Apollo's SlaughterhouseAuthor(s): Marcel Detienne and Anne DoueihiReviewed work(s):Source: Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 46-53Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/465070 .Accessed: 20/02/2012 16:06

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TEXTS/CONTEXTS

APOLLO'S

SLAUGHTERHOUSE1

MARCEL DETIENNE

Among philosophers, Apollo's reputation is settled. A sizeable consensus recognizes him to be the god of moral superiority. The loftiness of his spirit, his sense of measure, his pedagogical science based on self-knowledge are vaunted and eulogized. Apollo shines with such great virtues that ever since Plato and until long after Winckelmann it has become habitual to speak of him in only the most elevated style. He is a god of clarity and light: a philosopher before the birth of philosophy. He brings knowledge and the desire for knowledge. Socrates confessed to being his devotee and his slave, while Pythagoras, a cen- tury earlier, captivated the cities of southern Italy by proclaiming himself the reincarnation of the Hyperborean Apollo.

Yet this very god, serenely occupied with legislating the pure and the im- pure from the heights of Delphi, here and there allows himself to behave in a manner most bizarre and unusual; one might even frankly call it incongruous. His erratic comportment, which would be less surprising if it were imputed to a subversive god such as Dionysus, is moreover not just confined to the con- fidence of some out-of-the-way sanctuaries or some rarely frequented altars. He advertises it - and with what insolence! - in a number of his most prestigious temples. Obviously, it is necessary to point out the defiance of such a scandal- ous Apollo by assembling the earious signs of his strangeness with a discretely maniacal attention. One can quickly see, simply by drawing together certain scattered traits, that surrounding this immoral Apollo a field action, determined by the exigencies of alimentary sacrifice and the imperatives of the blood crime, awaits discovery. It is as if the bizarre characteristics of the god of Delphi were principally manifest around a set of concerns of major significance in the ar- chaic city: the need to kill in order to make sacrifice and to eat; the equally great need to proscribe bloodshed, to legitimate violence and to conceputalize homicide in political terms. By his gestures and actions, Apollo does, in fact, on more than one occasion, seem to want to suggest that the line separating eating and killing is more fragile than might appear, or at least that interferences be- tween the two cannot be excluded.

First landscape: the land of Cyprus and the kingdom of Pygmalion at the matutinal hour when a carnivorous diet is discovered, when man, it is said, first begins to eat meat - an event that does not come to pass without difficulty. A fire burns on an altar, and, as is the custom at the time, the flame entirely con- sumes the offering made to it. Without advance notice, holocaust reigns supreme. The cremation takes place under the supervision of a priest, who,

1 The current essay provides a brief summary of a longer work to appear under the title L'Apollon Furieux.

ft4

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silent and immobile, is a functionary of the fire. The fire eats, devours; it is the only guest as well as the god of the banquet. Then, one fine day, a piece of flaming meat falls from the altar; the priest performing the service rushes to pick up the burning morsel in order to throw it back onto the fiery table. But without meaning to, his fingers move to his lips and suddenly he is seized with the desire to taste the grilled, juicy meat. His wife is there, perhaps alerted by the accident, and Pygmalion's priest, still in silence, extends his finger to her to lick. A little later, and despite the king's brutal dissuasion, all the inhabitants have discovered a taste for grilled meat and the pleasures of a delicious aroma [fumet] [Jacoby (Porphyry, De Abstinentia), 752 F 1].

This story gives us a sensualistic version of the discovery of the food sacrifice [sacrifice alimentaire], or rather of carnal nourishment revealed at an altar. Taste, touch, tactile values introduce humanity to a new diet; meat-eating institutes itself via the detour of savory taste and the highly enlightened gustatory judgment of a priest in the process of exercising his functions. We may also note that this priest is attentive to the altar's appetite; he is present at the fire's feast, and is thus in a position that is highly favorable to his own future culinary ac- tivity. Moreover, Greek sacrificial ritual incited the development of both the one and the other activity. The testimony for this also comes from Cyprus -from a sanctuary for Apollo discovered at Pyla in the nineteenth century.2 The sanctuary has two rooms, and over it reigns a two-headed Apollo. The first head is called Lakeutes; he presides over the fiery feast of sizzling meat and flaming flesh: a sonorous Apollo, whose music is the hissing of flames, the wheezing of deflated entrails, and the more subdued crackling of naked bones. As for the second epithet of the deity at Pyla, mageiros, it designates Apollo as the god of butchers and cooks, people whose functions are a direct continuation of those of the sacrificial priest. In additon, on the esplanade in front of the sanctuary the statues of both butchers and cooks are erected, each one wearing a large sacrificial knife from his belt. Thus are indicated two domains of Apollo's competence: divination by means of signs made by fire, empyromancy; and bloody sacrifice on the odorous table. The oldest butchers of the Greek world - certain large-sized sculptures from Pyla date to about the end of the sixth century B.C.-are the chosen companions and servants of the sizzling Apollo, of Apollo the gourmet who presides over the aromatic sacrifice, his fingers smeared with grease.

