Restless Dead

by Sarah Iles Johnston

  The Erinyes' interest in the family, expressed in tragedy primarily by their charge to destroy it, also rings out in tragic associations of Erinyes and maenads,11 for as Richard Seaford and Renate Schlesier have shown,12 the polyvalent image of the maenad finds its unity in her constant association with the family's ruin. Indeed, she most often destroys the family in precisely the same way as the Erinyes do, by attacking the bond between mother and child. In the case of the Dionysiac maenad, this frequently takes the form of infanticide. But there is more at stake in these stories than simply the life of the child or the mother-child bond. The Dionysiac maenad, by obliterating the raison d'etre of her marriage, rejects the very existence of this cultural construct, developed in order to provide men with heirs. This is especially well articulated in those cases where maenadic disaster is precipitated by men who refuse to allow women to worship Dionysus, or who express suspicion that Dionysiac worship masks and thereby enables sexual misconduct, as in Euripides' Bacchae. Dionysus competes with the city's men for control of its women.

  Quite often, destruction or abandonment of the polls follows in the wake of Dionysiac madness as well. As has often been pointed out, this is symbolized spatially by the departure of the maenads for mountains or other outlying areas; mythically, it can also be represented by the dissolution of a royal line and the subsequent transfer of rule to outsiders, as happens in the case of Pentheus's death and Proetus's surrender of the kingdom to Melampus, Dionysus's prophet. The centrality of the polis to Dionysus's concerns is mirrored in another aspect of the god's behavior, too. As Seaford has shown, and as discussed briefly in chapter 6, Dionysus sometimes inserts himself into the plot of a maiden's tragedy by assuming the role of unaccepted suitor.13 When refused by the girl's family-that is, when the natal family refuses to open itself up to the outside alliance that marriage would create-Dionysus destroys the girl and sometimes destroys her family as well. In these myths, establishment of the rituals that enable girls to prepare for marriage is traced to Dionysus as well as, or even instead of, to Artemis or Hera. As Seaford observes, the communality of the polls is established at the expense of its women in these myths-but also, I would add, at the expense of the in dividual family's unity and independence. Dionysus's message is clear: for society to continue, the individual family must sometimes be subordinated to it.

  Although much of what can be said about Dionysiac maenads fits the maenadic Erinyes as well, there are important differences. First, as we just saw, it is almost always upon intrafamilial strife that the Erinyes feed; they care little about how a family reaches out to form links with others, so long as it does not compromise the intrafamilial relationships in doing so. Crimes prompted by, or punished by, the Erinyes are therefore often played out within the spatial confines of the house or its immediate surroundings, rather than in the wild exterior. The crime for which the Erinyes would punish Telemachus is the expulsion of his mother from her home, her proper area. It is at home that Orestes murders his mother, and it is at a family banquet that Polyneices and Eteocles insult their father, bringing his curse upon their heads. The curse then manifests itself as an argument between the brothers over possession of their father's house, played out as the attempt by one to exclude the other.14 The Erinyes' paradigmatic virginity's symbolizes this interest that they champion: they are the daughters who will not leave the self-contained family unit in its simplest form. Once we realize this, we see that the Dionysiac maenad and the maenadic Erinys are actually quite different or even opposed in their pursuits, despite the similarity of their behavior.

  Even more important, the Erinyes represent the blood bonds of the family in its diachronic totality, as it extends backward and forward through the generations. For although the Erinyes are not to be understood as the dead themselves, their link with the dead and the Underworld is a definitive aspect of their nature: they dwell in Hades or Erebus and often work at the command of its rulers. Their garb is black, the color of death, not because they bring death (which usually they do not), but because they dwell in the realm of death and mingle with its denizens. When Euripides calls them "bacchantes of Hades," this expresses the fact that their maenadic behavior often arises from an obligation to avenge the residents of Hades, who cannot avenge themselves, when their surviving kin will not do the avenging for them. In fulfilling this duty, the Erinyes' maenadic behavior reminds us that the successful family is one that carries on through time, each generation simultaneously constructing itself upon the last but relying upon the next. There are familial bonds of obligation amongst those whom we can see in this world, but also bonds that stretch in both directions beyond this world: backwards past the grave and into Hades, and forwards into the future, incorporating children not yet conceived who will properly respect their elders while alive and pay funerary cult to them once they are dead. In this sense, the Erinyes are counterparts to the Tritopatores whom we met in chapter z, the "ancestors" who watch over their descendants and ensure continuance of the family by blessing fecundity. Strength lies not so much in reaching out to other families, in this view, but primarily in guaranteeing the survival of one's own blood kin.

  If Bacchic madness can rise from Hades, inflicted by the dead and personified in their agents, the Erinyes, this implies that the dead can destroy the oikos just as effectively as any Dionysiac maenads. This can be understood literally: as we have seen many times already, the dead (especially the familial dead) are a genuine source of potential trouble for the living. But it can also be understood figuratively: because it is constantly required to renew itself by incorporating the very elements from outside that might threaten its integrity, the family survives only by anchoring its identity firmly within its past. Therein lies the importance of funeral cult, of hereditary priesthoods, of membership in a genos and of all the other accoutrements of Greek life that constantly reminded the individual of his or her ancestry and confirmed his or her links to others who shared it. Membership in the polis might weaken some of these allegiances, or require other affiliations that compromised the self-sufficiency of the family unit, but it would not obliterate them. Neither the family nor the polis could exist alone in the fifth century. Dionysiac maenads remind their audience that the family must accept outsiders if it is to thrive; maenadic Erinyes remind their audience that the family must cohere within itself before it can become a building block in other social structures. We shall return to this point later, in analyzing Aeschylus's Erinyes and Athena's manipulation of them.

  The double-sidedness of the Erinyes' behavior-sometimes they punish crime among blood kin, sometimes they incite it-should not trouble us. It is typical for Greek divinities to display both protective and destructive tendencies within their areas of concern. Artemis, for example, sometimes protects a young girl who is entering adult life and sometimes destroys her. Dionysus, as we have just noted, sometimes destroys a city even as he attempts to uphold a principle on which it is built. Erinys's combined defense and destruction of the relationships between blood kin simply confirms that she is at core a divinity whose primary concern lies therein. Notably, moreover, Erinys's destruction of a relationship usually follows upon an initial crime committed within it, as the tale of the House of Atreus demonstrates so well. In other words, Erinys's actions are retributive, in response to attacks against that which she protects. Here again, her behavior fits a pattern followed by the other gods. The Proetides transgressed boundaries by entering Hera's precinct while still unwed; Hera responded by ruining their chances of marriage. We should keep in mind, too, that the most severely negative portraits of the Erinyes-and certainly, the portraits that first presented them as snake-haired, blood-lapping fiends who took pleasure in family discord-come from the tragedians. This reflects tragedy's habit of presenting worst-case scenarios, of imagining what would happen if everything went as wrong as it possibly could, and of watching disaster play itself out to a final crash. Because tragedy was particularly interested in the effects of family relationships g
one awry, the Erinyes, as protectors of blood relationships, were particularly liable to be affected by tragic exaggeration, and because tragedy had such an immense effect on subsequent literature and art, the Erinyes have been canonized in our imaginations in this exaggerated form.

  In closing this section, we should consider briefly the few situations in which the Erinyes do not seem connected to the concerns of blood kin at all. In some of these, we simply have no indication of why they are involved-we know that they drove Melampus mad, for example, but what he did to deserve this punishment is not stated. But in other cases, the Erinyes clearly defend relationships that lie completely outside of any familial orbit. In the Iliad, Agamemnon invokes them in the oath he swears to Priam and again when he swears an oath to Achilles, with whom he is on bad terms at the time. Similarly, Alcaeus calls on Erinys to punish Pittacus for breaking an oath.16 The disguised Odysseus reminds the suitors that "even beggars" have Erinyes to avenge their mistreatment. Although the Erinyes' dominant association is still with the great familial crimes such as that of Orestes and Alcmaeon, by the late fourth century, South Italian vase painters occasionally show Erinyes (or Furies, with whom they had been combined by then) as present in myths that seem to have nothing to with the family, such as that of Artemis and Actaeon, or inflicting postmortem punishment on sinners who did not commit crimes against blood kin, such as Ixion.17

