Alan H. Sommerstein, Isabelle C. Torrance Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece Herausgegeben von Michael Erler, Dorothee Gall, Ludwig Koenen und Clemens Zintzen Band 307 Beiträge zur Altertumskunde Alan H. Sommerstein, Isabelle C. Torrance Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece With contributions by Andrew J. Bayliss, Judith Fletcher, Kyriaki Konstantinidou and Lynn A. Kozak ISBN 978-3-11-020059-1 e-ISBN 978-3-11-022736-9 ISSN 1616-0452 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com. Druck und Bindung: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ∞ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Preface This volume completes the publication of the project The Oath in Archaic and Classical Greece , based at the University of Nottingham and funded by the Lever- hulme Trust (award no. F.00 114/Z), whose assistance is warmly acknowledged. The main previous publications of the project have been the Nottingham Oath Database (Sommerstein, Bayliss and Torrance 2007) and Oath and State in Ancient Greece , edited by Sommerstein and Bayliss and referred to in this volume as S&B. The authors have in broad terms a common view of the nature and effect of oaths as a cultural phenomenon of ancient Greek society, as will be apparent from this volume, though – as will also be apparent – they inevitably disagree on matters of detail and nuance and on the interpretation of some particular pas- sages and incidents. The several chapters of the volume deal with different aspects of the oath phenomenon, and it thus inevitably often happens that the same passage is dis- cussed from different points of view in more than one chapter. We should draw attention to a peculiarity in the chapter numbering. There are some tall buildings that have no thirteenth floor, and some books in which chapter 14 directly follows chapter 12; this volume, contrariwise, has both a chapter 13 and a chapter 13a. This is because there are several references in S&B to specific numbered chapters of the present volume, and changes in the chapter plan since the publication of S&B would otherwise have rendered some of these references incorrect. The acknowledgements made in the preface to S&B apply equally to this volume, and are gratefully reiterated. But it is particularly appropriate, on the occasion of his retirement from the Department of Classics of the University of Nottingham, that Alan Sommerstein should record explicitly his deep apprecia- tion of all that the University, the Department, the School of Humanities, their academic and administrative staffs, and not least their students, have done to assist and encourage him over all but forty years, and especially over the ten years of the Oath project. The authors are also pleased to acknowledge their gratitude to the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame for a small research grant which supported work on § 5.2, and for funding to support the cost of indexing, which was carried out with great efficiency by Dr Joanna Luke. Alan H. Sommerstein ( Nottingham ), Isabelle C. Torrance ( Notre Dame ), Andrew J. Bayliss ( Birmingham ), Judith Fletcher ( Waterloo ), Kyriaki Konstantinidou ( Istanbul ), Lynn A. Kozak ( Montreal ) March 2014 Contents Abbreviations X 1 What is an oath? (A.H. Sommerstein) 1 2 Oath and curse (K. Konstantinidou) 6 2.1 Horkos and Erinyes: oath as a curse 8 2.2 Explicit self-curse and oath-taking 19 2.3 The explicit self-curse in Greek drama 24 2.4 The explicit self-curse in law-court speeches 37 3 Oaths in traditional myth (I.C. Torrance) 48 4 Friendship and enmity, trust and suspicion 60 4.1 Oaths between warriors in epic and tragedy (L.A. Kozak) 60 4.2 Oaths in business (A.H. Sommerstein) 67 5 The language of oaths 76 5.1 How oaths are expressed (A.H. Sommerstein) 76 5.2 The “Sophoclean” oath (I.C. Torrance) 86 5.3 “Of cabbages and kings”: the Eideshort phenomenon (I.C. Torrance) 111 6 Ways to give oaths extra sanctity (I.C. Torrance) 132 6.1 Sanctifying witnesses and significant locations 132 6.2 Oath-sacrifices 138 6.3 Gestures, libations, and unusual sanctifying features 143 6.4 Multiple sanctifying features 149 7 Oaths, gender and status 