This basic premise is proven by its inverse: there were instances, literary and real, where the Erinyes were approached by mortals under that very name, rather than another more auspicious one, precisely because they would be more useful as "Erinyes" than as "Eumenides." When Alcaeus invokes an Erinys against Pittacus, when Erinyes are prayed to and invoked in Homer, and when, occasionally, they are invoked in curse tablets or in the later spells of the magical papyri, it is in their role as angry goddesses that the person praying to them wishes them to act. Althaea could scarcely hope that "Eumenides" would kill Meleager; nor would "Eumenides" be likely to "rouse up with fire the souls of the aoroi" in order that they might curse a woman with sleeplessness, as a spell in a late papyrus requests Erinys to do. We also glimpse this logic when Clytemnestra complains to the Erinyes that despite her frequent nocturnal offerings of wineless libations, they have not carried out her request.49 The passage is a bit puzzling: Clytemnestra seems to be referring to her request that they pursue Orestes, and yet she scarcely could have made them offerings after she was dead; perhaps we are to presume that she had made offerings to them while alive in hopes that they would prevent Orestes from avenging his father, or that if he did so, they would pursue him thereafter. But at the moment the exact interpretation of Clytemnestra's words does not matter: what is impor tant is that she made offerings to these goddesses in order that they would inflict some injury or hamper someone else's endeavor; in such a case, the Erinyes would be exactly what she wanted. Are such invocations of deities who are expressly intended to harm others rightly considered "cult"? To evince "serious belief"? Indeed, yes, I would say; what is "cult" other than a mortal's attempt to interact profitably with a deity from whom he or she wants a favor? A favor is a favor, however nasty its effects on other people may be. To dismiss such invocations of the Erinyes as literary fictions is to allow ourselves to slide back into an older mentality that imposed Judaeo-Christian definitions of "worship" and "gods" upon the Greeks.
The second thing that causes scholars to dismiss the idea that anyone really "believed" in the Erinyes is a rather circumscribed notion that assumes that anything in which the Greeks "believed" would have received cult in a form approximately as we know it in its fullest, calen- drically scheduled and civically approved glory. But some cultic acts occurred only when needed, in response to a crisis, for instance. We saw some examples of this in chapter z, in the Cyrenean and Selinuntine rituals designed to avert ghosts, and in the instances just mentioned, in which the Erinyes are approached by the Spartans or Alcaeus.
To return now, in closing this section, specifically to the question of whether we should take seriously the cults of the Erinyes mentioned by Herodotus and Pausanias (and for that matter, the cult that Athena promises them at the end of the Eumenides, in a passage that obviously serves as an aition for real Athenian practices in honor of the Semnai Theai), the answer must be that although any cult documents and rituals themselves undoubtedly spoke of Eumenides, Semnai Theai, or Demeter, rather than Erinyes or Erinys-and so, strictly speaking, there was no cult of the Erinyes at any of these places-the myths associated with these cults clearly reveal that their origin lay in the perception that a goddess was angry and that the cause of the anger had to be addressed. It was the Erinyes, or goddesses of a closely similar, angry temperament, who demanded the cult, so to speak, but when the cult was paid, it was received and enjoyed by the Eumenides, the Semnai Theai, or even Demeter.
Upon this conclusion rests another. For all of the reasons I have discussed in this section, I think that it is acceptable to use, with caution, evidence derived from cults of the Eumenides or Semnai Theai to supplement our understanding of who the Erinyes were and what they were expected to do. Our primary source of information still must be state ments made by ancient authors about the Erinyes themselves, but where evidence from the cults of Eumenides and Semnai Theai does not conflict with it, we may use it to confirm what we hypothesize about the Erinyes themselves. It may seem that this is a pointless endeavor-if the supplemental evidence is not in disagreement with the primary evidence, then how does it move our analysis ahead? Is this not a circular technique? But the supplemental evidence often has the advantage of being from inscriptions and dedicatory art, from artifacts associated with "real life" rather than narrative. Or, even when taken from narrative, the evidence often refers to an important contemporary cult, familiar to the audience, and therefore is likely to be accurate. When we learn that the Eumenides were worshipped in connection with fecundity, or that the Semnai Theai were offered pregnant sheep (a typical offering to deities concerned with fecundity) '50 therefore, our earlier hypothesis that the Erinyes were deeply interested in reproductive vitality is lent additional support.
