Poine: a study in ancient Greek blood-vengeanceTreston, Hubert Joseph
History
Poine: a study in ancient Greek blood-vengeance
Treston, Hubert Joseph
Criminal law (Greek law); Greece -- Civilization; Greek drama (Tragedy) -- History and criticism; Homicide (Greek law); Vendetta
loathsome sleep in the temple of Apollo, whom they hate but also fear.
We find in Aelian and Plutarch the legend[153] that Apollo, in the days
of his conquest of Delphi, fled to Tempe, after slaying the Python, to
be purified from the pollution. The Stepteria festival was believed to
commemorate his flight! In this legend, however, as in that in which
Zeus purifies Ixion,[154] we see the effect of aetiological myth-making
and the operation of a principle of primitive religion whereby man makes
the gods in his own image and attributes to them the emotions and the
observances of his own day.
As we cannot regard Apollo, notwithstanding Müller’s[155] reasoning,
as the special product of Dorian religion, so we cannot attribute his
exaltation in post-Homeric days exclusively to the Dorian invasion.
The Achaeans worshipped Apollo as a prophet-god and as a powerful ally
in war, but their hegemony in Greece was based on military control
rather than on theocratic manipulation. The Delphians are not mentioned
in Homer. They were a Dorian dominant caste which conquered the
Phocian masters of the ‘Homeric’ temple at Pytho,[156] about 1000 B.C.
Undoubtedly they could not have retained the fruits of their conquest for
any period of time, if they had not been supported by the power of the
Dorian invaders of Southern Greece. Thus, in 448 B.C., when the Phocians
had reoccupied Delphi, it was the Dorian Spartans who sent an army to
restore it to the Delphians.[157] Yet the Athenians, who were then
supreme in Central Greece, restored it to the Phocians for a time. But,
about 585 B.C., when anti-Dorism was at its height in Greece, it was to a
northern league of Greek States, in which the Dorians were subordinate,
that Delphi looked for help against the Phocians of Crisa.[158] The fact
that Cleisthenes of Sicyon, an anti-Dorian, championed the Delphians
in this campaign, proves that their Dorian nationality was already
subordinated to the prestige which they had won as the High Priests of
Greek prophetic religion: and the loan of fifteen talents which a Spartan
king gave to the Phocian general who had once more seized Delphi in 356
B.C. shows how Dorism had lost its primal solidarity.[159]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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