156 7.1 Women and oaths (J. Fletcher) 156 7.2 Servile swearing (A.J. Bayliss) 179 7.3 The oaths of the gods (I.C. Torrance) 195 8 Oaths and characterization: two Homeric case studies (L.A. Kozak) 213 8.1 Achilles 213 8.2 Odysseus 222 VIII Preface 9 Oratory and rhetoric (A.H. Sommerstein) 230 10 “Artful dodging”, or the sidestepping of oaths (A.J. Bayliss except as stated) 240 10.1 The difficulty of proving an oath false: the case of Euripides’ Cyclops (I.C. Torrance) 240 10.2 The concept of sidestepping 243 10.3 “The art of Autolycus”: extremely careful wording to conceal the truth 256 10.4 The “Thracian pretence” 259 10.5 Capturing the commander 262 10.6 Other careful or dubious interpretation of wording: agreements that end sieges 265 10.7 Substitution 266 10.8 False foundations 270 10.9 Dodging the “blank-cheque” oath 273 10.10 What does this evidence tell us about Greek attitudes to sidestepped oaths? 276 10.11 Conclusions 279 11 The binding power of oaths 281 11.1 Were oaths always totally binding? (A.H. Sommerstein) 281 11.2 The oaths of lovers (A.H. Sommerstein) 287 11.3 The tongue and the mind: responses to Euripides, Hippolytus 612 (I.C. Torrance) 289 12 Responses to perjury 295 12.1 Divine responses (I.C. Torrance) 295 12.2 Human responses (K. Konstantinidou) 303 13 The informal oath (A.H. Sommerstein) 315 13.1 How informal oaths are used 315 Appendix: swearing by Hera 326 13.2 How binding were informal oaths? The case of Aristophanes’ Clouds 331 13a Swearing oaths in the authorial person (I.C. Torrance) 348 13a.1 The orators 348 13a.2 Pindar and other poets 349 Preface IX 13a.3 Xenophon 360 13a.4 Three more authorial oaths in prose texts 367 13a.5 Conclusions 368 14 The Hippocratic Oath (I.C. Torrance) 372 15 The decline of the oath? (A.H. Sommerstein) 381 Bibliography 394 Index locorum 413 Subject index 445 Abbreviations Abbreviations not listed below are as in LSJ (H.G. Liddell / R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon 9 , rev. H. Stuart Jones [Oxford, 1940] with Revised Supplement ed. P.G.W. Glare [Oxford, 1996]) or OCD 4 (S. Hornblower / A.J.S. Spawforth / E. Eidinow (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary 4 [Oxford, 2012]), except that some names of ancient authors and works are abbreviated in a fuller form than in these publications. [Apoll.] pseudo-Apollodorus (the mythographer) Ath.Pol. (if cited without author’s name) the Athēnaiōn Politeia ascribed to Aristotle BIWK G. Petzl, Die Beichtinschriften Westkleinasiens (Bonn, 1994) CA Classical Antiquity CID Corpus des inscriptions de Delphes (Paris, 1977‒2002) CP Classical Philology CSCA California Studies in Classical Antiquity DTA R. Wünsch, Defixionum Tabellae Atticae (= IG iii, part 3) (Berlin, 1897) ED M. Segre, Iscrizioni di Cos (Rome, 1993) EMC Échos du Monde Classique / Classical Views h.Dem. , h. Herm. , etc. Homeric Hymn to Demeter , to Hermes , etc. Horkos A.H. Sommerstein / J. Fletcher (eds.), Horkos: the oath in Greek society (Exeter, 2007) HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology IPArk G. Thür / H. Taeuber, Prozeßrechtliche Inschriften der griechischen Poleis: Arkadien (Vienna, 1994) Lyc. Leocr Lycurgus [not Lycophron], Against Leocrates Prov. Coisl. Proverbia e codice Coisliniano n. 177 , in: T. Gaisford, Paroemiographi Graeci (Oxford, 1836), 121ff. RO P.J. Rhodes / R.G. Osborne, Greek Historical Inscriptions, 404‒323 B.C. (Oxford, 2003) Σ scholium or scholia S&B A.H. Sommerstein / A.J. Bayliss, Oath and State in Ancient Greece (Berlin, 2013) WD Works and Days (Hesiod) 1 What is an oath? A.H. Sommerstein This book and its partner volume (S&B) are about oaths in archaic and classical Greece, and we should begin by defining our terms. Since we are not particu- larly concerned with drawing a line between the archaic and classical periods, we need only set beginning and end points for an era comprising both. We take the archaic period to begin with the earliest surviving alphabetic Greek texts – which means, in practice, with the major Homeric and Hesiodic poems, these being the oldest texts that contain references to oaths – and the classical period to end with the deaths of Aristotle, Demosthenes and