The Shedding of Blood

That the blood of his victim clings to the hand of a murderer, and, until cleansed, demands his seclusion from society, is a belief attested in a bewildering variety of literary, oratorical, historical, mythographical, and pictorial sources - although other sources preserve a stolid and no less perplexing silence on the same subject. Two texts illustrate the matter in some detail, Book 9 of Plato’s Laws, and the Tetralogies ascribed to Antiphon. The Tetralogies are an obvious starting-point for a discussion, although not an ideal one. Their sophistical author, whether Antiphon or another, is perhaps not himself committed to the doctrines he manipulates, and may not know where to draw the line in his imitation of belief; and the relation of these hypothetical cases to actual legal process is a long-standing difficulty. On the other hand, it is now generally agreed that the audience to which they are addressed is Athenian, which means that they can be confronted with the one body of homicide law that is well known to us; and the very form of the tetralogy, designed to show how the same topic of argument can be exploited and re-exploited by both parties, means that the full potential of the argument from pollution is here displayed as in no other text.

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Epistemology · Ideal (ethics) · Political science · Relation (database) · Silence · Subject (documents) · Variety (cybernetics) · Computer Science · Law · Legal principles and applications · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology