not irrationally destructive.
But Aeschylus’ vision was overly optimistic. As various cultures worked through the shift from private revenge to state punishment, the Furies were not always accorded a “home at Athena’s side.” Instead, revenge and justice became treated as polar opposites, and the urge toward revenge was deemed reprehensible and always excessive. But the change within any culture from Aeschylus’ optimistic positioning of the Furies to their complete dismissal could not be accomplished in a single step. A culture steeped in a tradition of blood feud revenge needed transitional steps.
One of these transitional steps took on some form of the lex talionis argument, the eye-for-an-eye principle that requires that the punishment exacted equal in both form and harshness the harm received. While often interpreted as a permissive doctrine, lex talionis sanctioned equal punishment, thereby imposing a limit upon the revenge that could be taken:58 a life for a life, an injury for an injury, property for property.59 Such limitations in theory provided end points for blood feuds; once the original harm was balanced, the feud ended. In practice, of course, the parties often disagreed as to what was a fair and adequate balancing, and the feud continued indefinitely. Another means of balancing the harm was a payment of money to the victim’s relative. As early as the eighteenth century B.C., for example, the Code of Hammurabi, while adhering generally to the principle of lex talionis, attempted to limit private revenge and blood feuds.60 Many wrongs could be compensated by payment (composition) to the victim’s family or clan, the amount varying with the offense and with the status of the victim.61 Among the Assyrians and the Hittites, a rich killer could have himself replaced by another or could buy his way out of blood revenge.62 The Pelagasians of ancient Greece practiced a “tribal wergeld.”63 In Anglo-Saxon societies, the wergeld, the worth of a man, could “buy off the spear”64 and was commonly used to avenge a death.65 The consolidated laws of the Germanic tribes describe sums of money as compensations for homicides.66
In all these practices, the state acknowledged the desire for revenge, keeping the Furies by Athena’s side, while it simultaneously worked to regulate and limit its fulfillment in action. The private settlements may be seen as an advancement over violence for violence yet these practices also met with disapproval and condemnation.67 Although the state vied to interfere and to regulate, at this time it still remained unthinkable for any authority outside the kinship group to act; the state had neither the power nor the approval of the people to take action68—until the emergence of the “pollution doctrine.”
The pollution doctrine was perhaps the most effective argument the state could make in its effort to regulate vengeance.69 In effect, the pollution doctrine began the process of state retribution in that it depersonalized harm and spread the revenge requirement from the individual or the clan to the entire community. In this doctrine, a crime became an insult to and a stain against the community at large. “Much as the religions of the Athenians and Hebrews differed, their doctrine … was … that the land is polluted by the shedding of innocent blood and no expiation can be made for the land but by the death of the offender. It is the duty of the nearest kin to obtain revenge for the slain and the presence of the slayer in the land destroys its fertility.”70 The pollution doctrine may be seen as a bridge between private blood feud revenge and state retribution in that it expresses a compromise between tribal traditions and the slowly evolving power of the state.71 Because the pollution doctrine saw the wrong as committed against the community, private settlement of any sort—violent revenge, compensation, or even pardon—was not exclusively a personal matter. Although the actual taking of revenge might still be enacted by a family member, this action would occur under state aegis.72
The conception of pollution was very Semitic and is essentially the biblical approach to revenge: a wrong is a stain against the community and no payment may be taken to balance the transgression.73 God instructs Moses as the Israelites approach Canaan as to the appropriate sanctions for homicide: “Blood defiles the land, and expiation cannot be made on behalf of the land for blood shed on it except by the blood of the man that shed it.”74 Not the individual or the clan but God, as the ruler of the tribal Israelites, alone is entitled to take vengeance.75 In this respect, revenge and justice are not contraries, but are related. While the God of the Old Testament is sometimes described as “compassionate [and] long-suffering,”76 God is also depicted as having a “sword steeped in blood” awaiting a “day of vengeance”77 and as showing “unfailing love” by causing enemies’ “life-blood [to] spurt[ed] over [his] garments.”78 In the world revealed in the Old Testament, revenge seems requisite to reestablishing the natural order: “And the sun stood still and the moon halted until a nation had taken vengeance on its enemies.”79 Revered Old Testament figures such as Samson80 and Deborah81 are renowned for their acts of heroic revenge. The New Testament likewise ratifies God’s right to avenge; Paul writes that God will “pay every man for what he has done…. [T]here will be the fury of retribution…. trouble and distress for every human being who is an evil-doer.”82 The principle of God’s justice is inextricably aligned with willingness to take revenge.
Although virtues such as courage and fidelity remained important in early societies, with the emergence of the pollution doctrine, blood vengeance and the duty to one’s clan was reluctantly ceded to the polis, or city-state. As the state managed to characterize itself as the victim, it could argue more effectively that the needs of the individual victim and family were less significant than a balancing within the state itself. If the state claims that it must reestablish the natural order that has been disrupted by the crime, then the importance of the victim’s need for some personal balancing becomes virtually insignificant. Like Euripides’ Orestes or Dorfman’s Paulina, the victim must be willing to forgo any personal desire for vengeance so that the state can function in an orderly fashion for some larger good. State punishment, then, carried an important message related to the pollution doctrine: a wrong was committed not just against the individual but also against the social unit itself—in many cases the state embodied in the person of the king.83
Gradually, the complete suppression of private revenge came to be presented as being essential to the advancement of civilization, as requisite to an ordered society. When the state takes revenge in the form of retribution, however, the passion leaches out of it; revenge is passionate, retribution is dispassionate.84 Over time, revenge, once an important component of justice systems, became justice’s polar opposite. Thus the powerful image in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the emotional drive for revenge taking its rightful place at wisdom’s side, is unrealized.
This ragged history reveals that revenge did not always have a bad reputation. Humankind was not always embarrassed by a desire to balance a harm with a comparable harm in an act of revenge. What, then, occurred that created the polarization? And why was it seen as necessary?
Chapter Two
The Demonizing of Revenge
If thou didst ever thy dear father love—
…
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
In the present age … we are inclined to think that civilized people are not given to hatred and to an anger so intense that it generates the desire for revenge.
—Jeffrie Murphy, Forgiveness and Mercy
The first quotation, spoken by the ghost of Hamlet’s father at the initial meeting between the prince and the ghost, was written around 1600, the second in 1988. In less than 400 years, the beliefs, in Western culture
