What's an oath?
How does one define an oath?
What entitles us to equate a feature of another culture with the feature of our own culture that is called swearing (or perhaps we should rather say, one of the features of our culture that are so called)?
The term ‘oath’ will be defined in accordance with the palmary formulation of Richard Janko, whereby ‘to take an oath is in effect to invoke powers greater than oneself to uphold the truth of a declaration, by putting a curse upon oneself if it is false’. (Adapted from Volume I, Chapter 1, of The Oath in Archaic and Classical Greece ).
An oath, that is, is an utterance whereby the speaker – the swearer – does the following three things simultaneously:
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The swearer makes a declaration. This may be a statement about the present or past, in which case the oath is assertory; or it may be an undertaking for the future, in which case the oath is promissory.
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The swearer specifies, explicitly or implicitly, a superhuman power or powers as witnesses to the declaration and guarantors of its truth. In English the swearer is said to swear “by” (sometimes, colloquially, “to”) this power or powers; in Greek the guarantor power was normally the direct object of the verb of swearing – strictly speaking, one did not in Greek “swear by Zeus”, for example; rather, one “swore Zeus”.
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The swearer calls down a conditional curse on him/herself, to take effect if the assertion is false or if the promise is violated, as the case may be; that is, (s)he prays that in that event (s)he may suffer punishment from the guarantor power. This element need not be, and often is not, explicitly spelt out; it is often left to be understood from the words of the oath itself, particularly the performative verb ‘I swear’ (in Greek omnumi, later omnuō); but it can always be made explicit when there is need for special assurance. At any rate, whether explicit or not, it is the true defining feature of an oath: an oath is a declaration whose credibility is fortified by a conditional self-curse.
Euripides’ Medea (731-758)
All the defining features of an oath are well seen in the oath which Medea exacts from Aegeus, king of Athens, in Euripides’ Medea (731-758):
When Aegeus arrives in Corinth, en route from Delphi to Trozen, Medea, who has been ordered by King Creon to leave Corinth with her children before the next day’s sunrise, supplicates him to grant her asylum, promising him that she will use her magical skills to ensure that his long childlessness comes to an end.
He says he is willing to do so, so long as Medea comes to Athens under her own steam. Medea, however, asks for a guarantee (pistis, 731) – a word which, when applied to the confirmation of a promise, often, but not always, refers to an oath.
Aegeus, with some surprise and maybe even indignation, asks her whether she does not trust him (733); she says she does, but points out that she has powerful enemies (Creon and “the house of Pelias”) and that if Aegeus was not bound by an oath they might cajole or bully him into complying with a request for her extradition (734-740).
Aegeus understands and accepts this argument, and asks her to name the gods he should swear by (745); she names the Earth, the Sun (her own grandfather) and “the whole race of gods” (746-7). Aegeus then asks what he is to swear to do or not do (748); Medea’s answer is “never yourself to expel me from your land, and never willingly while you live to give me up to any of my enemies who wishes to take me” (749-751).
Aegeus duly swears, using the performative verb and naming the gods Medea had specified, “to abide by what I have heard from you” (752-3). But Medea then also asks him to state what he wishes to suffer if he does not abide by the oath (754); he replies with the vague but apparently satisfactory formula “The things that happen to those who are impious” (755) – and thereupon she sends him on his way.
She feels completely secure, and rightly so. Not long afterwards she will turn up on Aegeus’ doorstep in Athens, having murdered Creon, his daughter (her ex-partner Jason’s new bride) and her own children, and he will have no alternative but to take her in and protect her. Her own (unsworn) promise to him, incidentally, she will not keep: Aegeus’ only son, Theseus, will have been conceived at Trozen before Aegeus returns to Athens, Aegeus will not even know of his existence for many years to come, and when Theseus does come to Athens Medea will plot to murder him.
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