THE ERINYES AND THE DEAD: THE DERVENI PAPYRUS
In our survey so far, we have observed that the Erinyes were associated with the dead in two fashions, both arising from their concern for the family and particularly for the rights of blood kin as they conflict with the necessity of blood kin seeking new alliances outside of their immediate group. The first is their obligation to avenge crimes among blood kin: what greater outrage can be committed within a family than the murder of one member by another? The Erinyes must punish the murderer on behalf of the victim. As has often been observed, this is especially important in the case of familial murder because the victim may have no living relative left who will do it for him. The second is Erinys's involvement with the tense moment when a girl makes the transition from her natal family to a new, marital family, which brings her into connection with dead maidens in much the same way as Hecate is brought into connection with them. Erinys's connection to the dead, then, specifically involves these two groups-the biaiotbanatoi and the aoroi. Eventually, when the idea of postmortem punishment takes hold, she sometimes has the additional duty of punishing bad behavior in the afterlife, but this is a secondary development.
It is important to emphasize here again that there is no good indication that the Erinyes were considered to be the souls of the dead in popular belief. There is one literary passage that is frequently adduced to support the idea: in Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes, the Chorus says that the "revered Erinys [potnia Erinys] of Oedipus" is responsible for their current problems (lines 885-86) and then shortly afterward (lines 976-77) calls upon the "revered ghost [potnia skia] of Oedipus, Black Erinys." This seems to equate the Erinys and the ghost. But this single poetic passage is scarcely enough evidence on which to build a theory. Moreover, there is a logical impediment to understanding the Erinyes as ghosts of the dead: why should the ghosts of men become female spirits?
We have another document now, however, which was not available before the 1970s, in which the Eumenides-and some scholars would say also the Erinyes51-are identified as souls: the Derveni Papyrus, recovered from the remains of a late fourth-century B.C.E. funeral pyre in northern Greece. This document contains an extended ancient commentary on an earlier poem, attributed to Orpheus, that explained the origin of the universe and the gods and described their natures, and the commentator, who quotes portions of the poem in the course of elucidating it, provides allegorical interpretations of Orpheus's words, sometimes supporting his interpretations through references to other literary or philosophical works, and sometimes through references to commonly held ideas and mainstream ritual practices. Thus, the contents of the papyrus are immensely valuable, not only for our understanding of Orphic teachings and ancient literary interpretation, but also for our knowledge of popular belief during the fourth century. With caution, the information it contains can be used to enhance our understanding of what the Erinyes represented for most people of the time.
Unfortunately, the papyrus is quite fragmentary, first having been partially burnt in the funeral pyre and then subsequently suffering the ravages of time. Here I give those portions of the remaining text that are relevant for our discussion, following the recently published translation of Laks and Most, except in parts of col
umn VI, where I have made minor changes (italicized): 52
COLUMN I
...each... ... of the Erinyes ...
COLUMN II
... Erinyes ... of the Erinyes ... they honor ... souls are53 .. . libations in droplets ... brings honors ... to each some kind of bird ... fitted to the music ...
COLUMN III
... for each a daimon becomes ... utterly destroyed ... daimones which beneath this mound.54 ... And they are called servants of the gods ... they are, in exactly the same way as unjust men . . . and they are responsible ... such as [masc. pl.]
Column IV is the quotation from Heraclitus examined above.
