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Chapter One

The Demise of Paulina’s Good: From Personal Revenge to State Punishment

Blood cries for blood; and murder murder craves.

—John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge (1599)

“What about my good?” Paulina’s question embarrasses Gerardo, and it embarrasses most of us. If we or our loved ones are harmed, we call the police and thereafter depend upon the state to investigate, judge, and punish for us. As good citizens and emotionally stable individuals, we are taught to become procedurally and emotionally distanced from both the harm and its perpetrator. Victims who make a fuss about their own needs are treated as emotionally suspect.¹ Feeling and acting have collapsed into one impulse so that even when the state acts in our behalf, we are expected to relinquish an emotional response as well, to give up or repress any feelings about revenge, despite the fact that the impulse to get back for injuries is probably universal and often culturally sanctioned.² Feeling any desire for personal revenge is regarded as a character flaw. We say “we don’t want revenge; we want justice,” indicating by this duality our conviction that a desire for revenge is shameful. When we use “justice” to deny any desire for revenge, we demonstrate our belief that justice is completely distinct from revenge, unrelated in any way.

But it was not always so. In early societies, the taking of revenge was a sacred duty, a right, and a responsibility that was both individual and familial, depending on the structure of the society. If a person was harmed, he would have a natural right to return the harm. If a family or clan member was killed or harmed, it was not only a right but, in many societies,³ the duty of a clan to avenge the wrong, to enter into a blood feud with the offender’s clan.⁴ The responsibility to avenge as well as the punishment was often personal but also collective, clan versus clan. Thus the actions of every person involved the clan: in killing someone, the offender brought the enmity of the victim’s clan not only upon himself but also upon his entire familial group.⁵

This chapter tells the story of the shift away from private dutiful and honorable revenge to dispassionate state punishment, what we have come to call retribution. Although the focus is on trying to understand the human need for revenge, with all its nuances, I do not, of course, advocate the taking of violent revenge. Instead, I am interested in what it means to want revenge: to feel something, not necessarily to do something. Does the feeling necessarily mean desiring an act of violence? Or can wanting revenge mean—as I think it can—wanting something back that was lost as a result of the initial harm? What has happened to this impulse as the personal has given way to the public? Do state systems of punishment include or acknowledge any desire for revenge on the part of the victim or the victim’s family? What becomes of Paulina’s “good”? Within the larger argument I am making in this book about the role that stories can play in revenge and retribution, I am concerned with a reappraisal of the desire for revenge, in particular in the context of transitional democracies, in which there is a justifiable temptation to put the past behind. What are the consequences and possibilities of reintegrating the need (the need, not the act) for revenge into emerging and changing justice systems of new and fragile countries? What are the consequences of any state’s efforts to repress a desire for redress as a legitimate, even necessary, part of the human psyche?

To answer these questions, we require a picture of what the desire for revenge looked like and how it was acted out before such a desire came to be considered reprehensible, before a harm against a person was the state’s business at all. The progression (real and constructed) has three steps:⁶ first, revenge as an honorable, measured act of balancing that focused on a victim’s need; second, the state’s appropriation of revenge in the form of state punishment and, along with that shift, personal revenge being characterized as always excessive and destructive; third, the change in focus from the victim’s need to the perpetrator’s desert—the contemporary understanding of retributivism⁷—and, concomitantly, the attaching of shame to a victim’s desires. Some understanding of this progression and its hold on us will help us to appreciate why hearing Paulina ask about her “good” makes us feel puzzled and uncomfortable.

The evolution within cultures from private revenge to state punishment was anything but regular and linear, and any attempt to tell the story of this shift in the form of a chronological history is filled with problems.⁸ The evolution occurred variously in different societies, depending upon such factors as geography, culture, and time. A pattern does emerge, nonetheless, in that societies develop laws concerning revenge at particular points in their evolution, regardless of when those points occur on some master calendar. Essentially (in an oversimplified way), the pattern develops along these lines: first, homicide and other crimes against people are personal matters appropriately settled by the family or clan, usually by the death of the killer or his relatives; next, the necessity of the death of the wrongdoer gives way to the willingness to accept other forms of restitution, usually, but not exclusively, money or property; then, crimes come to be seen not as personal matters but as wrongs against the community at large (an idea sometimes referred to as the “pollution doctrine”); and finally, as central authority strengthens, personal crimes become matters of concern to the state, the state assumes the duty to punish the wrongdoer, and personal revenge is outlawed.

The ancient Babylonian laws (the Code of Hammurabi), for example, demonstrate that blood feuds became more and more limited as the central government grew stronger. “The State by degrees forced composition [payment of a fine] and restricted gratification of vengeance…. This process of limitation by the State was slowly extended, and the injured party was only allowed to carry out the execution himself under the supervision of some central authority and sometimes merely to be present at it.”⁹ We see in these codes, perhaps for the first time, the notion of the state punishing a wrong against another person entering the civic imagination.

