The Eumenides

Introduction

We have seen in the Agamemnon how the law that “The doer must suffer,” or that Sin must bring Punishment, is mainly envisaged by the most primitive Greek tradition as a form of the blood-feud. It is blood calling for blood. At its simplest this takes the form of a straightforward vendetta, as when a man kills one of another tribe. There is no “sin” or “pollution” in this, though of course the kindred of the stranger will duly try to avenge him. Suppose, next, that a man kills, not a stranger, but his own kinsman. Then he has shed the “kindred blood,” and committed a real sin. He is polluted, and pollutes all who associate with him. If the kinsman has left any children or male representatives, they are bound in honour to take up the blood-feud and do vengeance, even though, if the relationship is very close, it may bring pollution on them. Thus Aegisthus, as son of Thyestes, acted quite correctly in killing Agamemnon, and Orestes in killing him. Similarly, when Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon the eternal law compelled Orestes to avenge him, however reluctantly.

But suppose there is no avenger left, what then? It is one of the fears that torment Orestes in Euripides’ Electra, “Who will do justice on me, when she is dead?” In that case, though there is no visible human avenger, the Law nevertheless acts. The doer must suffer. That is Dikê, Justice. It is the law of Themis, of Moira, of the Erinyes, and ultimately of Mother Earth. Let us consider each of these conceptions separately.

Themis, as Dr. Jane Harrison has shown, is the correct tribal custom, the thing that is always done—always, that is, by the people who really know. When prodigies occur, or bewildering emergencies, and you do not know what to do, you consult the elders or other authorities on ritual and precedent. If they fail you, you go to an oracle and consult the great ancestors, the “Earthy” or “Underworld” people, called Chthonioi, lying in the bosom of the earth. They tell you what is Themis; and that is why Themis presides at Delphi.

Moira is commonly translated “Fate,” but more strictly it is the “portion” allotted to every man, god, or city. Each of us must fulfil his portion; he cannot escape it: he must not exceed it nor trespass on the Moira of another. And the Moirai, when personified, are the Assigners or Apportioners of man’s lot in life. One is reminded of the conception of Righteousness in Plato’s Republic, where every man fulfils his “portion” of service to the community.

And the Erinyes. They are the wrath of the dead or the injured acting as a curse and pursuing the transgressor. Orestes, in the Choëphoroe, sees them as “his mother’s wrathful hounds.” In this play we see Clytemnestra waken them when they have fallen asleep. They are obedient to her wrath, for they are her wrath in personal form. And such wrath, though chiefly conceived as the blood-feud of the murdered, can be roused by any Hubris or overstepping of Moira. In the Agamemnon the Erinys avenges the vulture whose nest has been robbed. And in the Iliad, at the great moment when Achilles’ horse breaks into speech to warn his master of approaching death, the Erinyes “check his voice” (Il. XIX 418). The horse, however well-intentioned, was obviously transgressing his Moira.

So far we can follow the ancient ideas without much difficulty. But it is rather a surprise to the modern to find Mother Earth among the supreme authorities for executing this law. It is because Earth is the home of the dead, the Chthonian people, both the great ancestors who know what is Themis and “the wronged ones in the darkness” who cry for justice on their oppressors. Their wrath is her wrath. Besides that, whenever kindred blood is shed, the intolerable stain falls first and most directly on the face of Mother Earth. It pollutes her, and she sends up her punishments from below, blight and barrenness and plague, just as to the innocent in normal times she sends life and fruitfulness. Thus we see that blessing as well as cursing lies in the power of the Chthonian people, the dead, the Erinyes, and collectively of Mother Earth. They who send can also withhold.

The law that “The doer shall suffer” is a natural law like the maturing of seed, or the return of spring; most of all like the growth and diminishing every year of the power of the Sun. For that diminishing is really a punishment due to the Hubris which the Sun committed when at his height. There are suggestions occasionally that, since every living thing has its own Moira, one Moira might conceivably interfere with another, just as sometimes God may prevent the seed from maturing (Agamemnon, l. 1025). But in the main the rule that blood calls for blood, that Hubris goes before a fall, or that sin brings punishment, stands as an unbroken natural law, and the Erinyes are its especial guardians.

