• 1  Contributions to research on the topic since the seminal work of Glotz in (1904) include Vallois ( (...)
• 2 I will only use the term “inherited guilt” in the following discussion in reference to earlier scho (...)
• 3  Wilamowitz, for instance, was particularly careful already in distinguishing what he saw as the he (...)
• 4  See e.g.Schubert (2002).
• 5 E.g. Ambr., De Myst., I, 32; cf. Rondet (1966); Dubarle (1999); Minois (2002), p. 43-80.

1The concept of “inherited guilt” has played a key role in the modern scholarship of ancient Greece.1 Although it translates no ancient equivalent, this term, together with similar coinages such as “Erbschuld” and “péché héréditaire,” has been used to interpret material from most genres of Greek literature and all periods of Greek history since the early modern period.2 Not only does the term “inherited guilt” correspond to no ancient emic category, however, but it imposes, more significantly, a deep range of Christian associations upon the Greek material. This has long been recognized by classicists.3 The mention of “inherited guilt” activates an entire web of Christian concepts and references, implicit theological programs and Biblical correspondents. The long and eventful interpretatio christiana of the Greek sources has charged the ideas and the images linked to Greek conceptions of punishment through generations with the doctrines of another religious tradition. The English term “inherited guilt,” for instance, is itself a direct translation of the earlier German terms Erbschuld or Erbsünde. These German words have been used in philological scholarship from the early 19^th century to the present day to describe the Greek material of punishment through generations. They are, of course, highly marked theological terms of reference for the Christian notions of original sin and corporate responsibility.4 Both ultimately derive from terms such as the Patristic Latin haereditarium peccatum, a composite formation used by later Church Fathers in reference to the then emergent notion of Christian original sin.5 The usage of such terms of appropriation to describe this concept of pagan Greek culture is a direct application of Christian filters on the ancient material – translating one tradition through another. “Inherited guilt” and its equivalent terms are heavily charged concepts. They probably carry too much ideological baggage to retain any utility at this point.

• 6 Burkert (1980), p. 162-163.

2Whatever the stakes and baggage of this ideological tradition, however, and the analytical problems of preceding definitions, we cannot limit ourselves to analyzing away “inherited guilt” by simple deconstruction. The Greek expressions of divine punishment through generations are tied to a distinct tradition of vocabulary and imagery. The abundant material which expresses this idea in ancient Greek literature belongs to a common horizon of reference which has never been analyzed in detail. One of the keys to making sense of this rich material is reception. The long modern reception of the concept of ancestral fault has accrued layer upon layer of meanings over the Greek material, and any new engagement with it has to take the enduring force of this tradition seriously. An archaeology of “inherited guilt” as a modern concept of scholarship is necessary before an archaeology of ancestral fault as an ancient concept of culture is possible. As a contribution to this effort and as part of preliminary work towards a monography on Greek ancestral fault, the following pages will review and contextualize two of the seminal discussions of modern scholarship on the question, the work of two scholars generally seen as the founding fathers of the modern, “scientific” study of Greek religion: Christian August Lobeck (1781-1860), and Karl Otfried Müller (1797-1840).6

• 7 Momigliano (1946).
• 8  See Momigliano (1946); (1983); Münch (1976).
• 9  See Gagné (2008).

3The Aglaophamus, sive de theologiae mysticae Graecorum causis, the monument of Prussian erudition published by Christian August Lobeck in 1829, marks the beginning of modern philological research on Greek religion. The Aglaophamus was written as a reaction against Romantic and Symbolic domestications of ancient religion: the neo-pagan followers of Schiller and Goethe, the many enthusiasts of 18^th century pantheism, and especially Friedrich Creuzer’s 1810-1812 (2^nd ed. 1819-1828) massive Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, which had revived the idea of natural religion and the material of 17^th century mythological comparatism, particularly the ideas of Vossius.7 Creuzer tried to show that all the faiths of the world were united in common symbolic patterns stemming from human nature, and from an antediluvian revelation transmitted to the world by prehistoric missionaries from India and Egypt.8 In the same way that the odd enterprise of Creuzer descends in direct line from the theorists of natural religion and the humanist comparatists of the circle of Grotius and Vossius, Lobeck clearly belongs to the old tradition of Protestant apologists writing on “Papism” through paganism.9 The Aglaophamus, usually described as a pure product of enlightened rationality, is also very much a traditional tool in the defense of faith. Lobeck wanted to neutralize the religious value of classical cults, especially the supposedly mystical aspects of the Mysteries of Eleusis, of Samothrace, and of the religious literature ascribed to the singer Orpheus, the Orphica. Using positive reason as a tool of demystification, he proceeded to detach ancient religion from its aura of uncanny fascination, and expose its so-called mysteries as risible superstitions and obscene savagery. The speculations of the Neoplatonists, and of Proclus in particular, were shown to be late and inconsequential fabulations, and those “mystical” cults themselves were shown to be later and derivative products of Priestertrug, or cynical religious manipulators like Pythagoras or Onomacritus.

• 10 Lobeck (1829), p. 632-633.
• 11 Lobeck (1829), p. 964.

4In the Aglaophamus, a tour de force of positive rationalism, Lobeck systematically collects and discusses the entire range of material concerning the “mystical” cults of the Greeks. The almost fourteen hundred pages of cautious classification of documents, careful philological criticism, and detailed source analysis, aim to take away all possible obscurity. There is no mystery: just a collection of carefully inventoried banalities, and many shocking aberrations. The cults which come from the East, brought in by the followers of Cybele and others, are in Lobeck not hallowed examples of some superior wisdom carried by the heroic Brahman missionaries of Creuzer, but the barbarous superstitions of insane charlatans.10 They are the artificial aberrations which have corrupted the pure and simple national faith of the Hellenes exemplified in Homer. Rituals are described with disdain and a relish for the odd detail; portraits of exotic ritual performance and the strange manipulations of strange objects are designed to bring out their status as mere collections of improvisations. The similarities and the continuity between the superstition of these primitive rituals and beliefs, and the sacraments of the Catholic Church, are also repeatedly brought back to the attention of the reader. Creuzer was accused of being a crypto-Catholic by Lobeck. The very last page of the Orphica even compares the religious impostors of antiquity to the obfuscations of those who Lobeck saw as the religious impostors of the modern age, the Jesuits.11 This is the context in which the Aglaophamus discusses the concept of ancestral fault.

• 12 Lobeck (1829), p. 634-639, which stands within Chapter VIII of the De Zagrei morte (p. 615-699).
• 13 Lobeck (1829), p. 601-699.
• 14  See now E.G. Edmonds (1999); Bernabé (2002); (2003).
• 15 Lobeck (1829), p. 610-615.
• 16 Lobeck (1829), p. 629-630; see Gössmann (1998).
• 17 Lobeck (1829), p. 632.
• 18 Lobeck (1829), p. 634-639.

5In the Aglaophamus, the ancient Greek ideas of ancestral fault are discussed in the context of the Orphic Zagreus legend.12 They are shown to be a popular constitutive element of superstition that was used in the development of purification beliefs, and in the bricolage of the late and inauthentic “Orphic myth of original sin.” In chapter 8 of the Orphica, Lobeck aims to show that the savage tale of the death of Zagreus is a late, post-Homeric invention.13 This is the myth that had been thought by most people, then as now, to be the kernel of the “Orphic faith.”14 According to Lobeck, the myth was first assembled by Onomacritus. It is an obscaena fabula stitched from a number of different sources and later adopted by the Greeks’ fickle and inconstant religious spirit.15 Such tales and the rites which accompany them are answers to deep pathologies of the psyche, especially the hysterical impulses of women; Lobeck, for instance, cites with approval in this context Doctor Johann Heinrich Feustking’s bizarre and influential Gynaeceum haeretico-fanaticum (1704).16 According to Lobeck, the effeminate Phrygian rites at the core of the Orphic faith were celebrated by the ecstatic beggars of Sabazius, Cybele, and other ξενικοὶ θεοί, religious followers who performed the most bizarre and horrible acts imaginable for their mystici circuli. Even “more worthy of censure” are the antistites of their cults, the priests who, like the magicians of the day, were trained in the “occult arts.”17 They promised riches to some, friendship of gods and men to others, healing of the body also, made philters and poisons, etc. They also sold remission of sins (veniam peccatorum). Lobeck, echoing earlier Protestant scholarship on Greek religion such as the De Lustrationibus of Jan Lomeier (1681), gives many examples of the types of stain and pollution with which the superstitious thought they were soiled, and of the Catholic-like lustrationes which the charlatans offered them in exchange. This is the context of the passage where he discusses ancestral fault.18

• 19 Lobeck (1829), p. 636.

