THE Mycenaeans who had supported Orestes in his unheard-of action would not allow the bodies of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus to lie within their city, but buried them at some distance beyond the walls. That night, Orestes and Pylades stood guard at Clytaemnestra’s tomb, lest anyone should dare rob it; but, during their vigil, the serpent-haired, dog-headed, bat-winged Erinnyes appeared, swinging their scourges. Driven to distraction by these fierce attacks, against which Apollo’s bow of horn was of little avail, Orestes fell prostrate on a couch, where he lay for six days, his head wrapped in a cloak-refusing either to eat or to wash.
b. Old Tyndareus now arrived from Sparta, and brought a charge of matricide against Orestes, summoning the Mycenaean chieftains to judge his case. He decreed that, pending the trial, none should speak either to Orestes or Electra, and that both should be denied shelter, fire, and water. Thus Orestes was prevented even from washing his bloodstained hands. The streets of Mycenae were lined with citizens in arms; and Oeax, son of Nauplius, delighted in this opportunity to persecute Agamemnon’s children.
c. Meanwhile, Menelaus, laden with treasure, landed at Nauplia, where a fisherman told him that Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra had been murdered. He sent Helen ahead to confirm the news at Mycenae; but by night, lest the kinsmen of those who had perished at Troy should stone her. Helen, feeling ashamed to mourn in public for her sister Clytaenmestra, since she herself had caused even more bloodshed by her infidelities, asked Electra, who was now nursing the afflicted Orestes: ‘Pray, niece, take offerings of my hair and lay them on Clytaenmestra’s tomb, after pouring libations to her ghost.’ Electra, when she saw that Helen had been prevented by vanity from cutting off more than the very tips of her hair, refused to do so. ‘Send your daughter Hermione instead,’ was her curt advice. Helen thereupon summoned Hermione from the palace. She had been only a nine-year-old child when her mother eloped with Paris, and Menelaus had committed her to Clytaemnestra’s charge at the outbreak of the Trojan War; yet she recognized Helen at once and dutifully went off to do as she was told.
d. Menelaus then entered the palace, where he was greeted by his foster-father Tyndareus, clad in deep mourning, and warned not to set foot on Spartan soil until he had punished his criminal nephew and niece. Tyndareus held that Orestes should have contented himself with allowing his fellow-citizens to banish Clytaemnestra. If they had demanded her death he should have interceded on her behalf. As matters now stood, they must be persuaded, willy-nilly, that not only Orestes, but Electra who had spurred him on, should be stoned to death as matricides.
e. Fearing to offend Tyndareus, Menelaus secured the desired verdict. But at the eloquent plea of Orestes himself, who was present in court and had the support of Pylades (now disowned by Strophius for his part in the murder), the judges commuted the sentence to one of suicide. Pylades then led Orestes away, nobly refusing to desert either him or Electra, to whom he was betrothed; and proposed that, since all three must die, they should first punish Menelaus’s cowardice and disloyalty by killing Helen, the originator of every misfortune that had befallen them. While, therefore, Electra waited outside the walls to execute her own design-that of intercepting Hermione on her return from Clytaemnestra’s tomb and holding her as a hostage for Menelaus’s good behaviour-Orestes and Pylades entered the palace, with swords hidden beneath their cloaks, and took refuge at the central altar, as though they were suppliants. Helen, who sat near by, spinning wool for a purple robe to lay as a gift on Clytaemnestra’s tomb, was deceived by their lamentations, and approached to welcome them. Whereupon both drew their swords and, while Pylades chased away Helen’s Phrygian slaves, Orestes attempted to murder her. But Apollo, at Zeus’s command, rapt her in a cloud to Olympus, where she became an immortal; joining her brothers, the Dioscuri, as a guardian of sailors in distress.
f. Meanwhile, Electra had secured Hermione, led her into the palace, and barred the gates. Menelaus, seeing that death threatened his daughter, ordered an immediate rescue. His men burst open the gates, and Orestes was just about to set the palace alight, kill Hermione, and die himself either by sword or fire, when Apollo providentially appeared, wrenched the torch from his hand, and drove back Menelaus’s warriors. In the awed hush caused by his presence, Apollo commanded Menelaus to take another wife, betroth Hermione to Orestes, and return to rule over Sparta; Clytaemnestra’s murder need no longer concern him, now that the gods had intervened.
