Chapter III: Euripides (2)

In this quotation Orestes refers[86] to a law upon which he seems to rely for his acquittal. ‘If you require my life,’ he says, ‘the law hath lost its force.’ It is obvious that he is not referring to any law which the Argives recognise, for otherwise they would have acquitted him. Yet he suggests that such a law exists somewhere. We cannot suppose that he is referring to an actual law which prescribed the death-penalty for adultery, since he is definitely represented, like the nameless farmer, as endeavouring to persuade the Argives to adopt a code of penalties for adultery which would be more conducive to martial efficiency than the existing system. In the _Troades_ the Achaean army conferred on Menelaus the right to slay the adulterous Helen. But this fact implies that no existing law would have justified such a slaying. Moreover, there was nothing in contemporary Attic law or social custom to suggest to Euripides that murder and adultery in conjunction could be legally punished by death. Yet the law which Orestes mentions implies the legality of such a punishment somewhere. We cannot suppose that Euripides is indicating a contrast between Athenian and Argive legislation, for, so far as murder is concerned, we believe that their laws were similar. The explanation which we propose to offer for this peculiar reference is an alternative one, such as we have suggested in regard to the speech of Diomedes in the play. We believe that the law which Orestes mentions is either a pure fabrication of Euripides’ mind, derived from the supposition that archaic penalties were more severe than the penalties of contemporary law, or an instance of conscious archaising, in which Euripides attributes to an Homeric Achaean a discrimination in certain cases between murder and just revenge. The former alternative is rendered somewhat improbable by the fact that the Argives do not recognise the legality of this ‘archaic penalty.’ The latter alternative is therefore the more probable and suggests, if it is correct, that Euripides could sometimes be very subtle and, at the same time, successful in his archaising. According to this theory, Orestes suggests that he is justified by a law of the Achaean caste. But the Argives, who reflect the viewpoint of historical social law, reject a plea of justification which would compel them to recognise the legality of private vengeance.

Between the conclusion of this trial of Orestes at Argos and the appearance of Apollo as a _deus ex machina_ at the end of the play there occur some exciting incidents, such as the seizure of Hermione as a hostage and the murder of Helen[87] by Orestes. Apart from the fact that Menelaus, her husband, is very angry and vindictive, no one else seems to take much interest in the death of that famous woman who lived (and died!) in so many places.[88] The argument used by Pylades to Orestes in urging the death of Helen is very unscrupulous.[89] ‘Slay Helen,’ he says, ‘and people will forget that you slew your mother.’ The slaying of Helen was really murder, but Apollo ignores it. Legally, it does not exist. Legally, its presence in the _Orestes_ is a grotesque anomaly. But it has at least this value: it shows us how little Euripides cared for the legal aspect of a story as compared with its dramatic vitality. When Apollo comes on the scene, Orestes is in the act of setting fire to the royal palace at Argos. Orestes’ threats of incendiarism, his use of Hermione as a hostage, and the murder of Helen have delayed the doom which was pronounced by the Argives until Apollo comes! But when he comes,[90] how different is the picture! The conception of Orestes’ vengeance is completely altered. In an instant we pass from wilful matricide to quasi-involuntary matricide. We breathe once more the atmosphere of the Attic legend which we find in the _Electra_. Apollo is not consulted about the problem which had occupied, throughout the play, the attention of the Argive court, namely the question whether Orestes pursued an obsolete course of unlawful vendetta and obeyed the dictates of an Achaean system of vengeance which a later system of social justice had superseded, or whether he did not. The only problem which confronts Apollo is the question how he will most easily persuade the Argives, and the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra, to recognise the fact that he, Apollo, commanded Orestes to slay his mother and that, therefore, Orestes’ act was either justified or at least extenuated.

The contrast in this drama between the attitude which Apollo adopts in regard to Orestes and the attitude which the Argives adopt is so obvious and important that the legends which incorporated these attitudes could never have been reconciled. No Athenian with an interest in legal problems could ever have thought of them together without mentally contrasting them. But these legends, namely what we have called the Argive and the Attic legends, are both found in juxtaposition in this drama, and Euripides is naturally compelled to make use of Apollo as a _deus ex machina_ in order to produce a nominal appearance of dramatic unity. Euripides could not have ignored altogether the Attic legend. He was an Athenian, not an Argive. The _Electra_ could have been written without any reference to the Areopagus, but the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ could not. Thus, whether he is condemned or acquitted at Argos, Orestes must in either event go to Athens! But before he goes to Athens, Orestes must go into exile for a year in Arcadia.[91] Two problems now arise: (1) Why is one year the limit of the exile-period? (2) Why is this exile spent in Arcadia? The first question can only be solved by a reference to the _Laws_ of Plato. In the _Laws_[92] Plato assures us that there was a fixed penalty of one year’s exile which was applicable only to the following homicide cases: (1) involuntary homicide; (2) slaying in a passion (in which we include quasi-involuntary or extenuated homicide), if the dying person ‘forgave’ his slayer; and (3) quasi-involuntary kin-slaying, if the slayer was ‘forgiven.’ Of these three possible cases, only the last can be relevantly[93] applied to the slaying of Clytaemnestra by Orestes. Legally therefore it is necessary to regard the act of Orestes as quasi-involuntary matricide if we wish to explain the penalty which Apollo decrees at the end of the play. When Orestes has served a period of one year’s exile, he will be ‘acquitted’ by the Areopagus.[94] We cannot interpret this acquittal as a verdict of ‘not guilty,’ since on this assumption the preliminary penalty of one year’s exile becomes either meaningless or unjust. It is a curious kind of ‘acquittal,’ since it is intended to imply that a certain degree of guilt has now been sufficiently atoned. In the Attic homicide-code there is no reference to an acquittal of this kind, but Plato mentions something which suggests that such an acquittal was a legal possibility. Speaking of extenuated homicide, Plato says[95] that ‘when the period of exile shall have expired, it is right to send twelve judges to the borders of the State that ... they may judge of the pity to be shown and of the return (of the exiles to their home-land).’ Now Apollo in this play says[96] that Orestes will be tried by gods, not by men, at Athens. Demosthenes gives the tradition more explicitly when he says[97] that ‘the twelve gods judged between Orestes and the Erinnyes.’

We have said that there were two Attic legends of Orestes, that one of these represented him as tried by the Areopagus on a plea of justifiable matricide, and the other, on a plea of quasi-involuntary matricide. There is some difficulty involved in connecting the Areopagus with either of these pleas. In regard to the first we must assume that the Areopagus in early times tried pleas of homicide between strangers which were normally tried by the Delphinium. In regard to the second plea, we suggest that it is necessary to suppose that the ancient Areopagus would have tried pleas of involuntary and quasi-involuntary homicide which normally came under the jurisdiction of the Palladium court and of minor local courts. It is therefore, we must assume, in the unusual rôle of a reconciling court that the Athenian Areopagus ‘acquitted’ Orestes in the ‘second Attic legend.’ That he was not satisfactorily ‘acquitted’ will be manifest[98] when we discuss the _Iphigenia in Tauris_. Orestes had to leave Athens and to undergo still further wanderings as an exile, because all the Erinnyes did not recognise his ‘acquittal.’ We have already suggested[99] that the Erinnyes in the Oresteian legend frequently symbolise the conflict of opinions which sometimes preceded the consent of the relatives of the slain to accept ‘appeasement’ in cases of involuntary and quasi-involuntary homicide. The court to which Plato refers in the passage cited above was a ‘court of reconciliation.’ The ‘twelve judges’ whom Plato mentions may have been suggested by the ‘twelve gods’ who judged between the Erinnyes and Orestes. Such myths and such ‘courts of reconciliation’ made it possible, we believe, for the creators of the ‘second Attic legend’ to connect Orestes with the Areopagus.

It is not easy to explain why Euripides selected Arcadia as the place of exile for Orestes. First of all, there seems to have existed an Arcadian variant of the Oresteian legend which associated Orestes with Arcadia and maintained that he actually died there.[100] One of the Arcadian towns was called, from Orestes, ‘Oresteum.’ Again, it is possible to suppose that Euripides, who, in this drama, reveals a certain desire for originality, should have selected Arcadia because Aeschylus and Sophocles had exalted the association with Orestes of Athens and of Phocis, and had entirely ignored Arcadia. But there may also have been a religious or quasi-legal fact behind this idea of Euripides. We have seen that, in Attic law,[101] a homicide-exile was debarred (_a_) from his native place, (_b_) from the country of the slain, (_c_) from the State in which the deed took place. The basis of these legal facts was sentimental or religious. It was supposed that the spirit of the slain was not merely intolerant of the presence of the slayer in civic proximity to his burial-place, but was also indignant at the thought that the slayer should be enjoying himself, as it were, and not suffering any real hardships as a punishment for his crime.[102] Now, Argos was of course forbidden ground to the exiled Orestes. But one legend said that he had lived in Athens, another that he had lived in Phocis, before he slew his mother. In these places he had made friends and companions. In these places exile would not have involved for him sufficient hardship and suffering. Arcadia, however, held no attraction for Orestes, and hence it was to Arcadia that the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra desired that he should go.

We can therefore, in the light of these conclusions, understand in their full meaning the words of Apollo to Orestes[103]:

Thou, Orestes,
Quitting this country, in Parrhasia’s plains
For one revolving year thy dwelling fix,
And give the place thy name: that honour share
With Azan and with Arcas. Pass from thence
To Athens: there against the Furies urge
Thy plea; acquit thee of thy mother’s blood:
There in that awful court the gods shall sit
Thy judges; and thy just cause shall prevail.

After the lapse of a single year and after his ‘acquittal’ by the Areopagus, Orestes may again return to the city of Argos. This return is announced prophetically by Apollo to Menelaus, when he says[104]:

Thou, Menelaus, yield that Orestes reign
In Argos: haste to Sparta, reign thou there....
It shall be mine t’ appease the State to him,
Compelled by my command to slay his mother.

THE PROBLEM OF PYLADES

We may now consider a problem concerning Pylades which is presented by this drama. As in Aeschylus and in Sophocles, so in Euripides, Pylades co-operates with Orestes in avenging Agamemnon. But in Euripides the guilt of Pylades is more clearly emphasised. Hence, we hear for the first time that he is punished. He tells Orestes[105]:

My father in his rage hath banished me.

We saw that in Greek law the plotter, the co-operator, was as guilty as the actual slayer.[106] Hence the problem of Pylades’ guilt depends on that of Orestes’ guilt. If therefore Strophius, the King of the Phocian land, punishes Pylades _pendente lite_,[107] we attribute this to the autocratic power of a king on the one hand, and on the other to the general principle of Greek law that an accused person was presumed to be guilty until he had established his innocence.[108] Now, in the _Electra_[109] Castor and Pollux declare that Electra will marry Pylades and that he will take her to his home, but there is a suggestion that a brief period of time, probably one year, must elapse before this event takes place. We presume that he would be permitted by his father to return, in obedience to the divine decree. In the _Orestes_ he is still an exile from his home, as the guilt which he shares with Orestes has not yet been atoned by exile. But has he any legal right to remain in Argos? Orestes warns him that his life is in danger there, but Pylades replies that the Argives have no power to punish him[110]:

They have no right: I am no subject here.