Hypereides in 322 BC. At various points we will be referring to later (and indeed to earlier) evidence, but these are the bounds of the timespan we are actually examining. As to the term “oath” itself, we will use the definition embodied in the palmary formulation of Richard Janko,1 whereby “to take an oath is in effect to invoke powers greater than oneself to uphold the truth of a declaration, by putting a curse upon oneself if it is false”. An oath, then, is an utterance whereby the speaker – the swearer 2 – does the following three things simulta- neously. (1) The swearer makes a declaration. This may be a statement about the present or past, in which case the oath is assertory ; or it may be an undertaking for the future, in which case the oath is promissory. (2) The swearer specifies, explicitly or implicitly,3 a superhuman power or pow- ers 4 as witnesses to the declaration and guarantors of its truth. In English the swearer is said to swear “by” (sometimes, colloquially, “to”) this power or powers; in Greek the guarantor power was normally the direct object of the 1 Janko 1992, 194, on Iliad 14.271–9. 2 To be contrasted with the swearee , defined in the Nottingham Oath Database as “the person, if any, to whom an oath was addressed or who exacted it from the swearer”. 3 Ancient Greeks usually, though not always, specified the power(s) by whom they were swear- ing. When not explicitly specified, the identity of the guarantor power will be either implied in the context, or given by the culture. Contextual determination is to be found, for example, in Aesch. Eum. 762–74, where Orestes swears that, in his posthumous capacity as a hero, he will prevent the Argives from making any attack on Athens, but will bless them if they act as faithful allies to the Athenians: he does not specify by which god(s) he is swearing – but his promise is actually addressed to Athena, and she is well capable of punishing its breach. 4 Normally these are divinities, heroes, etc., but sometimes we find sacred or cherished objects ( Eideshorte ) filling the corresponding place in oath-formulae; see § 5.3. 2 1 What is an oath? verb of swearing – strictly speaking, one did not in Greek “swear by Zeus”, for example; rather, one “swore Zeus”.5 (3) The swearer calls down a conditional curse on him/herself,6 to take effect if the assertion is false or if the promise is violated, as the case may be; that is, (s)he prays that in that event (s)he may suffer punishment from the guarantor power. This element need not be explicitly spelt out; it is often left to be un- derstood from the words of the oath itself, particularly the performative verb “I swear” (in Greek omnumi , later omnuō ); but it can always be made explicit when there is need for special assurance. At any rate, whether explicit or not, it is the key defining feature of an oath: an oath is a declaration whose cred- ibility is fortified by a conditional self-curse .7 All the defining features of an oath are well seen in the oath which Medea exacts from Aegeus, king of Athens, in Euripides’ Medea (731‒58).8 When Aegeus arrives in Corinth, en route from Delphi to Trozen, Medea, who has been ordered by King Creon to leave Corinth with her children before the next day’s sunrise, suppli- cates him to grant her asylum, promising him that she will use her magical skills to ensure that his long childlessness comes to an end. He says he is willing to do so, so long as Medea comes to Athens under her own steam. Medea, however, asks for a guarantee ( pistis , 731) – a word which, when applied to the confirma- tion of a promise, often, but not always, refers to an oath. Aegeus, with some surprise and maybe even indignation, asks her whether she does not trust him (733); she says she does, but points out that she has powerful enemies (Creon and “the house of Pelias”) and that if Aegeus was not bound by an oath they might cajole or bully him into complying with a request for her extradition (734‒40). Aegeus understands and accepts this argument, and asks her to name the gods he should swear by (745); she names the Earth, the Sun (her own grandfather) and 5 This may be an elliptical form, shortened from “I swear 〈making〉 Zeus 〈a witness〉”; see § 5.1, p. 76 n. 2. 