Chapter V (3)

Before returning to the tragic Erinyes, another vase must be discussed. The design, from an early black-figured cylix in the Louvre[586], is reproduced in fig. 48. The centre of interest is clearly the large dog, a creature of supernatural size, almost the height of a man. To the left of him a bearded man is hastening away; he looks back, apparently in surprise or consternation. Immediately behind the dog comes a winged figure, also in haste, and manifestly interested in the dog. Behind her is Hermes, and behind him, as quiet spectators, two women figures. There is only one possible explanation of the general gist of the scene. It is the story of the golden dog of Minos stolen from Crete by Pandareos, king of Lycia, and by him from fear of Zeus deposited with Tantalos. The scholiast on the _Odyssey_[587] tells the story in commenting on the lines ‘As when the daughter of Pandareos the bright brown nightingale’ as follows. ‘There is a legend about the above-mentioned Pandareos, that he stole the golden dog of Zeus in Crete, a life-like work of Hephaistos, from the precinct of Zeus, and having stolen it he deposited it with Tantalos. And when Zeus demanded the stolen thing by the mouth of Hermes Tantalos swore that he had it not. But Zeus when he had got the dog again, Hermes having secretly taken it away, buried Tantalos under Sipylos.’ Another scholiast[588] gives a different version, in which judgment fell on the daughters of Pandareos. ‘Merope and Kleothera (daughters of Pandareos) were brought up by Aphrodite; but when Pandareos, having received the dog stolen from Crete in trust for Tantalos, denied that he ever took it, Merope and Kleothera were snatched away by the Harpies and given to the Erinyes.’

In the light of this version the vase-painting is clear. The moment chosen is the coming of Hermes to claim the dog. It is no use Pandareos denying he had it, for there it is, larger than life. The vase-painter had to put the dog in, to make the story manifest. The two women spectators are the daughters of Pandareos, Merope and Kleothera. Who is the winged figure? Archaeologists variously name her Iris, a Harpy, an Erinys. Iris I unhesitatingly reject. Between a Harpy and an Erinys the choice is harder, and the doubt is instructive. Taking into consideration the Lycian character of the story, and the not unimportant fact that the design of the reverse represents a Lycian myth also, Bellerophon and the Chimaera, I think we may safely say that the figure is a Harpy, but it is a Harpy performing the functions of an Erinys, avenging the theft, avenging the broken oath, come also to fetch the two maidens whom she will give to be handmaids to the hateful Erinyes—so near akin, so fluctuating are the two conceptions.

* * * * *

The fact then that Aeschylus brought them on the stage and his finer poetical conception of horror compelled the complete and human formulation of the Erinyes; before his time they have no definite art-type. The Erinyes of Aeschylus are near akin to Gorgons, but they lack the Gorgon mask; nearer still to Harpies, but wingless. It is curious and interesting to note that at the close of the _Choephori_[589], where they do not appear on the stage, where they are visible only to the imagination of the mad Orestes, he sees them like the shapes he knows—

‘These are like Gorgon shapes
Black-robed, with tangled tentacles entwined
Of frequent snakes.’

Aeschylus felt the imaginative gain of the purely human form, but his fellow artist the vase-painter will not lightly forego the joy of drawing great curved wings. In vases that are immediately post-Aeschylean the wingless type tends to prevail, though not wholly; later it lapses and the great fantastic wings reappear. On the red-figured vase-painting[590] in fig. 49—the earliest of the series and dating somewhere towards the end of the 5th century—we have the scene of the purification of Orestes. He is seated close to the omphalos—sword in hand. Above his head Apollo holds the pig of purification, in his left hand the laurel; to the right is Artemis as huntress with spears; to the left are the sleeping wingless Erinyes; the ghost of Clytaemnestra beckons to them to wake. From the ground rises another Erinys, a veritable earth demon. The euphemism of the vase-painter makes the Erinyes not only wingless but beautiful, as fair to see as Clytaemnestra.

The next picture[591] (fig. 50) is later in style, but far more closely under dramatic influence. We have the very opening scene of the _Eumenides_. The inner shrine of the temple, a small Ionic naos, the omphalos, and the supplicant Orestes, with no Apollo to purify; the frightened priestess holding the symbol of her office, the great temple key with its sacred fillet. All about the shrine are lying the Erinyes, wingless and loathly; the scanty dishevelled hair and pouting barbarous lips are best seen in the rightmost Erinys, whose face is drawn profile-wise.

In the third representation[592] from a krater formerly in the Hope Collection (fig. 51) the style is late and florid, and the vase-painter has shaken himself quite free from dramatic influence. Orestes crouches in an impossible pose on the great elaborately decorated omphalos; Apollo is there with his filleted laurel staff. The place of Artemis is taken by Athene, her foot resting on what seems to be an urn for voting. To the left is an Erinys, in huntress garb, with huge snake and high curved wings; but the vase-painter is indifferent and looks for variety: a second Erinys, who leans over the tripod, is well furnished with snakes, but has no wings.

In the last and latest of the series, a kalpis in the Berlin Museum[593] (fig. 52), the Erinys is a mere angel of vengeance; her wings are no longer fantastic, she is no huntress, but a matronly, heavily draped figure; she holds a scourge in her hand, she is more Poine than Erinys, only about her is still curled a huge snake.

* * * * *

Aeschylus then, we may safely assert, first gave to the Erinyes outward and visible shape, first differentiated them from Keres, Gorgons, or Harpies. In this connection it is worth noting that the Erinyes or Poinae were not infrequently referred to in classical literature as though they were almost the exclusive property of the stage. Aeschines[594], in his oration against Timarchus, exhorts the Athenians not to imagine ‘that impious men _as in the tragedies_ are pursued and chastized by Poinae with blazing torches.’ Plutarch[595] in his life of Dion tells how, when the conspiracy of Callippus was on foot against him, Dion had a ‘monstrous and portentous vision.’ As he was meditating alone one evening he heard a sudden noise and saw, for it was still light, a woman of gigantic size, ‘in form and raiment exactly like a tragic Erinys.’ She was sweeping the house with a sort of broom.