Apollo's passage through the kitchen is neither an accident nor is it an episode without glory in his career. On the contrary: at the panhellenic temple of Delphi, where he would be protected from the memory of earlier or bad activities, Apollo is publicly and without reser- vation hailed by the title "Prince of Sacrificers," or, if you wish, "Prince of Butchers and Cooks" [Aristophanes, F. 684 Edmonds]. And is he not also the god who, officially so to speak, in the Homeric hymn addressed to him, proudly announces to his Cretan priests that in his sanctuary a good knife in the right hand will not remain unused [Homeric Hymns to Apollo, 535-36]? Moreover, Apollo is not satisfied with inviting his officiants to wield the slaughter-knife, not with frequenting, himself, kitchens and the lower altars; rather, he ex- hibits a quite perverse taste for sacrificial left-overs: the animal's liquids, it viscera, its organs, all that is not transformed into aromatic smoke but remains attached to the stones of the altar, coagulating and hardening on the plaster; all those liquids that stain, that solidify into foul-smelling crusts. At Thebes, at Didymos, at Rhodes, in the sanctuaries where his power is affirmed, Apollo loves to be offered altars made of blood and ashes: the insipid and heavy blood mixing with the ashes of victims, sometimes burned under the gaze of diviners, sometimes consumed as legs of veal [cuisseaux] offered to the gods who love them when they are carbonized.3 Constructions made of sacrificial remains cemented with the blood of victims; these altars are the opposite of the pure tables such as the shrine [6dicule] at Delos,

2S. Besques, "L'Apollon Mageirios de Chypre," Revue Arch'ologique, 11 (1936) 3-11; O. Masson, "Kupriaka," Bulletin de Correspondence Hellenique, 1 (1966) 10-24; and especially L. Robert, "Sur un Apollon oraculaire a Chypre," Comptes Rendus de I'Acad6mie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres, (1978) 338-344.

3Thebes, Ashen Apollo, Spodios. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 9. 1.7-9; 9.12. 1; Didymos, an altar erected to Heracles, see Pausanias, Description of Greece, 5.13.8; Rhodes (Camiros), a "cinderall" Apollo, see D. Morelli, I culti in Rodi (Pisa, 1959), 103.

diacritics / summer 1986 47

which is reserved for an Apollo with ancestral connotations calledGenetor, towards whom Pythagoras turned, eulogizing the "unbloodied" table on which an animal had never been slaughtered [Bruneau, Recherches sur les cultes de Delos 161-64].

As far as that goes, Apollo could still pass for a sensualistic divinity, or an intellectual, an anarchist or a dandy, who would love to create a scandal by choosing audaciously ex- cremental furniture for his sanctuary. Such an interpretation proves itself inadequate if we continue our inventory of what we are calling here Apollo's eccentricities, but which would more accurately be called his judiciary record. His immoderate taste, his passion for blood, knives, and butcher-boys can be fully verified in even more violent and more bloody ac- tivities. And they are also a matter of public notoriety: Apollo is without doubt the only divine power represented in vase-paintings with a butcher-knife or a sacrificial knife raised above the head of one of his enemies.

It is at Delphi that Apollo indulges in his murderous drives. Perhaps he feels more at home there. Assuredly, at Delphi he is under the observation of the largest number: the sanctuary has a panhellenic vocation from the eighth century on. His most illustrious victim, who is also one of his chosen opponents, is named Neoptolemus. He is the son of Achilles, known also as the Red, Pyrrhos: it is he who conquers Troy, insulting the divine protector of the city of Priam. Apollo and Neoptolemus are young rivals, burning with the same passion: they both want to take revenge on one another. The outrages they inflict on each other are linked in a chain of previous murders, and lead, in an interlocking network, toward future killings perpetrated upon altars or within the sacred enclosures of sanctuaries, most often those of Apollo.4 Thus Troilos, a young protege of Apollo, is slain by Achilles on the altar of

Apollo Thymbreus in Troade. Priam, having taken refuge at the altar of Zeus in sacred triple supplication, is massacred by Neoptolemus. Apollo vows to avenge his death with the same resolve as that shown Neoptolemus when he goes to Delphi to demand from Phoebus "the

price of blood"-the blood of Archilles, spilled at the instigation of the god who hates him and in the very sanctuary where the young Troilos had met his death.