As states developed and legal codes were written, the right to private revenge was gradually ceded to official authorities, who assumed not merely the right but also the obligation to enact revenge for the victim and the victim’s family. The gradual rise of central authority in kings moved the avenging of wrongs from the private and familial to the public, a difficult yet critical transference in that warring clans had the potentiality to undermine and even destroy a king’s authority over the people. The advent of Christianity with its message of turning the other cheek in forgiveness may have played a small part,¹⁰ but the major reason for the change was utilitarian rather than Christian. The destructive potentiality of blood feuds in addition to the emergence of nation-states made private vengeance an impracticable and unwise practice and, perhaps most critically, a threat to the centralized state. In time it became a ruler’s right to seek revenge, by punishment, fine, or both, and crimes were seen not as private matters but as offenses against the king’s peace.¹¹

Yet the surrender of blood feud to state-controlled punishment was uneven and gradual, occurring at vastly different times in different cultures,¹² always revealing a struggle to balance revenge and restraint. The giving over was also reluctant and tentative because taking revenge was regarded as a sign of character. In heroic societies, for example, it was a right, an obligation, and a mark of character, particularly if a blood relative had been murdered, to enact revenge upon not only the murderer but also his relatives and even his descendants: “If someone kills you, my friend or brother, I owe you their death and when I have paid my debt to you their friend or brother owes them my death.”¹³ This loyalty and fidelity to duty was not condemned as emotional wrongheadedness but honored as virtue. Nor was seeking revenge evidence of lawlessness for it operated firmly within the established boundaries of customary law. In a kinship or friendship relationship, the virtues of courage and fidelity were paramount: courage assuring that a friend or kinsman had the power to respond and fidelity assuring the will to do so. These virtues held the social structure in place and thus blood vengeance was a duty and an honorable act.¹⁴

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

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

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

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

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

A man accepts compensation

For a murdered brother, a dead son.

The killer goes on living in the same town

After paying blood money, and the bereaved

Restrains his proud spirit and broken heart

Because he has received payment.²²

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

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

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

Euripides, depicting the same story centuries later, makes Orestes an entirely different character—a revenge-seeking thug dispossessed of any nobility, let alone any godliness. In so doing, Euripides transforms vengeance into an evil impulse. What the Odyssey described as Orestes’ duty to take revenge becomes in Euripides’ drama a character flaw, a selfish emotional need. But in order to characterize Orestes’ act of revenge as a failure of character, Euripides must offer an alternative to personal revenge and thereby indulge in an anachronism. He creates in his play a system of state punishment that did not actually exist when Orestes, according to legend, killed his mother. Of course, the system of state judgment and punishment did exist for Euripides’ audience, so they would have fully comprehended the consequences of Orestes’ repudiation of state retribution in favor of taking personal revenge.³² Equally understood would have been Euripides’ argument against Orestes’ act of revenge as he presents it through the judgment passed by Tyndareus, Orestes’ grandfather and Clytemnestra’s father. Tyndareus claims that Orestes acted “stupidly” and outside the boundaries of the law or accepted custom:

What should he have done? When his father died—killed, I admit, by my own daughter’s hand, an atrocious crime which I do not condone and never shall—he should have haled his mother into court, charged her formally with murder, and made her pay the penalty prescribed, expulsion from his house. Legal action not murder. That was the course to take. Under the circumstances, a hard choice, true, but the course of self-control and due respect for law, the better choice of two evils.³³

Orestes, in Euripides’ version, has demonstrated a lamentable lack of self-control and respect for law, traits that the audience would quickly condemn. His passion for revenge is given no place; it is unequivocally the foolhardy alternative to a court of law.

Aeschylus’ more nuanced treatment of the Orestes story is situated, on the other hand, between the outright praise from Zeus found in the Odyssey and the condemnation found in Euripides. Aeschylus and Euripides differ critically in the role they accord to vengeance in relation to any system of state punishment. For Aeschylus the desire for revenge is an understandable, although problematic emotion. Instead of condemning it, he creates a complex compromise that includes a system of state punishment within the polis of Athens, but this system incorporates a responsibility to the human desire for revenge.

Aeschylus presents Orestes as trapped between Apollo’s mandate that he avenge his father’s murder and the inevitability that the Furies will relentlessly pursue him if he does kill; Orestes cannot do the right thing. In the second part of Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Libation Bearers, Orestes is pressured by his sister, Electra, and by society (represented by the Chorus), to kill his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, because they have killed his father, Agamemnon. Electra and the Chorus both represent the values of heroic societies. Electra sees the problem as a simple one: a death for a death. As she prays at her father’s tomb, the Chorus approaches her and instructs: “Say simply: ‘one to kill them for the life they took.’ May you not hurt your enemy when he struck first?”³⁴ Electra prays that Agamemnon’s “avenger come, that they / who killed you shall be killed in turn, as they deserve.”³⁵ When Orestes appears, she and the Chorus argue powerfully in an attempt to convince him to be that avenger, aligning revenge with justice and insisting that vengeance, in the form of a murder for a murder, is necessary to heal the “Swarming infection that boils within”³⁶ the land. For the gods, too, the situation is clear. Apollo’s oracle orders Orestes to take revenge or he will experience “winters of disaster”;³⁷ if Orestes fails to avenge his father he will “pay penalty / with [his] own life, and suffer much sad punishment.”³⁸