On Lower Italy vases the Erinyes as Poinae frequently appear (Chap. XI.). They are sometimes winged, sometimes unwinged. From the august ministers of the vengeance of the dead they have sunk to be the mere pitiless tormentors of hell. They lash on Sisyphos to his ceaseless task, they bind Peirithoös, they fasten Ixion to his wheel. But it is curious to note that, though the notion of pursuit is almost lost, they still wear the huntress garb, the short skirt and high boots. It is needless to follow the downward course of the Erinys in detail, a course accelerated by Orphic eschatology, but we may note the last stage of degradation in Plutarch’s treatise ‘On those who are punished by the Deity late[596].’ The criminals whom Justice (Dike)—the Orphic divinity of purification rather than vengeance—rejects as altogether incurable are pursued by an Erinys, ‘the third and most savage of the ministrants of Adrasteia.’ She drives them down into a place which Plutarch very properly describes as ‘not to be seen, not to be spoken of.’ The Erinyes are from beginning to end of the old order, implacable, vindictive; they know nothing of Orphic penance and purgatory; as ‘angels of torment[597]’ they go to people a Christian Hell.

THE ERINYS AS SNAKE.

We return to Aeschylus. His intent was to humanize the Erinyes that thereby they might be the more inhuman. The more horrible the shape of these impersonations of the old order the greater the miracle of their conversion into the gentle Semnae, and yet the easier, for so early as we know them the Semnae are goddesses, human as well as humane.

In his persistent humanizing of the Erinyes Aeschylus suffers one lapse, the more significant because probably unconscious. When Clytaemnestra would rouse the Erinyes from their slumber, she cries[598],

‘Travail and Sleep, chartered conspirators,
Have spent the fell rage of the _dragoness_.’

It is of course possible to say that she uses the word ‘dragoness’ (δράκαινα) ‘poetically,’ for a monster in general, possibly a human monster; but the question is forced upon us, why is this particular monster selected? why does she say ‘dragoness’ and not rather ‘hound of hell’? In the next lines[599] comes the splendid simile of the dog hunting in dreams, and it would surely have been more ‘poetical’ to keep the figure intact. But language and associations sometimes break through the best regulated conceptions, and deep, very deep in the Greek mind lay the notion that the Erinys, the offended ghost, was a snake. The notion of the earth demon, the ghost as snake, will be considered when hero-worship is dealt with (p. 326). For the present it can only be noted in Aeschylus as an outcrop of a lower stratum of thought, a stratum in which the Erinys was not yet an abstracted or even humanized minister of vengeance, but simply an angry ghost in snake form.

The use of the singular number, ‘dragoness,’ is, in itself, significant. The Erinyes as ministers of vengeance are indefinitely multiplied, but the old ghost-Erinys is one, not many; she is the ghost of the murdered mother. Clytaemnestra herself is the real ‘dragoness,’ though she does not know it, and by a curious unconscious reminiscence the Erinyes sleep till she, the true Erinys, rouses them.

The mention by Aeschylus of the ‘dragoness’ does not stand alone. To Euripides also the Erinys is a snake. In the _Iphigeneia in Tauris_[600] the mad Orestes cries to Pylades,

‘Dost see her, her the Hades-snake who gapes
To slay me, with dread vipers, open-mouthed?’

Here it can hardly be said that the conception is borrowed from Aeschylus, for assuredly the stage Erinyes of Aeschylus, as he consciously conceived them, were in no wise snakes. Moreover the ‘Hades-snake’ confuses the effect of the ‘dread vipers’ that follow. In his _Orestes_ also[601] Euripides makes the Erinyes ‘maidens with the forms of snakes,’ where it is straining language, and quite needlessly, to say that the word δρακοντώδεις means ‘having snakes in their hands or hair.’

Art too has these harkings back to the primitive snake form. The design in fig. 53 is from a black-figured amphora in the Vatican Museum[602], dating about the turn of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. We have the usual striding flying type, the four wings, the huntress boots—a type of which, as has been shown, it is hard to say whether it represents Gorgon or Harpy. There is no context to decide. One thing is clear. The vase-painter is afraid that we shall miss his meaning, shall not understand that this winged thing striding through the air is an earth demon, so he paints below, moving _pari passu_, a great snake. The winged demon _is_ also a snake[603].

Most clearly of all the identity of ghost and snake comes out in the vase-painting in fig. 54 from an archaic vase of the type known as ‘prothesis’ vases, in the Museum at Athens[604]. They are a class used in funeral ceremonies and decorated with funeral subjects. Two mourners stand by a grave tumulus, itself surmounted by a funeral vase. Within the tumulus the vase-painter depicts what he believes to be there. Winged eidola, ghosts, and a great snake, also a ghost. Snake and eidolon are but two ways of saying the same thing. The little fluttering figures here represented are merely harmless Keres, not angry vindictive Erinyes, but when the Erinys developes into an avenger she yet remembers that she is a snake-ghost.

The Gorgon, too, has her snakes. To the primitive Greek mind every bogey was earth-born. In the design in fig. 55[605] we have the slaying of the Gorgon Medusa. The inscriptions are not clearly legible, but the scene is evident. Perseus attended by Athene and one of the nymphs, who gave him the kibisis and helmet and winged sandals, is about to slay Medusa. Medusa is of the usual Gorgon type, but she holds in her hand a huge snake, the double of herself.

But the crowning evidence as to the snake-form of the Erinys is literary, Clytaemnestra’s dream in the _Choephori_. Clytaemnestra dreams that she gives birth to and suckles a snake[606]. Dr Verrall (ad loc.) has pointed out that the snake is here the regular symbol of things subterranean and especially of the grave, and he conjectures that the snake may have been presented to the eyes of the audience by ‘the visible tomb of Agamemnon which would presumably be marked as a tomb in the usual way.’ I would go a step further. The snake is more than the symbol of the dead; it is, I believe, the actual vehicle of the Erinys. The Erinys is in this case not the ghost of the dead Agamemnon, but the dead Agamemnon’s son Orestes. The symbol proper to the ghost-Erinys is transferred to the living avenger. Orestes states this clearly[607]:

‘Myself in serpent’s shape
Will slay her.’

And this, not merely because he is deadly as a snake, but because he _is_ the snake, i.e. the Erinys.

Again, when Clytaemnestra cries for mercy, Orestes answers[608]:

‘Nay, for my father’s fate _hisses_ thy doom.’

The snake-Erinys in the _Eumenides_, and here again in the _Choephori_, remains of course merely an incidental survival, important mainly as marking the road Aeschylus has left far behind. It is an almost unconscious survival of a tradition that conceived of the Erinyes as actually ghosts, not merely as the ministers of ghostly vengeance.

Before we leave the snake-Erinys, one more vase-painting must be cited, which brings this conception very vividly before us. The design in fig. 56 is from an early black-figured amphora of the class known as ‘Tyrrhenian,’ formerly in the Bourguignon collection at Naples[609]. The figure of a woman just murdered lies prostrate over an omphalos-shaped tomb. The warrior who has slain her escapes with drawn sword to the right. But too late. Straight out of the tomb, almost indeed out of the body of the woman, rises a huge snake, mouthing at the murderer. The intent is clear; it is the snake-Erinys rising in visible vengeance. The murderer is probably Alcmaeon, who has just slain his mother Eriphyle. His story, already discussed (p. 220), is as it were the double of that of Orestes. The interpretation as Alcmaeon is not quite certain. It does not however affect the general sense of the scene, i.e. a murderer pursued by the instant vengeance of a snake-Erinys.

* * * * *

Before passing to the shift from Erinyes to Semnae it may be well to note that another tragedian—priest as well as poet—held to the more primitive view, realized definitely that the Erinyes, the avengers, were merely angry implacable Keres. To Sophocles in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_[610] Apollo is the minister, not, as in the _Eumenides_, of reconciliation, but of vengeance. He has taken over the functions of the Erinyes. With the lightning and fire of his father Zeus he leaps full-armed upon the guilty man; but even Apollo cannot dispense with the ancient avengers. With him

‘Dread and unerring
Follow the Keres.’

The Keres here are certainly regarded as a kind of Fate, but to translate the word ‘Fates’ is to precipitate unduly the meaning. The words calls up in the poet’s mind[611], not only the notion of ministers of vengeance, but also the reminiscence of ghostly fluttering things. He says of the guilty man:

‘Fierce as a bull is he,
Homeless, with desolate foot he seeks to flee
The dooms of Gaia’s central mound.
In vain, they live and flit ever around.’

Again, in the _Electra_ of Euripides[612], though the Erinyes are fully personified as dog-faced goddesses, yet they are also Keres.

‘They hunt you like dread Keres, goddesses
Dog-faced, in circling madness.’

Here the word Keres seems to be used because Moirae is of too beneficent and omnipotent association; Keres keeps the touch of personal ghostly vengeance.

* * * * *

To resume: the Erinyes are attributive epithets of ghosts, formless in Homer, but gradually developed by literature, and especially by the genius of Aeschylus, into actual impersonations. In accordance with this merely attributive origin it is not strange that quâ Erinyes their cult is practically non-existent. In only one instance do we hear of a definite place of worship for the Erinyes _as such_. Herodotus[613] tells us that at Sparta the children of the clan of the Aegidae ‘did not survive.’ Accordingly in obedience to an oracle the Aegidae ‘made a sanctuary to the Erinyes of Laios and Oedipus.’

Here the Erinyes are plainly offended ancestral ghosts destructive to the offspring of their descendants, and demanding to be appeased. In so far as they are ghosts, the ghosts of murdered or outraged men, the Erinyes were of course everywhere propitiated, but rarely under their ‘Angry’ name. That the natural prudence of euphemism forbade. As abstract ministers of vengeance we have no evidence of their worship. Clytaemnestra[614] indeed recounts in detail her dread service to the Erinyes, but when closely examined it is found to be merely the regular ritual of the dead and of underworld divinities; it has all the accustomed marks, the ‘wineless libations’ and the ‘nephalia for propitiation, the banquets by night’ offered on the low brazier (ἐσχάρα) characteristic of underworld sacrifice (p. 62). The hour was one, she adds, ‘shared by none of the gods.’ What she means is none of the gods of the upper air, the Olympians proper: it was an hour shared by every underworld divinity. Aeschylus has in a word transferred the regular ritual of ghosts to his partially abstracted ministers of vengeance, and has thereby left unconscious witness to their real origin.

THE ‘SEMNAI THEAI.’

To these Erinyes, adjectival, cultless, ill-defined, the Venerable Goddesses (σεμναὶ θεαί) present a striking contrast. If the Erinyes owe such substance and personality as they have mainly to poets, to Homer first, later to Aeschylus and the other tragedians, with the Semnae it is quite otherwise. Their names are of course adjectival—almost all primitive cultus names are—but from the first, as we know them, they are personal and local. The Erinyes range over earth and sea, the Semnae are seated quietly and steadfastly at Athens. They are the objects of a strictly local cult, never emerging to Pan-Hellenic importance. But for the fact that Aeschylus was an Athenian we should scarcely have realized their existence; they would have remained obscure local figures like the Ablabiae and the Praxidikae.