In Euripides' Andromache, Neoptolemus' death is staged with the baroque decor of a sacrifice: between the altar in front of the temple and the hearth of Hestia, a pure flame burns near the mouth of the oracle. Around the table and the altar, a quarrel breaks out. Neoptolemus challenges those conducting the service, the priests who are Apollo's soldiers. The voracity of the officiants at Delphi is equally famous and as great as Apollo's appetite in the midst of his altars at Cyprus. A violent quarrel breaks out among the armed partners, in

spite of the place. There is a mortal blow, struck close beside the altar, either by an

anonymous hand or by Apollo himself. "Apollo kills him," this is Pindar's cool version in a

paean of 490 composed for the citizens of Delphi and in honor of the master of the sanctuary [Snell, Pythian Odes, 6.119]. A second version will later correct the first one: it is indeed a knife, an anonymous one [Snell, Nemean Odes, 7.61-62]. And between Apollo and a knife held by an unknown, other actors will come into play: a priest of Apollo, for one, himself anonymous by representative of the corporate priesthood at Delphi [Pausanias, Description of Greece, 4.17.3]. Parallel to this anonymous priest, there appears a colleague of his called "the Man with the Knife," machaireus, a superb name for someone who kills in the midst of sacrifice [Jacoby, "Asclepiades of Tragilus," 12F 15]. The knife is personified, incarnate in a

priest - a hatchet-man for the god who is mageiros, Apollo, the same Apollo whose highest sacerdotal rank nevertheless comprehends the Pure ones, the Hagnoi or Hosioi, consecrated for life, holy down to their toes. That day at Delphi, Neoptolemus' slayer is a holy priest or Apollo himself.

Yet none of this is surprising: the sacrificial and bloodied knife, held in a firm grasp, openly has its place at Delphi. There is a widespread rumor, we are told, that at every sacrifice the citizens of Delphi convene, forming a circle around the altar, each holding a butcher's knife in the folds his robe. And as soon as the moment arrives for dividing up the offering, each one, according to his strength, cuts out a piece of the victim [Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Acheans 125]. On more than one occasion, it is murmured, the sacrificer is

4G. Roux, "Meurtre dans un sanctuaire sur I'amphore de Panagurist&," Antike Kunst, 7 (1964) 30-4 1; Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Acheans (Baltimore, 1979), 120-126.

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left empty-handed, if he is lucky enough not to fall under the dagger blows raining down on the occasion.

The Knife Man, the murderer of Neoptolemus, is totally invested in the apollonian realm in terms of both his ancestors and his descendants. His father, whose names is Daitas, "the Man who Divides up," the man who divides the victim into pieces, who evokes the meal divided in equal shares, like the banquet in Cyprus at which Apollo presides as Apollo Eilapinastes, the feasting, the banqueting Apollo. And by his progeniture, Machaireus avows his affinities with the oracle, with purification and with Apollo's installations at Didymos. His son Branchos is the eponyum of the Branchides. He inaugurates his career by purifying the citizens of Miletus of a plague, a loimos: the plague is driven out with laurel and musical in- cantations [Callimachus, F. 194 and 229 Pfeiffer and Clement of Alexandria, Stromatus, 5.8.48 in Stahlin, Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller, v. 11, 359]. It is also at the sanc-

Itr

tuary of the Branchides, at Didymos, that Heracles erects to Apollo one of his altars of coagulated blood, like those favored by the Ashen Apollo, the Theban Apollo.