6 The punishment prayed for need not fall exclusively, or at all, directly on the swearer him/ herself; but it must always be something that is harmful or hurtful to the swearer. If it is not, the oath is a sham – like that of the chorus in Ar. Birds 445–7, who pray that if they keep their promise they may win the comic competition by a unanimous verdict but that if they break it they may ... win by just one vote. 7 The equation of oath and curse is made unusually explicit by Andocides (1.31) in a reference to the oath of the jurors (see S&B 69‒80): “you ... will cast your votes about me after having taken great oaths, and invoked the greatest curses both upon yourselves and upon your children, un- dertaking to vote justly in my case”. See further ch. 2 below. 8 See further § 2.3 below. 1 What is an oath? 3 “the whole race of gods” (746‒7). Aegeus then asks what he is to swear to do or not do (748); Medea’s answer is “never yourself to expel me from your land, and never willingly while you live to give me up to any of my enemies who wishes to take me” (749‒51). Aegeus duly swears, using the performative verb and naming the gods Medea had specified, “to abide by what I have heard from you” (752‒3). But Medea then also asks him to state what he wishes to suffer if he does not abide by the oath (754); he replies with the vague but apparently satisfactory formula “The things that happen to those who are impious” (755) – and thereupon she sends him on his way. She feels completely secure, and rightly so. Not long after- wards she will turn up on Aegeus’ doorstep in Athens, having murdered Creon, his daughter (her ex-partner Jason’s new bride) and her own children, and he will have no alternative but to take her in and protect her. Her own (unsworn) promise to him, incidentally, she will not keep:9 Aegeus’ son Theseus will have been con- ceived at Trozen before Aegeus returns to Athens, Aegeus will not even know of his existence for many years to come, and when Theseus does come to Athens Medea will plot to murder him. Any utterance that does not contain the three features specified above, explic- itly or by clear implication, will not in this book be regarded as an oath. There has been some tendency in scholarship over the years to use the term loosely; a few examples follow. (1) In most English-speaking countries, the giving of false evidence in court tri- als can be prosecuted as the crime of “perjury” even if the witness has bound him/herself by solemn affirmation rather than by oath. This has created a standing temptation to use the same term as a translation of Greek pseudo- marturion “false testimony”, and even sometimes to take it for granted that witnesses in ancient Greek trials were regularly required to swear to the truth of their evidence, when in fact, at least at Athens, they were sworn only in homicide trials (and others held before the Council of the Areopagus) and in certain exceptional circumstances. For a full discussion see S&B 87‒91. (2) The mere fact that a statement is made when the speaker is in contact with a sacred object (such as the entrails of a sacrificial animal) does not in itself make the statement into an oath, if no divine witness is explicitly or implicitly invoked. When Demaratus of Sparta puts into his mother’s hands the entrails from a sacrifice he had made to Zeus, and solemnly beseeches her to tell him truthfully who his father was (Hdt. 6.67‒9; see ch. 6, p. 140 n. 31), she clearly 9 Except in those versions in which she herself bore a son, Medus, to Aegeus. Diodorus Siculus (4.56.1) says this story was told in tragedy, but we do not know whether it was already current by 431 BC when Medea was produced. 4 1 What is an oath? regards herself as being under a specially binding duty to speak the truth, but nothing in her 267‒word speech gives any hint that she is under oath. The episode is merely a more formal and elaborate version of the common formula whereby a question is asked, or a request made, in the name of a god (Attic Greek normally uses the preposition pros with genitive, literally “from”, e.g. pros Dios “in the name of Zeus”); this formula certainly makes a ques- tion more difficult to ignore or answer falsely, or a request more difficult to disregard, but it cannot of itself subject the addressee to a conditional curse unless the addressee him/herself invokes one. However, laying one’s hand on the earth can constitute an oath (Bacch. 