In this connection it is of cardinal importance that, though we are apt to speak of them as the Semnae, the Venerable Ones, this is not their cultus title, not the fashion in which they were actually addressed at Athens. They are uniformly spoken of, not as the Venerable Ones, but as the Venerable Goddesses[615] (αἱ σεμναὶ θεαί). The distinction is important. It marks the fact that the Semnae from the first moment they come into our view have attained a complete anthropomorphism, have passed from ghosts to goddesses[616]; they are clearly defined personalities with a definite cultus; they are primitive forms, in fact _the_ primitive forms, of earth goddesses, of such conceptions as culminated finally in the great figures of Demeter and Kore. Other such figures are, for Athens the two Thesmophoroi, who are indeed but developments, other aspects, of the Semnae; for Eleusis the ‘two goddesses,’ τὼ θεώ, known to us by inscriptions and reliefs; for Aegina Damia and Auxesia; and for the rest of Greece many another local form, dual or triune, which need not now be enumerated. The process of this gradual anthropomorphism, this passage from sprite and ghost and demon to full-fledged divinity will be fully traced when we come to the ‘making of a goddess’ (p. 257). For the present it can only be noted that the term ‘goddesses’ sharply differentiates the Semnae from the Erinyes, who, save for sporadic literary mention, never attained any such rank. Euripides[617] does indeed make Orestes call the Erinyes ‘dread goddesses,’ but Aeschylus[618] is explicit: ‘their adornment (κόσμος) was neither human nor divine.’ It must be distinctly understood that, as the Semnae are goddesses, they are dealt with at this point only by anticipation, to elucidate the transformation effected by Aeschylus.

What we certainly know of the Semnae, as distinct from kindred figures such as the Eumenides, is not very much, but such as it is, is significant. We know the site of their sanctuary, something of the aspect of their images, something also of their functions and of the nature of their ritual. We know in fact enough, as will be shown, to feel sure that like the Erinyes they were underworld potencies, ghosts who had become goddesses. The origin of the two conceptions is the same, but their development widely different, and moreover we catch it arrested at a different stage.

It is obvious from the play of the _Eumenides_ that the worship of the Semnae at Athens was of hoary antiquity. It is true that Diogenes Laertius[619] states (on the authority of the augur Lobon) that the sanctuary of the Semnae at Athens was founded by Epimenides. The scene of the operations of Epimenides was undoubtedly the Areopagos, but, as the purification of Athens took place in the 46th Olympiad, the statement that he founded the sanctuary must be apocryphal. Very likely he may have revived and restored the cult. Diogenes says that he took a number of black and white sheep and led them up to the Areopagos and thence let them go whither they would, and he commanded those who followed them to sacrifice each of them wherever the sheep happened to lie down, and so the plague would be stayed. Whence even now, adds Diogenes, you may find in the Athenian demes nameless altars in memory of this atonement. Some such altar as this was still to be seen at or near the Areopagos when St Paul preached there, and such an altar may have got associated with the Semnae, who like many other underworld beings were Nameless Ones.

The site of the worship of the Semnae was undoubtedly some sort of cave or natural chasm amplified artificially into a sanctuary. Such caves, clefts or chasms are, as has already been shown (p. 125), the proper haunts of underworld beings; they are also usually, though not uniformly, primitive. Of the sanctuary and the cultus images Pausanias[620] speaks as follows. After describing the Areopagos and the two unwrought stones called ‘Transgression’ (ὕβρις) and ‘Pitilessness’ (ἀναιδεία) on which accused and accuser stood, he says ‘And near is a sanctuary (ἱερόν) of the goddesses whom the Athenians call Semnae, but Hesiod in the _Theogony_ calls Erinyes. Aeschylus represents them with snakes in their hair, but in their images there is nothing frightful, nor in the other images of the underworld gods that are set up. There is a Pluto also and a Hermes and an image of Ge. And there those who have been acquitted in a suit before the Areopagos sacrifice. And others besides sacrifice, both strangers and citizens, and within the enclosure there is the tomb of Oedipus.’

Pausanias by his reference to Aeschylus betrays at once the source of his identification of the Semnae with the Erinyes. The statement cannot be taken as evidence that prior to Aeschylus any such identification was current. After the time of Aeschylus, classical writers, except when they are quoting ritual formularies, begin to accept the fusion and use the names Erinyes, Eumenides, and Semnae as interchangeable terms. A like laxity unhappily obtains among modern commentators.

The statement of Pausanias, that about the cultus images of the Semnae there was nothing frightful, is important, as showing how foreign to the Semnae was the terror-haunted conception of the tragic Erinys. Aeschylus might fuse the Erinyes and the Semnae at will, but the cultus images of the Semnae take on no attribute of the Erinyes. About these cultus images we learn something more from the scholiast on Aeschines[621]. Commenting on the Semnae he says ‘These were three in number and were called Venerable Goddesses, or Eumenides, or Erinyes. Two of them were made of lychnites stone by Scopas the Parian, but the middle one by Kalamis.’ Here again we must of course discount the statement as regards the triple appellation, at least for a date preceding Aeschylus. The number of the statues is noticeable. At the time when the scholiast or his informant[622] wrote the images were unquestionably three. The origin and significance of the female trinities will be considered later (p. 286). For the present it is sufficient to note that the trinity was probably a later stage of development than the duality. From the notice of the scholiast we cannot be certain that the images were _originally_ three; nay more, it looks as if there was some reminiscence of a duality. Moreover the scholiast on the _Oedipus Coloneus_[623] expressly states that according to Phylarchus the images of the Semnae at Athens were two in number. He adds that according to Polemon they were three. That the number three ultimately prevailed is highly probable, indeed practically certain. The scholiast on Aeschines goes on to say ‘the court of the Areopagos adjudged murder cases on three days in each month, assigning one day to each goddess.’ The three days were probably a primitive institution, three being a number sacred to the dead, and these three days may have helped the development of the threefold form of the Semnae. Later in considering the Charites and other kindred shapes (p. 286) it will be shown that many different strands went to the weaving of a trinity. The strictly definite number of the Semnae, be it two or three, is in marked contrast to the indefinite ‘wondrous throng’ (θαυμαστὸς λόχος) of the Aeschylean Erinyes. The contrast may have been softened, if in the concluding scene the chorus of Erinyes filed away in groups of three.

The sanctuary of the Semnae was, in the narrower sense of the word ‘sanctuary,’ a refuge for suppliants. This is, of course, a trait that it has in common with many other precincts. Thucydides[624] tells how in the conspiracy of Kylon some of the conspirators sat down at the altars of the Venerable Goddesses, and were put to death at the entrance. A monument, the Kyloneion, was put up close to the Nine Gates to expiate the pollution. Plutarch[625], in his account of this same conspiracy, adds a curious primitive touch: the conspirators connected themselves with the image of ‘the goddess’ by a thread, believing thereby they would remain immune; the thread broke of its own accord when they reached the Semnae; this was taken as an omen of rejection and they were put to death. Aristophanes twice alludes to the precinct of the Semnae as a place of sanctuary. In the Knights[626], he makes the outraged triremes say

‘If this is what the Athenians like, we must needs set sail forthwith
And sit us down in the Theseion or in the Semnae’s shrine.’

In the _Thesmophoriazusae_[627], when Mnesilochus is about to make off in a fright, Euripides asks

‘You villain, where are you off to?’

and the answer is

‘To the shrine of the Semnae.’

It is noticeable that in both these cases the name given to the goddesses of sanctuary is Semnae, not Erinyes or Eumenides. The confusion of the three was never local, only literary, and by the time of Aristophanes it has not yet begun.

Euripides[628] is our solitary authority for the fact that the sanctuary was also oracular. At the close of the _Electra_ he makes the Dioscuri, in a speech not untinged by irony, prophesy that Orestes, pursued by the Erinyes, will come to Athens and be acquitted by the equal vote, and that in consequence the baffled Erinyes will descend in dudgeon into a subterranean cleft hard by the Areopagos:

‘A mantic shrine,
Sacred, adored of mortals.’

Oracular functions were ascribed to most, if not all, underworld divinities, so that it is quite probable that the description of the Dioscuri is correct.

* * * * *

The sanctuary of the Semnae was open to suppliants and to those who sought oracular counsel, but to one unfortunate class of the community, happily a small one, it was rigidly closed. These were the people known as ‘second-fated’ or ‘later-doomed.’ Hesychius[629], in explaining the term ‘second-fated’ (δευτερόποτμος), says ‘he is called by some “later-doomed.” So a man is termed when the accustomed rites have been performed as though he were dead, and later on he reappears alive; and Polemon says that to such it was forbidden to enter the sanctuary of the Venerable Goddesses. The term is also used of a man who is reported to have died abroad and then comes home, and again of a man who passes a second time through the folds of a woman’s garment, as was the custom among the Athenians in a case of second birth.’

This curious statement is fortunately explained to us in instructive detail by Plutarch in the answer to his 5th _Roman Question_. He there says ‘Those who have had a funeral and sepulture as though they were dead are accounted by the Greeks as not pure, and they will not associate with them, nor will they permit them to approach sanctuaries. And they say that a certain Aristinus, who believed in this superstition, sent to Delphi to enquire of the god and to ask release from the disabilities this custom imposed on him, and the Pythian made answer:

“Whatsoe’er is accomplished by woman that travails in childbed,
That in thy turn having done, sacrifice thou to the gods.”

And Aristinus being a good and wise man gave himself up, like a new-born child, to the women to wash and swaddle and suckle, and all the others who were called “later-doomed” did the like.’ ‘But,’ adds Plutarch, and doubtless most justly, ‘some say that these things were done with respect to the “later-doomed” before Aristinus did them, and the custom was an ancient one.’

Plutarch says the exclusion was from all sacred rites. In this he is probably mistaken. Anyhow in the case of the Semnae, and of all underworld divinities, the significance is clear. If a man comes back to life after burial rites, the reason to the primitive mind is that there is something wrong with him; he is rejected by the powers below and unfit to mingle with his fellows in the world above; he is highly taboo. Despised of the gods, he is naturally rejected of his fellow men. The only chance for him is to be born again.

When we come to the ritual of the Semnae every detail confirms the view that they are underworld beings. From Aeschylus himself[630] we know that σφάγια, animal sacrifices consumed but not eaten, were offered to them. Athene bids the Erinyes, after they have turned Semnae,

‘pass below the earth
With these your sacred sphagia.’

The underworld nature of _sphagia_—the word has no English equivalent—has been fully discussed (p. 63). In careful writers, as has been seen, it is never interchangeable with ἱερεῖα, victims sacrificed and eaten.

The scholiast on Sophocles[631] speaks of the holocaust of a black sheep to the Eumenides, whom he identifies with the Semnae; but, as he expressly states that this sacrifice took place in the Peloponnese, we cannot safely attribute it to the local Semnae of Athens. It is probable that σφάγια formed part of the regular sacrifice mentioned by Pausanias as offered to the Semnae by the acquitted; σφάγια belong, as has already been shown, to the class of expiatory offerings. It was on σφάγια, which were also called τόμια, that oaths were taken (p. 64) in the law courts, oaths the extraordinary solemnity of which Demosthenes[632] emphasizes. A man so swearing stood on the fragments of victims officially and solemnly slain, and devoted himself and his household to destruction in case of perjury. By standing on the slain fragments he identifies himself proleptically with them. We have no explicit statement that the divinities by whom these awful oaths on the τόμια had to be taken were the Semnae, but as the Semnae were the underworld divinities resident on the Areopagos, and as they were frequently invoked with the local heroes, and as sacrifice was done to them by the acquitted, it seems highly probable. If they were the goddesses of oaths, this is another link with the Erinyes, the avengers of oaths. It is notable that in an ordinary imprecation in the law-courts they take precedence of Athene herself. Thus Demosthenes[633] says, ‘I call to witness the Venerable Goddesses, and the place they inhabit, and the heroes of the soil, and Athene of the city, and the other gods who have the city and the land in their dominion.’

We learn from Philo[634] that no slave was allowed to take part in the processions of the Semnae. This in a worship of special antiquity and solemnity is natural enough. But it is strange to hear from Polemon[635] that there was the same taboo on all the Eupatrids. Strange at first sight, but easily explicable. The Semnae are women divinities, and in this taboo on the Eupatrids there seems to lurk a survival of matriarchal conditions. Aeschylus in the _Eumenides_ is not concerned, save incidentally, to emphasize the issue between matriarchy and patriarchy, between kinship through the mother and through the father, but it lies at the back of the legend he has chosen for his plot. The stories of Orestes and Clytaemnestra, of Alcmaeon and Eriphyle, are deep-rooted in matriarchy—both look back to the days when the only relationship that could be proved, and that therefore was worth troubling about, was that through the mother; and hence special vengeance attends the slayer of the mother. In the light of this it is easy to understand why in the worship of the Semnae the family of Eupatrids—those well-born through their fathers—had no part. For them Apollo Patrôos was the fitter divinity. The family of the Eupatrids had their own rites of expiation, ancestral rites significantly called πάτρια, paternal. These rites as described by Dorotheos have been already discussed (p. 60).

The name of the family that held the priesthood of the Semnae is also recorded; they were the Hesychidae whom Hesychius[636] describes as ‘a family of well-born people at Athens.’ Polemon is again our authority for connecting these ‘Silent Ones’ with the cult of the Semnae. He is quoted by the scholiast already cited (p. 246 note). In commenting on the expression ‘uttering words inaudible’ the scholiast says ‘This is from the sacrifice performed to the Eumenides. For they enact the sacred rites in silence, and on account of this the descendants of Hesychos (the Silent One) sacrifice to them, as Polemon says in his writings about Eratosthenes, thus: “the family of the Eupatrids has no share in this sacrifice”; and then further, “in this procession the Hesychidae, which is the family that has to do with the Venerable Goddesses, take the lead.” And before the sacrifice they make a preliminary sacrifice of a ram to Hesychos ... giving him this name because of the ritual silence observed. His sanctuary is by the Kyloneion outside the Nine Gates.’

Though these remarks of the scholiast are prompted by the cult of the Eumenides at Colonos, it is quite clear that Polemon is speaking of the Semnae at Athens. He states three important facts. The cult of the Semnae was in the hands of a clan descended from a hero called aetiologically ‘the Silent One.’ Sacrifice to the goddesses was regularly preceded by the sacrifice of a ram to the eponymous hero. That hero had a sanctuary of his own outside the Nine Gates of the old Pelasgic fortification, and near the historic monument of Kylon. The name ‘Silent One’ is possibly a mere cultus epithet, used to preserve safely the anonymity of the hero; heroes, as will later (p. 340) be seen, are dangerous persons to mention. On the other hand Hesychos may have been the actual name of a real hero, and after his death it may have seemed charged with religious significance. This seems quite possible, the more so as the name was adopted by the whole family. The female form Hesychia was a proper name in the days of Nikias, and it is curious to find that even then an omen could be drawn from it. Plutarch[637] recounts that when the Athenians were taking omens before the Syracusan expedition an oracle ordered them to fetch a priestess of Athene from Clazomenae. They found, when they got her, that her name was Hesychia; and this seemed ‘a divine indication that they should remain quiet.’

The scholiast speaks of Hesychidae, male members of the family of Hesychos, but if we may trust Callimachus[638] it was the women of the family who brought burnt-offerings; and these offerings were, as we should expect, wineless libations and honey-sweet cakes. The name of the priestesses was according to Callimachus λῄτειραι, and it is no doubt from this source that Hesychius[639] gets his gloss, ‘Leteirai, priestesses of the Semnae.’

The Semnae were women divinities served by priestesses, and it is noticeable that Athene, who was ‘all for the father,’ promises to the Erinyes that, if they become Semnae, they shall have worshippers, both men and women[640]. But when the procession to the cave is actually formed, in strict accordance no doubt with the traditional ritual of the place, it is women attendants who bring the ancient image,

‘A goodly band,
Maidens and wives and throng of ancient dames[641].’

It can scarcely be doubted that among these ancient dames were members of the clan of Hesychids.

Aeschylus[642] has left us other notes of underworld significance in the ritual of the Semnae. When the procession is forming for the cave Athene speaks:

‘Do on your festal garments crimson-dyed
For meed of honour, bid the torches flame—
So henceforth these our visitants shall bless
Our land and folk with shining of their grace.’

Athene proffers for guerdon to the Semnae the ritual that as underworld goddesses was already theirs, torches and crimson raiment.

In connection with the torches it cannot be forgotten that some, though possibly not all, the sittings of the court of the Areopagos took place by night, doubtless in honour of the underworld goddesses who presided. In Lucian’s time, at least, these sittings were almost proverbial. He says of a man perceiving with difficulty[643], ‘unless he chance to be stone-blind or like the Council of the Areopagos which gives its hearing by night’: and again in the _Hermotimus_[644] ‘he is doing it like the Areopagites who give judgment in darkness.’ To these sittings in the night-time it may be that Athene refers when she says[645]

‘This court I set, untouched of gain, revered,
Alert, a wakeful guard o’er those who sleep.’

The garments of crimson or purple dye point to a ritual of placation and the service of the underworld. This is clearly shown in the details given by Plutarch[646] of the rites of placation performed annually for those who fell in the battle of Plataea. ‘On the 16th day of the month Maimakterion the archon of Plataea, who on other days may not touch iron nor wear any garment that is not white, puts on a crimson chiton and taking a hydria and girded with a sword goes to the sepulchres. There with water from the spring he washes the stelae and anoints them with myrrh; he slays a black bull, prays to Zeus and Hermes Chthonios, and invokes to the banquet and the bloodshed the heroes who died for Greece.’

The crimson-purple is blood colour[647], hence it is ordained for the service of the dead. It has already been noted (p. 144) that Dion[648] when he took the great oath in the Thesmophorion identified himself with Kore of the underworld by putting on her crimson robe and holding a burning torch. Purple, Pliny[649] tells us, was employed when gods had to be appeased.

The purple robes, the torches, the night-time, above all the σφάγια, point to a dread underworld ritual, a ritual that shows clearly that the darker side of the Venerable Ones was not far remote from the Erinyes. But Aeschylus, whose whole mind is bent on a doctrine of mercy, naturally emphasizes the brighter side of their functions and worship. Athene[650] herself knows that they are underworld goddesses, that they must have low-lying altars and underground dwellings; only so seated will they ever feel really at home. She remembers even that for their feast they must have the wineless sacrifice that drives them mad[651]; but she bids them leave this madness, and they for their part promise that the earth, their kingdom as vengeful ghosts, shall cease to drink the black blood of citizens. Henceforth they will be content with the white side of their service[652].

‘From this great land, thine is the sacrifice
Of first-fruits offered for accomplishment
Of marriage and for children[653].’

Again Athene offers what was theirs from the beginning. Underworld goddesses presided over marriage: in later days, as Plutarch[654] tells us, it was the priestess of Demeter; earlier we can scarcely doubt it was the Semnae. Here they stand in sharp contrast to the Erinyes, who are all black. Who would have bidden an Erinys to a marriage feast? as well bid Eris who, in form (fig. 57) and function as perhaps in name, was but another Erinys, Eris

‘The Abominable, who uninvited came
And cast the golden fruit upon the board.’

The Erinyes transformed to Semnae ask Athene what spells they shall chant over the land. She makes answer[655]:

‘Whatever charms wait on fair Victory
From earth, from dropping dew and from high heaven,
The wealth of winds that blow to hail the land
Sunlit, and fruits of earth and teeming flocks
Untouched of time, safety for human seed.’

The chorus accept these functions of health and life, and chant their promised guerdon[656].

‘No wind to wither trees shall blow,
By our grace it shall be so;
Nor that nor shrivelling heat
On budding plants shall beat
With parching drouth
To waste their growth,
Nor any plague of dismal blight come creeping;
But teeming, doubled flocks the earth
In her season shall bring forth,
And evermore a wealthy race
Pay reverence for this our grace
Of spirits that have the rich earth in their keeping.’

We are reminded that Ploutos himself, the Wealth of the underworld, had, according to Pausanias[657], a statue in the precinct of the Venerable Goddesses. Moreover it is impossible to hear the words ‘no wind to wither trees shall blow’ without recalling the altar of the Wind-stillers (Εὐδάνεμοι), which stood somewhere on the western slope of the Areopagos. Arrian[658], speaking of the statues of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, says ‘they stand at Athens in the Cerameicus where we go up to the citadel, just opposite the Metrôon not far from the altar of the Wind-stillers. Whoever has been initiated in the Eleusinia knows the altar of the Wind-stillers which stands on the ground.’ A low-lying altar doubtless, an eschara, for, as has already been shown (p. 65), the winds were to primitive thinking ghosts or caused by ghosts and worshipped with underworld sacrifices. Hesychius[659] tells us that there was at Corinth a family called the Wind-calmers. The Areopagos was a wind-swept hill. It was thence, according to a form of the legend recorded by Plato[660], that Boreas caught up Oreithyia.

The Semnae claim as their special ‘grace[661]’ control over the winds. As goddesses who bring the blessings of marriage and of fertile breezes, they are but good fructifying Keres like the Tritopatores already discussed (p. 179); the Erinyes are blighting poisonous Keres, who Harpy-like foul the food by which men live.

* * * * *

The Erinyes, in the play of Aeschylus, are transformed into Semnae, into the local goddesses of Athens. Of this there is no shadow of doubt. They accept the citizenship of Pallas[662], and they are actually hailed as Semnae[663]. Aeschylus it is true never definitely states that they entered the cleft of the Areopagos, but Euripides, manifestly borrowing from him, is as has been seen explicit.

Such a conversion may have been gratifying to the patriotism of an Athenian audience, but Athenian though he is, it is not the glorification of a local cult that inspires Aeschylus; it is the reconciliation of the old order of vengeance with the new law of mercy. It is significant in this connection that Aeschylus, or some one who took his meaning, gave to the play the title, not as we should expect of _Semnae_, but of _Eumenides_. The moral of the play is thereby emphasized.

It is, to say the least, curious that a play called traditionally, if not by the author, the ‘_Eumenides_’ should contain no single mention of the Eumenides by this name. Harpocration[664], commenting on the word Eumenides, says ‘Aeschylus _in the Eumenides_, recounting what happened about the trial of Orestes, says that Athene, having mollified the Erinyes so that they did not deal harshly with Orestes, called them Eumenides.’ Aeschylus says no such thing. The text of the play contains no mention of the Eumenides, though in the hypothesis prefixed to the text occur the following words: ‘Having prevailed by the counsel of Athene, he (Orestes) went to Argos, and when he had mollified the Erinyes he addressed them as Eumenides[665].’ Harpocration attributes to Athene in the play what the hypothesis notes as done by Orestes in the sequel at Argos. By his use of the word ‘mollified’ (πραΰνασα) he betrays, I think, the source of his information. It must always be remembered that the Orestes legend was native to Argos and at Argos the local cult was of Eumenides not Semnae.

THE EUMENIDES.

The worship of divinities bearing the name of Eumenides, though unknown at Athens[666], was wider-spread than that of the Semnae, which is found nowhere outside Attica. It was possibly for this reason that Aeschylus or later tradition gave this name to the play. The Semnae were familiar figures at Athens, and, spite of many underworld analogies, the shift from Erinyes to Semnae must have been a difficult one. A great deal is borne for the glory of the gods, but there must have been among the audience men conservative and hard-headed who would be likely to maintain that, all said and done, the Erinyes were not, could not be, Semnae. If asked to believe that the Erinyes became Eumenides, they would feel and probably say: that is a matter for Colonos, for Argos, for Sekyon to consider; it affects no Athenian’s faith or practice. At Colonos it is certain that goddesses were worshipped who bore the name of Eumenides, goddesses of function and ritual precisely identical with the Semnae, but addressed by a different cultus epithet. We have the express statement of Sophocles[667], who, as a priest himself and a conservative, was not likely to tamper with ritual titles. He makes Oedipus ask the stranger who they are whose dread name he is to invoke. The answer is explicit:

‘Eumenides all-seeing here the folk
Would call them: other names please otherwhere.’

Sophocles no doubt shows the influence of Aeschylus in his ‘other names please otherwhere.’ He realizes that Eumenides and Semnae are ‘one form of diverse names[668].’ This truth it was the mission of the reconciling monotheist always to preach, but he would scarcely dare to tamper with the familiar titles of a local cult. In fact by this very statement, that elsewhere the goddesses bore other names, he makes the local appellation certain. He may indeed have brought Oedipus to Colonos rather than to the Areopagos, where he had also a grave, just because the local attributive title of the goddesses at Colonos suited the gentle moral of his play.

Again when Oedipus asks to be taught to pray aright, the Chorus lay emphasis on the title Eumenides.

‘That, as we call them Kindly, from kind hearts
They may receive the suppliant[669].’

So strong is the exclusiveness of local cults that, had the title of Eumenides occurred only at Colonos, neither Aeschylus nor tradition would perhaps have ventured to assume it for the Semnae. But from Pausanias we learn of sanctuaries of the Eumenides at Titane[670] near Sekyon, at Cerynaea[671] in Achaia, and in Arcadia near Megalopolis[672]. The sanctuary between Sekyon and Titane consisted of a grove and a temple. Pausanias expressly says these belonged to the goddesses whom the Athenians called Semnae and the Sikyonians Eumenides. The festival in their honour was a yearly one, and has already been discussed (p. 56). Tradition said that the sanctuary at Cerynaea was founded by Orestes, and that ‘if any one stained by blood or any other pollution, or impious, entered the sanctuary wishing to see it, he straightway went out of his wits by the terrors he beheld. The images in it were made of wood[673] ... and they were not large.’ The ritual of the sanctuary at Megalopolis, with its black and white sides, addressed severally to the goddesses as Madnesses (Maniae) and Kindly Ones (Eumenides), has already been noted (p. 56). To the Madnesses Orestes sacrifices, it will be remembered, with underworld rites to avert their wrath; to the Kindly Ones when healed, and after the same fashion as to the gods; the clearest possible instance of two stages of development in ritual and theology, of ἀποτροπή side by side with θεραπεία.

To these four instances of the cult of the Eumenides a fifth may safely be added, the sanctuary at or near Argos. Of any such sanctuary we have no literary record, but we have what is of even greater value—monumental evidence. Three votive reliefs dedicated to the Eumenides have been found at the little church of Hag. Johannes, about half-an-hour to the east of the modern village of Argos[674]. They are still preserved in the local museum of the Demarchy. The material of all three is the hard local limestone, and they must have been set up in a local sanctuary. The sanctuary of Titane was nearly twenty miles away, too far to admit of any theory of transportation. All three are inscribed, and in each the dedicator is a woman. The relief reproduced in fig. 58 was found built into the outside of the Church of Hag. Johannes. It is clearly inscribed Εὐμενίσιν εὐχάν, a vow or prayer to the Eumenides. The beginning of the inscription is lost, but enough remains, ...η Α...εία, to show that a woman dedicated it, and that she was probably an Argive. It is a woman’s offering, but she likes to have her husband carved upon it and she lets him walk first. Perhaps he went with her to the sanctuary and offered sacrifice of honey and water and flowers and a ewe great with young[675].

‘The first-fruits offered for accomplishment
Of marriage and for children.’

About the figures of the Eumenides at Argos, as of the Semnae at Athens, ‘there is nothing frightful.’ These are not the short-girt huntress women of the vases, nor yet the loathly black horrors of tragedy; they are gentle, staid, matronly figures, bearing in their left hands, for tokens of fertility, flowers or fruit, and in their right, snakes[676] as the symbols, not of terror and torture, but merely of that source of wealth, the underworld; but for the snakes, which lend a touch of austerity, they would be Charites (p. 297). From the inscriptions these reliefs are certainly known to be later than Aeschylus, but because a poet writes a great play at Athens the local stonemason does not alter the type of the votive offerings he supplies. Why should he frighten pious women and perhaps lose his custom? The Erinys of tragedy took strong hold of literature, but even at Athens there was a sceptic to whom the great conversion scene was merely absurd. If we may trust Suidas[677], the comic poet Philemon held to it that ‘the Semnae were quite other than the Eumenides,’ and we may be sure that the humour of the situation attempted would lose nothing in his hands. Great though the influence of Aeschylus over the educated undoubtedly was, it was powerless to alter traditional types in art; equally powerless we may be sure to abate or alter one jot or one tittle of hieratic ceremonial. The Erinyes remained Erinyes, and in popular bogey form went, as has been seen (p. 232), to people with horrors a Christian hell. Man was not ready yet to worship only the Kindly Ones. For generations, nay centuries, he must bear the hard yoke of ἀποτροπή before he might offer to gods remade in his own image the free-will offering of a kindly θεραπεία.