It is not hard to see how a goddess concerned with protecting the blood relationships within the family would also be concerned with human fecundity: reproduction and the proper care of children are, obviously, the first steps toward creating those relationships. This can never be completely separated from the "Dionysiac" concerns explored in the last section. Indeed, until the woman moves outside of her own oikos and away from the blood relationships of her natal family, she cannot establish new ones of her own, as a mother. But this is exactly why these myths are so powerful. They articulate the persistent tension of the Greek household-the difficulty that a woman has in striking a balance between loyalty to the family in which she was born and loyalty to the marital family in which she will bear her own children.
A different aspect of this tension underlies the stories of aorai discussed in chapter 5 and the stories of dying maidens discussed in chapter 6: reproductive failure for an individual woman has ramifications that potentially extend far beyond her natal family, affecting the entire polis, the whole circle of families with whom her own was expected to interact maritally, politically, and socially. We recall from chapter 6 that the Erinyes are involved in two of these myths. In the Odyssey, Penelope tells of how the Pandareids, girls who died just before marrying, were doomed to wander for eternity with the Erinyes. The story of Helen's demise on the island of Rhodes makes the Erinyes the very agents of her death. (As we saw there, the Helen of this story, unlike the better-known Helen of epic, was almost surely originally a virgin like the Pandareids.) The Erinyes' association with such girls involves them in yet another stage of the reproductive process: they can thwart it even before it begins, immobilizing the girl at the very moment when she attempts to leave the natal family and enter a marriage. The Erinyes' own portrayal in classical sources as eternal virgins makes them divine paradigms for just this sort of girl, as well as expressing their own allegiance to ties of blood rather than marriage, as we have already observed.28 Aeschylus's Apollo-that staunch defender of the marital relationship-transforms their virginity into an insult when he implies that it is involuntary, saying they are so disgusting that neither god nor man nor beast could bear to mate with them,29 but behind the Halloween masks that Aeschylus has put on the Erinyes' faces, we glimpse Artemises-virgins who chose to remain daughters rather than become any men's wives. The Erinyes are paides apaides, "childless children," as Aeschylus so nicely puts it, because their allegiance to the mother-child relationship precludes their moving beyond it into marriage, even to produce children of their own. Athena provides an important counterpoint to them in this respect, for her own virginity reflects the primacy of her connection to her father: it is because she has no mother that she refuses to become a mother herself. Maternity is rejected by the Erinyes perforce, because they refuse to accept male partners, but it is rejected by Athena because motherhood itself lacks value in her eyes.
And yet, as I have emphasized already, the Aeschylean Erinyes have the potential to show another side: at the end of the trilogy, after they have been placated, they specifically promise to prevent Athenian girls from becoming aorai. Seventy lines earlier, Athena has already highlighted this aspect of their talents and subtly directed it toward the ac complishment of marriage-and thereby of the links between families that will sustain the polis-by promising that they will receive firstfruit offerings, not only whenever children are born (that is, whenever the mother-child link is recreated), but also whenever girls wed (that is, whenever an interfamilial link is created). Athena sums up her promises by saying that no family will be able to thrive without the Erinyes' blessing, which stresses even more firmly that reproduction, the gift that the Erinyes have to give, is properly situated only within the marital relationship that sustains the polis.30 Athena, in other words, whose interests always lie more in protecting the vigor of the city in all of its social and political complexity than in protecting any ties between blood kin, craftily incorporates the Erinyes in such a way as to turn their natural interests toward the creation of new citizens and new social bonds. This is similar to the redirection of energies behind the Thesmophoria as we know it. There, in Demeter's most important cult, the celebration of women's fecundity was supported by the polls and its men, but with the provision that the cult be open only to legally married women, women who used their procreative powers for the good of the city.