5.41‒2, 8.19; cf. Iliad 14.270‒6), since Earth was herself a goddess; see §5.1, p. 85, and §6.3, p. 143. (3) In Sophocles, and very occasionally in other texts, a statement or promise which, when actually made, did not have the form of an oath, is sometimes referred to retrospectively as if it had been an oath; this phenomenon, which we call the “Sophoclean oath”, is fully discussed in §5.2. It only occurs in a small number of passages (less than one per play, even in Sophocles), and it will be shown in §5.2 that on each occasion it serves an identifiable thematic function. This does not, therefore, authorize us to treat, for example, any sol- emn injunction as the exacting of an oath.10 Going in the opposite direction, Polinskaya 2012 claims that it was possible to call gods to witness in “situations where no oaths [were] sworn”, and cites a number of instances11 in which, she claims (p. 27), gods are invoked “as simple observers, 10 As Markantonatos (2007, 175) does when, referring to Soph. OC 1530‒2, he says that Oedipus “places each and every one of the [future] Athenian rulers under oath”; in fact Oedipus is simply giving an instruction that each of these rulers shall not divulge the secret of Oedipus’ tomb to anyone but his successor as ruler, and telling Theseus that in this way Athens will be kept safe from Theban attack. He does go on to say (1536‒8) that the gods will sooner or later punish any- one who “abandons religion and turns to madness”, but that follows a mention of hubris (1535); in the actual passage about the secret there had been no suggestion that improper divulgement of it would be impious, only that it would be imprudent. Similarly Martinez 2012, 49 says that in h.Dem. 331‒3 “Demeter ... swears not to go home” when the text has simply ephaske “ she said”, “she persisted in saying”, with no indication whatever of any added solemnity, much less of a divine invocation or a conditional curse. 11 Soph. Trach. 1248; Eur. Med. 619‒20, Hipp. 1451, Supp. 1174‒5; Hdt. 5.92ζ‒5.93.1; Thuc. 2.71.4, 2.74.2, 4.87.2‒3. Polinskaya (p. 35) adds Xen. Hell. 2.3.55, but in this passage Theramenes is only calling on gods (and men) to see what is happening to him; this is not the only place in her article where Polinskaya is led astray by the fact that the English word “witness” has two mean- ings (“one who has seen, heard, etc., some significant event” and “one who bears, or will bear, 1 What is an oath? 5 not as executors of justice”. It is certainly true that in some (not all)12 of these passages the main purpose of the invocation is less to certify the truthfulness of the speaker’s utterance than to arouse divine anger against those who have treated him/her unjustly or (as in Eur. Supp. 1174‒5) against those who may do so in future. Since, however, there are many undoubted oaths (from Iliad 3.280 onwards) in which gods are likewise called to bear witness, it is not clear how the deity can be expected to distinguish one kind of calling-to-witness from another. It is certain, moreover, that a god will resent it if (s)he is invited to bear witness to a falsehood; to issue such an invitation, therefore, itself amounts to invoking divine punishment on oneself should one’s statement be untrue.13 We therefore continue to hold that when a god is called to witness to the truth of a statement, this constitutes an oath even if no (other) oath-language is used. testimony”) whereas Greek martus and its synonyms are used only in the latter sense (compare her definition of “witnessing”, p. 24). 12 In Eur. Hipp. 1451, Hippolytus’ objective is plainly to reassure Theseus as strongly as possible that he truly has been freed from the guilt and pollution of having caused Hippolytus’ death; and it is fitting that almost the last utterance of Hippolytus’ life should be a straightforward and successful oath, after two previous oaths of his which in different ways were disastrous failures – the oath of secrecy by which Phaedra’s nurse entrapped him and which Phaedra was convinced he would break (cf. Hipp. 612‒13, 689‒92) and the oath of innocence which Theseus would not believe (1027‒37, 1055‒9). See further §11.2. 