Book 3 — CHAPTER III EURIPIDES

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

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]:

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!

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]:

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]:

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

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]:

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]:

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]:

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:

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]:

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]:

Again, he says to Tyndareus[51]:

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]:

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]:

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]:

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:

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:

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.

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]:

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]:

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]:

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]:

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

And again:

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]:

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]:

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:

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:

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]:

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

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]:

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.