Ancient Greek Murder Mysteries

Murder mysteries are always a subject of popular fascination. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories to modern CSI television shows, everybody loves a good whodunit. Today, we are going to be looking at three famous murder trials from ancient Athens. We do not know the outcomes of any of these trials, which means that, from our perspective, you could classify these murders as technically “unsolved.”

Murder investigation in ancient Athens

In ancient Athens, there were no professional detectives. There was not even a real police force. The Athenians did have a group of public-owned slaves taken from the Skythian lands north of the Black Sea whose job was to maintain the peace. They were armed with bows and arrows. Their job, though, mainly involved tasks such as putting down riots, keeping people from murdering each other in the Assembly, and basically ensuring public order. They did not do investigations of any kind.

Instead, the sole responsibility for investigating a murder lay with the family of the victim. If the victim’s family wanted their relative’s killer caught, they had to conduct the investigation and track down the killer on their own. It was a drastically different system from the one we have today here in the United States.

Thankfully, we do have a number of surviving accounts of murder trials from ancient Athens that give all kinds of interesting bits of information about the various investigations that led to the defendant being put on trial. People back then could get away with a lot questionable investigative techniques that would certainly never fly today.

For instance, in the first case I am about to discuss, the victim’s family tortured a couple of slaves to get them to say that the defendant murdered the victim. Eventually, after several days of being tortured, one of them caved and said the defendant had done it. Obviously, homicide detectives today would probably get in a lot of trouble if they tortured slaves for days to get testimony out of them.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix depicting a Skythian archer, painted by Epiktetos, dating to c. 520 – c. 500 BC. Skythian archers served as a sort of rudimentary police force in ancient Athens, but they were mainly only used for ensuring public order and they did not do investigations.

Trials in ancient Athens

The way trials in ancient Athens were handled was also very different from how trials are handled today. For one thing, there were no lawyers allowed in the courtroom whatsoever; the plaintiff and the defendant were both required by law to speak on their own behalf and no one else was allowed to speak for them.

Nonetheless, although the plaintiff and defendant were required to speak for themselves, they were not required to have written their own speeches. In other words, as long as you delivered the speech yourself, it did not matter if you had paid someone else to write it for you. Thus, there existed an entire industry of eloquent writers who would write a speech for a plaintiff or a defendant in exchange for payment.

These writers were basically the closest ancient Athenian equivalent to modern-day lawyers. It is from the surviving speeches written by these speech-writers that we know most of what we know about how murder trials were done in ancient Athens.

The Areios Pagos

Trials for murder in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries BC were usually held on the Areios Pagos, a hill in Athens where the god Ares was said to have once been tried for having murdered Halirrhothios, the son of Poseidon. In early times, the Areios Pagos was the meeting place for a council of Athenian elders similar to the Roman Senate, but, in 462 BC, the Athenian statesman Ephialtes stripped the council of elders who met on the Areios Pagos of all their powers except for the power to try accused murderers. Ephialtes gave all the court’s other powers over to the Heliaia, which became the main Athenian court from then on.

Today, the Areios Pagos is most famous for having allegedly been the location where the apostle Paul preached to the Stoics and the Epicureans when he was in Athens, according to the Book of the Acts of the Apostles 17:16–34. In 1644, the English poet John Milton published a prose polemic titled Areopagitica, in which he argued that the ancient Athenian censors who were based on the Areios Pagos did not practice prior restraint and that their model should be emulated by contemporary publishers.

As a result of Milton’s polemic, the term Areopagus, which is derived from Areios Pagos, has become a term used to refer to a platform for free speech. In classical times, though, the Areios Pagos was where trials were held for accused murderers.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Areios Pagos, the hill on which murder trials in ancient Athens were usually conducted

ABOVE: Photograph of the shrine of the Erinyes underneath the Areios Pagos

On the Murder of Herodes

There are several famous surviving accounts of murder trials in ancient Athens. For instance, one very famous murder trial in classical Athens was the trial of Helos, a young man from Mytilene, for the murder of Herodes, a young Athenian man who was probably a cleruch. We know about the murder of Herodes from a speech written by the Athenian speech-writer Antiphon (lived c. 480 – 411 BC) titled On the Murder of Herodes. Antiphon wrote this speech as a defense for Helos to deliver to the jury at his trial. The trial probably occurred in around 419 BC.

This particular trial was highly unusual both because the defendant was a Mytilenian rather than an Athenian citizen and because the defendant was charged, not with murder, but with being a “malefactor.” The first part of the speech deals primarily with Helos’s complaint that the proper legal procedures have not been followed, since he was being tried in the regular court as a “malefactor,” even though murderers were supposed to be tried in the court on the Areios Pagos.

In the second part of the speech, Helos describes how he went on a ship with Herodes to the port of Ainos in Thrake. Helos was going there to visit his father and Herodes was going there to release some Thrakian slaves who were being ransomed by their relatives. There were other passengers on board the ship with them, including the Thrakian slaves whom Herodes was going to release.

Due to a storm, they were forced to dock their ship at Methymna on the north end of the island of Lesbos and change ships. According to the defendant, that evening, he and Herodes spent much time on the deck of the ship drinking. Then, well after dark, Herodes left the ship in a drunken stupor without anyone to accompany him. He never returned. The next morning, Helos and the other members of the crew sent out a search party to look for him. The search party found no trace of him.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Molivos Harbor at Methymna, taken in 2003

After the ship that Helos and Herodes had been on returned to Mytilene, Herodes’s family had the ship searched and they claimed to have discovered bloodstains, proving that Herodes had been murdered. The blood, however, turned out to be sheep’s blood left over from a sacrifice. Consequently, Herodes’s family bought two of the slaves who had been crew on the ship and brutally tortured them to get them to confess that Helos had murdered Herodes.

The first slave refused to confess, insisting that Helos was innocent. The second slave, however, declared, after being tortured for several days, that Helos had gone ashore after Herodes and murdered him with a rock. He claimed that he knew this because he had helped Helos to dispose of the body.

Once the slave confessed, Herodes’s family decided to kill him as punishment for having allegedly had a role in the murder of their relative. Just before they killed him, he recanted his confession, declaring that he had made the whole story up to get them to stop torturing him. Despite his recantation, the family killed him anyway.

All of this was done completely in accordance with ancient Athenian trial proceedings. Ancient Athenian law dictated that the testimony of a slave was not admissible in court unless it had been extracted via torture because it was assumed that all slaves were inveterate liars and that the only way to get them to tell the truth was by torturing them. Furthermore, it was completely legal for a person to kill their own slave because slaves were considered property and not human beings.

The outcome of the trial is unknown because we only have the speech Antiphon wrote for Helos’s defense.

Against the Stepmother for Poisoning

All of Antiphon’s surviving speeches were written for the defendant in the case, except one: Against the Stepmother for Poisoning, which he wrote for an unknown plaintiff sometime between c. 419 and c. 414 BC. The trial at which this speech was delivered probably took place on the Areios Pagos.

In the speech, the unnamed plaintiff accuses his stepmother of having persuaded another woman, the mistress of her husband’s friend Philoneus, to murder her husband (i.e. the plaintiff’s father) when the plaintiff was still a child. The plaintiff never provides a motive for the murder, however, and it is generally thought among classicists that the case the plaintiff presents is unconvincing.

The plaintiff’s case rests almost entirely on an appeal to the all-male jury members’ fear of women, specifically their fear of being murdered by their own wives. As strange as this fear may seem to most modern readers, it was apparently not an extraordinarily uncommon fear in ancient Greece, since the theme of a wife murdering her husband occurs again and again throughout Greek mythology and the idea is referenced in many surviving classical texts.

The plaintiff himself in this case alludes to the famous story of the murder of the great king Agamemnon by his wife Klytaimnestra in an attempt to garner sympathy. (As I discuss in this article I published in June 2019, the ancient Greeks were not necessarily all misogynists, but ancient Greek culture was, on the whole, generally very misogynistic and statements about the supposedly evil nature of women that most people today would find appalling were quite commonplace in the ancient Greek world.)

In spite of this, the outcome of the trial is unknown because all that has survived is the speech that Antiphon wrote for the plaintiff. Although it is known that the speech for the defense at this trial was delivered by the defendant’s son (i.e. the plaintiff’s half-brother), that speech has not survived.

ABOVE: The Murder of Agamemnon, painted in 1817 by the French Neoclassical painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin

On the Murder of Eratosthenes

Another famous murder trial from classical Athens was the trial of Euphiletos for the murder of Eratosthenes, which we know about from a speech written by the Athenian orator Lysias (lived c. 445 – c. 380 BC) titled On the Murder of Eratosthenes. Lysias wrote the speech for Euphiletos to deliver to the jury at his trial. The exact date of the trial is unknown, but it occurred sometime between 400 and 380 BC at the lawcourt in the Delphinion near the Athenian Akropolis.

Euphiletos is characterized in the speech as a noble, upstanding, elderly Athenian citizen who married a virtuous young woman. Then, at his mother’s funeral, Euphiletos’s wife was spotted by a handsome young man named Eratosthenes, who seduced Euphiletos’s slave-girl and convinced her to corrupt Euphiletos’s wife and persuade her to have an affair with him. Euphiletos describes how the slave-girl corrupted his wife and how she was seduced by Eratosthenes. He emphasizes that he was totally unaware of this affair as it was going on, even though it was happening right under his nose.

He then describes how he learned of the affair from an old woman. He then interrogated his slave-girl and found out that the story was true and that his wife was having sex with Eratosthenes. Euphiletos states that he waited for Eratosthenes to come to the house to have sex with his wife. Then, once Eratosthenes arrived, Euphiletos gathered some of his friends. He and his friends burst into the bedroom, where they discovered Eratosthenes in the very act of having sex with Euphiletos’s wife. Euphiletos states that he killed Eratosthenes right there on the spot.

In the speech, Euphiletos admits that he did indeed kill Eratosthenes, but he insists that his killing of Eratosthenes was completely legal because Athenian law at the time permitted a man to kill another man if he caught him in the act of adultery with his wife and he killed him on the spot. Euphiletos declares that he had caught Eratosthenes with his wife and killed him on the spot, so Eratosthenes’s murder was therefore completely legal and completely justified.

We do not know what the outcome of the trial was because we only have the speech Lysias wrote for Euphiletos’s defense.

ABOVE: Roman marble copy of a fourth-century BC Greek bust of the speech-writer Lysias, the author of the speech On the Murder of Eratosthenes, which documents the murder of Eratosthenes by Euphiletos

Conclusion

There are a number of other surviving accounts of murder trials from ancient Athens aside from the ones I have just discussed, but I will not discuss all of them in this article because that would take far too long. I hope the cases I have presented have given you something of an impression of what ancient Greek murder investigations were like.