13 At the end of her article (p. 35) Polinskaya says that whereas “oaths demand divine interven- tion, invitations to witness only ... [submit the inviter] to the discretion of the gods should they choose to take an interest” [emphasis mine]. But this is a distinction without a difference: it was always a matter for the discretion of the gods whether or not they acted on a human request of any kind (except in a few mythical cases like that of Theseus who was granted, and misused, the right to make three requests of Poseidon which would automatically be fulfilled: Eur. Hipp. 44‒6). 2 Oath and curse1 Kyriaki Konstantinidou There is a proper place for the fear-inspiring and for fear to sit high in the soul as its overseer: it is beneficial to learn good sense under the pressure of distress. What man that does not at all nourish his heart on fear – or what community of men, it makes no difference – will still revere Justice? Aesch. Eum. 517‒252 But the Zeus in the Council Chamber is of all images of Zeus the one most likely to strike terror into the hearts of those who do wrong. His epithet is Oath-god (Horkios), and in each hand he holds a thunderbolt. Beside this image it is the custom for athletes, their fathers and their brothers, and even their trainers, to swear an oath upon slices of a boar that there will commit no misdeed on their part in the competition in the Olympic games...Before the feet of the Oath-god is a bronze plate, with elegiac verses inscribed upon it, the object of which is to strike fear into those who forswear themselves. Pausanias 5.24.9‒11 The well-known lines sung by the chorus of Erinyes in Aeschylus’ Eumenides draw attention to the critical importance of the common human emotion of fear for the proper workings of human justice. One dimension of this fear is mani- fest in the identity of the singers who play the role of agents of retribution in the play: all men should nourish in their heart fear of the divine , if they truly want to revere justice.3 In a very different context, on his visit to Olympia, Pausanias similarly describes the terrifying image of Zeus Horkios , “Zeus of the Oath”, who 1 I would like to thank Elton Barker, Eftychia Bathrellou and Alan Sommerstein for their invalu- able comments and suggestions on this chapter. 2 All translations of Aeschylus and Aristophanes are from A.H. Sommerstein (2008a and 1980‒2003 respectively) and of Hesiod from G.W. Most (2007). The rest are mine, unless other- wise indicated. 3 See esp. Sommerstein 1989, 171‒82 and Parker 2009, 142‒51 for a positive evaluation of the no- tion of human fear of the divine for the maintenance of a well-ordered society, in the otherwise terrifying song by the Erinyes. I am in agreement with those critics who see these lines as already alluding to human fear of institutional justice too, as developed in the play with Athena’s foun- dation of the Areopagus: see e.g. Lebeck 1971, 147‒9; Conacher 1987, 156‒8; Sommerstein loc. cit. 2 Oath and curse 7 strikes fear into the heart of the athletes and those who swear in support of them. As Burkert has long ago stated, “only fear of the gods provides a guarantee that oaths will be kept”.4 In oath-taking practice, this fear underpins the presence of the conditional self-curse that differentiates the verbal act of oath from any simple promise or assertion (see §1.1). Any divine power(s) could be invoked in oath-taking to execute the divine punishment (cf. e.g. §13.1), implied or stated explicitly through the self-curse, and activated in the event of oath-breaking. But it is certainly not by accident that these two powers, Zeus and the Erinyes, who are related so closely to the notion of imposing fear upon mankind, appear in literary sources with a broader jurisdiction over the institution of the oath.5 In §1.1 the oath was defined as a conditional self-curse, a definition that draws attention to the pervasive presence of (conditional) divine