g. With wool-wreathed laurel-branch and chaplet, to show that he was under Apollo’s protection, Orestes then set out for Delphi, still pursued by the Erinnyes. The Pythian Priestess was terrified to see him crouched as a suppliant on the marble navel-stone-stained by the blood from his unwashed hands-and the hideous troop of black Erinnyes sleeping beside him. Apollo, however, reassured her by promising to act as advocate for Orestes, whom he ordered to face his ordeal with courage. After a period of exile, he must make his way to Athens, and there embrace the ancient image of Athene who, as the Dioscuri had already prophesied, would shield him with her Gorgon-faced aegis, and annul the curse. While the Erinnyes were still fast asleep, Orestes escaped under the guidance of Hermes; but Clytaemnestra’s ghost soon entered the precinct, raking them to task, and reminding them that they had often received libations of wine and grim midnight banquets from her hand. They therefore set off in renewed pursuit, scornful of Apollo’s angry threats to shoot them down.
h. Orestes’s exile lasted for one year-the period which must elapse before a homicide may again move among his fellow-citizens. He wandered far, over land and sea, pursued by the tireless Erinnyes and constantly purified both with the blood of pigs and with running water; yet these rites never served to keep his tormentors at bay for more than an hour or two, and he soon lost his wits. To begin with, Hermes escorted him to Troezen, where he was lodged in what is now called the Booth of Orestes, which faces the Sanctuary of Apollo; and presently nine Troezenians purified him at the Sacred Rock, close to the Temple of Wolfish Artemis; using water from the Spring of Hippocrene, and the blood of sacrificial victims. An ancient laurel-tree marks the place where the victims were afterwards buried; and the descendants of these nine men still dine annually at the booth on a set day.
i. Opposite the island of Cranaë, three furlongs from Gythium, stands an unwrought stone, named the stone of Zeus the Reliever, upon which Orestes sat and was temporarily relieved of his madness. He is said to have also been purified in seven streams near Italian Rhegium, where he built a temple; in three tributaries of the Thracian Hebrus; and in the Orontes, which flows past Antioch.
j. Seven furlongs down the high road from Megalopolis to Messene, on the left, is shown a sanctuary of the Mad Goddesses, a title of the Erinnyes, who inflicted a raging fit of madness on Orestes; also a small mound, surmounted by a stone finger and called the Finger Tomb. This marks the place where, in desperation, he bit off a finger to placate these black goddesses, and some of them, at least, changed their hue to white, so that his sanity was restored. He then shaved his head at a near-by sanctuary called Ace, and made a sin-offering to the black goddesses, also a thank-offering to the white. It is now customary to sacrifice to the latter conjointly with the Graces.
k. Next, Orestes went to live among the Azanes and Arcadians of the Parrhasian Plain which, with the neighbouring city formerly called Oresthasium after its founder Orestheus, son of Lycaon, changed its name to Oresteium. Some, however, say that Oresteium was formerly called Azania, and that he went to live there only after a visit to Athens. Others, again, say that he spent his exile in Epirus, where he founded the city of Orestic Argos and gave his name to the Orestae Paroraei, Epirots who inhabit the rugged foothills of the Illyrian mountains.
l. When a year had passed, Orestes visited Athens, which was then governed by his kinsman Pandion; or, some say, by Demophoön. He went at once to Athene’s temple on the Acropolis, sat down, and embraced her image. The Black Erinnyes soon arrived, out of breath, having lost track of him while he crossed the Isthmus. Though at his first arrival none wished to receive him, as being hated by the gods, presently some were emboldened to invite him into their homes, where he sat at a separate table and drank from a separate wine cup.
m. The Erinnyes, who had already begun to accuse him to the Athenians, were soon joined by Tyndareus with his grand-daughter Erigone, daughter of Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra; also, some say, by Clytaenmestra’s cousin Perilaus, son of Icarius. But Athene, having heard Orestes’s supplication from Scamander, her newly-acquired Trojan territory, hurried to Athens and, swearing-in the noblest citizens as judges; summoned the Areiopagus to try what was then only the second case of homicide to come before it.
n. In due course the trial took place, Apollo appearing as council for the defence, and the eldest of the Erinnyes as public prosecutrix. In an elaborate speech, Apollo denied the importance of motherhood, asserting that a woman was no more than the inert furrow in which the husband man cast his seed; and that Orestes had been abundantly justified in his act, the father being the one parent worthy of the name. When the voting proved equal, Athene confessed herself wholly on the father's side, and gave her casting vote in favour of Orestes. Thus honourably acquitted, he returned in joy to Argolis, swearing to be a faithful ally of Athens so long as he lived. The Erinnyes, however, loudly lamented this subversal of the ancient law by upstart gods; and Erigone hanged herself for mortification
o. Of Helen’s end three other contradictory accounts survive. The first: that in fulfilment of Proteus’s prophecy, she returned to Sparta and there lived with Menelaus in peace, comfort, and prosperity, until they went hand in hand to the Elysian Fields. The second: that she visited the Taurians with him, whereupon Iphigeneia sacrificed them both to Artemis. The third: that Polyxo, widow of the Rhodian King Tlepolemus, avenged his death by sending some of her serving women, disguised as Erinnyes, to hang Helen.