Which of these opinions is correct—that of Orestes or that of Pylades? We have shown[111] that, in Greek law, accused and convicted slayers were debarred from three possible States, of which one was the State of the deceased. Demosthenes says[112]: ‘The boundary-line for all homicides is exclusion from the country of the deceased ... from everything in which the deceased in his lifetime had a part.’ We cannot of course suppose that this law applied to unconvicted slayers, but we may presume that they were at least debarred from the temples and the public places of the State. Hence we can reconcile these two opinions by assuming that Orestes is referring to the public aspect and Pylades to the private aspect of residence at Argos. When Pylades asserts that he deserves to suffer at Argos,[113] he is referring to the period which follows the trial of Orestes, which involved, we presume, a condemnation of Pylades. Menelaus asks if Pylades had a share in the slaying of Helen, and leaves us in no doubt that his life is forfeit in Argos.[114] We have quoted[115] Plato in support of the assertion that strangers were liable to more serious penalties for homicide than natives were. But this assertion only applies to convicted slayers. Hence it is possible to accept the suggestion of Euripides that Pylades was not imprisoned at Argos, as Orestes was, and that he visited Phocis before the trial of Orestes.

THE PROBLEM OF ORESTES’ POLLUTION

From what has been said it will be obvious that Orestes is more ‘polluted’ in Euripides than he is in Aeschylus or in Sophocles. The ‘pollution’ of a person who was conceived as guilty of wilful and unjustified matricide was the greatest and the most horrible kind of ‘pollution,’ and it is this conception of Orestes which predominates in this Euripidean drama. At the end of the play the pollution of Orestes is miraculously diminished. This is because Orestes is here conceived not as a wilful matricide of full guilt, but as a quasi-involuntary matricide who transfers the main portion of his guilt to Apollo. In Greek law an extenuated act of homicide produced, even when the dying person ‘forgave,’ a minor temporary ‘pollution,’ which continued until the slayer had endured a minimum period of one year’s exile and had appeased the relatives of the slain. During this period of exile the slayer had to abstain from three possible States, which we have already defined. But a kin-slayer was in a peculiar position. Until the fact of involuntariness was established before a court he was liable to be regarded as polluted wherever he went. In Arcadia Orestes was not ‘polluted,’ according to Euripides, perhaps because Apollo commanded him to go there, perhaps because his residence there did not create any special anger on the part of the slain Clytaemnestra. But in Argos he would have been polluted, because Argos was his native State and could not therefore have been for him a place of exile even if he had been guilty of involuntary homicide, and not, as he was, of involuntary kin-slaying. In Athens, too, he would have been regarded as polluted until he had been tried, especially if he was accused (as he was accused, by the Erinnyes) of wilful kin-slaying; but his pollution would have been that of an untried criminal, and therefore public rather than private. We shall see in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ that he was, in a certain sense, polluted when he came to Athens for his trial, and the Athenians based upon this ‘pollution’ an explanation of a peculiar ritual of which the origin was obscure, namely the Feast of the Pitchers (χόες) at the Anthesteria.[116] Now in Aeschylus and in Sophocles the predominant conception of Orestes is that of an unconvicted matricide who pleads justification for his act; and if we find, in addition, the conception of Orestes as a quasi-involuntary matricide, this does not affect to any great extent the question of Orestes’ pollution, because Orestes has already atoned for the guilt of extenuated matricide. He has actually been purged by Apollo himself, and he is still, so far as Athens is concerned, untried and unconvicted, and therefore his pollution is minor and merely ‘public’—that is, he is forbidden to frequent the temples or public places but he is free to associate privately with his fellow-men. In Euripides, however, Orestes is convicted of wilful matricide by an Argive court. His pollution is therefore technically so great that no Greek city could receive him. If his pollution is subsequently reduced to the minor pollution of involuntary kin-slaying, this is only because Apollo acts not as a purifier, but as a dramatic _deus ex machina_ who does miraculous and impossible things.

Wedd, in his edition of this play, proposes a strange explanation for the graver pollution of the Euripidean Orestes, which is based, as we think, on a false interpretation of the dramatic ideals of Euripides. ‘In Sophocles,’ he says,[117] ‘all men will honour Orestes, in Aeschylus he is welcomed as a deliverer, in Euripides the whole State rises up in horror against him ... in Aeschylus, although Orestes flies for his first purification to Apollo, many others aid in freeing him from guilt and he associates with thousands in harmless intercourse; in Euripides all doors are shut against him, all speech is denied him, none will perform the purifying rites for him; the full rigour of Athenian law, which refused to the parricide alone among murderers the right of escaping death by flight, is exercised against him ... the attitude of the whole State towards the matricide, the feeling of the murderers themselves with regard to their own act, are precisely what would be expected if in modern (? fifth century B.C.) Athens two children were induced by an oracle to take the law into their own hands and put their mother to death.’

This account of the facts is fairly accurate, but it suggests that the Euripidean Orestes is a definite unitary personality, whereas we have shown that there are at least two different conceptions of Orestes in this play. The ‘full rigour of Athenian law’ is certainly apparent in the Argive verdict, but Wedd assumes that Euripides, in this play, adopted towards Orestes an attitude which ignored Homer and the Attic legends made familiar by Aeschylus and Sophocles, and which paid no attention to Apolline decrees. In this respect the account is misleading. It is based on an erroneous conception of Euripides. According to Wedd, Aeschylus and Sophocles adopted towards Greek legends an attitude which was quite different from that which Euripides adopted. These two dramatists accepted, he thinks, the legends in their main outline and sought to reproduce them as far as possible in their archaic setting, with the least possible admixture of ‘historical’ ideas. Euripides, on the contrary, adopted a critical attitude to the myths and made it his object _not_ to reproduce them for their own sake but to contrast them with the more enlightened feeling of his own time. This interpretation of Euripides is very similar to that of Jevons which we have already discussed.[118] The arguments which we adduced against Jevons are therefore applicable to Wedd, but we offer here an additional criticism which is more definitely concerned with the _Orestes_ drama.