I may seem merely to have added a flourish to the analyses of others before me (most notably Froma Zeitlin),i1 who have defined the Aeschylean Erinyes as defenders of feminine power and the rights of blood kin against Apollo and Athena's advocacy of male power and patrilineal marriage. My own approach to the Eumenides is indeed much indebted to Zeitlin's, but it is important to be precise, in closing this section, about the particular point that I have tried to develop-namely, that before they are propitiated, the Erinyes champion the primacy of blood relationships, not only over patrilineal marriage, but also over the polis. Once propitiated, as Semnai Theai, they will moderate their natural tendencies and abdicate some of their rights in favor not only of male control but also of the polis's ability to sustain and renew itself through the erasure of familial boundaries. The three issues-male control of women, patrilineal marriage, and the primacy of the polls-certainly coincide and are mutually supportive of one another, but later in this chapter, after we have examined some other pieces of the puzzle, we shall see why primacy of the polls is especially important for understanding certain elements of Aeschylus's Erinyes that I would like bring out.
HERACLITUS'S ERINYES
At this point let us backtrack just a little, chronologically, and consider a famous statement about the Erinyes by Heraclitus, which in its most complete form comes to us embedded in the fourth-century B.C.E. Derveni Papyrus: "The Sun, according to its own nature, is a human foot in width, not exceeding his boundaries. For if the Sun oversteps his boundaries, the Erinyes, helpers of justice [epikouroi Dikes], will seek him out." 32 Much ink has been spilt over the second half of this passage. The most popular way of approaching it has been to understand the Erinyes as "guardians of the natural order," charged with ensuring that nothing in the cosmos behaved aberrantly and that everything fulfilled the role that justice had assigned it. Thus, if the Sun became larger than he was supposed to (i.e., larger than a human foot),33 the Erinyes would compel him to return to his assigned size. This reading often has been upheld by reference to the Erinyes' actions in Iliad r9, where they stop the voice of Achilles' horse Xanthus after Xanthus has been prophesying to him, on the assumption that it is against the natural order for horses to speak, much less to prophesy. In this reading, Xanthus is understood to have been "exceeding his assigned role" in the cosmos.34
As I shown elsewhere, however, fragments from other epic poems and allusions to lost poems made by the lyric poets indicate that it was part of the natural order of the epic world for horses to speak, or even prophesy; Achilles' Xanthus is just one in a line of warriors' horses who do this, including another Xanthus, who belonged to Castor, and Arion himself, who prophesies to both Adrastus and Polyneices. The talking figurehead of Jason's Argo is a variation of this, suitable to a hero who sailed, rather than rode, into his adventure.35 If we are to accept an interpretation of the Heraclitean Erinyes as guardians of a natural order, then that interpretation has to stand completely on its own.
This is not impossible. The last thing that anyone would expect from Heraclitus, who was known for his obscure and riddling style even in antiquity,36 is that he would reflect the standard view of anything. It was his habit to invert, transpose, and turn inside out the assumptions of others-indeed, the Derveni commentator seems to refer to this habit in the words that immediately precede the quotation: ". . . Heraclitus, [transforming] 37 the common views, also overturns his own, he who said, speaking in the same way as a myth-teller ... [quotation]." Apparently, the commentator thought Heraclitus's statements about the Sun, the Erinyes, or both were out of kilter not only with standard views but also wi
th those that Heraclitus himself offered elsewhere. This is only to be expected from a philosopher who has been described by one modern scholar as "dense and cryptic," and whose fragments are "a cross-referring network rather than a linear argument." 38
Anything that Heraclitus says about the Erinyes can, therefore, be used as evidence for what the "normal" view of them was only in the broadest sense, and with caution. It is unlikely that he completely ignored the roles and characteristics that common opinion had assigned to them, but it is quite likely that he adapted them, probably by extending the jurisdiction in which the Erinyes operated. The idea that the Erinyes are "helpers of justice" is easy to harmonize with other evidence we have of them as defenders of familial relationships, where they punish one individual's infringement of the rights of another; this much, then, probably reflects common opinion. The idea that the Erinyes prevent individuals from transgressing or exceeding the roles or limits assigned to them (as the Sun would do if allowed to exceed his assigned width) is also in line with what we know of their protection of familial relationships, and is more or less in line with Plutarch's interpretation of the second half of the fragment, which emphasizes the respect that the celestial bodies show for one another's territories, never straying into an area assigned to another. In this case, the transformation of common views to which the commentator refers lies in the fact that Heraclitus has made the Erinyes responsible for ensuring that celestial bodies as well as mortals remain within the behavioral limits that justice has laid down for them (the Erinyes never show any interest in the celestial bodies elsewhere in our sources).