That being so, how can there be any forgiveness? Would not forgiveness be a sort of monstrosity, a wanton breach in the law of Cause and Effect? Aeschylus, in the Agamemnon, gives his answer in unusually clear language (161–182). The prophet Calchas has been describing the ravenous feast of the two Eagles; the wrath of Artemis thereat and the vengeance exacted in the death of Iphigenia; the future vengeance to be exacted for that death; and beyond a yet further vista of vengeances re-avenged. Then Aeschylus asks how man can find escape from this endless chain and “cast off from his mind the burden of futility.” “Only,” he answers, “in the thought of Zeus, whatever Zeus may be.” It is a Zeus sublimated by the mind of Aeschylus and very different from that glorified Achaean chieftain who was King of gods and men in the ordinary Homeric tradition. To Aeschylus Zeus, as the ruler of heaven, is the founder of a new world, much as Athena herself was the founder of a new civilization on earth. The old gods struck and were stricken; they fought and they passed away. One had no more meaning than another. But Zeus is “He who made a road to Thought, who established Learning by Suffering to be an abiding law.” He himself in the distant past won his throne by violence, but now he has learned and his heart is changed.

This idea of a supreme Ruler who, though inscrutably wise, is not perfect but only working his way towards perfection, was developed by Aeschylus in the Prometheus-trilogy, where Zeus, beginning as a conqueror and a tyrant, seems at first like the villain of the piece. But he possesses this peculiar secret: he can learn by his own offences; so the end is reconciliation. Similarly in the Supplices we hear how Io, once the persecuted victim of his lust, is at last led to peace and blessedness and becomes the Virgin Mother of the Deliverer of Prometheus.1 The idea is not purely Aeschylean, for Pindar also tells us how Eternal Zeus set free his chained enemies, the Titans (Pyth. IV 291). It is also he who instituted the law of the suppliant. He forgave the bloodstained Ixion because of his suffering and prayer. Nay, he is not only the protector of suppliants, he is himself the Eternal Suppliant, the God and Master of all things, who forgives because he also craves for forgiveness (Supplices, l. 1). There, however, we touch upon a mystery. … The essential point is that the Zeus who learns and understands is also the Zeus who can forgive the sinner. He can forgive just because he understands. The Law of the Moirai and the Erinyes neither understands nor forgives. It simply operates.

“All this,” it may be said, “is possible enough, but it is not what Aeschylus represents as occurring. Zeus does not appear at all in the Eumenides.” Of course he does not. The Greek convention, like our own, did not easily represent the Supreme Father in bodily form on the stage. Apart from satyr-plays and comedy, I only know of one play, The Soul Weighing of Aeschylus, in which Zeus was actually represented; and there he appears not on the stage but in the sky, holding the divine balance. In the Eumenides he is represented by his son and daughter, Apollo and Athena.

Apollo, we are told expressly, is “the Prophêtês Dios, the revealer of Zeus” (19). He says himself, “Never have I spoken on my throne of prophecy any word concerning man, woman or city, which was not commanded by Zeus the Father” (616). He warns the Court not to disregard the oracles “that are mine and the Father’s” (713). Consequently we see that it was by the will of Zeus himself that Orestes slew his mother, it is Zeus who wills now that he be set free.

Athena likewise, we are told with emphasis, is the daughter of Zeus alone, with no mother. She is pure, undiluted Zeus (664 ff.). She is, so to speak, his Thought, not born by any bodily process, but sprung directly from his brain (665); and when she gives her vote it is not so much that she votes on the side of Zeus but that her judgement inevitably is the same as his, “for I am utterly the Father’s” (738). When she asks the Furies to yield to the will of Zeus she says, “I also trust and obey him. I know his overwhelming strength, but He needs it not!” (826). And she explains that Zeus has given to her just that power of thinking and understanding (τὸ φρονεῖν) to which we were told in the Agamemnon that he was guiding mankind. Thus the mechanical and automatic operation of the Law is corrected by the will of the Father. It is not broken, but more truly and perfectly fulfilled.

One is reminded of a passage in Plato’s Statesman: “The best of all is not that a law should rule, but a man, if the man be wise and of royal nature. … A law can never comprehend exactly what is noblest and most just for all cases, and consequently cannot enjoin what is best. The infinite varieties of men and circumstances, and the fact that nothing human ever for a moment stands still, make it impossible for any art to lay down a simple rule to hold universally and for all time. … But that is what we see the law aiming at, like some stubborn and ignorant man who will allow nothing to be done against his orders and no further question to be asked …” (p. 294a).

Equally near to Aeschylus is Aristotle’s famous discussion of the difference between legal justice and that higher justice which he calls Epieikeia (Equity). “It is the correction of the law where it fails owing to its generality” (Ethics, V p. 1137 b, 26), and the correction has to be applied by the “wise man.” In Aeschylus as in these two philosophers the ultimate justice is to be found in an appeal from a law to a person.

This appeal plays an important role in the history of Greek thought, and consequently in that of all modern Europe. The other philosophic schools of the Hellenistic Age, Cynic, Stoic, and Epicurean, made even greater use than Plato and Aristotle of the idea of the Wise Man, rather than the Law, as the judge and embodiment of right conduct. In a grosser form the idea invaded practical politics. We find the Hellenistic world escaping from the conflict of constitutions and systems of law by the deification of Alexander and his successors, and cutting its juridical knots by the legal fiction of the divine will. Nay, even before Aeschylus set to work upon it, the same conception was really implicit in the anthropomorphism of the classical Olympian religion. As I have tried to show elsewhere,2 the great advance made by that system as compared with the welter of primitive taboos and terrors which it tried, however artificially and inadequately, to supersede, lies in this same humanizing of the nonhuman. It brought to man the Good News that, as Plutarch expresses it, “the world is not ruled by fabulous Typhons and Giants”—nor, we may add, by blind mechanical laws—“but by One who is a wise Father to all.” It sought to make religion humane at the expense of making it anthropomorphic.

It is more interesting still to realize that the Aeschylean doctrine is in essence an early and less elaborate stage of the theological system which we associate with St. Paul: the suppression of the Law by a personal relation to a divine person, and a consequent disregard for the crude coarse test of a man’s “works” or “deeds” in comparison with the one unfailing test of the spirit, its “faith” or “faithfulness” towards God. Aeschylus would have understood Paul’s exhortation to escape beyond the “beggarly elements” to Him who made them, beyond the Creation to the Creator; and Paul would have understood Aeschylus’ insistence on the forgiveness of the suppliant, that is, of him who believes and repents and prays. It is noteworthy, indeed, that Paul made one great concession to primitive thought which Aeschylus had entirely rejected. When Orestes is pardoned by the will of Zeus, the Furies yield; the Law is deemed to be satisfied; there is no talk of its demanding to be paid off with another victim. But in Paul, when man is to be forgiven, the sin still claims its punishment, the blood will still have blood; and the only way to appease it is for the Divine King, himself or his son, to “die for the people.” Thus the pollution is cleansed and sin duly paid with blood, though it happens to be the blood of the innocent. Aeschylus, as a poet, was familiar with that conception. He knew how Codrus died, and Menoikeus and Macaria, how Agamemnon and Erechtheus and other kings had given their children to die. But for him such practices belonged to that primitive and barbaric world which Hellenic Zeus had swept away, so he hoped, forever.

A modern reader is more likely to ask why, if Orestes only fulfilled the command of Zeus, he should be punished at all. Why is there any talk of suffering and forgiveness? The answer is quite straightforward. He has after all broken the Law; he has offended against Themis and Moira, and he must suffer. In modern language, a man who kills his mother, even if he is amply justified in doing so, is bound to suffer acute grief and distress; if he did not, he would really deserve to be punished. It is only in the end that Zeus can overrule and make good, just as he did with Io and with Prometheus. It is in the end, after suffering and struggle, after cleansing and supplication, that union is achieved between the Law which acts like blind fate and the Father who understands.3

Thus at last the offender who deserves pardon can be pardoned. But that is not all. The Law that can pardon and understand can itself be understood and loved. Its ministers are no longer alien and hostile beings, proud of the agonies which they righteously inflict and the hatred which they naturally inspire. They are accepted by Athena as fellow-citizens, and their Law recognized as an inward aspiration, a standard of right living which men consciously need and seek. The “Furies” have become “Eumenides.”

Dramatis Personae

• The Pythian Prophetess

• Orestes

• The God Apollo

• The Goddess Pallas Athena

• The Ghost of Clytemnestra

• Chorus of Furies (Eumenides)

• Chorus of Athenian Citizens