By staging the scene in which Neoptolemus' throat is cut, the apollonian sanctuary makes public the extreme fragility of a cultural frontier between the blood-crime and the sacrificial meal. Other stories surrounding Apollo, moreover, recount violence at the altar, even among blood relatives. At Thebes, a certain Eumelos offers splendid sacrifices to Apollo Ismenios. One day in the middle of the officiations, his son throws himself gluttonously on a

piece of lamb's brain which has not yet been consecrated [Antoninus Liberalis, Metamor- phoses 18]. This impiety is doubled when the father seizes a firebrand and breaks the skull of the impatient perpetrator of sacrilege. At Megaros the same scenario unfolds. The founder of the city is Alkathoos, a murderer who has exiled himself from Elis. Apollo protects him, and he establishes the first altars, erects a temple to Artemis and her brother, and raises walls for the city. But one day while he is busy officiating a sacrifice, his son Callipolis runs up with the news that his brother, Ischepolis, has just been killed while hunting. Impatient, with an angry

diacritics / summer 1986 49

gesture, the son overturns the sacrificial flame. Alkathoos becomes furious, takes a piece of wood and strikes Callipolis on the head. His brain spills onto the altar. For such a terrible murder it is necessary to call a descendant of Melampous, Polyeidos, to Megara; a wise purifier in the service of Dionysus, he comes to purify the city of its abominable desecration [Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1.42.6; 1.43.5]. At Megara as at Thebes, killing and eating intermingle. A sacrificer to Apollo hides another who may be a murderer- if he does not suddenly reveal himself openly, transformed into a sharp blade, a protagonist claiming his due role, the famous role of the knife that Neoptolemus at Delphi was unable to support.

It is thus interesting to look at the same sanctuary at Delphi on those occasions when Apollo is consulted through the shedding of blood. The first victims are animals killed by ac- cident and without the slightest suspicion of premeditation. On the day that a sheep, a goat, or a pig was inadvertantly beaten and fell down dead, the guilty party would have consulted the oracle about the effects of this act, an act which no longer belonged to the usual ways of slaying an animal. Quite naturally, when the first ox fell dead to the ground, the victim of the uncontrollable anger of a laborer, it would be to Pythia that one turned. The slain ox is the hero of an Athenian ritual, the Bouphonias. The ritual recounts and dramatizes the trauma provoked by the first incident in which the blood of an ox was shed, an animal who until that time had been man's companion and the laborer's double- if not his twin brother. One day, returning from the fields, a certain Diomos or Sopatros lays some vegetables upon a table as an offering to the gods of the Acropolis. An ox on the way back from its labor decides to taste this appetizing dish. Sopatros loses his head, seizes a hatchet lying in a corner, and vigor- ously beats the skull of the indiscreet animal to the death. The ox dies. Sopatros, mourning, digs a grave for him as if he were one of his companion laborers. Feeling that he is guilty of an impiety, he flees to Crete, the abode of the skillful purifiers capable of delivering murderers of their pollution. At the same time, the land becomes wasted: drought makes it sterile, it bears no more fruit. A consultation with the Pythia becomes urgent; and it is Apollo who, through the mouth of his prophetess, gives meaning to all these events by prescribing an appropriate mode of behavior.

The death of the laboring animal is given a name by the Pythia, its real name: it is a murder, a phonos. Then the oracle enjoins a punishment on the murderer. The Pythia thus installs a ritual scenario which the actors of the drama will play out by inverting the place reserved for the judgment of the guilty party. Apollo's prophetess puts the judgment at the beginning without explaining the nature of the judicial proceedings. She then gives instruc- tions that the ox must be placed standing on its feet in the same sacrifice. Finally, everyone together must consume the good dead without having any scruples about it. Freed from murder, from the anguish that gushes forth from a killing, the sacrificial ceremony becomes repetitive a ritual act of communal consumption of meat in honor of the gods. When they returned to Athens, those who consulted the oracle, consoled by such an outcome, leave the outcome of the judgment to the end of the meal: "All those who have communally taken part in the operation were asked to justify themselves." This is the tribunal's game: the judges and the accused are confused; each justifies himself before the others in passing the respon- sibility on to the next one. The women who bring water designate those who sharpen the hatchet and the knife. These in turn point to the officiant who held the hatchet. Finally there remains only the knife accused by the slaughterer. And because it remains mute and speechless, it is found guilty, and is thereupon condemned to be drowned in the depths of the sea.5

The role of Delphi is unambiguous. Apollo, by his authority, voids the anxiety of the

slaughter; he encourages the community to feast without scruples. But at the same time, he shifts the responsibility for the recognized murder to the instrument of death, the slaughter knife. The distinctions are in fact carefully traced out. On the one hand, there is the sacrificial meal: to eat of the meat is to forge social bonds and to confirm the political ties that con- stitute the city. On the other hand, and at a respectable distance, there is tribunal to speak

5Document and analysis in J.-L., Durand, "Le corps du d6lit," Communications 26 (1977) 46-61 and Bouphonia. Recherches sur le sacrifice et le labour en Grace Ancienne (Thesis, Paris IV, 1981), forth- coming.

