Hubert Joseph Treston

“ Such deeds the younger brood of gods will do,
Swaying all things by force beyond the right.
One sheet of gore, mantled from base to cope,
Earth’s midmost shrine is visibly beheld
Self-cloaked with horror-breathing guilt of blood.
O prophet-god! Thou hast stained thine own hearthstone
From thine own mind, moved by no just appeal,
Breaking the law of gods to honour man. But Apollo regards them as Titan-rebels, as deities of a barbarous past. He sees in them the avengers of the Dark Ages. [94]
Begone! ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was in post-Achaean times, and especially in the Hesiodic period and in the Dark Ages of Greek history, that murder and vengeance passed outside the control of law or discipline. In such conditions it was more than probable that murder would be unjustly punished, but it was equally probable that it would not be avenged at all. Into this abyss of chaos came in the seventh century the Apolline religion of ‘pollution.’ The birth of great States, the dawn of synoekised nationhood, was overshadowed by the wrath of gods and ghosts, which reflected the vindictive hatred of human vengeance. ”

“ Do we not seem to have here a legend which evolved? First of all we have private vengeance. Everything depends on Neoptolemus. Then pollution enters the story and the people have a religious interest in homicide. Yet the main fact could not be got rid of, namely that Hermione escaped punishment. If Euripides is archaising, could he not have been consistent? Or is he thinking of that vaguely defined post-Homeric age in which the conception of murder as a pollution existed, but in which homicide is still, as amongst the Hebrews, a matter for the avenger of blood? ”

“ While it is true that ancient law, however crude and obscure its expression, is not so repulsive, so inhumanly technical as medieval or modern law, and while it is also true that a writer on Greek blood-vengeance cannot avoid an occasional reference to legal formulae and technique, nevertheless I feel that a merely legal treatise would not advance the prospects of Greek education or our knowledge of Greek civilisation, for the simple reason that no one but a professed student of ancient law could be induced to read it! ”

“ How would it have been punished within the Achaean caste? We have little Homeric evidence to guide us here. Homicide amongst the Achaeans is a private affair which concerns a small family circle. In the Iliad [35] the Trojan Akamas says that it is desirable for a man to pray that ‘some kinsman be left in his home to avenge his fall.’ If Akamas avenges the slaying of his brother even in war, will a son not avenge the slaying of a father? Does not Orestes avenge the murder of his father, Agamemnon, even when that vengeance necessitates the shedding of his mother’s blood? ”

“ Amongst rude and savage races there exists or has existed a system of vengeance which we may describe as a barbarous and unrestricted vendetta. In the absence of any social machinery for the determination of blood-guilt, or for the estimation of its varying degrees, a single deed of blood provokes an endless series of retaliations: a hideous orgy of revenge rages through the land, an orgy which no one may escape; for old men and women and children perish, whether one by one, or in a general massacre. The vengeance is at once collective and hereditary. ”

“ All the objects which Demosthenes attributes to the legislator are the creations of his own rhetorical mind. Why should he expect pity for ‘unfortunate wretches’ in a legislator who decreed that, if these wretches remained at home until the verdict of the court was given, they would inexorably be put to death? Why should a murderer expect pity from the relatives of the slain who were polluted by his presence? ”

“ We shall now apply our conclusions to the Attic homicide courts—the only Greek courts of which we have any precise and authentic knowledge. The actual origin of the Athenian courts is surrounded by mystery and obscurity. Many of the legends which refer to their foundation are clearly the fabrications of men who were born when these courts were already old. Places which in later times came to be notoriously associated with the courts which sat there to give judgment in homicide cases, had previously, in many instances, been consecrated by legends which had no connexion with homicide at all. ”

“ One crime only has he committed, yet not with malice and deliberation. He had slain an old man ‘with dark locks just sprinkled o’er with grey,’ [52] and this old man was no slave or serf, but a free man and a prince. For this deed, according to Greek law, Oedipus must become an exile. But was the exile to last for ever? We have quoted from Plato [53] what we believe to have been the Greek legal penalty for slaying in a passion, namely a period of exile which sometimes extended to two, and sometimes to three, years, according to the degree of malice in the act. ”

“ Love rejected, love transferred, transforms Medea from a faithful friend into a dangerous enemy. Her children, erstwhile the sweetest pledges of affection, are now so many goads which stimulate her vengeance. The conflict of passions which rages in Medea’s breast is depicted by Euripides with matchless skill. It proclaims her at once human and insane. Subjectively therefore she need only plead guilty to extenuated homicide, to slaying in a passion; and if such a plea were accepted she would be entitled in Greek law [277] to the sanctuary of exile. Why then does she bind Aegeus by an oath? ”

“ But if they will not pay, I will that all the kindred be free from the feud except the murderer, provided they do not afterwards give him food and protection.’ In such laws as these we catch a glimpse of a system of blood-vengeance which once prevailed amongst tribal peoples, but which soon became a mere echo, a phantom shadow of its former self, in the march of mightier movements, in the onward course of civilisation. ”

“ Feuds of blood must have occasionally occurred amongst the early Pelasgian folk, but we cannot ignore the control of tribal authority, and the Achaean domination which may have acted as a check. However, it is one thing to declare war on a group which refuses to fulfil the law of a district or of a tribe; it is quite another thing to refuse the ‘satisfaction’ prescribed by custom, and to make a single murder an invariable cause of incessant bloodshed. This is the state of Homeric society as conceived by Glotz, and by most writers on the subject of early Greek homicide. ”