punishment looming large over the swearer. A number of anglophone scholars have remarked that this religious aspect of the oath can be difficult for us to grasp:6 modern cultural parameters do not always leave space for such a perception. The present chapter aims to approach archaic and classical Greek sources by examining and showing the extent to which the oath was perceived as or identified with the self-curse. Scholarly attention to the distinctive symbolism of the self-curse in formal oath-rituals in Greek religion has shaped one fruitful avenue for exploring its prominence.7 The current study argues for a close-bound interrelation of oath and curse by taking a twin approach to the evidence. In §2.1 it builds up a picture of how well-known notions of divine and human dikē in archaic and early classi- cal Greek literature define and represent the nature of the oath as a conditional 4 Burkert’s (1985, 252) emphasis on fear in oath-taking is expounded further by e.g. Faraone, 1993, 2002; Berti 2006; Kitts 2005, 114‒87. On the common human emotion of fear of divine anger, which can be defined by cultural parameters, cf. e.g. the recent study by Chaniotis (2012) on later epigraphic evidence. 5 See §2.1 below, also p. 28 with n. 84. 6 cf. e.g. Stephanie West’s remarks (2003, 438) on our understanding of the religious dimension of the oath: “For us nowadays an oath introduces a more formal element into our undertakings... we need to adjust to earlier assumptions as characteristic of medieval England as of classical antiquity. An oath introduced a religious element.” See also Sommerstein 2007a. Their point is made in relation to formal oaths. The extent to which the element of divine presence and punish- ment in oath-taking is culturally determined could be shown through e.g. a comparison between English and modern Greek language for oaths. English seems to lack expressions of informal oath-taking but in modern Greek informal everyday oaths are frequently used, in which both the divine element and the explicit element of the self-curse are prominent, as in the case of “by God and the Holy Virgin!”, with, sometimes, the addition of an explicit self-curse “may I die!” for extra confirmation of the oath statement. 7 See pp. 26‒7. 8 2 Oath and curse self-curse, through the association of the divine personifications of these verbal concepts, Horkos and the Erinyes as Curses. In §2.2 the focus shifts to investigat- ing actual instances of oath-taking: while the conditional self-curse is implied behind every oath, the section examines oaths in which individual speakers explicitly articulate the element of the conditional self-curse in two different public spaces in Athens: (a) scenes of dialogue on the theatrical stage, and (b) litigants’ speeches in Athenian law-courts. Individuals’ use and manipulation of these ver- balized self-curses vary according to the contextual situation and purpose of each speaker; improvisation on the self-curse is a recurrent feature in these contexts. But the character’s or speaker’s choice to underline the element of the self-curse is a clear demonstration of the conscious perception of the oath as a conditional divine punishment hanging over the swearers. 2.1 Horkos and Erinyes: oath as a curse It is commonly acknowledged that personifications of abstract concepts in the archaic and classical Greek period often interact with other abstractions or super- natural entities;8 and that in this interaction, well-known characteristics of the latter might sometimes be transferred to the former who share, then, similari- ties in attributes or areas of activity.9 The present section sketches out the liter- ary representations of two personified abstractions, Horkos and Arai, Oath and Curses. By bringing them together it aims to outline their interchangeable activity in contexts of a breach of dikē that implicate oaths and perjury in archaic and early classical Greek poetry:10 specifically, in Hesiod, the personified Horkos is clearly presented as a curse while in Aeschylus’ Eumenides , the personified Arai, Curses, come to prominence in the context of institutional oaths and potential perjury. The unifying factor that defines the personification of both abstractions 8 See Webster 1954; Gombrich 1971; Stafford 2000 (with an emphasis on cult); Stafford 2007, 71‒81. 