According to Wedd’s hypothesis, the trial of Orestes at Argos which is described in this play contains the Euripidean conception of the manner in which the myth should have regarded Orestes. We admit that the viewpoint of the Argive court is in the main historical; by an anachronism it identifies the world of Orestes with that of the Argives of the historical era.

But the existence of an Argive legend which despite its lack of archaism[119] was of considerable human interest would explain Euripides’ description of such a trial. The fact that at the end of the play[120] the resultant verdict of the trial is ignored and reversed suggests rather that Euripides regarded the Attic legend as more archaic and therefore more correct than the Argive legend. We have already[121] pointed out that the Messenger’s description of the trial and the opinions of some of the speakers at the trial are more suggestive of the dramatist’s own views than is the verdict of the Argive court. According to Wedd, the _real myth_ occurs at the end of the play, and the rest of the play is the invention of Euripides. Euripides did not agree with the mythical presentation of Orestes, so he invented a new version which he deliberately set in emphatic contrast to the obsolete Attic myth! In our view, Euripides reproduces two pre-existing legends—an Attic and an Argive legend of Orestes. The Argive legend he regarded as more dramatic, the other as more orthodox but less replete with human interest. According to Wedd, the graver pollution of the Euripidean Orestes is due to the fact that Euripides conceived him as a fifth-century Athenian. For us, the different degrees of pollution in Orestes are due to different conceptions of Orestes’ guilt or to the different legal and religious attitudes of the legends which the dramatists followed. They are not to be attributed to any distinction in the attitude of the dramatists to the legends themselves. The contrast is in the legends, not in the dramatists.

THE ERINNYES IN EURIPIDES

The conception of the Erinnyes in this play is naturally different from the Aeschylean and Sophoclean conceptions. It is similar to but not identical with the picture of these goddesses which we shall find in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_.[122] It is, however, erroneous to suppose that the Furies who in this play assail Orestes are conceived by the dramatist as the subjective delusions of a madman. In our opinion, the Erinnyes in Euripides, though not actually brought upon the stage, are as real and as vital as the Erinnyes of Aeschylus.[123] If the psychical effect which these goddesses produce upon Orestes is greater in Euripides, this is because the Erinnyes stand, so to speak, like vultures beside their prey, since the Argives are about to condemn him to death, and because Orestes is conceived as irremediably polluted, a victim already ‘devoted’ to the Erinnyes. Hence, naturally, at Argos Orestes feels that he is powerless to struggle against the Erinnyes; his insight into the immediate future and his contemplation of his approaching fate deprives him, temporarily, of sanity and self-control. We must not suppose that a more tender or more civilised and ‘modern’ Orestes realises his guilt more keenly than does the archaic Orestes of Aeschylus, nor must we imagine that this feeling of remorse and self-contempt produces the mental insanity which creates a more hideous Erinnys. On the contrary, Orestes is here, as elsewhere, subjectively innocent. He admits no moral guilt. If the legend insists that he is guilty, if the public opinion of the Argives decides to punish him with death, he does not admit the validity of this conception or of the decision, but nevertheless his fear of the Erinnyes naturally increases, since in death even more than in life can these titanic monsters torture the slayer. Aeschylus makes them say[124]:

It is our fate to track the steps of men
By murderous wantonness polluted, till
Beneath the earth they pass, nor yet for them
Can death grant freedom from our power.

It is Orestes’ fear of such titanic monsters waiting to inflict on him unspeakable punishment that makes him cry out in this Euripidean drama:

Ah! mother, do not set thy Furies on me.
See how their fiery eyeballs glare in blood,
And wreathing snakes hiss in their horrid hair!
There, where they stand, ready to leap upon me....[125]

And again:

O Phoebus, they will kill me, those dire forms,
These Gorgon-visaged ministers of hell.[126]

The conflicting attitudes of the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra and the Erinnyes of Agamemnon which we found in the _Choephoroe_ of Aeschylus are also revealed in this play. Speaking of his father’s Erinnyes, Orestes says[127]:

Had I in silence tamely borne her deeds,
Would not the murdered, justly hating me,
Have roused the Furies to torment my soul?
Or hath she only her assisting fiends
And he no fav’ring power t’ avenge his wrongs?

We shall meet the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra in a somewhat similar rôle in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_. But in that play the Erinnyes are not united in their conception of Orestes as they are here. Those Erinnyes who refuse to accept the ‘acquittal’ of Orestes by the Areopagus continue to pursue him to the Tauric Chersonese. When Orestes sees them he cries out[128]:

Dost thou behold her, Pylades,
Dost thou not see this dragon fierce from hell—
Rushing to kill me, and against me rousing
Her horrid vipers? See this other here
Emitting fire and slaughter from her vests,
Sails on her wings, my mother in her arms
Bearing, to hurl this mass of rock upon me!
Ah, she will kill me! Whither shall I fly?

The important thing to remember about the Euripidean Erinnyes is that they are real goddesses, not mental fictions. The Furies of the ‘Argive Scene’ are the Furies who pursue the criminal convicted of wilful matricide. For him there is no cleansing. To him no land can offer the shelter of its protection. ‘Alone, he has arrayed against him the universe.’[129] Sooner or later he will be put to death and will be delivered into the hands of the Erinnyes. But in the Attic legend Orestes is not a wilful matricide. Hence the Erinnyes of the _Iphigenia_ drama are not so implacable as the Erinnyes of the _Orestes_. They are placated by the simple device of transferring an image of Artemis from the Tauric land to Athens!