  Odysseus's remark might be understood as a taunting exaggeration of the normal expectation that the Erinyes will protect blood kin, extending their concern even to those furthest away from the blood relationship. Regarding the vase paintings, Christian Aellen has demonstrated that in this medium, the Erinyes and Furies have become both abstract symbols of justice and interesting compositional elements that were added to the artistic representations of myths in which they previously had no role. But the Erinyes' inclusion in oaths sworn by Agamemnon and Pittacus cannot be dismissed either as flippant exaggeration or artistic license. We have to conclude that however closely the Erinyes were associated with blood kin, already by the time of Homer, they sometimes were believed to intervene in serious extrafamilial affairs as well. This is not especially surprising. No Greek divinity sticks strictly to a well-defined sphere of interest (or, if he does, we begin to wonder how important a divinity he really is), and oaths in general call on an amazing variety of different gods whom we would not expect to be "naturally" interested in either the act of swearing itself or the matters the oaths aim to protect. The fact remains that the predominant association of Erinys and the Erinyes is the protection of relationships between blood kin. In the next section we shall see another facet of this.

  DEMETER ERINYS

  Keeping in mind the Erinyes' interest in the relationships between blood kin should help us to understand the myth of Demeter Erinys. We have three sources for this myth, each slightly different. The fullest is given by Pausanias, who tells us that when Demeter was wandering around Greece searching for her lost daughter, she was pursued by Poseidon. To escape him, Demeter turned herself into a mare, but Poseidon responded by transforming himself into a stallion and raped her. From this union was born a daughter, whose name Pausanias refuses to mention, and the marvelous horse Arion, who later belonged to several heroes and who had the ability to speak. Demeter, angered by all of this, withdrew to a temple in Arcadian Thelpusa. In her angered state, she was worshipped under the epiclesis Erinys, Pausanias says, but after she had been placated and had bathed in the nearby river, she was called Lousia, a named that can be translated either as the "Cleansed" or the "Cleanser." 18

  Our second version is also from Pausanias, who says that the Phiga- lians told the same story as the Thelpusians about a goddess named Black Demeter, except that the rape produced only Arion, no daughter. The motive for Demeter's retreat is doubled in this version of the story: she is angered both by the loss of her daughter and by her own rape. As in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, her retreat leads to famine until Zeus sends the Moirai to bring her out of hiding.19 The third version of the story, set in Boeotian Tilphusa, is found in fragments of Callimachus and in the scholia to the Iliad. Here, the goddess, called simply Erinys, is pursued by Poseidon, turns into a mare, is raped by him in the form of a stallion, and gives birth to Arion. Apollodorus knows this version of the story as well.20

  The story in its fuller form is made up of two elements. The first is the tale of a marvelous horse sired by Poseidon upon a goddess closely concerned with both human fecundity and the fertility of the earth. There are several variations of this, the best-known being Poseidon's siring of Pegasus upon Medusa. Rhea is involved in another variation of the tale, although here the father of the horse is not Poseidon but her husband Cronus himself. It is one of the traditions that lies behind the story of Xanthus, Achilles' marvelous talking horse, who also has a special relationship to the Erinyes.21 At the core of all these stories lies a connection between horses and a certain type of goddess whom we might call a "fecundity" goddess. Poseidon himself, being the "earth embracer" makes an appropriate consort for her.

  That this part of the story is quite old is suggested by two things. First, both Pausanias and the scholia to the Iliad tell us that the story of Arion's conception and birth was told in the epic Thebais. This usually is dated to the seventh or sixth century B.C.E., but because allusions to the myth also show up in the scene involving Achilles' horse'22 we can be fairly sure that the story was even older than that. Second, the fairly wide geographical distribution of the story-Thelpusa, Phigelia, Til- phusa-suggests a myth that was first popularized by the epic poets and then later claimed by several locales as their own.

  The second element is the mother's loss of her child, which is best known from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter but was also available in a variety of other forms in antiquity. Indeed, as with the story of Arion's birth, a number of locales claimed to be the spot where it had hap- pened.23 Whatever else was altered, however, Demeter's loss of a child and her subsequent anger and retreat always lay at its core.24 This story originally had nothing to do with horses. Nor, except in the Arcadian stories, is Demeter's anger caused even partially by rape; in all other versions it follows upon her loss of a child alone. The Arcadian versions, struggling to accommodate the story of Poseidon's siring of horses within the story of Demeter's loss, have tried to combine two separate themes by introducing the idea of anger caused by rape, but they tellingly retreat into the traditional version by redundantly using both injuries to motivate Demeter's anger. The fact that the loss/retreat sequence does not appear in the Callimachean version of our story, where the goddess is called only Erinys and simply gives birth to a horse, is a further indication that the two stories do not really belong together.

  Sifting the story into its originally distinct components helps us to disentangle the mythic plot, but it does not change the fact that these elements were combined at some point, which implies that there was a perceived similarity between them. Since the plots have no relationship to each other, we must assume that it was the two goddesses on whom the stories centered who were perceived as similar. Those who wished to claim the unfamiliar story for their own locale did so by identifying its main character with one of their local goddesses; the stories that had always been told about this local goddess then were told about the new, hybrid goddess. To use a hypothetical example, if Thelpusa wished to claim that it was the birthplace of Arlon, then the mother whom epic had given him, Erinys, had to be merged with the local Demeter; the story of Demeter's retreat then began to be told about Demeter-Erinys. (Unfortunately, this hypothetical example is only that; paucity of information makes it impossible to tell which of the two stories was relatively old and which relatively new to each of our three locales, Thelpusa, Phigelia, and Tilphusa.)

  Erinys's interest in the parent-child relationship, particularly the mother-child relationship, would make it especially easy for her to be identified with Demeter in the context of a story where Demeter's actions are motivated by the loss of
her child. The story of Demeter and her daughter, indeed, resonates with the very issue that I have just been discussing apropos of the Erinyes: should the blood link between mother and child take priority over the marital relationship that a father can establish between his daughter and another man, or must the mother abdicate her primacy to make way for the new connections, the new order, that marriage creates?

  But the similarity between the two goddesses that allowed them to be combined in these myths goes beyond this into a broader concern for fecundity, particularly human fecundity. Demeter's connection with this is too well known to need any comment. Erinys's is demonstrated through a number of sources that credit her with the ability to smite fecundity of all types, but especially human, and by the Erinyes' eventual equation with the Semnai Theai and Eumenides, two groups of goddesses to whom cult was paid in order to ensure fecundity. The nature of this equation is discussed later in this chapter; for now let it simply be said that it reflects the fact that Erinyes, once propitiated, could aid, rather than smite, fecundity. Both capacities are demonstrated in Aeschylus's Eumenides, where the Erinyes claim to be able to infect Athens' soil, wither its plants, and make its animals and humans barren, but also say that they are able, once they are made happy and become "Semnai Theai," to ensure that Athenian maidens will marry and reproduce and that the crops and animals will thrive.25 Other evidence includes Herodotus's report that a plague of sterility and infant deaths in Sparta was stopped by paying the Erinyes proper cult, which implies that they were the cause of the plague in the first place. Argive myth blamed the Erinyes for wholesale infant deaths that avenged the death of a mother and child.26 One spell against a child-killing demon specifically calls her Megaira, which elsewhere is the name of one of the Erinyes, and a grave inscription from secondcentury C.E. Paros blames the death of a parturient woman and her child on an Erinys who made them bleed to death. We recall that the Erinyes' punishment of Phoenix in the Iliad took the form of making him childless.27