9 Cf. e.g. Persuasion and Aphrodite (Hes. WD 73‒5) and the erotic connotations that the former develops in classical period: see Buxton 1982; Stafford 2000, 111‒45. 10 While Solmsen 1949 remains the classic work on the Aeschylean echoes of Hesiodic percep- tions of the divine, the representation of divine powers in relation to oaths is limited to Horkos and Styx in Hesiod (32‒33). On aspects of these two personifications in relation to oaths and perjury, see Hirzel 1902, 142‒9 (on Horkos as divine figure) and recently Fletcher 2012, 62‒6 (on the Erinyes/Semnai and oaths); Gagné 2013, 159‒77 (on the divine punishment of exōleia and perjury in Hesiod). The emphasis in this section is on their affiliation and interchangeability as “the conditional curse” in their Hesiodic and Aeschylean representation. 2.1 Horkos and Erinyes: oath as a curse 9 is their association or identification with the divine Erinyes whose relation with all forms of cursing extends to oaths.11 The examination of these personifications will allow us to map out the forms of divine punishment, which we are going to see crystallized as verbalized conditional curses in the second section. A good starting point for getting a sense of Greek attitudes to conceiving the oath as a conditional self-curse is to consider the Ηesiodic representation of Horkos. Explaining why “fifth days” should be avoided, Hesiod gives as a reason his birth (Hes. WD 802‒4): Avoid fifth days since they are difficult and dread: for they say that it was on the fifth that the Erinyes attended upon Oath [Horkos] as he was born – Oath, whom Strife bore as a woe to those who break their oath 12 Here Martin West identifies the Oath as a conditional self-curse: “an oath is by origin a curse which a man lays upon himself, to take effect if what he declares is false. The god Horkos is the personification of this curse; that is why he is attended by the Erinyes...”13 This association of Horkos and the Erinyes makes sense when evidence for the latter’s role in archaic poetry is taken into consid- eration, evidence which links them with two different notions of the verbal act of cursing. In their most common role, they are invoked to fulfil revenge curses within a family (a role that they famously retain in Greek tragedy).14 Thus, in Homer we learn from Phoenix of the time when Althaea beats the earth and calls down curses on her son Meleager for killing her brother, and the Erinys hears her ( Il. 9.568‒72).15 Some lines earlier, Phoenix had also given an account about 11 The most thorough approaches to the Erinyes, which highlight to varying degrees their con- nection to revenge cursing or “the curse” of the dead, are offered by Wüst 1956; Visser 1980; A.L.Brown 1983, 1984; Sommerstein 1989, 6‒12; Johnston 1992, 1994, 1999, 250‒87; Henrichs 1994; Bacon 2001; Sewell-Rutter 2007, 78‒109; Labarrière 2006; Easterling 2008; cf. also Sarian 1986 ( LIMC 825‒43); Prag 1985, 44‒51, 117‒20 for iconographic evidence. 12 In Hes. Thg. 226‒32 the personified Oath is similarly described among a number of negative personified concepts (e.g. Lies, Disputes, Lawlessness, etc.) as the one “who indeed brings most woe upon human beings on the earth, whenever someone wilfully swears a false oath”. The equivalent power in the world of the gods, the power of the river Styx as “the Great oath of the gods”, also evolves around its punitive potential in Hes. Thg. 793‒806, for which see §7.3.1. 13 M.L. West 1966, ad Hes. Thg. 231. 14 Their area of action regarding revenge cursing is not limited to parental cursing (e.g. Aesch. Sept. 720‒5, 866‒9, 886‒7; Aesch. Cho. 924; Soph. OC 1298‒9), but encompasses other relations too: curses from children against mothers (Electra against Clytaemestra – and against Aegisthus, Soph. El. 110‒6; Hyllus against Deianeira, Soph . Trach. 807‒12), husbands against wives (Eur. Med. 1389‒90), comrades-in-arms against their generals (Soph. Aj. 835‒44 [839‒42], 1389‒92). 15 Mentioned as δασπλῆτις Ἐρινύς in Hes. fr. 280.9 M-W (=216.9 Most), which also preserves the