Once Orestes has killed his mother and her lover Aegisthus, however, he discovers that he has enmeshed himself in a cycle of revenge that is unending: one murder begets another. Unlike the unscathed Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey whose serial revenge has enabled him to regain his wife and his throne, Orestes suffers mightily for what appeared to be a god-sanctioned act of murder. The Furies (or Erinyes)³⁹ haunt him: “Women who serve this house, they come like gorgons, they / wear robes of black, and they are wreathed in a tangle / of snakes. I can no longer stay.”⁴⁰ He becomes an outcast, and the Furies, “utterly repulsive,”⁴¹ stalk him, demanding their own retribution.⁴² Orestes cannot rule in his rightful place, and he flees his land unable to rest anywhere without the omnipresent Furies. The Furies are a unique composite image created by Aeschylus, who drew them partly from the Keres, the ghosts of those murdered who cry out for vengeance, and partly from an image depicting a source of physical infection capable of poisoning the land (in keeping with the pollution doctrine). The revenge sought by the Furies, then, is both individual representing a vengeful spirit of the slain Clytemenestra, and more widespread, in that Orestes’ murders pollute the very land.

In the final play of the Oresteia, The Eumenides, Aeschylus depicts the difficulties and intricacies of a transition from private revenge to state judgment. Orestes, still fleeing the Furies, becomes a suppliant to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, a very different Athena than the vengeful goddess present in the final books of the Odyssey. Athena asks to hear both sides. The Furies’ indictment is brief, to the point, and reflects the basic principle of blood feuds that the intent of the wrongdoer is irrelevant:⁴³ “He murdered his mother by deliberate choice.”⁴⁴ Orestes then makes his argument:

He [Agamemnon] died without honor when he came home. It was my mother of the dark heart, who entangled him in subtle gyves and cut him down, the bath is witness to his death. I was an exile in the time before this. I came back and killed the woman who gave me birth. I plead guilty. My father was dear, and this was vengeance for his blood. Apollo shares responsibility for this. He counter-spurred my heart and told me of pains to come if I should fail to act against the guilty ones. This is my case.⁴⁵

Athena, in a dramatic shift away from earlier practices that left decisions about vengeance to individuals and families, characterizes the “matter as too big for any mortal man”⁴⁶ and that even she, a goddess, does not have the right “to analyze cases of murder where wrath’s edge is sharp.”⁴⁷ At the same time, Aeschylus presents her as wise enough to see the consequences of ignoring the Furies: “yet these, too, have their work. We cannot brush them aside, / and if this action so runs that they fail to win, / the venom of their resolution will return / to infect the soil, and sicken all my land to death.”⁴⁸ Orestes’ dilemma becomes Athena’s dilemma when the Furies agree to turn their authority to avenge murder over to Athena. She, the goddess of wisdom, recognizes her problem and sets up a court: “Here is dilemma. / Whether I let them stay or drive / them off, it is a hard course and will hurt. Then, since / the burden to the case is here, and rests on me, / I shall select judges of manslaughter, and swear / them in, establish a court into all time to come.”⁴⁹ Athena refers to the conception of the pollution doctrine that held that the harm would spread from the individual to the culture at large—“infect the soil.” Yet she takes the expiation of the pollution away from the individuals seeking vengeance, the Furies, and places it in the hands of a jury of strangers to the matter.

The Oresteia provides insights into the problems that accompanied the transfer of the right to revenge to a central authority, even to the goddess of wisdom herself. The outcome may not deal well with the emotional needs of those seeking revenge.⁵⁰ The ballots of the jury that Athena has selected result in a tie, and Athena casts the deciding ballot for Orestes.⁵¹ The Furies, having lost, threaten: “I, disinherited, suffering, heavy with anger / shall let loose upon the land / vindictive poison / dripping deadly out of my heart upon the ground.”⁵² Athena has foreseen their disappointed and angry reaction, and she placates them by offering “a place of [their] own, deep hidden under ground that is yours by right / where you shall sit on shining chairs beside the hearth / to accept devotions offered by your citizens.”⁵³ Unconvinced at first, the Furies repeat their lament, claiming to be disinherited, mocked, dishonored. Athena pleads with them: “No, not dishonored. You are goddesses. Do not / in too much anger make this place of mortal men / uninhabitable.”⁵⁴ Athena is patient with the Furies, promising that no household will prosper without their will, that she will let them have much influence and be honored. (It takes over 150 lines of dialogue between Athena and the Furies before they are convinced.) The Furies finally concede to Athena and utter these crucial lines: “I accept this home at Athena’s side,” thereby creating a complex image of vengeance at wisdom’s side, of raw unrestrained emotion incorporated into justice.⁵⁵ In so doing, the Furies became transformed into the Eumenides, the “kindly ones,” a critical aspect of institutionalized law.⁵⁶ They cease to be the Furies and become instead the local goddesses, contained by but also part of the legal system of Athens. As such, they are no longer frightful Gorgons but, as they came to be portrayed in artifacts, “gentle, staid, matronly figures.”⁵⁷ Acknowledged and incorporated, they participate in justice but are 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?