6Before the priests and charlatans imposed their beliefs about purification on Greek culture, the superstitiosi, says Lobeck, feared the angry souls of the dead and their terrifying attacks much more than the gods. Crimes within the family were punished by the ancestors of the group on their descent. This wrath from the family gods held the group together in common sanction. Ancestors functioned as the guardians of morality. The luculentissimus interpres of this belief, Aeschylus, gives voice in the Oresteia to the life of fear in which people lived, gripped by the terror of an ancient guilt they couldn’t know and a punishment which could strike at any time. The word for sin, ἁμαρτήμα, is used to described the domestic faults “by which the rights of the family are violated,” according to Lobeck. This ἁμαρτήμα is the result of an offense against the family and its protector gods, figures like the θεοὶ πατρῷοι, Zeus Xenios, Zeus Homognios, and the Erinyes. One of the punishments they can inflict is infertility and loss of children, and this is one of the reasons why the Athenians sacrificed to the Erinyes πρὸ παίδων καὶ γαμηλίου τέλους. This role attributed to family gods as figures of fertility derives from the “common belief of all Antiquity” that “piety and obeisance for parents is the greatest foundation of all domestic prosperity.”19 The family gods and the dead ancestors can contribute to the wealth of the clan, the prosperity of its fields, the birth of children; they can also, when their honor has been offended, take away all hope of fecundity. Lobeck finds traces of this primitive conception of the familiarum iura in Homer, and even has a positive word for it as the expression of a magnifica professio.

• 22 Lobeck (1829), p. 636-637; see Linforth (1946b).
• 23 Lobeck (1829), p. 638-639.

8The γένηof ἔν τισι τῶν γενῶν, argues Lobeck, does not refer to the families of the purifying priests, as others had thought before, but to those “cursed” families affected by the pollution of an ancestral evil.22 The παλαιὰ μηνίματα now had their origin in the vengeful wrath of ancestors against their descendants. They were seen as the expression of the offended power of the family gods for crimes committed against them. The power of the hereditary evil (vis haereditari mali) could hide in a family for generations and resurface at any time, and the belief in its prevalence was so strong that any affection of the soul or the body was thought to have its origin in this wrath of the dead. Quoting a passage from Plutarch’s Life of Solon, Lobeck says that those who thronged the cemeteries at night were thought to be afflicted by womanly and effeminate pains on account of sins committed within the γένη; he continues by asserting that the torments and disorders of the melancholics and the lycanthropes who were used to wander around tombs and graves were also believed to result from the obscure power of the ghosts over their descendants.23 Even the madness of love occasioned by a young girl’s passion could be interpreted as such a form of punishment from the ancestors. According to Lobeck, the telestic madness described by Plato in Phaedrus 244d was thought to be another symptom of this “silent power of ancestral fault” (vis tacita avitae noxae), and it was believed that the mad words of those who were afflicted by such mental conditions could reveal the hidden causes of the domestica labes and thus help discover its remedies. The cynical charlatans of the “mystical” cults described by Lobeck made up the cures which prescribed the miserrimi homines to supplicate the angry dead in the midst of the funerary monuments, and the right piacula would remove the guilt of the fathers from the line once and for all. The devotiones of the mages, which people feared could curse them with the wrath of the restless dead, proceeded from the same superstitious logic.

• 24 Lobeck (1829), p. 300-301.
• 25 Lobeck (1829), p. 639.
• 26 Lobeck (1829), p. 698-699.

9Καθαρμοί, says Lobeck,have to do with such appeasements of the angry dead, supplications to the gods of the dead, and similar macabre nonsense. These are the types of superstitions which provided the material for the lustrationes of the religious charlatans which he describes in chapter 8 of the Orphica. For Lobeck, belief in pollution and purification is a late, post-Homeric development: a foreign contamination from the east superimposed on the simple and noble religion of the Olympians.24 The καθαρμοίand τελεταίmentioned by Plato in Phaedrus 244d refer to the sacra Phrygia ac Metragyrtarum negotia: that is, the obscene and cynical rites of purification of the eastern ecstatics whose vile cults came to be adopted by the inconstantia of the Greek religious spirit, and whose stories resemble nothing if not the Papistica Legenda.25 These are the cults, together with similar rites and beliefs coming from Egypt, which have provided the material for the cerimoniae Orphicae luctuosae et horridae of the Zagreus cycle developed by Onomacritus; they eventually came to represent and express the horrible παθήματα οf Dionysos as καθαρμοίand τελεταί.26 Instead of the ‘erhabenen Naturdienst’ of Lobeck’s Romantic and Symbolist adversaries (nostri mythographi), superstitious beliefs such as ancestral fault are shown to be behind the rites and the religious experience of the Orphica. Such irrational ideas show ingenia inculta et indomita naturaliter ferocire rituque puerorum exsultandoet vociferando sese explere. Ancestral fault is understood by Lobeck as a mistaken belief (opinio) in the transmission of guilt (culpa) through generations, and a corresponding practice of ritual funerary purifications (lustrationes). It is for him an immature error of popular superstitio.

• 27  On Müller’s Eumeniden, see Most (1998); Graf (1998).

10Four years after the publication of Lobeck’s Aglaophamus, Karl Otfried Müller presented an altogether different view of ancestral fault in his Eumeniden (1833).27 In the Eumeniden, ancestral fault becomes an element of Müller’s Romantic projection of Greek religion as a canvas of aesthetic alterity. It is cast as the exotic object of a terrible and noble ancient spirituality. The most striking characteristic of Müller’s scholarship on ancient religion is the empathy of the great descriptive frescoes in which he attempts to evoke the power and beauty of pagan religious feeling before nature. His Romantic valuation of antiquity as an aesthetic and moral source of inspiration is a characteristic which permeates his entire scholarly production. The Romantic aesthetic of this work is particularly evident in its valuation of absolute religious difference. Authentic Greek religion is a product of popular belief, it is close to the earth, and its simplicity is an expression of the unity of nature. It still sees correspondences where we make only divisions. Ancient faith becomes an essence of difference, a product of exotic fascination. It is a witness both to the original, authentic feeling of man before nature, and to the progressive constitution of distinctive national character. This religious national character is embodied in the different forms of cultus and cycles of myths carried by the different Greek tribes in their wanderings, and expressed by the differences of their poetry. Müller developed original theories on regional specificity in his work of cultural history, putting great emphasis on the distinctions between national groups and the thoroughness of historical change over time. He also looked for the more ancient strata of original, primordial religion. Müller’s Romantic belief in the overwhelming imprint of nature on the mind of ancient man led him to search ancient religion for its universal elements. He attempted to identify the more authentic, ancient reactions to the power of nature, the early expressions of the noble and simple echoes of the world. In his work, the most ancient forms of Greek religion are presented as witnesses to a time when faith was a direct expression of awe before the universe. Poetry flows directly out of this religious feeling. To understand it, the modern interpreter needs to attune himself with the foreign logic of a different aesthetic and moral world.

• 30 Müller (1833), p. 165-168.
• 31 Müller (1833), p. 168.
• 32 Müller (1833), p. 168.
• 33 Müller (1833), p. 168.
• 34 Müller (1833), p. 168.

13The Erinyes were originally expressions of this prehistoric Gefühl which perceived the world in its unity of crime and atonement. As the myths started to “congeal” and crystallize over time in more fixed shapes, they eventually became individualized and came to be seen as independent beings, something which is already apparent in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod. The extended semantic field of the word ἐρινύς gives us precious information for understanding the original religious feeling which underlies their individuation as divine beings.30 But, more importantly, the history of cult and myth can allow us to recover their true origin in primeval religion.  Müller says that “the Erinnyes as great and venerable Goddesses is an idea founded on a more extensive system of views and thoughts, and manifested in legends and religious rites and ceremonies.”31 The Erinyes, in the extremely ancient common stock of beliefs which lies behind the real differences between the various national mythical cycles of the Greek tribes, were in fact “a particular form of the great Goddesses who rule the earth and the lower world and send up the blessings of the year, namely Demeter and Cora.”32 This is what explains their double nature, as benign and kindly beings of fertility, and as dread goddesses of vengeance. The unity of their nature in later poetry, such as the Eumenides, can only be understood in relation to their primeval role. Müller argues that this prehistoric figure of Demeter-Erinys has left its clearest traces in the old Arcadian cults of Thilphossa and Phigalia, and especially in the related ancient legends concerning the Cadmean Kings of Thebes.33 His research is an attempt “to recover those primeval conceptions from which a considerable portion of tragic Poetry originally emanated.”34 Those primeval conceptions are idealized cosmic understandings of ancestral fault.

• 35 Müller (1833), p. 168-175.
• 36 Müller (1833), p. 169.
• 37 Müller (1833), p. 169.

14The whole of the Theban cycle, for Müller, is an expression of the two-sided cosmic force of the Erinyes as Earth Goddess.35 The ancestral curse which afflicts the House of Cadmus over the generations is a symbolic projection of this religious reaction to the force of nature. The entire history of suffering of the Theban royal line is a representation of human confrontation with nature. At the beginning of the line, Cadmus had to slay the Dragon “begotten by Ares the God of War with Erinnys Tilphossa, i.e. the resentful, offended Demeter worshipped at Tilphossa; and from the sowing of this dragon’s teeth springs the new Cadmean race of men.”36 For Müller, the mythical origin of the Cadmean race in the murder of the Dragon and the wrath of its genitors, including Demeter-Erinys, is the key to the ancestral curse of the Theban line. The “wrathful spite” of the Dragon, the μήνιμα δράκοντος, “continues to influence the whole course of the Theban Mythic History.”37 It is what motivates the “continual vicissitudes of exalted fortune and deep misfortune” which are the characteristics of the legends surrounding every generation of the Cadmean kings, and even brought down by Pindar in the Second Olympian Ode to the calamities of the present age. This is what explains the cruel destiny of Cadmus already, forced by Ares to become a Dragon himself and to lead barbarian nations to ravage his own country. It is also what lies behind the stories of Laius and his descendants:

• 41 Müller (1833), p.174: “Darum wurde erst an den Söhnen die Sünde der Väter gerächt.”
• 42 Müller (1833), p. 168-169.
• 43 Müller (1833), p. 174.

17The continuity of the ancestral curse of the Dragon explains why from the delays of atonement “the sons were the first to suffer retribution for the sins of their fathers.”41 More importantly, it expresses the presence of Evil in the world, as an original stain carried by mankind before birth.42 The discussion of Müller shows how “Demeter, as a punient power, as Erinnys, is the predominant principle in the Theban legends.”43 The complementary double power of the natural force which is symbolized by the Great Mother Goddess, the divine force behind the logic of the legends, brings together life and death in a union of opposites. These are the two domains of action which the Erinyes will inherit after their individuation and separation from the primeval mother figures. Even in historical times, they will continue to rule over the complementary cycles of life and death:

• 45 Müller (1833), p. 176-177.

18These tales of the Erinyes are older than Homer, and the adaptations of the tragedians reproduce the religious sentiments of much earlier times. Through the content of the myths, Müller is even able to trace the development of these tales in stages in prehistoric times, and map the contours of their diffusion through the movements of the various Greek tribes.45 But what is important in the case of the Theban legends is that they embody a fund of myths common to all Greeks, which goes back to prehistoric times. The ambivalent power of the Erinyes as goddesses of fertility and death is a principle of the common Greek national legend. The continuation of its vengeance over generations in traditional tales is a symbolic expression of this primeval understanding of nature as the common source of “death and ruin, as well as life and welfare.” Ancestral fault is a cosmic principle.

• 48 Müller (1833), p. 197.

21The tales of both heroes are functions of the same logic, the reaction of man to Evil and suffering, and the deep association of this suffering with the gift of life and the fertility of nature. The rewriting of this ancient “ethico-religious idea” in the trilogy of Aeschylus as a political justification of the Areopagus and of the justice of Athenian institutions is entirely in line with the older strata of the myth, where the “curse, rooted in the human race and generating one misdeed out of another, is averted by the superior control of the saving God, in a case where only the family-destiny and no guilt of his own weighs upon the curse-possessed person.”48 In the Eumeniden, the stain of the original fault which courses through generations is an expression of this sublime portrayal of man’s place in the cosmos, adapted to the realities of Athenian life in the classical period. In Müller’s understanding of the cycles of Thebes and Argos, ancestral fault is a fundamental key to the interpretation of tragedy as poetry which flows from deep religious feeling. It is a central element of the common Greek national faith.

• 49 Lloyd-Jones (1983), p. 107.

23For the Rationalist Protestant Lobeck, Greek ancestral fault is a product of inauthentic, artificial religious manipulation. It has its roots in the deepest impulses of the irrational, in madness and hysteria. It is based on the archaic law of the family, which doesn’t recognize the individual and the state yet. It is tied to the rise of belief in pollution, the treason of the priests and their imposition of purification and empty ritual over the fears of men. It is a secondary elaboration of human obscurantism. For the Romantic Pietist Müller, on the other hand, the wrath of the dragon is an echo of true, original religious feeling, still resonating with the direct experience of nature before individuation. It is a primeval expression of participation in the universe, out of which the idea of the individual will grow. It embodies a “stern reciprocal justice, recalling the Old Testament but not the New,” in the words of Hugh Lloyd-Jones, who directly drew from Müller’s vision in his own understanding of “the doctrine of inherited guilt.”49 The opposite and complementary portraits of the Greek material presented by Lobeck and Müller set the stage for all succeeding work on the topic. The more elaborate discussions of Gustave Glotz (1904) and Eric Robertson Dodds (1951) on the question, for instance, on which most relevant contributions of the 20th century are directly dependant, reproduce many of the problems and questions found in Lobeck and Müller, notably the definition of ancestral fault in terms of origin, purification, and ritual. Cultivating the deep tradition of scholarship on Greek religion is a key to understanding how the questions and problems of the field emerged, of course, but also to recover the explicit values still active behind most implicit assumptions of research. In the case of ancestral fault, it is a necessary step for any serious attempt at redefining the material.