurs is very obscure. Aristotle mentions three possible ideals of characterisation: ἢ γὰρ οἷα ἦν ἢ ἔστιν, ἢ οἷά φασιν καὶ δοκεῖ, ἢ οἷα εἶναι δεῖ, ‘Either as (things and people) were or are, or as they assert that they are and as they seem to be, or as they must be.’ Now if the criticism of Euripides which Aristotle attributes to Sophocles read οἷοι ἦσαν instead of οἷοι εἰσίν, meaning ‘men as they were,’ _not_ ‘men as they are,’ we should be more readily prepared to accept it. We hope to show that the characters and situations in Euripides are often archaic, and this archaism must be attributed either to the conscious archaising of the dramatist or to the antiquity of the legends which he follows.

With this preamble we may proceed to discuss the references to blood-vengeance in the dramas of Euripides. Once more we will begin with the legend of Orestes. We do not possess a Euripidean play which describes the actual murder of Agamemnon; but the deed is attributed to Clytaemnestra and to Aegisthus in the prologue to the _Electra_.

THE ‘ELECTRA’

In the _Electra_ Euripides follows closely the lines which were laid down by Aeschylus in his _Choephoroe_ and by Sophocles in his _Electra_. There are certain minor divergencies which Verrall has indicated in the Introduction to his edition of the _Choephoroe_, but there are also very striking similarities, not only in the main plot, but even in the arguments which appear in the dialogue. We are told that Orestes left Argos while his father was still in Troy, and went to Phocis.[13] We do not hear that at that period he was associated with Athens. Thus the Homeric narrative[14] is ignored and we observe, once more, the strange omission of a fact which rendered so natural the legendary assumption of Orestes’ subsequent trial at Athens. But the omission is less flagrant in Euripides than it is in Aeschylus or in Sophocles, because Euripides follows in the main a legend which connected the trial of Orestes with Argos and not with Athens, and though the dramatist cannot altogether avoid a reference to a trial at the Areopagus, he refers to it in a subordinate manner,[15] attributing, no doubt, any difficulty which he found in understanding it to the inscrutable nature of Apolline decrees.

Once more we find Clytaemnestra pleading, as a justification for her act, the ‘sacrifice’ of Iphigeneia. The peasant of the Prologue doubts the justice of this plea[16] and the ordinary people are not in the least deceived by it. Electra repudiates it as a dangerous fiction. She reveals the insidious nature of the plea by pointing out, as she does also in the _Electra_ of Sophocles, that if Clytaemnestra arrogates to herself the right to decide whether the sacrifice of Iphigeneia was or was not an act of murder, and whether, therefore, the death of Agamemnon was or was not justified by this sacrifice, she must logically concede to Orestes a similar right of decision regarding these issues, and therefore, also, the right to slay Clytaemnestra if he considers it right to slay her!

If blood, in righteous retribution, calls
For blood, by me behoves it thou should’st bleed,
And by thy son, Orestes, to avenge
My father: there if this was just, alike
Is it just here.[17]

In reasoning of this kind, which we cannot suppose to have been included in traditional saga, we see a deliberate effort at ‘conscious archaising’ on the part of Sophocles[18] and of Euripides. In the Homeric society there existed, we have argued,[19] a distinction between murder and righteous vengeance. If this distinction had not existed in the Achaean caste the result would have been chaotic. Instead of a restricted system of ‘private vengeance’ which is controlled by discipline and by public opinion, we should find prevailing everywhere a barbarous vendetta-system. The ‘sacrifice’ of his daughter by Agamemnon is not mentioned in Homer, and there is no reason for assuming that such a sacrifice ever took place. But if it had occurred, the Achaeans would not have regarded it as an act of murder. In historical Athens such a plea as that which Clytaemnestra here advances could never have been made, as the legal and religious atmosphere was so entirely different. Hence, in dramatising a legend of this kind the correct reproduction of such arguments as those which we are discussing demanded considerable skill. As this play of Euripides cannot be regarded as a mere servile imitation of the corresponding Sophoclean drama, we must suppose that Euripides had recourse to ‘conscious archaising.’ It so happens, as we think, that in attributing this sentiment to Electra he has visualised correctly the Achaean attitude to murder.

In the _Orestes_ we shall find an argument attributed to Tyndareus which at first sight seems to resemble the reasoning of Electra in this passage, but which is really very different. Tyndareus says of Orestes[20]:

He ought t’ have called the laws, the righteous laws,
T’ avenge the blood, and by appeal to them
Have driven his mother from this royal house:
Thus ’midst his ills calm reason had borne rule,
Justice had held its course, and he been righteous.