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1. The tradition that Clytaemnestra’s Erinnyes drove Orestes mad cannot be dismissed as an invention of the Attic dramatists; it was too early established, not only in Greece, but in Greater Greece. Yet, just as Oedipus’s crime, for which the Erinnyes hounded him to death, was not that he killed his mother, but that he inadvertently caused her suicide; so Orestes’s murder seems also to have been in the second degree only: he had failed in filial duty by not opposing the Mycenaeans’ death sentence. The court was easily enough swayed, as Menelaus and Tyndareus soon demonstrated when they secured a death sentence against Orestes.
2. Erinnyes were personified pangs of conscience, such as are still capable, in pagan Melanesia, of killing a man who has rashly or inadvertently broken a taboo. He will either go mad and leap from a coconut palm, or wrap his head in a cloak, like Orestes, and refuse to eat or drink until he dies of starvation; even if nobody else is informed of his guilt. Paul would have suffered a similar fate at Damascus but for the timely arrival of Ananias. The common Greek method of purging ordinary blood guilt was for the homicide to sacrifice a pig and, while the ghost of the victim greedily drank its blood, to wash in running water, shave his head in order to change his appearance, and go into exile for one year, thus throwing the vengeful ghost off the scent. Until he had been purified in this manner, his neighbours shunned him as unlucky, and would not allow him to enter their homes or share their food, for fear of themselves becoming involved in his troubles; and he might still have to reckon with the victim’s family, should the ghost demand vengeance from them. A mother’s blood, however, carried with it so powerful a curse, that common means of purification would not serve: and, short of suicide, the most extreme means was to bite off a finger. This self- mutilation seems to have been at least partially successful in Orestes’s case; thus also Heracles, to placate the aggrieved Hera, will have bitten off the finger which he is said to have lost while tussling with the Nemean Lion. In some regions of the South Seas a finger-joint is always lopped off at the death of a close relative, even when he or she has died a natural death. In the Eumenides Aeschylus is apparently disguising a tradition that Orestes fled to the Troad and lived, untroubled by the Erinnyes, under Athene’s protection on silt land wrested from the Scamander and therefore free from the curse. Why else should the Troad be mentioned?
3. Wine instead of blood libations, and offerings of small hair-snippings instead of the whole crop, were Classical amendments on this ritual of appeasement, the significance of which was forgotten; as the present day custom of wearing black is no longer consciously connected with the ancient habit of deceiving ghosts by altering one’s normal appearance.
4. Euripides’s imaginative account of what happened when Helen and Menelaus returned to Mycenae contains no mythical element, except for Helen’s dramatic apotheosis; and Helen as the Moon-goddess had been a patroness of sailors long before the Heavenly Twins were recognized as a constellation. Like Aeschylus, Euripides was writing religious propaganda: Orestes’s absolution records the final triumph of patriarchy, and is staged at Athens, where Athene-formerly the Libyan goddess Neith, or Palestinian Anatha, a supreme matriarch, but now reborn from Zeus’s head and acknowledging, as Aeschylus insists, no divine mother-connives at matricide even in the first degree. The Athenian dramatists knew that this revolutionary theme could not be accepted elsewhere in Greece: hence Euripides makes Tyndareus, as Sparta’s representative, declare passionately that Orestes must die; and the Dioscuri venture to condemn Apollo for having prompted the crime.
5. Orestes’s name, ‘mountaineer’, has connected him with a wild, mountainous district in Arcadia which no King of Mycenae is likely to have visited.
6. These alternative versions of Helen’s death are given for different reasons. The first purports to explain the cult of Helen and Menelaus at Therapne; the second is a theatrical variation on the story of Orestes’s visit to the Taurians; the third accounts for the Rhodian cult of Helena Dendritis, ‘Helen of the Tree’, who is the same character as Ariadne and the other Erigone. This Erigone was also hanged.
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