COLUMN V
... consulting an oracle . . . they consult an oracle ... for them, we go into the oracular shrine in order to ask, on behalf of those seeking oracular answers, if it is right . . . the terrors of Hades, why are they distrustful? Not understanding dreams, not any of the other real things, on the basis of what kinds of examples would they have trust? For overcome both by fault and by something else, pleasure,55 they neither know nor trust. For distrust is the same as ignorance. For if they neither know nor understand, it is not possible that they would have trust even seeing ... distrust ... appears ...
COLUMN VI
... prayers and sacrifices assuage the souls, and the incantation of the magoi is able to keep away56 the impeding daimones. Impeding daimones are enemies to souls. This is why the magoi perform the sacrifice, just as if they were paying a penalty. And on the offerings they pour water and milk, from which they also make the libations. And they sacrifice innumerable and many-knobbed cakes, because the souls too are innumerable. Initiates make preliminary sacrifices to the eumenisi ("kindly ones," i.e., kindly souls) in the same way as the magoi do. For the eumenides are souls. For these reasons anyone who is going to sacrifice to the gods first ... a kind of bird ... and the ... and they are ... and as many as [fem. pl.] ... (emphasis added)
The writer of the papyrus intends to interpret esoteric information from an Orphic poem for a special group of people, the initiates mentioned in column VI.57 That this information has to do with mysteries of some sort, which promise release from the terrors of Hades, is also clear .51 Thus the significance of equating Eumenides with souls in column VI, and possibly of equating Erinyes with souls in column II, must be addressed within these eschatological confines.
Let us begin with the Erinyes. I do not see any reason that we should assume that the commentator (or the poet himself) equated the Erinyes with souls.59 The section of the papyrus that mentions both groups is too fragmentary for us to be certain about the relationship between Erinyes (whose name is in the genitive plural here) and soul(s) (a word whose case and number cannot be determined), and there are a number of reasons that the Erinyes might have been brought into a discussion about the afterlife and the Underworld. They might have been serving in their traditional role as avengers of the dead, in which case they could be understood to have operated in somewhat the same way as the daimones empodon of column VI, as interpreted in chapter 4 (that is, the Erinyes might also have impeded the initiation or safe passage into the afterlife of those who were blood-guilty). Or, they might have punished the dead who deserved it at a later stage in process, once they were in Hades, as they were believed to do at least by the time of Aeschylus, and as they are shown doing on Apulian funerary vases of the fourth century and later .6' The mention of "unjust men" (andres adikoi) in column III suggests that the idea of postmortem retribution may have interested the commentator; the mention of "servants of the gods" (theon hyperetai ) just before the mention of unjust men suggests that some lesser deities were expected to be involved in this punishment, who may have been the Erinyes. Porphyry, in his commentary on the Iliad, applies the term hyperetes to Erinys in just this way when explaining why it was that Erinys arrived when Althaea called upon Hades and Persephone to pun ish Meleager: Erinys was the servant, hyperetes, of Hades, Porphyry ex- plains.61 (Indeed, we may wonder whether Porphyry, that enthusiastic student of mystic lore, was acquainted with either the work of the Derveni commentator or the poem on which he was commenting.) We also should remember that the Derveni commentator himself, in the very next column, quotes Heraclitus's description of the Erinyes as "Helpers of justice," which is very close to the concept of "servants of the gods."
Given that the only indication we have that the Erinyes were ever identified as souls of the dead is the passage from Aeschylus discussed above, and that, as we have seen, we can by no means always assume an equation between Erinyes and Eumenides (which might have indirectly supported identifying Erinyes with souls here), it seems more sensible to assume that the Erinyes who appear in column II are there for one of the two reasons I just suggested-they operate more or less as we see them operate elsewhere. That either the poet or the commentator equated souls and Eumenides, in contrast, is certain. Does this mean that all souls were to be considered kindly and well disposed to the initiates? Surely not. If Tsantsanoglou's reconstruction of the beginning of column VI is correct, then as we have seen already in chapter 4, some souls-that is, souls of the dead62-were considered daimones empodon and had to be appeased by prayers, sacrifices, and incantations, lest they cause problems for those who were being initiated or trying to pass safely into Hades after death.