We believe that this sentiment of Tyndareus was either included in or suggested by an Argive variant of the Oresteian legend, and that it is based on the assumption that trials for homicide existed _before_ Orestes slew his mother. The contrast which is drawn in the _Orestes_ passage is a contrast between social justice and private vengeance, but the _Electra_ passage indicates a contrast between private vengeance and vendetta. Now, in social justice such as existed in historical Greece, from the seventh century onwards, the Achaean system of private vengeance would have been regarded as a crime. Similarly in the Achaean system of ‘private vengeance’ uncontrolled and indiscriminate ‘vendetta’ was a crime. In both cases the crime would have consisted in the violation of the existing order. Now Euripides suggests (as we infer from these two passages in the _Orestes_ and the _Electra_) that the consequence of such a violation is identical in both circumstances, namely an indefinite series of murders. As applied to vendetta we admit that this criticism is true, but in regard to private vengeance it is false. We have seen[21] that such a series of slayings did not characterise either the Achaean or the Pelasgian system of ‘private vengeance.’ We shall have occasion to refer to this topic again when we discuss the problems of the _Orestes_ drama.[22]

In the _Electra_ the Chorus approves of the long-expected vengeance of Orestes. Speaking of the slain Aegisthus, they say to his slayer, Orestes[23]:

His deeds were dreadful: dreadful hath he felt
Your vengeance. With great power is Justice armed.

Orestes tells Electra that, since Aegisthus was a murderer, his body cannot be buried[24]:

... his lifeless corse
I bring thee: treat it as thy soul inclines;
Cast it by rav’nous beasts to be devoured,
Or to the birds, the children of the air;
Fix it, impaled, a prey.

We have already quoted Plato for the custom of refusing burial to murderers. We presume that it was a legally prescribed custom in historical Greece. The precise origin of the custom cannot be determined with any degree of certainty, but we associate it with the doctrine of pollution and the evolution of State power in the seventh century. In Homer,[25] of course, Aegisthus was duly and formally buried, even though the people of that age regarded burial as a passport to eternal repose in the Spirit-land. It is perhaps because of this Homeric fact that, at the end of the _Electra_,[26] the deities Castor and Pollux decree that the body of Aegisthus must be buried. Thus we find Euripides making use of the _deus ex machina_ to reconcile two divergent viewpoints, and probably, therefore, two inconsistent legends.[27]

Euripides is distinctly non-Homeric in attributing to Orestes a psychological conflict as the dread moment approached in which he was to slay his mother and his cousin Aegisthus. Such a conflict would have been natural, in Pelasgian tribalism, if a kin-slayer refused to go into exile; but the conflict would not have been confined to a single avenger: it would have been diminished by the group-consciousness of an avenging clan. Nor could such a conflict have arisen in historical times, for the punishment of kin-slayers had, as we maintain,[28] been assumed by the State. Hence we must regard this tragic conflict as a piece of unhistorical conscious archaising on the part of Euripides. The fact that the picture is unhistorical is no doubt to be condoned in view of its dramatic value.

In this play Electra actually assists her brother in his deed of vengeance. For this co-operation she is sentenced to exile by Castor and Pollux,[29] but we are prevented from regarding the penalty as severe by the further decree that she must become the wife of Pylades![30] It is true that Pylades was absent from the actual slaying of Clytaemnestra, but a short time previously he was present at the death of Aegisthus,[31] although he took no actual part in the slaying. From the standpoint of historical Attic law, he was therefore as guilty (or as innocent) as Orestes and Electra were. Hence this decree of Castor and Pollux must be interpreted prophetically; they are speaking of the future, which, as gods, they foresee. Therefore they regard the exile of Electra as temporary and her guilt as that of extenuated matricide. That the death of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus involved their slayers in some degree of guilt, in the opinion of Castor and Pollux, is obviously suggested by the penalties which they impose. They say to Orestes[32]:

With justice vengeance falls
On her: in thee unholy is the deed.

Such sentiments can only be rendered intelligible by assuming the existence of what we have described[33] as the second Attic legend, which conceived Orestes and his friends as guilty of quasi-involuntary homicide. Castor and Pollux are compelled by their foreknowledge of destiny to believe that, some day, a court will declare the act of Orestes to have been either justifiable or extenuated; that Court they know will be the Athenian Areopagus. They cannot understand, perhaps, why the court should be Athenian, but they know it must be so! From a legal point of view, nothing could be more strange than their decree that Orestes, pending his acquittal at the Areopagus, must leave his native Argos. In historical Greece an accused kin-slayer awaiting trial would only have been debarred from the temples and the public places of his own State; he would have been tried before a court of his own State. He would not have been tried by a foreign court unless he fled from his own State and sought permission to reside in a foreign State. Hence to command Orestes to leave Argos until he was tried at Athens is legally absurd. The only explanation which we can offer for such an absurdity is that Euripides is following either two separate legends or a fusion of two legends, and that he uses the dramatic device of the _deus ex machina_ to remove, or rather to obscure, the inconsistency and the confusion.

Again, it is strange that, in this play, Castor and Pollux, who, as divine kinsmen of the slain Clytaemnestra, should appear in a diabolical implacable rôle clamouring for blood, content themselves with the promulgation of Apolline decrees which they do not profess to understand. We can only explain this fact by supposing that in the story of Orestes, as it evolved in post-Homeric times, the influence of Apollo, the pioneer Interpreter and Purifier, was so great that no respectable local gods could resist his decrees; and it devolved upon the quasi-diabolical Titanic Erinnyes to unfurl the standard of revolt.

Castor and Pollux proclaim that, at Athens, Apollo will take upon himself the guilt of having commanded the deed[34]:

For the blame
Apollo on himself will charge, whose voice
Ordained thy mother’s death.

In historical Greek law the plotter and the executor of bloodshed were equally criminal and culpable. To partition blood-guilt was not to remove it. Therefore, if Apollo can transfer to himself the guilt of Orestes, this can only be because there is a doubt about the nature of the guilt. But in estimating the nature or the extent of this guilt, the legends seem to have been divided, some of them regarding the case as one of justifiable matricide and others as one of extenuated matricide.[35] Similarly the Erinnyes were divided in their opinion. Sometimes they pursue Orestes in the rôle of avenging relatives clamouring for the trial or extradition of a wilful kin-slayer who had fled to a foreign State with the intention of residing there as an exile and who hoped to secure admission by a plea of ‘justifiable slaying’; but sometimes they seem to suggest that Orestes was not a matricide of full guilt, that the anger of the slain was temporary and transient, and that it would ultimately terminate in ‘forgiveness,’ because of the extenuation involved in Apollo’s command.

This latter standpoint is undoubtedly implied in several passages in the _Electra_: we shall find it also at the end of the _Orestes_,[36] for Orestes is there condemned to a period of one year’s exile from Argos and from Athens, and this penalty can only refer to involuntary or quasi-involuntary slaying, and presumes, in the event of kin-slaying, that the deed was either formally ‘forgiven’ or that, at least, it merited ‘forgiveness.’ Plato[37] assures us that in such cases the anger of the dead did not continue for more than a year. He refers to a sacred legend which described how a freeman who had been slain was angry with his slayer while his death was still a recent event, and in his anger he harassed and worried the slayer, ‘using memory as an ally.’ This picture seems to us very suggestive of the attitude of the milder group of Furies in some Oresteian legends, but the attitude of the fiercer group is more aptly illustrated by the following story from Herodotus which reveals the nature of the implacable anger of the dead. Herodotus[38] tells us how Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, was anxious to drive out of Sicyon the spirit and the cult of the Argive hero Adrastus, and how, to secure this object, he established in Sicyon the hero-worship of a certain Theban, named Melanippus, who had slain a son and a son-in-law of Adrastus in the war of the Seven against Thebes. Cleisthenes therefore anticipated that by the magical induction of the spirit of Melanippus into a Hero-tomb at Sicyon he could drive out of Sicyon the Spirit of Adrastus, because Adrastus was still so angry with the slayer of his kindred that he could not, even after the lapse of five hundred years, tolerate the presence of the Spirit of Melanippus!

The meaning of the ‘conversion’ of the Erinnyes therefore varies according to the dramatist’s conception of the rôle of the Erinnyes. In Aeschylus the Erinnyes proclaim Orestes a wilful matricide, and their ‘conversion,’ which implies that they accept his plea of justifiable matricide, must be regarded as symbolical of a transition in their attitude to the social and religious aspect of homicide.[39] But in Euripides the conversion of the Erinnyes symbolises not so much a transition as a compromise. Thus, in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ some of the Erinnyes refuse to be placated even when the Areopagus acquits Orestes.[40] For them the issue does not lie between wilful matricide and justifiable matricide, but between varying degrees of extenuated matricide. Hence they reject a verdict of acquittal, because they interpret it not as an indication that Orestes was justified, but as an indication that he had already suffered a sufficient penalty for his ‘extenuated’ act of matricide. Some of the Erinnyes, however, accept the acquittal, because they are satisfied that Orestes has sufficiently atoned for his guilt.

The most severe and uncompromising attitude to the guilt of Orestes which is found in any legend appears in the _Orestes_ drama, which we shall now discuss.