“ In our view there are just two reasons for this refusal: one is the fact that the purgation-rites for homicide were a symbol of reconciliation, not with ghosts, but with gods: the other is the fact that the Erinnyes of Attic tragedy are a complex product, reflecting the attitude of the relatives of the slain at different periods, and from different points of view, in the post-Homeric era. ”

“ The murderer, in Greek law, at the moment of his condemnation, nay at the moment that he challenged a verdict and uttered his second speech at the trial, no longer ranked as an outlaw; he was a State criminal whose insult to the State and its gods must be atoned by public execution. Like the sacrilegious criminal, he must be executed solemnly and with public execration. His body cannot be buried in the tomb of his fathers. ”

“ If Polyneices had slain Eteocles and had become in his stead the ruler of Thebes, how different would Kreon’s appreciation of the facts have been! It is obvious that sedition, faction, and civil war, whether in ancient Greece or in modern Ireland, produce a contempt for civic law because of the despotic dogmatism which regards the same individual as now a patriot and now a traitor, now a hero and now a villain, according to the momentary swing of a political pendulum or the varying strength of political parties. ”

“ Vite on jette l’opprobre sur les parents qui vieillissent: on leur parle un langage dur et insultant, impie, sans souci de la vindicte divine: on refuse à la vieillesse de parents les vivres qu’on a reçus d’eux dans l’enfance: car on ne connaît que le droit de la force.... Pas d’égards pour la bonne foi, la justice, la vertu: au crime et à la violence tous les honneurs.’ Into this chaotic condition, he says, [37] came the new religious doctrine of homicide as a pollution. ”

“ In Greek religion, apart from the Olympian Pantheon of the Achaean caste, every great man assumed a divine nature when he died. But the Olympian religion did not recognise the right of man to become divine, and therefore whenever legend attributes human acts to such Olympian gods as Apollo or Athene (of whose mortal life there was no record) we must assume that at the time of such acts these gods have temporarily assumed a human form. ”

“ Our fourth category of the modes of blood-vengeance is intended to comprise all the methods of punishing homicide which are characteristic of fully developed social organisms, whether in ancient or in modern times. Homicide, which was originally conceived as an outrage affecting only a family or clan, may come to be regarded as a crime against the body politic, as an insult to the majesty of the State, its laws, its gods, or its governors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Apollo, unlike Hercules, could not be conceived as a man. It was from Olympus, the abode of the Olympian gods, that he was banished. The obvious motive for the legend is the association of Apollo with Admetus. Some reason had to be assigned for this ‘exile’ of Apollo. We may suppose that a deed of homicide was invented to explain this ‘exile,’ but that its details were not worked out. The only real importance of such a legend is that it affords a certain amount of evidence for the existence of servitude as a homicide-penalty in early Greece. ”

“ When the avenging Erinnyes of the slain Clytaemnestra threaten to hurl the shafts of their wrath upon the Attic land because it has harboured Orestes, whom they regard as the murderer of his kin, Athene, who has caused a murder-court to declare him free from guilt, apparently on a plea of justifiable homicide, commands the Erinnyes to be appeased, and says: ‘Hurl you not the weight of your wrath upon Attica; be not indignant, nor cause barrenness by sending down the blighting drops that come from Spirits, the cruel bitter destroyers of our seed. ”

“ Voluntary and Involuntary Homicide
It is generally [131] asserted that primitive societies recognise no distinction either between wilful murder and manslaughter (which presumes a certain degree of guilt) , or even between wilful murder and accidental slaying. The reason assigned is that bloodshed, even in comparatively advanced civilisations, is a ‘civil’ rather than a ‘criminal’ offence—a matter for damages and compensation rather than for exemplary punishment. Thus Glotz [132] says: ‘L’intention n’est rien: le fait est tout. ”

“ It strikes at the neighbours and at the most distant relatives of the murderer: it strikes, too, at the children that are born when the murderer has been gathered to his fathers. It ends only when there is hardly anyone left to kill, or when a paltry sum of money is offered to placate a glutted thirst for blood. ”

“ Blood has been shed; blood is avenged by blood. It was the Achaean principle, whether for strangers or for kinsmen. There is no trace of divine interference or of social justice. Apollo has no place or part in the story: there is no trial or official execution. We cannot discover even the element of psychological conflict. The Achaeans were soldiers, trained in the stern school of war. Neither emotion nor family religion stood between passion and its satisfaction.
But the legend or legends which are found in Aeschylus present very obvious and important points of difference. ”

“ It differs from our first-mentioned mode of vengeance in the fact that satisfaction is paid in ‘money,’ not in blood, and in the fact that payment is fixed by custom or law and is not of an indefinite duration. It differs from the second mode in this, that the ideal penalty is not death, but compensation or exile, and that the punishment is collective rather than personal. The system is found only in tribal communities, where the life of the individual is subordinated to that of the group, and where property is frequently possessed and enjoyed in common. ”

“ We shall see later how, in historical times, purgation for homicide was inadmissible in cases of kin-slaying, unless the dying man forgave; even then the slayer had to be exiled for one year before he could be purged in his homeland: in cases of wilful murder, purgation of the slayer in his own country was impossible at any time, but was possible, if not compulsory, abroad: in cases of manslaughter, purgation could take place at home when the conditions of exile and of the ‘appeasement’ of the slain man’s relatives had been fulfilled. ”