This may also be, incidentally, where Heraclitus contradicts himself in the opinion of the Derveni commentator, for the idea of a cosmos where change is sharply curtailed and the status quo is carefully protected may not seem to fit well with Heraclitus's belief in a cosmos that thrives on constant flux. If so, the commentator misunderstood Heraclitus's philosophy, for in Heraclitus's view, in fact, justice (dike) lay precisely within the dynamic tension between opposites that struggled against one another; Heraclitean justice, in a sense, comprises the constant state of flux existing in the cosmos. The Derveni commentator may have found it hard to understand how divine agents who protected celestial order precisely by preventing change had any place in Heraclitus's worldview, but for Heraclitus himself, the Erinyes could have been the very personifications of the constant tension that prevented change from going too far, a tension that would stop either one of a pair of opposites (day and night, for example) from "exceeding its limits" and overriding the other completely. This would be a reasonable, if idiosyncratic, development of the Erinyes' roles in literature and popular belief and would also sit well with Heraclitus's refusal to treat the topics that we now would call "ethics" and "cosmology" separately; if the same Logos guided the heavenly bodies as human society, then why could there not be meteorological "Erinyes" as well as ethical ones? 39
Be that as it may, certainly it is clear that the Heraclitean fragment is an inadequate basis for making the Erinyes "guardians of the natural order." We leave Heraclitus, then, with our view of the Erinyes' roles in popular belief unchanged. This is a good time, before we try to grapple with the views of the Derveni commentator himself and finally return to the Erinyes' relationship to the dead, to address the thorny problem of the Erinyes' equation with two other groups of goddesses, the Eumenides and the Semnai Theai.
EUMENIDES AND SEMNAI THEAI
Two questions loom large: when did the equations first take place (or were they indeed always implicit), and what do they tell us about the way in which these goddesses were understood to function? Scholarly opinion on these issues ranges over the whole spectrum: some insist that the three groups were separate until Aeschylus chose to equate the Erinyes with the Semnai Theai and Euripides chose to equate the Erinyes with the Eumenides; 40 others insist that all three terms were always just alternative names for the same figures, expressing their different moods-thus the opinion of Jane Ellen Harrison as expressed in the well-known quotation that heads this chapter. I shall not run through all of the variations of these arguments or the evidence on which they are based; those who are interested can follow the history of the debate by looking at the scholarship that I cite below.41 I shall instead simply state that I am in substantial agreement with the 1994 analysis of Albert Henrichs, one important point of which is that the Semnai Theai were a group of Attic goddesses who were regarded in antiquity as being closely similar to goddesses known elsewhere in Greece as Eumenides-similar enough that the ancients had no trouble accepting the use of one term for the other in literary contexts-and that Erinyes was a name that could be used, by the middle of the fifth century at latest, to express the negative side of either of these two other groups of goddesses.42 This does not, as we shall see, imply an original identity of the groups but rather enough shared similarities that they could be identified by a tragedian without bewildering his audience. Andre Lardinois may be right in proposing that the name Erinyes was first associated with the Semnai Theai by Aeschylus because the Athenian playwright wanted to connect prominent local deities to figures well known from epic '41 but this does not change the essential point: the three groups shared salient characteristics.