THE ‘ORESTES’

The main theme of the _Orestes_ is the trial of Orestes at Argos, on the charge of having slain, unjustly, his mother, Clytaemnestra. It would not be correct—it would, in fact, be misleading—to assert that, as the Euripidean _Electra_ corresponds with the Aeschylean _Choephoroe_, so the _Orestes_ corresponds with the _Eumenides_. The points of resemblance between these two dramas are much less important than the points in which they differ. In this play we find, very strangely, a reference to two distinct trials of Orestes, at two distinct places, in two distinct States, namely Argos and Athens. But while the Argive trial is described at great length, and forms in fact the chief topic of the play, the Athenian trial is only casually referred to, in the closing scene, as an event of the not too distant future. In the Argive trial Orestes is condemned to death as an unjust avenger, or, which is almost the same thing, as a wilful matricide. His act is conceived, we think, as an act of culpable private vengeance committed in an atmosphere of social justice. But at the end of the play, when Apollo appears on the scene, the act of Orestes is presented, according to our interpretation, as extenuated matricide, which involves a penalty of temporary exile. The words of Apollo imply that when Orestes has served a period of one year’s exile—the penalty which was prescribed by Attic law for involuntary homicide—he will be declared by the Athenian Areopagus to have sufficiently atoned for his partial degree of guilt and he will be at liberty to return forthwith to Argos. Now these two verdicts, these two conceptions, are legally incompatible. The verdict of the Argive court is not found in Sophocles or in Aeschylus, and, needless to say, it is not found in Homer; the Athenian verdict has, however, been rendered familiar by references in Aeschylus, in Sophocles, and in the _Electra_ of Euripides.

Are we then to suppose that the Argive verdict was the invention of Euripides? Such, no doubt, is the view of the matter which Jevons and Verrall would adopt. They would probably see in the Argive trial Euripides’ own idea of how Orestes ought to have been tried, and in the use of Apollo as a _deus ex machina_ they would see a device by which Euripides’ idea was brought into harmony with the traditional legend.

But we venture to suggest, as against such an hypothesis, that in his account of the Argive trial Euripides is not putting before us his own conception of the moral and legal position of Orestes. Euripides leaves us in no doubt that in his opinion Orestes was not a matricide (_i.e._ an unjust avenger) and that he was not worthy of death. Hence the attitude of the dramatist is much more in harmony with the traditional Attic legends which regard Orestes as a just avenger, or at most as an avenger of merely nominal guilt, than with the attitude of the Argives and their verdict of condemnation which is the predominant feature of the drama.

At the Argive trial all the speakers save one solitary individual are opposed to the death penalty, yet only one speaker favours complete acquittal. Now it was in the speeches that Euripides found himself least trammelled by tradition, and if he ‘invented’ the Argive episode—including the verdict—in order to provide, for an Athenian audience, a thrill which the traditional accounts of the Athenian trial of Orestes no longer possessed, why is he not consistent in attributing to the speakers the sentiments which are expressed in the verdict? How do we explain, on the ‘invention’ hypothesis, the fact that the Messenger, in his account of the trial, takes the part of Orestes and condemns the verdict? The ordinary Athenian of Euripides’ day, who regarded the matter from the standpoint of contemporary law, could not possibly have approved of the act of Orestes. Why does not Euripides express this disapproval in his speeches, since he was free to do so?

Again, Euripides was an Athenian democrat, and the Athenian democratic party were anti-Spartan and pro-Argive. In the _Andromache_[41] Euripides reveals his democratic leanings by a bitter attack upon Sparta. In the _Orestes_ he undoubtedly exalts an Argive court above the Athenian Areopagus, but is there not a suggestion that the Argive verdict was barbarous and unjust?

Again, if the Argive trial episode was the invention of Euripides, would it not have been just as easy, and more consistent, for him to have caused the Argives to acquit Orestes? If he was not fettered by any tradition, would he not have represented the Argive verdict as similar to, if not identical with, the predicted verdict of the Athenian Areopagus? It may be suggested, as an objection to this view, that an adverse verdict at Argos was necessary as a prelude to the Athenian trial, and that Euripides was naturally anxious to include a reference to the Areopagus, out of respect for the legends and for the prestige of the Areopagus. The actual _Orestes_ drama supplies the answer to this objection, for it ignores, almost completely, the Attic legends of Orestes, and it shows very little respect for the Areopagus court. Moreover, a favourable verdict at Argos could still have been followed by a trial at Athens, if we merely suppose that the Erinnyes refused to accept an Argive acquittal, just as the verdict of the Areopagus could have been followed by a trial among the Tauri (if these people had developed homicide courts), since in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ the Erinnyes refused to accept the Athenian verdict.

Again, it is not very flattering to the Argives (and Euripides was pro-Argive) to represent them as condemning Orestes to be stoned to death at one moment, and as accepting, twelve months afterwards, a condemned criminal as their king, simply because a different verdict had been brought in by an Athenian court! In fact, to suggest that Euripides invented the conjunction of two different trials, and represented one as overriding the decision of the other—the foreign court having the right to dictate to the native court—is to attribute to Euripides an astounding disregard for international Greek homicide-law. The introduction of Apollo in order to persuade[42] the Argives to accept Orestes as their king would not be sufficient, on this hypothesis, to remove the insult to the Argive people which is implied in the suggestion that they are compelled to accept Athenian arbitration.

