contrasted so pointedly with the quiet solemnity of the Pæan addressed to Apollo—were all originally Phrygian.
From all these various countries, novelties, unknown to the Homeric men, found their way into the Grecian worship: and there is one amongst them which deserves to be specially noticed, because it marks the generation of the new class of ideas in their theology. Homer mentions many persons guilty of private or involuntary homicide, and compelled either to go into exile or to make pecuniary satisfaction; but he never once describes any of them to have either received or required purification for the crime.[1] Now in the time subsequent to Homer, purification for homicide comes to be considered as indispensable: the guilty person is regarded as unfit for the society of man or the worship of the gods until he has received it, and special ceremonies are prescribed whereby it is to be administered. Herodotus tells us that the ceremony of purification was the same among the Lydians and among the Greeks:[2] we know that it formed no part of the early religion of the latter, and we may perhaps reasonably suspect that they borrowed it from the former. The oldest instance known to us of expiation for homicide was contained in the epic poem of the Milesian Arktinus,[3] wherein Achilles is
- ↑ Schol. ad Iliad, xi. 690 —οὐ διᾶ τὰ καθάρσια Ἰφίτου πορθεῖται ἡ Πύλος, ἐπεί τοι Ὀδυσσεὺς μείζων Νέστορος, καὶ παρ' Ὁμήρῳ οὐκ οἵδαμεν φονέα καθαιρόμενον, ἀλλ' ἀντιτίνοντα ἢ φυγαδευόμενον. The examples are numerous, and are found both in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Iliad, ii. 665 (Tlêpolemos); xiii. 697 (Medôn); xiii. 574 (Epeigeus); xxiii. 89 (Patroclos); Odyss. xv. 224 (Theoclymenos); xiv. 380 (an Ætolian). Nor does the interesting mythe respecting the functions of Atê and the Litæ harmonize with the subsequent doctrine about the necessity of purification. (Iliad, ix. 498).
- ↑ Herodot. i. 35—ἔστι δὲ παραπλησίη ἡ κάθαρσις τοῖσι Λυδοῖσι καὶ τοῖσι Ἕλλησι. One remarkable proof, amongst many, of the deep hold which this idea took of the greatest minds in Greece, that serious mischief would fall upon the community if family quarrels or homicide remained without religious expiation, is to be found in the objections which Aristotle urges against the community of women proposed in the Platonic Republic. It could not be known what individuals stood in the relation of father, son or brother: if, therefore, wrong or murder of kindred should take place, the appropriate religious atonements (αἱ νομιζόμεναι λύσεις) could not be applied, and the crime would go unexpiated. (Aristot. Polit. ii. 1, 14. Compare Thucyd. i. 125-128).
- ↑ See the Fragm. of the Æthiopis of Arktinus, in Düntzer's Collection, p. 16.