THE ‘IPHIGENIA IN AULIDE’ AND ‘IPHIGENIA IN TAURIS’

A comparison of these two dramas reveals at first sight a rather obvious inconsistency. The Aulid play centres round Agamemnon’s sacrificial slaying of his daughter at Aulis, while in the Tauric play the victim reappears as a priestess of Artemis amongst the Tauri! It is generally maintained that the last scene of the Aulid play, which describes the substitution of a stag for the maiden by a miraculous intervention, is not the work of Euripides. But in the _Orestes_ Apollo intervenes to preserve the life of Helen, though he can do so only by deifying her! In the Aulid play, also, Iphigeneia is said to have been saved from death by deification.[130] In the Tauric drama, however, the daughter of Agamemnon has once more assumed a mortal form and appears as a priestess of Artemis among the Tauri. Nowhere else in Euripides can we find such a magical atmosphere. If the human Iphigeneia was really saved, would we not expect that her father and her mother should have been informed of her deliverance? But they both believe that she is dead.[131] The plea which Clytaemnestra advances in the _Electra_ of Euripides,[132] namely that the death of Agamemnon was a revenge for the death of her daughter, is based upon the reality of her death. Hence we think that Euripides reproduced both these legends of Iphigeneia simply because of their human interest and dramatic merit, without any special concern for their consistency. It is clear that Euripides did not invent the Aulid story, since it is found in Aeschylus[133] and in an epic poem,[134] entitled the _Cypria_, of post-Homeric date. The Tauric story is not found in any previous author, but we do not think that it was invented by Euripides. Both legends suggest a similar source. Two hundred years before Euripides[134] it was said that Iphigeneia was made immortal by Artemis, who brought her from Aulis to the Tauri, and substituted for her a stag-victim. As soon as Iphigeneia became a goddess she could, like other goddesses, be easily transferred from place to place by a simple transference of images. Herodotus says[135] that the goddess to whom the Tauri sacrificed was Iphigeneia the daughter of Agamemnon. The word ‘Iphigeneia’ was apparently a cultus epithet of Artemis[136] which signified her connexion with fertility and her influence on the birth of men and animals. The real as distinct from the legendary deification of Iphigeneia was therefore due to the abstraction and personification of a cultus epithet. The existence of a temple of Artemis-Iphigeneia at Aulis, whence Agamemnon sailed to Troy, and the similarity of the name Iphigeneia with Iphianassa (the Homeric name for a daughter of Agamemnon), led to a belief in the deification of Iphianassa at Aulis. Moreover, the survival at Halae, in Attica, in historical times of a mock ritual of human sacrifice to Artemis induced the further idea that Iphianassa had been deified through sacrifice at Aulis. The existence at Halae of a statue of Artemis believed to have been brought from the Tauric land, and the existence there of a temple to ‘the maiden’ at which real rites of human sacrifice were enacted, explain the origin of the Tauric belief which is referred to by Herodotus. Iphianassa, identified with Iphigeneia, becomes a goddess among the Tauri, and Iphigeneia is worshipped as the daughter of Agamemnon! The final transition to the stage in which Iphigeneia returns to life as a priestess of Artemis at Tauri is explained by reference to the ancient tendency to identify the priest with the god and by the ritual of resurrection or re-birth which is found in ancient fertility-religion. England[137] thinks that this stage was probably pre-Euripidean but that the story of Orestes’ visit to the Tauri was invented by Euripides. We do not think that even this story was of Euripidean origin. It belongs rather, we think, to the legends of the wandering of Orestes, which conceived him as guilty of extenuated or quasi-involuntary matricide which was ultimately ‘forgiven.’ When Iphigeneia was conceived as a priestess of Artemis and at the same time as the sister of Orestes, the evolution of a story which described Orestes’ visit to the Tauri does not, we think, require the genius of Euripides. Again, the inconsistencies of this story with the Aulid story which he has dramatised, with arguments which he introduces in the _Electra_[138] and with other legends of Orestes, such as the Arcadian legend, and, moreover, the insult to Apollo, the degradation of Athene, and the exaltation of Artemis which this story involves—all suggest a local origin for the story and the inspiration of theocratic legend-makers rather than the invention of a dramatist.

In the _Iphigenia in Aulide_ the sacrifice of Iphigeneia is condemned as murder not only by Clytaemnestra[139] but also by Achilles,[140] whose promised marriage with Iphigeneia was the bait by which legend lured her from her Argive home. This view, we have said,[141] belongs to an age which has rejected human sacrifice and which interprets all the traditional systems of blood-vengeance as unrestricted hereditary vendetta. It belongs therefore to the border-line between the Dark Ages of Greece and the civilised historical era. From the legal point of view Clytaemnestra’s plea has no validity; we see in it rather a counterpart to the plea of justification which Orestes based on the command of Apollo. If Orestes claims the command of Apollo as a justification and if this claim is disputed, then the command of Artemis to Agamemnon may also be impugned. Artemis has the same right to obedience as Apollo has. If the Furies of the dead Clytaemnestra rejected the Apolline oracle, it was natural that the living Clytaemnestra should have repudiated the justice of the decree of Artemis at Aulis.