As noted above, all Greek gods have two sides to their personality. None are completely beneficent or completely maleficent. Even Hades had his more positive side, in which he appeared under the names of Pluton or simply theos. These names, in fact, are very much like the names Eumenides and Semnai Theai, in that the first deliberately emphasizes a beneficial side of the god and the second avoids the use of a real name at all. Similarly, the name Persephone, familiar from myth, was carefully avoided in some cultic contexts where she was being propitiated in favor of the name Kore ("maiden") or the term thea.44 Even if the Erinyes were not equated with the Semnai Theai per se until Aeschylus, and not equated with the Eumenides per se until Euripides, we can be certain that, like other deities who were foreboding in myth, Erinys had a beneficent alter ego in cult who was approached by worshippers under a title expressing that beneficence in the hope that she would display it, or else was approached under no name at all-anonymity is another way of avoiding the pronouncement of ill-favored names that are out of place in contexts where favors are sought from a divinity.45
We must remember that the inverse is true as well: it is impossible to believe that any deity-including the Eumenides and the Semnai Theai-had no negative side. It is worth noting with respect to this that the aitia presented at the ends of Greek tragedies generally preserve the main characteristics of the cults they pretend to establish. It is very unlikely that Aeschylus would have been so bold as to link goddesses who previously were viewed as completely benign with goddesses who were previously viewed as completely maleficent. Each group must already have been viewed as having at least the potential to shift in the other's direction. It is precisely this point that makes Lardinois's thesis both intriguing and convincing: if a desire to link Athenian goddesses to the epic cycle was at work, then all that Aeschylus needed to borrow was the name Erinyes; his innovation was at one and the same time a bold stroke and yet completely acceptable within the nature of the existing cult. For Aeschylus's equation to really ring true, however, the two groups would have had to be similar enough in other ways for the transformation to make sense to the audience; they could not be just any goddesses, each of whom had positive and negative sides. Their similarities probably included a concern with the swearing of oaths, a shared concern with fecundity (on which both they and Athena place so much emphasis in the play), and a shared interest in the world of the dead.
Another issue is whether the Erinyes were objects of "serious belief" or merely creatures of the mythic imagination by the time we meet them in our literary sources. Many scholars have argued for the latter, and even Henrichs assumes that the Erinyes were seldom serious objects of cult.46 Usually this conclusion is supported by the observation that, with two possible exceptio
ns (Demeter Erinys, as mentioned by Pausanias, and the Spartan Erinyes, as mentioned by Herodotus), the Erinyes do not receive cult in historical Greece. Moreover, because descriptions of these two cults arise in narrative sources, it is charged that we cannot be sure that the goddesses described were really called "Erinyes" by those who paid them cult. Mentions in Homer of people invoking the Erinyes or praying to them are dismissed for the same reasons.
We must take all of these reports seriously, however, even as we remain cautious about accepting their details at face value. Dismissal of them is usually based on two things in addition to their narrative settings. The first is the absence of the name Erinys in any cult inscription.47 But as the very nature of cult is to use every means possible to flatter and persuade the deity into cooperating, it would be surprising indeed if any official document called these goddesses by the title associated with their negative side-this would make about as much sense as addressing one's dean, when asking for a raise, as "You Tight-Fisted Bureaucrat," however often one may call him that (or worse) in private. Cult would be paid to deities of a dual nature under the name Eumenides, or something similar, in the hope that they would then take the hint and "look kindly" upon their worshippers, just as cult would be paid to Hades under the name of Pluton. Particularly at a time of crisis, offerings intended to appease the goddesses would be made to them under their propitious name, in hopes of cajoling them into a good mood again, but retrospectively, when the crisis had been managed successfully and passed into tradition, it would be possible to admit that the deities responsible for it had been angry: they had been "Erinyes," not "Eumenides," at the time. What Herodotus and Pausanias actually tell us about the cults of the Erinyes aligns with this: they arose from crisis situations in which the angry Erinys or Erinyes had to be propitiated by the Spartans and Arcadians. There are literary instances as well. For example, in Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica, Jason and Medea must make propitiatory offerings to the Erinyes as part of their purification after the murder of Ap- syrtus.48 The goddesses are angry at their grossly impious murder of Medea's brother and are threatening to make that anger felt.
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