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the law: that shedding blood and killing is the business of the knife, the same knife that in the sacrificial ceremony is carefully hidden in a basket, in the kanoun. An occulted knife which the daily sacrifice designated without naming it as the old murderer, unforgettable because it is necessary.

In the ceremony played out on the Acropolis on the occasion of the Festival of the Ox's Murder, there are two elements that are remarkable as much for themselves as in the rela- tion that joins them. On the one hand, there is a case of judgment, an anonymous tribunal which we know was the Prytaneos, in the center of the city.6 On the other, the clean separa- tion between murder and bloody sacrifice is pronounced. But the tribunal for the blood crime arises here in response to an anxiety engendered by a gesture destined to become in- significant: the anguish of bloodshed is the dramatic motivation for the ritual. Because of this, recourse is taken to Delphi and its god, Apollo. The same Apollo, who is so aware of the misdeeds or the virtues of the knife, and who, moreover-and it is at Thebes that he is honored as a "poliade"- invites his devotees to his ashen altar to slaughter an ox of labor in his honor, a subject as hardworking as Sopatros' companion. A competence so great and so exact merits attention, because from it derives the place and the position Apollo occupies in the domain where the pure and impure share boundaries. The character of Sopatros in the business of the ox can lead us even farther, towards Apollo's greatest darkness. In effect, Sopatros, once the beast is slaughtered, feels himself to be impious, polluted, enagbs, closed up within an impurity which the Pythia identifies in designating him as a "murderer." Crete welcomes him in his exile; and by its insular position it heightens the horror that separates the guilty man from the others. But Crete with its purifiers is not foreign to an Apollo who is deeply traumatized as Sopatros and who sees his companion-in-labor die under his blows.

There is Apollo the impudent murderer, the audacious cut-throat, stronger with each act of violence. But next the Lord of Delphi, the wolf-faced god, there is the fugitive Apollo, the god who exiles himself, the god who is livid and terrorized. This Apollo can be found in Corinth, more specifically at Sicyon. Here the mythic rituals are celebrated, the rituals which were required for the purification of the daughters of Proitos, who had been thrown into a devastating madness after the victory over Python, the monstrous serpent. The death of Python was looked upon as a murder; and Apollo came for purification to a country where neither diviners nor purifiers were lacking. Suddenly, the murderous god is overcome by an immense fear, an anguish, phobos-deima, sometimes represented by the image of a woman with a terrifying face - the mask of an Erynie, we would say. And Apollo precipitously flees: terror makes him mad, frenetic, beside himself, like Orestes, or like the possessed corybant. His flight takes him to Crete, to the land in which he himself may have originated and which gave him his first officiators, his priests, his butcher-boys, but also the lofty purifiers who press around him, lead him, calm him, and deliver him from his frightful pollution [Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.7.7-9; 2.30.3]. The gods know the bitterness of a nine- year-long exile, but alone with Dionysus, only Apollo journeys to the end of the night; it is the same journey that Orestes, the matricide, once took. Apollo discovers in himself the madness that invades the murderer: the frightening visions and exhausting hallucination, the same illness that devours his protege and double, Orestes, murderer, martyr, and witness to a homicide [M. Delcourt, Oreste et Alcmeon 92-113].

As a result, it is necessary to limit oneself to the observation that both the pure and the impure are at work in a god whose power is double, who is purifier and killer, a god who cures the plague and the sickness he himself brings to mortals. Perhaps one of his best- known names will reveal the significance of this profound ambivalence. This name is the word Phoibos, the greek form of Phoebus: Phoibos Apoll6n in Homer, an epithet trans- formed into a proper name. In archaic Greek, phoibos signifies pure and holy, like Ocean's water or the sun's brightness. In the religious vocabulary, according to Plutarch who was well versed in it, phoibos in composite form designated a state of segregated purity, since

6Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1.28.10; 1.24.4; Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 57.4; Pollux 8. 120. On the Prytany as a tribunal charged with the most dangerous transgression or sin, that which cannot be limited to the responsibility of one agent (ho drasas), see P. Carlier, La royaut6 en Grace avant Alexandre (Strasbourg, 1984), 343-44, 354.

diacritics / summer 1986 51

during ill-fated days the priests lived in isolation, withdrawn and distant from all impurities and pollution. Such priests living in purity were said to "phebonomize" [Plutarch, De E apud Delphos, 20.393c.]

To be phoibos is to be so rigorously separate that one becomes consecrated, as are, in effect, the priests with whom Apollo loves to surround himself. It means to be consecrated like the Hosioi, the perpetually Pure of Delphi; but also like the suppliants of Cyrenus who are round about his temple and are personally tied to the god, and who have indeed become his own property. Among the latter are found the "decimated ones," the dekatoi, homicides whose adominable polution places them entirely on the side of the gods, on the side of phoibos. 7 It is precisely here that the totally impure tends to merge itself with the

\

perfectly pure. Apollo is fully phoibos. He is the untouchable in his two poles: murderer to the point of madness, he is a god who is like the night, the archer encamped on the threshold of the Iliad. And when, in the sixth century, in the Orphic and Pythagorean sects, the requirement for renunciation arises and grows, Apollo, the Hyperborean purifier, becomes the emblem for a way of life so pure it excludes both the blood of death and the blood of birth. Thus, the Orphic Apollo becomes a name for the Sun and its light at dawn.8

70n the sacred laws of Cyrenus, see F. Sokolowski, Lois sacrbes des cites grecques (Paris, 1962), No. 115, A. 1.33ff. Purification is made with blood, as with the murderer supplicant (No. 115 B. 1., 50-58) devoted to Apollo according to the intepretation of). Servais in his "Les suppliants dans la loi sacree de Cyrkne," Bulletin de Correspondence Hellenique (1960), 112-147, especially 134-37.

8See our essay "Un polytheisme recrit: Entre Dionysos et Apollon: Mort et vie d'Orphee," Archives des sciences sociales des religions, 59 (1985) 65-75.

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Thus, too Pythagoras' Apollo is so close to and so distant from the bloody god, that at Delos, the holy island which is yet still touched by birth, the philosopher chooses to render homage to his god at the table of an intact altar unsullied by the splash of animal blood. But this altar, said to be pure and pious, is flanked by another made of interlacing horns which, without scruples, invites the bloodiest sacrifices to be made upon it. Great Greece and its land open to colonization witness Apollo the man-eater and the god of the pure ones and the white- clad converge in the same fever. The Archegetes who founds altars and cities, the god who savors the first born of humans and the bodies consecrated to him, is also the god of Crotonus or of Metapontus of whom Pythagoras considered himself the intact and luminous incarnation.

The excess of violence and the murderous madness of the angry young Apollo are not to be assigned to his past, to the troubled life of an ancient, earlier god which the "Delphic morality" would reject or cover with forgetfulness. The excesses of murder are inseparable from the rigors of purity. And when the tribunals for blood crimes arise between the seventh and sixth centuries, at a time when the voice of city justice begins to be heard -a justice competent at speaking the law and leaving the concern for purification to the exegetes- it is on the very Apollonian horizon of an extreme sensibility to bloodshed. Even in Libya in the middle of the fourth century, the Apollo of Cyrenus demonstrates an obsessive casuistry in which the most negligible taint is harshly penalized. Sicyone's mad murderer is not a stranger to the obsession of purity cultivated in the sects, nor is he separable from the for- mulation of a first penal code within the political arena. In Attica, one of these tribunals, the Delphinion, is even placed under Apollo's patronage: it is on the basis of his competence that murders are pronounced legitimate, hosios phonos, when the tribunal is led to say: "This murder is not a homicide."

Certainly, not all the gods of Greece are so elegantly immoral. And instead of the Belvedere Apollo, which for Winckelmann evoked the calm power of form, I would point, in order to have a glimpse of this, to the god of Ve'les confronting Heracles on the ridge of the roof. Fighters of baked earth, multi-colored, shaggy, dead-set against each other, the two disputing the inert body of a doe in great danger of being torn apart. The lion against the wolf: Heracles against Apollo, his lips snarling, revealing a cruel smile, entirely within his in- stinct of wild beast-with the violent beauty not of the Devil but of Dionysus the night- prowler, no doubt ravished by the shadow rising in his young accomplice, the beautiful homicide of Delphi.

Translated by Anne Doueihi

WORKS CITED Bruneau, P. Recherche sur les cultes de D6los. Paris: E. de Boccard, 1970. Jacoby, Felix. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. 13 vols. Berlin: Weidmann,

1923-58. Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Acheans. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. Pausanias. Description of Greece. Trans. W. H. S. Jones. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,

1918-35. Plutarch. De E apud Delphos. In Moralia V. Ed. Frank Babbit. Loeb Classical Library, 1936. Snell, Bruno. Pindarus. 2 vols. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1964, 1971-75.

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