The _Iphigenia in Tauris_ merits special consideration from our present point of view. As the general _dénouement_ of the plot is sufficiently familiar, we shall proceed _in medias res_. We may confine our comments to the speech delivered by Orestes to Iphigeneia after their mutual recognition. Omitting for the moment Orestes’ reference to the Athenian custom of using separate drinking-cups on the Libation-day of the Anthesteria festival, we will give first Orestes’ description of his trial at Athens and of its immediate sequel. It will be noted that he has already served a period of exile before he reaches Athens and that the verdict of the Areopagus is not accepted by all the Erinnyes. We have suggested[142] that the Erinnyes symbolise in this legend the attitude of the relatives of the slain and that the Areopagus acts as a court of reconciliation rather than as an ordinary homicide court. We have seen that the relatives had always a theoretical right to refuse to accept ‘appeasement’ in cases of involuntary homicide, according to the Draconian law, ἁπάντας ἢ τὸν κωλύοντα κρατεῖν: ‘let all be appeased or let one objector hold the field.’[143] We cannot suppose that the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra in this play assume the same attitude to Orestes as they assume in the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, for in Aeschylus the conversion of the Erinnyes signifies acceptance of the plea of justifiable matricide. Neither is their attitude to be compared to that of the Erinnyes of the Argive scene in the _Orestes_, for there they conceive Orestes as guilty of wilful matricide. Their attitude here is rather that of the ‘second Attic legend,’ in which Orestes is conceived as a matricide of partial guilt—his crime being conceived as extenuated by Apollo’s command. According to this assumption we can explain the conflict of opinion which characterises the Erinnyes. It is derived from a legendary conception of the Erinnyes as the symbols of the relatives of the slain Clytaemnestra who are presumed to have refused ‘appeasement’ and to have resisted the verdict of the Areopagus, which was conceived as a court of reconciliation rather than as a high State court adjudicating with full authority on questions of guilt or innocence. Orestes says:

When vengeance from my hands o’ertook
My mother’s deed—foul deed which let me pass
In silence—by the Furies’ fierce assaults
To flight I was impelled: to Athens then
Apollo sent me, that, my cause there heard,
I might appease the vengeful powers whose names
May not be uttered. The tribunal there
Is holy, which for Mars when stained with blood,
Jove in old times established ...[144]
... when to the tribunal on the mount
Of Mars I came, one stand I took, and one
The Eldest of the Furies opposite:
The cause was heard touching my mother’s blood,
And Phoebus saved me by his evidence;
Equal, by Pallas numbered, were the votes,
And I from doom of blood victorious freed
Such of the Furies as there sate, appeased
By the just sentence, nigh the court resolved
To fix their seat: _but others whom the law_
_Appeased not, with relentless tortures still_
_Pursued me_, till I reached the hallowed soil
Of Phoebus.[145]

But Orestes’ visit to Delphi merely suspends, it does not terminate, the pursuit of the Erinnyes. At this point the religious rather than the legal aspect of the Erinnyes comes into prominence, and what may be described as a magical mode of appeasement is indicated by Apollo when he commands Orestes to visit the temple of Artemis among the Tauri, to bring back with him the image of the Tauric Artemis and to deposit it in an Attic temple. Orestes says to Iphigeneia:

From the golden tripod burst
The voice divine, and sent me to this shore,
Commanding me to bear the image hence
Which fell from Jove, and in th’ Athenian land
To fix it.... If we obtain
The statue of the goddess, I no more
With madness will be tortured.[146]

Here we breathe the atmosphere of religious expiation rather than of legal atonement. The origin of this oracular command may be attributed to Attic priests of Artemis, for in the temple at Halae there was an image which was believed to have been brought from the Tauri.[147] This expiation was not in any real sense ‘purgation,’ but it was sufficiently similar in character to be readily confused with it.[148] We are reminded of the expiatory sacrifice offered at the altar of the Erinnyes or the Semnai Theai at the Areopagus by persons who had been acquitted of homicide at the Areopagus court and by involuntary slayers who had returned from exile.[149] We may recall also the expiatory festival which Medea instituted at Corinth after she had slain her children and put to death the King of Corinth and his daughter.[150] In this play a mock ceremonial of purgation is performed in connexion with Orestes by Iphigeneia. She says[151]:

The strangers come, the sacred ornaments,
The hallowed lambs, for I with blood must wash
This execrable blood away, the light
Of torches, and what else my rites require
To purify these strangers to the goddess.

It will seem curious that Thoas, a barbarian king, should admit the necessity for such a ceremony, seeing that in the _Andromache_[152] Hermione is made to say

Such is the whole abhorred barbarian race.
... friends by their dearest friends
Are murdered: deeds like these no wholesome law
Prohibits.

We shall see presently[153] that this sentiment was the outcome of Hermione’s emotional attitude to the Trojan Andromache.

ORESTES AND THE PITCHER FEAST

The suggestion of Orestes that his ‘pollution,’ when he reached the Attic land, was the origin of the Attic rite which prescribed the use of separate cups on the second day of the Anthesteria is of interest as an illustration of what is known as the aetiological myth. Orestes says to Iphigeneia[154]:

There arrived,
None willingly received me, by the gods
As one abhorred: and they, who felt the touch
Of shame, the hospitable board alone
Yielded, and though one common roof beneath,
Their silence showing they disdained to hold
Converse with me, I took from them apart
A lone repast; to each was placed a bowl
Of the same measure: this they filled with wine,
And bathed their spirits in delight. Unmeet
I deemed it to express offence at those
Who entertained me, but in silence grieved,
Showing a cheer as though I marked it not,
And sighed for that I shed my mother’s blood.
A feast, I hear, at Athens is ordained
From this my evil plight, e’en yet observed,
In which the equal-measured bowl then used
Is by that people held in honour high.

Euripides is not our only authority for such a myth. Its existence is confirmed by Athenaeus[155] and by Suidas.[156] It is not probable that Euripides himself invented it. At the Libation-feast which was known as the ‘Cups’ (χόες) an unusual custom decreed that each man should drink from a separate goblet and forbade any suggestion of collective drinking such as attached to the ordinary wine-bowl. The Athenians did not understand the real origin of this rite. In the strange blending of joy and sorrow which characterised this Dionysiac festival, they overlooked the connexion which existed between the public civic offering, at this festival, of libations to dead ancestors of the citizens as a whole and the primitive tomb-offerings (χοαί) of tribal ancestor-worship. Coulanges has indicated[157] the private, individual, or domestic nature of such tomb-offerings. He goes so far as to suggest that the origin of private ownership in land is to be attributed to the exclusive and non-communistic character of primitive ancestor-worship. Even in Solon’s time the laws defined rigidly the limit of relationship to the deceased which permitted a relative’s presence at the funeral.[158] The worship of Dionysus had many affinities with the worship of the dead. It is in such affinities that we must seek, in the last resort, the explanation of the gloom and morbid mourning which permeates all Greek tragedy. But we cannot suppose that the Dionysiac festival was able to import an aspect of civic communism into the essentially local and tribal ritual of tomb-libations. Hence, we believe a compromise was accepted in which men were permitted to drink together at a public libation-festival but were compelled to drink from separate vessels and to sit at separate tables! Such, we believe, was the real origin of this strange rite. But the Athenians, who were ignorant of its true origin, sought to find for it at least an intelligible explanation. They knew from the Attic legends of Orestes that this Argive prince had come to Athens for his trial. They knew that a kin-slayer who had not yet been tried and declared innocent was ‘polluted’ with a minor kind[159] of pollution wherever he went. His purgation by Apollo was legally valid for Phocis if an Apolline court had declared him innocent. But in the Attic legends he was untried and therefore unpurged. They argued therefore that when Orestes came to Athens to submit to trial on a charge of kin-slaying, he was prohibited from public civic and religious communion with Athenian citizens. It does not matter in this connexion whether the plea of Orestes was justifiable matricide or extenuated matricide. As he had been proclaimed as an unjust slayer by the avengers, who in this case were the Erinnyes, he was ‘polluted’ until he had either established his innocence or indicated the completion of his atonement to a court of reconciliation. Now ‘pollution’ was regarded by the ancients as a disease of a quasi-physical nature. Murder courts had to be held, even by night, in the open air. The ‘polluted’ man could not enter the temples or the market-place. He could not eat at anyone’s table. He was isolated from public life. His civic existence was suspended. If, then, it be supposed that Orestes arrived for his trial at Athens during the Anthesteria festival, he could not have been received into civic or religious communion. Hence the creators of this myth could quite naturally have conceived that a compromise was agreed upon by which the Athenians preserved, on the one hand, their reputation for hospitality, and respected, on the other, the religion of pollution. They admitted Orestes to the public feast, but they insisted that he should sit apart and drink from a separate vessel! It was thus that the Athenians explained the origin of this rite: nor is the explanation to be regarded as ‘anomalous’ or ‘artificial,’ as Miss Harrison suggests.[160] To people who were ignorant of the real origin of the Pitcher Feast, this was at least a respectable and intelligible aetiology.

Orestes says to Iphigeneia that he had some difficulty in refraining from rebuking his hosts on this occasion.[161] Miss Harrison’s explanation[162] of this statement is that Orestes was mad! But we are convinced that Orestes was not mad, either at Athens or amongst the Tauri, though he may have been temporarily insane amongst the Argives.[163]

We have seen that there were conflicting opinions concerning the guilt of Orestes in different legends. The predominant opinion in Aeschylus and in the legend (probably Phocian) which referred to his purgation by Apollo suggests that his act was justified. The Argive legend which we have met in the _Orestes_ of Euripides conceived his act as wilful matricide which involved an eternal pollution. But the prevailing conception of Orestes’ act which we find in the legends of post-Homeric times regards him as guilty of matricide extenuated through Apollo’s command. The dramatic attempt to unify these various legends is the source of the complexity of the problem of Oresteian blood-vengeance in Euripides. It is impossible to analyse successfully the legal and religious position of a hero who is tried and who is at the same time untried, who is eternally and who is at the same time temporarily polluted, in one and the same drama! But the myth of the Pitcher Feast was based on a well-defined tradition. It ignored the Argive and the Phocian legends, it ignored also what we have called the first Attic legend, and it considered only the second Attic legend from which the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ drama was ultimately derived.

The surprise which Orestes feels at the partial social boycott which confronts him in Athens is, we think, to be attributed to the coexistence of the Attic and the Phocian legends. In the Phocian legend Orestes was tried and purged, therefore he could visit any Greek city with impunity. But the Attic legend suggested that this purgation, though valid for Phocis, could not be accepted by the Athenians, so long as the avenging Erinnyes pursued, until Orestes had been acquitted by an Athenian court. This conflict of legendary view-points explains, we believe, the divergence of opinions which is suggested by these words.

THE ‘PHOENICIAN MAIDENS’ AND THE ‘SUPPLIANTS’

The homicide-problems of the _Phoenissae_ and of the _Supplices_ may be simultaneously discussed, as both these dramas are concerned with the war of the Seven against Thebes. The dramas correspond in their general atmosphere and in regard to the problems which they present with the _Septem_ of Aeschylus or the _Antigone_ of Sophocles. We also find an incidental reference[164] to the punishment of Oedipus which recalls the _Oedipus at Colonus_ and the _King Oedipus_ of Sophocles. Euripides, in his account of the conflict which took place between Polyneices and Eteocles and of the war between the Argives and the Thebans is, from a legal point of view, more satisfactory than his brother dramatists, inasmuch as he makes a clear distinction between the different aspects of the problem of burial in both cases. Polyneices may or may not have been a fratricide and a traitor,[165] but the Argives at least were legitimate belligerents. In the _Antigone_ these two issues seem to have been deliberately confused. The burial of the Argives was a question for Greek international law, the violation of which brought down upon the offenders the anger of the gods. The burial of Polyneices was a more delicate question, upon which the gods might adopt divergent attitudes. Teiresias, in the _Antigone_, does not differentiate very clearly between the religious aspects of these two problems. The gods were angry—about that there was no doubt. But might not this anger have been mainly, if not entirely, due to the non-burial of the Argives? Here are the words addressed by Teiresias to Kreon[166]:

And this evil state
Is come upon the city from thy will:
Because our altars—yea, our sacred hearths,
Are everywhere infected from the mouths
Of dogs or beak of vulture that hath fed
On Oedipus’ unhappy slaughtered son.