The sequence of events narrated in column VI could be reconstructed as follows. The souls who were liable to cause problems for the initiates, otherwise known as daimones empodon, first were approached by experts, the magoi, who assuaged or appeased (meilissousi) them with prayers, sacrifices, and incantations,63 and by doing this paid a necessary ransom or penalty (poinen apodidontes) on behalf of the initiates. This changed (methistanai) 64 the daimones empodon-we are not told how they changed, but we must presume it was a positive transformation if it followed appeasements. This seems to be confirmed by the next part of the column, where souls now are equated with Eumenides, "Kindly Ones." After this transformation, the initiates might safely approach these entities on their own behalf and offer sacrifices to them as well. Finally, the initiates could then continue with the next step of the process, which was to make sacrifices to gods of some kind: Hades? Persephone? Demeter? Dionysus? Any or all of these might be appropriate in the context of eschatological mysteries. This sequence also makes sense, for as we saw in chapter 4's discussion of mystery initiations, problematic souls or other problematic spirits appear and are dealt with before the gods manifest themselves.
But we still are left with the rather surprising equation of Eumenides and souls. For souls to be called daimones is not a problem; this possibility is attested as early as Hesiod and, more important insofar as the Derveni Papyrus is concerned, something like this idea is found in Heraclitus as well.65 The idea of souls functioning as impeding daimones in particular is also acceptable, given what we learned about restless souls in chapter 4. Nor is it at all unusual, in Greek religion, to find that a illdisposed entity is transformed into a helpful one through ritual. The only novelty, then, lies in the apparent transformation of souls into deities, namely, the Eumenides. For, although the related adjective eumenes was applied to a number of gods as well as to people, so far as I know the special form Eumenides was only used of the goddesses who were worshipped, for example, at Sicyon. But this equation may be yet another instance of the wordplay and idiosyncratic interpretations that the commentator displays in many other parts of the papyrus. It may be that the Orphic poem on which he was commenting said only that impeding, hateful souls could be made kindly and helpful through propitiatory rituals; the commentator then took the extra step of identifying these kindly souls with the divinities of formal cult he knew as Eume- nides.66 In any case, it would be quite risky for us to assume that the statement casts any light on popular belief. All that column VI tells usalthough this is valuable in itself-is that the priests of this eschatologically oriented cult had to propitiate dangerous souls and perhaps also their agents (the Erinyes) on behalf of those whom they wer
e initiating before those initiates could approach the gods.
THE CYLONIAN AFFAIR
According to tradition, in the late seventh century, Epimenides was called in from Crete to cure Athens of the problems it was suffering after the Cylonian Affair, in which prominent citizens, mainly of the Alcmaeonid clan, had killed suppliants at altars of the Semnai Theai, within the precinct of those goddesses that lay between the Areopagus and the Acropolis.67 According to Diogenes Laertius, one of the techniques Epimenides used was to turn a flock of black and white sheep loose on the Areopagus and allow them to wander forth from there. Wherever any of them happened to lie down, it was sacrificed "to the divinity of that area" (prosekonti theoi ). This was understood to have been the origin of the many "nameless altars" that were scattered throughout Attica (that is, altars to deities who were left nameless because it was inauspicious to speak their names).61 Epimenides is also credited by Diogenes with establishing a temple (hieron) for the Semnai Theai in Athens following the cure. Although we cannot prove that the "nameless" altars, like the hieron, were dedicated to the Semnai Theai, it is highly likely. For one thing, it was the Semnai Theai who would have been most offended by the murders, as it was at their altars that the suppliants were killed. For another, the Semnai Theai are referred to as "nameless divinities" in Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians,69 and the appellation "Semnai Theai" is itself descriptive rather than denotative, as is common in the case of deities whose "real" names are not to be spoken. It looks, in other words, as if this legend was meant to credit Epimenides with establishing worship of the Semnai Theai in the form in which Athenians knew it in historical times.
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