For these reasons then, and for others which will appear in the course of the discussion, we do not believe that the episode of the Argive trial was invented by Euripides. We admit of course that Euripides composed the speeches, because he wrote the play! But we believe that he was guided and controlled by a certain tradition, by the skeleton form of an Argive saga which supplied him with the fact of an Argive trial of Orestes, with the nature of the verdict, and perhaps with some remarks which were made at the trial. While there are many elements in Euripides’ account which could have been suggested by contemporary Attic thought, we think that the skeleton-saga reflects, and therefore probably originated in, the early historical era. The Achaean atmosphere is missing; Orestes was an Achaean, but he was judged, in this saga, as the Achaeans would not have judged him.

The reason why Aeschylus ignored this legend was that it obviously could not be reconciled with his theory that the Orestes trial was the first homicide-trial in Greek lands, it was less complimentary to Athens than the Attic legends were, and it was too much at variance with the Phocian legend, in which Apollo was the central figure and Orestes was conceived as a just avenger. It was probably for similar reasons that Aeschylus also ignored the Arcadian stories of Orestes, of which one seems akin to the Argive variant, for it represented Orestes as never having returned to Argos and as having died of a snake-bite in Arcadia.[43] Euripides, however, apparently found the Argive legend more interesting than the others, though he condescends to mention, in passing, the Attic and Arcadian variants.[44]

If, then, Euripides reproduces in the same drama several different legends, without any regard for their mutual inconsistencies, this is probably because he aimed at variety and human interest rather than consistency, and because he felt that he could always fall back, in the last resort, on a _deus ex machina_ to help him to maintain the appearances, if not the realities, of consistency.

In the beginning of the play Electra describes, though naturally she does not accept, the prevailing attitude of the Argives to the vengeance of Orestes. This attitude is post-Draconian. Orestes is conceived, not as an Homeric Achaean, but as an Argive citizen of the historical era. He is of course ‘polluted’ even before trial, and so also is Electra. A preliminary decree of social boycott has been issued against them and the sentence of death is foreshadowed as ultimately inevitable. Thus, Electra says[45]:

Meantime the State of Argos hath decreed
That shelt’ring roof and fire and conference
Be interdicted to us matricides.
And this decisive day the State pronounces
Our doom, to die, crushed with o’erwhelming stones,
Or by th’ avenging sword plunged in our breasts.

It is strange that Helen, the sister of Clytaemnestra, who would naturally have been expected to assume an attitude of stern condemnation, assures Electra that she regards Orestes and herself as innocent, and that she transfers the guilt to Phoebus:

With thee conversing I am not polluted,
Charging the crime on Phoebus.[46]

There is a suggestion of the Attic rather than of the Argive legend in this attitude of Helen. Her words are very similar to those spoken by Castor and Pollux in the _Electra_ in a dialogue with Orestes and the Chorus[47]:

_Chorus_: O sons of Jove, may we presume t’ approach
And converse with you be allowed to hold?
_Castor_: You may: no curse this blood derives on you.
_Orestes_: May I address you, sons of Tyndareus?
_Castor_: Thou mayst: to Phoebus this dire deed I charge.

This confusion may be attributed to a conflation of ideas which had already affected the Argive legend prior to the time of Euripides, or it may be merely due to a lack of consistent discrimination, on the part of the dramatist, between the divergent viewpoints of the Attic and the Argive legends. In historical times a person accused of homicide was not debarred from private social intercourse. He was merely prohibited from frequenting the temples and public places. Plato asserts[48] that there were degrees of pollution corresponding to degrees of guilt and in proportion to the certainty of guilt. In this case, therefore, the ‘pollution’ of Orestes and Electra was of a minor character, since they were both as yet untried and unconvicted.

Orestes naturally interprets his guilt from the standpoint of the Attic and the Phocian legends, but he does not distinguish very clearly[49] between justification and extenuation. He says to Menelaus[50]:

Yet have we where to charge our miseries ...
Phoebus, by whose command I slew my mother.

Again, he says to Tyndareus[51]:

See’st thou Apollo, who to mortal ears
Sounds from his central cave the voice of truth?
Him we obey in all that he commands:
Obeying his commands I slew my mother:
Drag him then to your bar, put him to death:
The guilt is his, not mine. What should I do?
The guilt on him transferred, is not the god
Sufficient to absolve me? Where shall man
Find refuge if the god, at whose command
I did it, will not now save me from death?