Kreon is unmoved by this declaration, which he regards as the outcome of bribery and political corruption.[167] But Teiresias now utters words which strike terror into Kreon’s heart[168]:

A little while, and thine own palace-halls
Shall flash the truth upon thee with loud noise
Of men and women, shrieking o’er the dead,
And all the cities whose unburied sons,
Mangled and torn, have found a sepulchre
In dogs or jackals or some ravenous bird
That stains their incense with polluted breath,
Are forming leagues in troublous enmity.

Now, Euripides, on the other hand, keeps these two questions clearly distinct. The burial of the Argives, being an international question, is referred by Adrastus to Theseus,[169] King of Athens. At first Theseus refuses to intervene, and rightly, since Athens was merely one of a number of Greek States, and she did not wish to undertake single-handed a war which was properly an Amphictyonic war. But ultimately Theseus, yielding to the persuasion of his mother and of Adrastus, fought and defeated the Theban army under the command of Kreon, and handed over the bodies of the Argives to their relatives for burial.[170] That in refusing burial to the Argives Kreon had violated a Greek international law is clear from many passages in the _Suppliants_. Thus Aethra says[171]:

The mothers now of these,
Spear-slain, are fain to lay them in the grave,
Wherefrom the victors let them, and refuse
The corpses, setting the gods’ laws at nought;

and Theseus says[172]:

But lifeless bodies—harming not your State, ...
I claim to bury: lo! all Hellas’ law
Do I uphold.

The Messenger thus describes the words of the herald[173]:

Silence, ye people! Hush, ye ranks of Cadmus!
Hearken—we come but for the corpses’ sake,
To bury them and keep all Hellas’ law
Inviolate.

The problem of the burial of Polyneices has two distinct aspects in Euripides, as it has in Sophocles. In both accounts Polyneices was ultimately buried, as it was necessary for legend to insist that he should be, in view of the existence of tombs in Thebes which were said to contain the bones of all the seven Argive leaders.[174] But whereas in Sophocles it is religious fear which causes Kreon to consent to the burial of Polyneices, in Euripides we feel that it is rather the victorious intervention of Theseus which is the cause of this _dénouement_. Eteocles and Polyneices are represented by Euripides as having foreseen the conflict which would rage over their burial when they had mutually slain each other. Thus, Eteocles solemnly binds Kreon to refuse burial to Polyneices[175]:

But I, on the city
And thee, O Kreon, this injunction lay:
If I prove stronger, suffer not the corse
Of Polyneices in this Theban realm
To be interred: let death be the reward
Of him who scatters dust o’er his remains,
Although he be the dearest of my friends.

Again, Polyneices is said to have commanded, as he lay dying, his mother and Antigone to bury him in Theban soil[176]:

But bury me, O thou who gav’st me birth,
And my loved sister, in my native land,
Your mediation to appease the city
Uniting, that of my paternal soil
Enough for a poor grave I may obtain,
Though I have lost the empire.

Thus Euripides conceives in a twofold aspect the act of Polyneices. Subjectively, he thinks, Polyneices was justified in attacking and in slaying his brother[177]: objectively, however, or technically, he was a traitor and a fratricide because _prima facie_ he was the aggressor.[178] But the sympathetic intuition of Antigone looks beyond the superficial enactments of a political justice of which the obscure and oscillating dictates cannot compete with her love for her brother in life, with her grief for him in death, and with her reverence for the solemn injunction which his dying lips had uttered.

The punishment of Oedipus which is mentioned in the _Phoenissae_ is based, we believe, on the conception of his fatal act as voluntary homicide,[179] but it also takes into account the facts of the Homeric narrative. The Homeric[180] story of the continued rule of Oedipus ‘over the Cadmeans’ was not in harmony with Achaean principles of blood-vengeance. Homer does not understand it. Perhaps this is because, in Boeotia, as Leaf points out,[181] the Achaeans had not established their power. It is possible that Oedipus enjoyed immunity from punishment because of his position as a Minoan autocrat, but as there existed in legendary story many capable and willing avengers it is better to attribute his immunity to a discrimination between degrees in homicide-guilt which we have associated with Pelasgian tribal custom, and to interpret the Homeric reference as a Pelasgian ‘reminiscence.’[182]

In Homer, Oedipus lives, dies, and is buried in Thebes. But post-Homeric legend, under the influence of the pollution doctrine, could not accept these facts. Even if the plea of quasi-involuntary homicide which Oedipus himself put forward had been accepted he would still have had to go into exile for at least a period of years, and even then he could not have returned to his domestic religion or have been buried in the tomb of his fathers. The duration of exile for extenuated or involuntary slaying in historical times, and therefore presumably[183] in the pollution era, depended on the will of the relatives of the slain. One single objector could have extended the exile period indefinitely, at least in theory, according to the law ‘let all consent to be appeased or let one objector hold the field.’[184] But in the post-Homeric story of Oedipus, as Sophocles gives it, the plea of Oedipus was not accepted. He was regarded as a voluntary homicide and sent into exile. It is true that when Polyneices himself was banished, for political reasons, from Thebes, he naturally relented, and in his altered mood he offered to restore Oedipus to his home.[185] But in order to restore Oedipus it was necessary that Kreon and Eteocles should be either killed or exiled, and this contingency had not been realised. In Euripides the unhappy king ultimately suffers the same fate. Kreon says to Oedipus[186]: