Once Orestes has killed his mother and her lover Aegisthus, however, he discovers that he has enmeshed himself in a cycle of revenge that is unending: one murder begets another. Unlike the unscathed Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey whose serial revenge has enabled him to regain his wife and his throne, Orestes suffers mightily for what appeared to be a god-sanctioned act of murder. The Furies (or Erinyes)39 haunt him: “Women who serve this house, they come like gorgons, they / wear robes of black, and they are wreathed in a tangle / of snakes. I can no longer stay.”40 He becomes an outcast, and the Furies, “utterly repulsive,”41 stalk him, demanding their own retribution.42 Orestes cannot rule in his rightful place, and he flees his land unable to rest anywhere without the omnipresent Furies. The Furies are a unique composite image created by Aeschylus, who drew them partly from the Keres, the ghosts of those murdered who cry out for vengeance, and partly from an image depicting a source of physical infection capable of poisoning the land (in keeping with the pollution doctrine). The revenge sought by the Furies, then, is both individual representing a vengeful spirit of the slain Clytemenestra, and more widespread, in that Orestes’ murders pollute the very land.
In the final play of the Oresteia, The Eumenides, Aeschylus depicts the difficulties and intricacies of a transition from private revenge to state judgment. Orestes, still fleeing the Furies, becomes a suppliant to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, a very different Athena than the vengeful goddess present in the final books of the Odyssey. Athena asks to hear both sides. The Furies’ indictment is brief, to the point, and reflects the basic principle of blood feuds that the intent of the wrongdoer is irrelevant:43 “He murdered his mother by deliberate choice.”44 Orestes then makes his argument:
He [Agamemnon] died without honor when he came home. It was my mother of the dark heart, who entangled him in subtle gyves and cut him down, the bath is witness to his death. I was an exile in the time before this. I came back and killed the woman who gave me birth. I plead guilty. My father was dear, and this was vengeance for his blood. Apollo shares responsibility for this. He counter-spurred my heart and told me of pains to come if I should fail to act against the guilty ones. This is my case.45
Athena, in a dramatic shift away from earlier practices that left decisions about vengeance to individuals and families, characterizes the “matter as too big for any mortal man”46 and that even she, a goddess, does not have the right “to analyze cases of murder where wrath’s edge is sharp.”47 At the same time, Aeschylus presents her as wise enough to see the consequences of ignoring the Furies: “yet these, too, have their work. We cannot brush them aside, / and if this action so runs that they fail to win, / the venom of their resolution will return / to infect the soil, and sicken all my land to death.”48 Orestes’ dilemma becomes Athena’s dilemma when the Furies agree to turn their authority to avenge murder over to Athena. She, the goddess of wisdom, recognizes her problem and sets up a court: “Here is dilemma. / Whether I let them stay or drive / them off, it is a hard course and will hurt. Then, since / the burden to the case is here, and rests on me, / I shall select judges of manslaughter, and swear / them in, establish a court into all time to come.”49 Athena refers to the conception of the pollution doctrine that held that the harm would spread from the individual to the culture at large—“infect the soil.” Yet she takes the expiation of the pollution away from the individuals seeking vengeance, the Furies, and places it in the hands of a jury of strangers to the matter.
The Oresteia provides insights into the problems that accompanied the transfer of the right to revenge to a central authority, even to the goddess of wisdom herself. The outcome may not deal well with the emotional needs of those seeking revenge.50 The ballots of the jury that Athena has selected result in a tie, and Athena casts the deciding ballot for Orestes.51 The Furies, having lost, threaten: “I, disinherited, suffering, heavy with anger / shall let loose upon the land / vindictive poison / dripping deadly out of my heart upon the ground.”52 Athena has foreseen their disappointed and angry reaction, and she placates them by offering “a place of [their] own, deep hidden under ground that is yours by right / where you shall sit on shining chairs beside the hearth / to accept devotions offered by your citizens.”53 Unconvinced at first, the Furies repeat their lament, claiming to be disinherited, mocked, dishonored. Athena pleads with them: “No, not dishonored. You are goddesses. Do not / in too much anger make this place of mortal men / uninhabitable.”54 Athena is patient with the Furies, promising that no household will prosper without their will, that she will let them have much influence and be honored. (It takes over 150 lines of dialogue between Athena and the Furies before they are convinced.) The Furies finally concede to Athena and utter these crucial lines: “I accept this home at Athena’s side,” thereby creating a complex image of vengeance at wisdom’s side, of raw unrestrained emotion incorporated into justice.55 In so doing, the Furies became transformed into the Eumenides, the “kindly ones,” a critical aspect of institutionalized law.56 They cease to be the Furies and become instead the local goddesses, contained by but also part of the legal system of Athens. As such, they are no longer frightful Gorgons but, as they came to be portrayed in artifacts, “gentle, staid, matronly figures.”57 Acknowledged and incorporated, they participate in justice but are not irrationally destructive.
But Aeschylus’ vision was overly optimistic. As various cultures worked through the shift from private revenge to state punishment, the Furies were not always accorded a “home at Athena’s side.” Instead, revenge and justice became treated as polar opposites, and the urge toward revenge was deemed reprehensible and always excessive. But the change within any culture from Aeschylus’ optimistic positioning of the Furies to their complete dismissal could not be accomplished in a single step. A culture steeped in a tradition of blood feud revenge needed transitional steps.
One of these transitional steps took on some form of the lex talionis argument, the eye-for-an-eye principle that requires that the punishment exacted equal in both form and harshness the harm received. While often interpreted as a permissive doctrine, lex talionis sanctioned equal punishment, thereby imposing a limit upon the revenge that could be taken:58 a life for a life, an injury for an injury, property for property.59 Such limitations in theory provided end points for blood feuds; once the original harm was balanced, the feud ended. In practice, of course, the parties often disagreed as to what was a fair and adequate balancing, and the feud continued indefinitely. Another means of balancing the harm was a payment of money to the victim’s relative. As early as the eighteenth century B.C., for example, the Code of Hammurabi, while adhering generally to the principle of lex talionis, attempted to limit private revenge and blood feuds.60 Many wrongs could be compensated by payment (composition) to the victim’s family or clan, the amount varying with the offense and with the status of the victim.61 Among the Assyrians and the Hittites, a rich killer could have himself replaced by another or could buy his way out of blood revenge.62 The Pelagasians of ancient Greece practiced a “tribal wergeld.”63 In Anglo-Saxon societies, the wergeld, the worth of a man, could “buy off the spear”64 and was commonly used to avenge a death.65 The consolidated laws of the Germanic tribes describe sums of money as compensations for homicides.66