But the attitude of Tyndareus and Menelaus towards Orestes’ act which is revealed in their conversation with Orestes is fundamentally different. This attitude discloses a condemnation of private vengeance from the standpoint of social justice. As we conceive it, this attitude would normally have been adopted by Greek States, not only in Euripidean times but also in Draconian times. We have suggested that Euripides is following, in the play, a post-Draconian Argive legend—we use the term ‘post-Draconian’ merely to indicate that the legend presumes the existence of State interference in the trial and punishment of homicide. This legend was therefore, as we conceive it, so historical, so ‘modern’—in a sense—that it demanded little or no conscious archaising on the part of Euripides. Tyndareus says to Menelaus[52]:

If virtuous and dishonourable deeds
Are plain to all, who more unwise than he?
Deaf to the call of justice, he infringed
The firm authority of the public laws:
For when beneath my daughter’s murd’ring axe
Th’ imperial Agamemnon bowed his head,
A horrid deed, which never shall I praise,
He ought t’ have called the laws, the righteous laws,
T’ avenge the blood, and by appeal to them
Have driven his mother from the royal house:
Thus ’midst his ills calm reason had borne rule,
Justice had held its course, and he been righteous.
But the same Fury which had seized his mother
Had now seized him; and with ungoverned rage,
Justly abhorrent of her impious deed,
He did a deed more impious, slew his mother.

In this passage the historical Greek system of State trial and the historical penalty of exile for wilful murder are clearly indicated. We need not point out how inapplicable such an attitude is to Homeric Achaeans.

The manner in which social justice abolished the evils of vendetta is thus described[53]:

For, let me ask thee, should the faithless wife
Bathe in the husband’s blood her murd’rous hands,
And should th’ avenging son the mother slay,
His son retaliate by deed of blood,
What bound shall the progressive mischief know?
The wisdom of our ancestors ordained
That he who had the guilt of blood upon him
Be not allowed the sight, the walks of men,
By banishment atoning, not by death:
Else one must always be to death devote
Who hath the last pollution on his hands.

It was natural that the Greeks of the ‘pollution’ era—that is, the historical period—should have referred to the chaotic vendetta which their ‘fathers’ had abolished. But the Achaean vengeance-system was not a chaotic vendetta, because Achaean military discipline and Achaean public opinion were able to maintain a distinction between murder and just revenge.[54] We have said[55] that it was only in the Dark Ages of chaos and migration—that is, from 1000 B.C. to 700 B.C.—when the control of tribal chieftains, of phratry-assemblies, and of clan-courts, and the public co-operation of organised groups were paralysed and rendered impotent, that the instinct and habit of vendetta was awakened from its slumber. In the seventh century the doctrine of pollution and the evolution of State power restored equilibrium by the institution of the historical system of homicide law. But it was erroneously supposed that the vendetta system which was thus abolished had always existed in prehistoric Greece.

If in historical Greece Clytaemnestra had slain her husband, she would have been tried by a regular State-court, and, as her husband was not a kinsman, she would have been permitted, as Tyndareus here implies, the option of exile. But Tyndareus does not correctly visualise the Achaean mode of vengeance. He argues as if trials for homicide had been always and everywhere operative. This anachronism, at least, is absent in Aeschylus, who could not have attributed such an attitude to his characters, since, in his view, the trial of Orestes was the first Greek murder-trial.[56] Hence it is that the condemnation of ‘private vengeance’ from the standpoint of social justice does not appear in Aeschylus—nor, we may add, in Sophocles.[57]

Further, the suggestion of Tyndareus that Clytaemnestra could have been sent into exile is an additional anachronism. In historical Greece a wilful murderer usually went into exile. But the autocratic Homeric Clytaemnestra remained in the royal palace with Aegisthus! Thus Tyndareus again fails to reproduce the essential elements of the Homeric story. Now Euripides elsewhere, as we shall see, frequently reproduces quite correctly the Homeric atmosphere. If then he attributes here[58] to Tyndareus a non-Homeric standpoint, it is not because he was incapable of correctly archaising, but because he deliberately depicted a non-Homeric Oresteian legend and attributed a non-Homeric attitude to the Argives. The views which he attributes to Tyndareus are quite consistent with the subsequent verdict of the Argive court, and with the sentence of death for unjustifiable kin-slaying, which is pronounced against Orestes and Electra.

There is a very archaic—an almost Homeric—tone in the words with which, we are told, the herald ushered in the Argive trial[59]:

Soon as th’ assembly sate, the herald’s voice
Proclaimed free speech to all who wished to speak,
Whether Orestes for his mother slain
Should die or not.

In historical times such a proclamation could only be associated with a trial which was known as an ἄγων τιμητός, concerning offences for which the penalty was not fixed by law, and for which, therefore, the penalty had to be determined by the court, as, for instance, the crime of Impiety.[60] We have argued[61] that there were no homicide-indictments (γραφαί φόνου) at Athens, but even if there had been there could not have been any assessment of penalties in such cases, since the penalties for homicide were fixed by law from time immemorial. It is therefore, we believe, from the Homeric ἀγορά rather than from the Athenian Heliastic courts that Euripides received his inspiration for such a proclamation. Moreover, his description of the composition and of the general procedure of this Argive court is very Homeric, and reminds us very forcibly of other archaic pictures in Greek drama, such as the Council of Achaean chieftains in the _Ajax_ of Sophocles,[62] and the Assembly of the Greeks who condemn to death Helen[63] and Polyxena.[64] It is a herald who conveys the death-sentence pronounced by the Greeks against Astyanax, in the _Troades_[65] of Euripides. Thus we have in this play a strange mixture of the archaic and the historical. We sometimes feel as if the Achaean atmosphere had momentarily reappeared in the Draconian age, as if Homeric heroes had been suddenly transformed into historical Argives, without, however, having completely divested themselves of their Homeric usages.

Pollux assures us[66] that at the Athenian Areopagus it was not permitted to appeal to pity or to indulge in rhetorical persuasion, but it was necessary for the plaintiff and the defendant to confine themselves to the issues of guilt or innocence. Similarly, we may assume, at the Delphinium court no discussion of general principles would have been admitted, but merely evidential statements of fact. But at the Argive trial in this play there is no attempt at an investigation of facts. The speeches are entirely concerned with general principles. It is impossible to maintain that Euripides is explaining, in this trial, his ideas, based on contemporary practice, of the manner in which Orestes ought to have been tried.

Talthybius, the ubiquitous herald, sets his sails to the wind, but he cannot, unfortunately, decide how the wind is going to blow. He does not approve of the vengeance of Orestes, because, he says,[67] it establishes a bad precedent in regard to parents. This viewpoint ignores the distinction between murder and vengeance. Orestes is conceived as a matricide, pure and simple, and being a matricide his guilt is greater than that of Clytaemnestra. It is regrettable, of course, that Agamemnon was slain, but Clytaemnestra, his slayer, was not his daughter, but only his wife! The Erinnyes, in Aeschylus,[68] advance a similar argument, but in the _Orestes_ such reasoning is more logical because the Argive court interprets the vengeance of Orestes as an act of barbarous vendetta and assumes that such a mode of vengeance was already obsolete and unlawful in his time. It is only by assuming that Orestes and Clytaemnestra were both criminals that one can logically compare the act of Clytaemnestra with that of Orestes and maintain that the act of Orestes was, because of blood relationship, more criminal than that of Clytaemnestra. It is thus that Hesiod,[69] living in an age of chaotic vendetta, would have singled out for special condemnation the shedding of kindred blood. In the Aeschylean drama, on the other hand, and therefore, as we think, in the Attic legends of Orestes, ‘private vengeance’ is not definitely and dogmatically assumed to have been obsolete and unlawful in the time of Orestes. There is of course a doubt about the matter such as would naturally have arisen amongst legend-makers of the transitional seventh century. This doubt is, naturally enough, availed of by the Erinnyes of the slain. But Apollo has no doubt about the matter. In the interests of justice he commands a ‘private’ avenger to avenge.

After Talthybius, Diomedes utters a speech[70] in which he attributes the guilt of matricide not only to Orestes but also to Electra, and proposes not indeed that they should be put to death, but that they should be banished from the city of Argos. He suggests, very curiously, that the death penalty would be impious! It is difficult to find any legal justification for this view. It is quite possible that Euripides is depicting for dramatic purposes, with a complete disregard for law, a variety of possible penalties. In Attic law a criminal who was convicted in a matter of grave import was punished by a general penalty of ἄτιμία, or loss of citizen rights; in some cases, such as parent-slaying, this degradation of civic status involved death and confiscation of property: in other cases, such as sacrilege, it involved death without confiscation; in ordinary wilful murder, it involved either death or banishment and confiscation, and in cases of malicious wounding the penalty of ἄτιμία denoted simple banishment without confiscation. It may be, then, that Euripides is applying such a gradation of penalties[71] to a period when the penalties for crime were not rigidly fixed.

If we suppose that in this speech of Diomedes Euripides is consciously archaising, his archaism is not very felicitous. For kin-slaying amongst Pelasgian clans, we have seen,[72] the normal penalty was exile: for kin-slaying amongst the Achaeans, the penalty was death. In historical times, when private vengeance gave place to State execution, the penalty was invariably death. Hence, Diomedes’ reference to impiety can become legally intelligible only if it is interpreted according to the standpoint of the tribal renaissance of post-Achaean days, when the group-system resumed its sway. From such a standpoint the act of the Achaean Orestes would have been viewed as matricide by the Elders of the tribe and in the public opinion of the clans. If a tribal court sat in judgment on Orestes in, say, the year 1000 B.C. and discussed the penalty which his act deserved, it would have been natural to suggest the exile penalty which was the normal punishment for kin-slayers. If then Euripides has been so very subtle in his archaising as to have attributed this proposal to the Argive Diomedes, he might at least have selected for the mouth-piece of this utterance someone whose name was not so inextricably connected with the Achaean domination!

After Diomedes, there rises up a bold bad man whom the messenger describes as ‘an Argive who was not an Argive’[73] and who is generally supposed to typify, in Euripides’ view, the Athenian demagogue Cleophon.[74] His speech, we are told,[75] had been previously prepared for him by Tyndareus, who, though the nearest kinsman of the slain Clytaemnestra, does not speak at all at this assembly! His nameless subordinate, however, proposed[76] that Orestes and Electra should be stoned to death. This was the opinion which in a modified form the assembly ultimately adopted,[77] though only one speaker actually proposed it. Orestes succeeded in obtaining his request that he, together with his sister Electra, should be allowed to end their own lives in a respectable manner.

The penalty of death by stoning is not mentioned in Homer, in Attic law, or in Plato’s laws. Was it, then, mentioned in an Argive legend or did Euripides invent it? The penalty may have existed in the antique system of tribal vengeance. Plato assures us[78] that the slayer of a parent or a kinsman was stoned, _after death_, by the judges and the magistrates. This custom was probably a survival of the more primitive custom of stoning criminals to death. If the Argive legend of Orestes did not mention such a penalty, Euripides is either archaising on the basis of this survival or is importing into the drama an idea which he derived from the crude customs of outlying ‘barbarian’ lands.

The sentence of the Argive court permitted suicide as an alternative to execution. We do not know of any legal basis for this option. We have no reason to doubt that suicide was always in practice, if not in theory, accepted as an alternative for execution in historical Greece. Here, however, the theory is accepted by a homicide-tribunal.

Before the verdict of the court was given, a nameless man, for whom Euripides clearly feels much admiration,[79] a small farmer by occupation, proposed to crown Orestes because he avenged his father by slaying his impious mother, whose adulterous criminality was fatal, he said, to the interests of a martial or militaristic society. We have said[80] that the legal aspect of the vengeance of Orestes is complicated to some degree by the fact that his mother was an adulteress. We have argued[81] that death was not the regular penalty for adultery in Greek tribal life, and we do not think that the Achaeans, like the German tribes, followed a sterner code. It is difficult to derive any deductions either in regard to homicide or to adultery from this argument, because adultery and murder are mentioned in conjunction. The following words of the nameless speaker[82] seem, however, to imply that adultery required a more serious punishment than that which custom sanctioned:

For who in distant fields, at honour’s call,
Would wield his martial arms if in his absence
Pollution stains his wife and his pure bed
Be made a foul sty of adulterous lust?

A similar conjunction of murder and adultery is revealed in the words of Orestes,[83] who poses as a pioneer in the application of the death penalty to adultery:

Ye illustrious Argives ... to vindicate your honour,
Not less than to avenge my father’s death,
I did this deed. For should the husband’s blood
Leave on the wife’s hand no foul stain, full soon
The purple tide would flow, or you must sink—
O shame to manhood!—vile slaves to your wives.
Now she that to my father’s bed was false
Hath died for it. If you require my life,
The law hath lost its force: and who shall say
His own life is secure, as these bold deeds
From frequency draw force and mock at justice?

In Aeschylus and in Sophocles the only plea of justification which Orestes advances is the command of Apollo. But in the Euripidean account of the Argive trial Apollo is not mentioned at all. We cannot explain this strange fact by supposing that it would have been unprofitable to refer to him because at the end of the play the decree of Apollo is accepted without question by the Argives. We cannot suppose that Euripides, in his conscious archaising, is trying to visualise a pre-Apolline Court, as he would probably, in such a case, have ignored Apollo completely and avoided all references to pollution. The most satisfactory and, to our mind, the most obvious explanation of the absence of any reference to Apollo at the Argive trial is this: Apollo appears in the Oresteian legends in the rôle of justifier and purifier. Such a rôle is consistent only with the conception of Orestes as an avenger of partial guilt or as an entirely justified avenger. It is quite irreconcilable with the theory that Orestes was a wilful matricide of full guilt. Now, the verdict of the Argive court conceived Orestes as a guilty matricide worthy of death. The only speaker who approves of his act does so not because he was a just avenger, but because his mother was an adulteress. To introduce Apollo into a court of this kind would have been to expose him to ridicule and contempt. Hence the attitude of the Argives to Orestes, whether invented by Euripides or, more probably, as we think, enshrined in an Argive legend, made it impossible to connect Apollo with this Argive trial.

In the above quotation Orestes poses as a pioneer in the stern punishment of adultery. We have already[84] suggested what we consider to have been the evolution of the penalties of adultery in Greece. We have quoted Pausanias[85] for the view that, at first, adultery was leniently treated. A certain Hyettus, he says, first punished it by death, and Dracon finally legalised the death penalty, but only for adultery _in flagrante delicto_. We believe that this plea of Orestes was the invention of Euripides. Seeing that he could not permit any reference to Apollo at the Argive trial, he had to invent a new plea. But ancient law shows no regard for pioneers. Until the law is changed the pioneer reformer is a criminal. In our opinion, Greek law never adopted the penalty for adultery which, according to Orestes, it ought to have adopted.