Shattered Voices. Teresa Godwin Phelps

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СКАЧАТЬ the power to respond and fidelity assuring the will to do so. These virtues held the social structure in place and thus blood vengeance was a duty and an honorable act.¹⁴

      The tension between the customary power of revenge and the gradual ceding of the right to the state can be seen in numerous societies. For example, although England in the tenth and eleventh centuries saw a rapid growth in the power of kings and in the development and centralization of law, surrendering the right to revenge was still greatly resisted. Up until the Norman conquest, kinship was the strongest of bonds and that bond was never more palpable than in the blood feud. The blood feud was the visual equivalent of the strength of the familial bond. “A man’s kindred are his avengers; and, it is their right and honour to avenge him…. Step-by-step, as the power of the State waxes, the self-centered and self-helping of the kindred wanes. Private feud is controlled, regulated, put … into legal harness.”¹⁵ Slowly, and only by degrees, did the principles of state retribution prevail, and only gradually did the members of a community or family become, at least overtly, content with the remedies afforded by law.

      This transition from a culture’s practice of personal revenge to a growing dependence on the state for retribution can be usefully illustrated through a look at the values reflected in the literature and history of pre-Christian Greek culture. The Greek word for avenging the dead is etymologically related to the word for honor, signifying that revenge is more than satisfaction for the revenger, but also a requisite restoration of honor.¹⁶ This double meaning is reflected throughout both the Iliad and the Odyssey: “the objective of the Homeric heroes was always to ensure that they recovered from an aggressor the loss they had suffered.”¹⁷ Blood vengeance reestablished the balance lost as a result of the initiating harm; the revenge balanced the natural order and put the world back on the right track: “the balance of restorative transactions … explains [s] the rhythmical exchanges of natural events.”¹⁸ This balancing should not be seen as actual, of course; even the life of another, taken in precisely the same way, in no way equals the life of a loved one. Nonetheless, the metaphor of balancing to restore a kind of natural order informs most of the discourse concerning revenge. Many Greek myths and legends express the idea that order rested on vengeance, and the Homeric poems of the heroic age for the most part reveal an undisputed approval of the right to revenge.

      In the Odyssey (ca. 700 B.C.), for example, Odysseus’ revenge on the suitors of his wife Penelope, which comprises the last eleven books, possesses no ambivalence. Odysseus does not suffer the tribulations of later revengers: he does not hesitate or fear for his life or his soul. He does not die or go mad or even require any sort of purification. He even seems to have heavenly approval as the goddess Athena serves as his ally while he wreaks his bloody revenge. And after the suitors are killed, Athena steps in to prevent their relatives from continuing the revenge cycle, which would be unending without divine intervention.

      The Iliad, as well, is filled with stories of blood-for blood retaliation that are generally dealt with approvingly.¹⁹ In some ways, the Iliad is all about revenge in its broad sense, that is, anger and resentment for even minor wrongs, slights, and insults. The great hero Achilles pouts in his tent, refusing to fight, because his slave girl was taken from him. Beyond relating these smaller acts of getting even, the Iliad explicitly celebrates blood revenge; in a gruesome scene, Patroclus makes the Trojans “pay in blood.”²⁰ After Patroclus himself is killed, Achilles, his friend, takes specific payment for the slaying: “When Achilles’ hands were sore from killing, / He culled twelve boys live from the river / To pay for the blood of dead Patroclus.”²¹ We are meant to recognize Achilles’ great love for Patroclus in his act of revenge for Patroclus’ death; we are also meant to admire Achilles’ virtue in his willingness to so act.

      Interwoven with these scenes, however, are intimations of the ultimate incommensurability of great loss and the necessity of accepting less than adequate recompense (because “adequate” is impossible). Ajax, in an attempt to convince Achilles to return to fight the Trojans, portrays a model of human behavior that involves self-restraint and acceptance of loss:

      A man accepts compensation

      For a murdered brother, a dead son.

      The killer goes on living in the same town

      After paying blood money, and the bereaved

      Restrains his proud spirit and broken heart

      Because he has received payment.²²

      This reference to “blood money,” although arguably atypical for the Achaean society of both Ajax and Achilles,²³ foretells the gradual giving way of the custom of blood revenge that prevailed at the time. This very giving way occurs in the character of Achilles, who, initially unmoved by Ajax’s story, apparently learns about restraint and forgiveness when he later bows to Priam’s entreaties to return Hector’s body for burial. Earlier, when Hector has suggested that the winner of their combat shall return the slain to his family, Achilles refuses the bargain, comparing himself to lions and wolves, wild creatures that would not observe such niceties. By the end of the Iliad, we see a slightly more compliant Achilles. When Priam comes as a suppliant to Achilles to get Hector’s body, saying, “I have borne what no man / Who has walked this earth has ever yet borne. / I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son,”²⁴ Achilles surrenders his overwhelming need further to avenge the death of his friend, Patroclus, even upon Hector’s corpse. Instead, he opens himself to share with Priam the human experience of shared grief. In one of the final scenes of the Iliad, archenemies Priam and Achilles weep together, and the warrior Achilles promises Priam a temporary truce to give him time to bury his son properly.²⁵

      As the Iliad so movingly depicts in this surprising scene, although revenge was acknowledged as the hero’s right, a true hero recognized limits. The unabashed acceptance of unlimited bloody revenge had dire consequences. Even small disputes could require families and clans to enter into blood feuds that continued indefinitely in a state of vendetta, thereby weakening the clan by the loss of most men of fighting age. Blood revenge was among the most common causes of war among primitive people, with “mutual extinction” a likely outcome.²⁶

      The utter destructiveness of unrestrained blood feuding gave rise to certain variations to bring about closure. By the time of the great Attic tragedies in the fourth century B.C., the natural right to revenge was clearly ambiguous²⁷ and the moral status of an act of revenge depended upon the individual context.²⁸ This ambiguity and contextuality become apparent through the contrast between the Odyssey’s version of the story of Orestes, who kills his mother and her lover in revenge for his father’s murder, and the versions presented by Aeschylus and Euripedes some three centuries later. In the Odyssey, Zeus relates the tale of Orestes’ revenge on Aegisthus with approval: Zeus told Aegisthus “not to kill the man [Agamemnon] and not to woo his wife, / Or payment would come through Orestes.”²⁹ Orestes is described as “godly,”³⁰ and his act of revenge is viewed as expected, fully justified, and unambiguous. Orestes’ revenge strictly accords with the operative Achaean system of vendetta: “Blood has been shed; blood is avenged by blood.”³¹

      Euripides, depicting the same story centuries later, makes Orestes an entirely different character—a revenge-seeking thug dispossessed of any nobility, let alone any godliness. In so doing, Euripides transforms vengeance into an evil impulse. What the Odyssey described as Orestes’ duty to take revenge becomes in Euripides’ drama a character flaw, a selfish emotional need. But in order to characterize Orestes’ act of revenge as a failure of character, Euripides must offer an alternative to personal revenge and thereby indulge in an anachronism. He creates in his play a system of state punishment that did not actually exist when Orestes, according to legend, killed his mother. Of course, the system of state judgment and punishment did exist for Euripides’ audience, so they would have СКАЧАТЬ