CHAPTER IV

.

THE RELATION OF SOUL AND BODY.

§ 1. THE MODERN GREEK VAMPIRE.

The division of the human entity into the two parts which we call soul and body has been so universally recognised even among the most primitive of mankind that the idea of it must have been first suggested by the observation of some universal phenomenon--most probably the phenomenon of unconsciousness whether in sleep, in fainting, in trance, or in death. If it had been man’s lot to pass in this world a life of activity unbroken by sleep or exhaustion, and thereafter to be translated like Enoch or Ganymede to another world, so that the spectacle of a body lying inert and senseless could never have been forced upon men’s sight, the first impulse to speculation concerning that impalpable something, the loss of which severs men from converse with the waking, active world, might never have been given, and the duality of human nature might never have been conceived. But death above all overtaking each in turn has forced in turn the mourners for each to muse on the future condition of these two elements which, united, make a man, and, disjoined, leave but a corpse. Does neither or does one or do both of them continue? And, continuing, what degree of intelligence and of power has either or have both? Are they for ever separated, or will they be re-united elsewhere? Such are the questions that must have vexed, as they still vex, the minds of many when their eyes were confronted by the spectacle of death.

For some indeed a means of answering or of quieting such searchings of heart has been found in the acceptance of religious dogma. But ancient Greek religion, the faith or superstition in which the Hellenic people, defiant alike of destructive and of constructive philosophy, lived and moved and had their being, was not dogmatic; the very priests were guardians and exponents of ceremonies rather than preachers of doctrine; there was no organised hierarchy committed to one set creed and prepared to assert the divine revelation of a single formulated answer to these questions. The sum total of orthodoxy amounted to little more than a belief in gods; and each man was free to believe what he would, evil as well as good, concerning them, and to find for himself hope or despair. In determining therefore the views to which the mass of the common-folk inclined with regard to the relations of soul and body, little assistance can be obtained in the first instance from those personal opinions which literature has preserved to us, opinions emanating from poets and philosophers who were not of the people but consciously above them, and who set themselves some to expose, others to reform, the popular religion, but few simply to maintain it. The conservative force of the ancient religion lay in the inherited and almost instinctive beliefs of the common-folk; oral tradition weighed more with them than philosophic reasoning, and their tenacity of customs as barbarous even as human sacrifice defied the softening influences of an humaner civilisation.

That these characteristics of the ancient Greek folk are stamped equally upon the people of to-day is a fact which every page of this book has confirmed; and it is therefore by analysis of modern beliefs and customs relative to death that I propose to discover the fundamental ideas held by the Greek people from the beginning concerning the relations between soul and body. For I venture to think that the great teachers of antiquity, whose doctrines dominate ancient literature, were often more widely removed by their genius, than are the modern folk by the lapse of centuries, from the peasants of those early days, and that the oral tradition of a people who have instinctively clung to every ancient belief and custom is even after more than two thousand years a safer guide than the contemporary writings of men who deliberately discarded or arbitrarily modified tradition in favour of the results of their own personal speculations. First then the peasants of modern Greece must furnish our clue to the popular beliefs of antiquity; afterwards we may profitably consider the use and handling of those beliefs in ancient literature.

To this end I shall examine first and necessarily at some length a certain abnormal condition of the dead about which very definite ideas are everywhere held; for the abhorrence and dread with which the abnormal state is regarded will be an accurate measure of the eagerness with which the opposite and normal state is desired; and further in this desire to promote and to secure the normal condition of the departed will be found the motive of various funeral-customs.

This abnormal condition of the dead is a kind of vampirism. It is believed that under certain conditions a dead body is withheld from the normal process of corruption, is re-animated, and revisits the scenes of its former life, sometimes in a harmless or even kindly mood, but far more often bent on mischief and on murder. The superstition as it now stands is by no means wholly Greek or wholly popular. Two extraneous influences, the one Slavonic and the other ecclesiastical, have considerably modified it. But in the present section I shall confine myself to describing the appearance, nature, habits, and proper treatment of the Greek vampire as he is now conceived; the work of analysing the superstition and of separating the pure Hellenic metal from the extraneous alloys with which in its now current form it is contaminated will occupy the next section; and the two which follow will be devoted to showing that the native residue of superstition was in fact well known to the ancient Greeks and was utilised to no small extent in their literature.

The best accounts of this superstition and of the savage practices to which it led are furnished by writers of the seventeenth century. At the present day, though the superstition is far from extinction, the more violent outbreaks of it are comparatively rare; and, although stories dealing with it may frequently be heard, it might perhaps be difficult to piece together any complete and coherent account of the Greek vampire without a previous knowledge obtained from writers of two or three centuries ago. In such stories as I myself have heard I have found nothing new, and have often missed something with which older narratives had made me familiar. In the seventeenth century some parts of Greece would seem to have been infested by these vampires. The island of Santorini (the ancient Thera) acquired so enduring a notoriety in this respect, that even at the present day ‘to send vampires to Santorini[959]’ is a proverbial expression synonymous with ‘owls to Athens’ or ‘coals to Newcastle’; and the inhabitants of the island enjoyed so wide a reputation as experts in dealing with them, that two stories recently published[960], one from Myconos and the other from Sphakiá in Crete, actually end with the despatch of a vampire’s body to Santorini for effective treatment there. The justice of this reputation will shortly appear; for one of the best accounts of the superstition was written by a Jesuit residing in the island, to whom the resurrection of these vampires seemed an unquestionable, if also inexplicable, phenomenon of by no means rare occurrence. Nowadays cases of suspected vampirism are much less common, and I can count myself very fortunate to have once witnessed the sequel of such a case. But of that more anon.

The most common form of the Greek name for this species of vampire is βρυκόλακας[961], and in order to avoid on the one hand continual qualification of the word ‘vampire’ (which I have used hitherto as the nearest though not exact equivalent) and on the other hand confusion of the Greek with the Slavonic species from which in certain traits it differs, I prefer henceforth to adopt a transliteration of the Greek word, and, save where I have occasion to speak of the purely Slavonic form of vampire, to employ the name _vrykólakas_ (plural _vrykólakes_[962]).

The first of those writers of the seventeenth century whose accounts deserve attention is one to whose treatise on various Greek superstitions reference has already frequently been made, Leo Allatius. ‘The _vrykolakas_,’ he writes[963], ‘is the body of a man of evil and immoral life--very often of one who has been excommunicated by his bishop. Such bodies do not like those of other dead men suffer decomposition after burial nor turn to dust, but having, as it appears, a skin of extreme toughness become swollen and distended all over, so that the joints can scarcely be bent; the skin becomes stretched like the parchment of a drum, and when struck gives out the same sound; from this circumstance the _vrykolakas_ has received the name τυμπανιαῖος (“drumlike”).’ Into such a body, he continues, the devil enters, and issuing from the tomb goes about, chiefly at night, knocking at doors and calling one of the household. If such an one answer, he dies next day; but a _vrykolakas_ never calls twice, and so the inhabitants of Chios (whence Allatius’ observations and information were chiefly derived) secure themselves by always waiting for a second call at night before replying. ‘This monster is said to be so destructive to men, that appearing actually in the daytime, even at noon--and that not only in houses but in fields and highroads and enclosed vineyards--it advances upon them as they walk along, and by its mere aspect without either speech or touch kills them.’ Hence, when sudden deaths occur without other assignable cause, they open the tombs and often find such a body. Thereupon ‘it is taken out of the grave, the priests recite prayers, and it is thrown on to a burning pyre; before the supplications are finished the joints of the body gradually fall apart; and all the remains are burnt to ashes....’ ‘This belief,’ he pursues, ‘is not of fresh and recent growth in Greece; in ancient and modern times alike men of piety who have received the confessions of Christians have tried to root it out of the popular mind.’

As evidence of this statement he adduces a _nomocanon_, or ordinance of the Greek Church, of uncertain authorship:

‘Concerning a dead man, if such be found whole and incorrupt, the which they call _vrykolakas_.

‘It is impossible that a dead man become a _vrykolakas_, save it be that the Devil, wishing to delude some that they may do things unmeet and incur the wrath of God, maketh these portents, and oft-times at night causeth men to imagine that the dead man whom they knew before[964] cometh and speaketh with them, and in their dreams too they see visions. Other times they see him in the road, walking or standing still, and, more than this, he even throttles men.

‘Then there is a commotion and they run to the grave and dig to see the remains of the man ... and the dead man--one who has long been dead and buried--appears to them to have flesh and blood and nails and hair ... and they collect wood and set fire to it and burn the body and do away with it altogether....’

Then, after denying the reality of such things, which exist in imagination (κατὰ φαντασίαν) only, the _nomocanon_ with some inconsistency continues: ‘But know that when such remains be found, the which, as we have said, is a work of the Devil, ye must summon the priests to chant an invocation of the Mother of God, ... and to perform memorial services for the dead with funeral-meats[965].’

Allatius then leaving the _nomocanon_ pronounces his own views. ‘It is the height of folly to deny altogether that such bodies are sometimes found in the graves incorrupt, and that by use of them the Devil, if God permit him, devises horrible plans to the hurt of the human race.’ He therefore advocates the burning of them, always accompanied by prayers.

To the fact of non-decomposition he cites several witnesses--among them Crusius[966] who narrates the case of a Greek’s body being found by Turks in this condition after the man had been two years dead and being burnt by them. Moreover Allatius himself claims to have been an eye-witness of such a scene when he was at school in Chios. A tomb having for some reason been opened at the church of St Antony, ‘on the top of the bones of other men there was found lying a corpse perfectly whole; it was unusually tall of stature; clothes it had none, time or moisture having caused them to perish; the skin was distended, hard, and livid, and so swollen everywhere, that the body had no flat surfaces but was round like a full sack[967]. The face was covered with hair dark and curly; on the head there was little hair, as also on the rest of the body, which appeared smooth all over; the arms by reason of the swelling of the corpse were stretched out on each side like the arms of a cross; the hands were open, the eyelids closed, the mouth gaping, and the teeth white.’ How the body was finally treated or disposed of is not related.

The next writer whose testimony deserves notice and respect is Father François Richard, a Jesuit priest of the island of Santorini, to whose work on that island reference has above been made[968]. Agreeing with Allatius in his description of the appearance of _vrykolakes_, he adds thereto many instances of their unpleasantly active habits. His whole narrative bears the stamp of good faith, but is too long to translate in full; and I must therefore content myself with a _précis_ of it, indicating by inverted commas such phrases and sentences as are literally rendered.

The Devil, he says[969], works by means of dead bodies as well as by living sorcerers. ‘These bodies he animates and preserves for a long time in their entirety; he appears with the face of the dead, traversing now the streets and anon the open country; he enters men’s houses, leaving some horror-stricken, others deprived of speech, and others again lifeless; here he inflicts violence, there loss, and everywhere terror.’ At first I believed these apparitions to be merely the souls of the dead returning to ask help to escape the sooner from Purgatory; but such souls never commit such excesses--assault, destruction of property, death, and so forth. It is clearly then a form of diabolical possession; for indeed the priests with the bishop’s permission employ forms of exorcism. They assemble on Saturday (the only day on which _vrykolakes_ rest in the grave and cannot stir abroad) and exhume the body which is suspected. ‘And when they find it whole, fresh, and full of blood, they take it as certain that it was serving as an instrument of the Devil.’ They accordingly continue their exorcisms until with the departure of the Devil the body begins to decompose and gradually to lose ‘its colour and its _embonpoint_, and is left a noisome and ghastly lump.’ So rapid was the decomposition in the case of a Greek priest’s daughter, Caliste by name, that no one could remain in the church, and the body was hastily re-interred; from that time she ceased to appear.

When exorcisms fail, they tear the heart out, cut it to pieces, and then burn the whole body to ashes.

At Stampalia (Astypalaea), he proceeds, a short time before my arrival (about the middle of the seventeenth century) five bodies were so treated, those of three married men, a Greek monk, and a girl. In Nio (Ios) a woman who was confessing to me affirmed that she had seen her husband again fifty days after burial, though already his grave had been once changed and the ordinary rites performed to lay him. He began however again to torment the people, killing actually some four or five; so his body was exhumed for the second time and was publicly burnt. Only two years ago they burnt two bodies in the island of Siphanto for the same reason; ‘and rarely does a year pass in which people do not speak with dread of these false resuscitations.’ In Santorini a shoemaker named Alexander living at Pyrgos became a _vrykolakas_; he used to frequent his house, mend his children’s shoes, draw water at the reservoir, and cut wood for the use of his family; but the people became frightened, exhumed him, and burned him, and he was seen no more.... In Amorgos these _vrykolakes_ have been seen not only at night but in open day, five or six together in a field, feeding apparently on green beans.

I heard, continues the holy father, from the Abbé of the famous monastery of Amorgos, that a certain merchant of Patmos, having gone abroad on business, died. His widow sent a boat to bring his body home. Now it so happened that one of the sailors sat down by accident upon the coffin and to his horror felt the body move. They opened the coffin therefore and found the body intact. Their fears being thus confirmed, they nailed up the coffin again and handed it over to the widow without a word and it was buried. But soon the dead man began to appear at night in the houses, violent and turbulent to such a degree that more than fifteen persons died of fright or of injuries inflicted by it. The exorcisms of priests and monks proved useless, and they thought best to send back the body whence it had been brought. The sailors however unshipped it at the first desert island[970] and burnt it there, after which it was seen no more. The Abbé considered this possession by the devil to be a proof of the truth of the Greek persuasion, alleging that no Mohammedan or Roman Catholic ever became a _vrykolakas_[971]. This however is not strictly accurate, for in Santorini a Roman priest, who had apostatized and turned Mohammedan and who for his many crimes was finally hanged, appeared after death and was only disposed of by burning.

Another case was that of Iannetis Anapliotis of the same island, an usurer who about a year before his death repented of his misdeeds and made what amends he could; he also left his wife an order to pay anything else justly reclaimed from him. She however though giving much in charity did not pay his debts. It was just six weeks after his death when she refused to satisfy some just claim for repayment, and immediately he began to appear in the streets and to molest above all his own wife and relatives. Also he woke up priests early in the morning, telling them it was time for matins, pulled coverlets off people as they slept, shook their beds, left the taps of wine-barrels running, and so on. One woman was so frightened in broad day-light as to lose the power of speech for three days, and another whose bed he shook suffered a miscarriage. Then at length his name was published--for as a man of some position he had till then been spared. Exorcism was tried in vain by the Greek priests. Then by my advice the widow paid off all her husband’s debts and made due restitution. Also she had the body exhumed and exorcised a second time. On this occasion I saw it, but it did not look like a real _vrykolakas_; for, though the hands were whole and parchment-like, the head and the entrails were to some extent decomposed. At the end of the ceremony of exorcism the priests hacked the body to pieces and buried it in a new grave. From this time the _vrykolakas_ never re-appeared, but this was due, in my opinion, to the restitution made, not to the treatment of the body.

There are in Greek cemeteries dead bodies of another kind which after fifteen or sixteen years--sometimes even twenty or thirty--are found inflated like balloons, and when they are thrown on the ground or rolled along, sound like drums; for this reason they have the name ντουπί[972] (drum).... The common opinion of the Greeks is that this inflation is a sure sign that the man had suffered excommunication; and indeed Greek priests and bishops add always to the formula of excommunication the curse, καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαράλυτος, ‘and after death to remain indissoluble[973].’

In a manuscript from the Church of St Sophia at Thessalonica, he continues, I found the following:

Ὁποῖος ἔχει ἐντολὴν ἢ κατάραν, κρατοῦσι μόνον τὰ ἔμπροσθεν τοῦ σώματός του.

Ἐκεῖνος ὁποῦ ἔχει ἀνάθεμα, φαίνεται κιτρινὸς καὶ ζαρωμένα τὰ δακτύλιά του.

Ἐκεῖνος ὁποῦ φαίνεται ἀσπρὸς[974] (_sic_), εἶναι ἀφωρισμένος παρὰ τῶν θείων νόμων.

Ἐκεῖνος ὁποῦ φαίνεται μαῦρος, εἶναι ἀφωρισμένος ὑπὸ ἀρχιερέως.

‘He who has left a command of his parents unfulfilled or is under their curse has only the front portions of his body preserved.

‘He who is under an anathema looks yellow and his fingers are wrinkled.

‘He who looks white has been excommunicated by divine laws.

‘He who looks black has been excommunicated by a bishop.’

From this account it is manifest that Father Richard, with the experience acquired by residence in Santorini, drew a distinction not known to Leo Allatius between two classes of dead persons. Those, who though not subject to the natural law of decomposition lay quiescent in their graves, were merely τυμπανιαῖοι or ‘drum-like’; while _vrykolakes_ proper were addicted also to periodical resurrection. And the extract with which he concludes his description shows that the authorities of the rival Church pretended to powers of even more subtle discrimination between different species of incorrupt corpses. The importance of Father Richard’s distinction will appear later; there was originally a difference in the usage of the two words, although not precisely the difference which he makes; but by the middle of the seventeenth century popular speech rarely discriminated between them. To the common-folk, whose views Leo Allatius fairly presents, any body which was withheld from decomposition for any cause was at least a potential _vrykolakas_, even if its power of resurrection was not known to have been exerted and no act of violence had been traced to it.

For further attestation of the prevalence and the violence of this superstition it would be easy to quote many graphic accounts by other writers, such as Robert Sauger[975], another Jesuit of Santorini, or the traveller Tournefort[976]. But it will suffice to call as witness Paul Lucas, whose observations concern a part of the Greek world remote enough from either Chios or Santorini, the island of Corfu. ‘Some persons,’ he says, ‘who seem possessed of sound good sense speak of a curious thing which often happens in this place, as also in the island of Santorini. According to their account dead persons return and show themselves in open day, going even into the houses and inspiring great terror in those who see them. In consequence of this, whenever one of these apparitions is seen, the people go at once to the cemetery to exhume the corpse, which is then cut in pieces and finally is burnt by sentence of the Governors and Magistrates. This done, these quasi-dead return no more. Monsieur Angelo Edme, Warden and Governor of the island, assured me that he himself had pronounced a sentence of this kind in a case where upwards of fifty reasonable persons were found to testify to the occurrence[977].’

The superstition, which had so firm a grip upon the Greeks of two or three centuries ago, has by no means relaxed its hold at the present day, in spite of the efforts made by the higher authorities civil and ecclesiastical, native and foreign, to suppress those savage and gruesome ceremonies to which it leads. The horrible scenes of old time, when the suspected body was dragged from its grave and dismembered by a panic-stricken and desperate mob, when the heart, as sometimes happened, was torn out and boiled to shreds in vinegar, or when the ghastly remains were burnt on a public bonfire, have certainly become rarer. The administrative action of the Venetians in the Ionian Islands in requiring proof to be furnished of the _vrykolakas’_ resuscitation, and official sanction to be obtained for exhuming and burning the body; the more vigorous suppression of such acts by the Turks in the Aegean Islands[978] and probably also on the mainland; the somewhat half-hearted condemnation of the superstition by the Greek Church, which, as we shall see later, maintained the belief in the non-decomposition of excommunicated persons and notorious sinners, hesitated between denying and explaining the further notion that such persons were liable to re-animation, but certainly endeavoured to repress or to mitigate the atrocities to which that notion led; and at the present day the forces of law and order as represented on the one hand by the police and on the other by modern education, the chief fruit of which is a desire to appear ‘civilised’ in the eyes of Europe; all these influences combined have certainly succeeded in reducing the proportions of the superstition and curtailing the excesses consequent upon it. Thus in some places the old practice of burning corpses which fail to decompose within the normal period--and it must be remembered that exhumation after three years’ burial is an established rite of the Church in Greece--has been definitely superseded by milder expedients. In Scyros the body is carried round to forty churches in turn and is then re-interred, while in parts of Crete, in Cythnos[979], and, I believe, in some other Aegean Islands the custom is to transfer the body to a grave in some uninhabited islet, whence its return is barred by the intervening salt water.

None the less the superstition itself still holds a firm place among the traditional beliefs of modern Greece. Witness the following account of it from a history[980] of the district of Sphakiá in Crete written by the head of a monastery there and published in 1888:

‘It is popularly believed that most of the dead, those who have lived bad lives or who have been excommunicated by some priest (or, worse still, by seven priests together, τὸ ἑπταπάπαδον[981]) become _vrykolakes_[982]; that is to say, after the separation of the soul from the body there enters into the latter an evil spirit, which takes the place of the soul and assumes the shape of the dead man and so is transformed into a _vrykolakas_ or man-demon.

‘In this guise it keeps the body as its dwelling-place and preserves it from corruption, and it runs swift as lightning wherever it lists, and causes men great alarms at night and strikes all with panic. And the trouble is that it does not remain solitary, but makes everyone, who dies while it is about, like to itself, so that in a short space of time it gets together a large and dangerous train of followers. The common practice of the _vrykolakes_ is to seat themselves upon those who are asleep and by their enormous weight to cause an agonizing sense of oppression. There is great danger that the sufferer in such cases may expire, and himself too be turned into a _vrykolakas_, if there be not someone at hand who perceives his torment and fires off a gun, thereby putting the blood-thirsty monster to flight; for fortunately it is afraid of the report of fire-arms and retreats without effecting its purpose. Not a few such scenes we have witnessed with our own eyes.

‘This monster, as time goes on, becomes more and more audacious and blood-thirsty, so that it is able completely to devastate whole villages. On this account all possible haste is made to annihilate the first which appears before it enter upon its second period of forty days[983], because by that time it becomes a merciless and invincible dealer of death. To this end the villagers call in priests who profess to know how to annihilate the monster--for a consideration. These impostors proceed after service to the tomb, and if the monster be not found there--for it goes to and fro molesting men--they summon it in authoritative tones to enter its dwelling-place; and, as soon as it is come, it is imprisoned there by virtue of some prayer and subsequently breaks up. With its disruption all those who have been turned into _vrykolakes_ by it, wherever they may be, suffer the same lot as their leader.

‘This absurd superstition is rife and vigorous throughout Crete and especially in the mountainous and secluded parts of the island.’ So too another well-informed Greek writer, who has published a series of monographs upon the Cyclades, says in one of them[984]:

‘The ignorant peasant of Andros believes to this day that the corpse can rise again and do him hurt; and is not this belief in _vrykolakes_ general throughout Greece?’

To that question I might without hesitation answer ‘yes,’ even on the grounds of my own experience only; for the places in which I have heard _vrykolakes_ mentioned, not merely in popular stories[985] such as are told everywhere, but with a very present and real sense of dread, include some villages on the west slopes of Mount Pelion, the village of Leonidi on the east coast of the Peloponnese, Andros, Tenos, Santorini, and Cephalonia.

The wide range and general prevalence of the superstition in modern times being thus established, it remains only to record a few recent cases in which the peasants, in defiance of law and order, have gone the length of exhuming and burning the suspected body.

Theodore Bent[986] states that a few months before his visit to Andros (somewhat over twenty years ago) the grave of a suspected _vrykolakas_ was opened by a priest and the body taken out, cut into shreds, and burnt. In January of 1895 at Mantoúde in Euboea a woman was believed to have turned _vrykolakas_ and to have caused many deaths, and the peasants resolved to exhume and burn her--but it is not stated whether the resolve was actually carried out[987]. In 1899, when I was in Santorini, I was told that two or three years previously the inhabitants of Therasia had burnt a _vrykolakas_, and when I visited that island the incident was not denied but the responsibility for it was laid upon the people of Santorini. In 1902 there was a similar case of burning at Gourzoúmisa near Patras[988]. These are certain and well-attested instances of the continuance of the practice, and, regard being had to the secrecy which such breaches of the law necessarily demand, it is not unreasonable to suppose that even now a year seldom passes in which some village of Greece does not disembarrass itself of a _vrykolakas_ by the traditional means, cremation[989].

Of the causes by which a man is predisposed to become a _vrykolakas_ some mention has already been made in the passages which have been cited from various writers above; but before I conclude this account of the superstition as it now is and has been since the seventeenth century, and proceed to analyse its composite nature, it may be convenient to give a complete list of such causes. The majority of these are recognised all over Greece and are familiar to every student of modern Greek folklore, and I shall not therefore burden this chapter with references to previous writers whose observations tally exactly with my own; for rarer and more local beliefs I shall of course quote my authority.

The classes of persons who are most liable to become _vrykolakes_ are:

(1) Those who do not receive the full and due rites of burial.

(2) Those who meet with any sudden or violent death (including suicides), or, in Maina[990], where the _vendetta_ is still in vogue, those who having been murdered remain unavenged.

(3) Children conceived or born on one of the great Church-festivals[991], and children stillborn[992].

(4) Those who die under a curse, especially the curse of a parent, or one self-invoked, as in the case of a man who, in perjuring himself, calls down on his own head all manner of damnation if what he says be false.

(5) Those who die under the ban of the Church, that is to say, excommunicate.

(6) Those who die unbaptised or apostate[993].

(7) Men of evil and immoral life in general, more particularly if they have dealt in the blacker kinds of sorcery.

(8) Those who have eaten the flesh of a sheep which was killed by a wolf[994].

(9) Those over whose dead bodies a cat or other animal has passed[995].

The _provenance_ and the significance of these various beliefs concerning the causes of vampirism will be discussed in the next section.

§ 2. THE COMPOSITION OF THE SUPERSTITION. SLAVONIC, ECCLESIASTICAL, AND HELLENIC CONTRIBUTIONS.

_Vrykolakes_ are not ghosts. Such is the first observation which I am compelled to make and which the reader of the last chapter might well consider superfluous. But so many Greek writers, and with them even Bernhard Schmidt[996], have fallen into the error of comparing ancient ghost-stories with modern tales about _vrykolakes_, without apparently recognising the essential and fundamental difference between them, that some insistence upon the point is necessary. That a definite and close relation does indeed subsist between the ancient belief in wandering spirits and the modern belief in wandering corpses, I readily admit, and with that relation I shall deal later; but the issue before us can only be kept clear by remembering that _vrykolakes_ are not ghosts. There is absolute unanimity among the Greek peasants in their belief that the corpse itself is the _vrykolakas_, and even the work of re-animating the corpse is generally credited not to the soul which formerly inhabited it, but to the Devil. Thus it appears that whereas most peoples believe to some extent in the return of the ghosts or spirits of the dead, the Greeks fear rather the return of their bodies. If then we can determine what part, if any, of this superstition is genuinely Hellenic, we shall have gained a step in our knowledge of the ideas popularly held in ancient Greece concerning the condition and the relations of soul and body after death.

The view which I take is briefly this, that though Slavonic influence is very conspicuous in the modern superstition as I have described it, yet the whole superstition has not been transplanted root and branch from Slavonic to Greek soil, but the growth, as we now see it and as the writers of the seventeenth century saw it, is the result of the grafting of Slavonic branches upon an Hellenic stock; and further, that before that process began the old pagan Greek element in the superstition had been modified in certain respects by ecclesiastical influence. This is the view which I propose to develop in this section; and my method will be to work back from the modern superstition, removing first the Slavonic and then the ecclesiastical elements in it, and so leaving a residue of purely Hellenic belief.

To Slavonic influence is due first of all the actual word _vrykolakas_, the derivation of which need not long detain us. Patriotic attempts have indeed been made by Greeks to deny its Slavonic origin, the most plausible being that of Coraës[997], who selecting the local form βορβόλακας sought to identify it with a supposed ancient form μορμόλυξ (= μορμολύκη, μορμολυκεῖον), a ‘bugbear’ or ‘hobgoblin’ of some kind. But there need be no hesitation in pronouncing this suggestion wrong and in asserting the identity of the modern Greek word with a word which runs through all the Slavonic languages. This word is in form a compound of which the first half means ‘wolf’ and the second has been less certainly identified with _dlaka_, the ‘hair’ of a cow or horse. But, however the meaning of the compound has been obtained, it is, in the actual usage of all Slavonic languages save one, the exact equivalent of our ‘were-wolf[998].’ That one exception is the Serbian language in which it is said to bear rather the sense of ‘vampire[999].’ If this is true, the reason for the transition of meaning lies probably in the belief current among the Slavonic peoples in general that a man who has been a were-wolf in his lifetime becomes a vampire after death[1000]. Yet in general there is no confusion of nomenclature. Although the depredations of the were-wolf and of the vampire are similar in character, the line of demarcation between the living and the dead is kept clear, and the great mass of the Slavonic peoples apply only to the living that word from which the Greek _vrykolakas_ comes, and to the dead the word which we have borrowed in the form ‘vampire[1001].’

Now among the Greeks the latter word is almost unknown; in parts of Macedonia indeed where the Greek population lives in constant touch with Slavonic peoples, a form βάμπυρας or βόμπυρας has been adopted and is used as a synonym of _vrykolakas_ in its ordinary Greek sense[1002]; but in Greece proper and in the Greek islands the word ‘vampire’ is, so far as I can discover, absolutely non-existent, and it is _vrykolakas_ which ordinarily denotes the resuscitated corpse. In discriminating therefore between the Slavonic and the Greek elements in the modern Greek superstition it is of some importance to determine in which sense the Greeks originally borrowed the word _vrykolakas_ which at the present day they in general employ in a different sense from that which both etymology and general Slavonic usage accord to it. Was it originally borrowed in the sense of ‘were-wolf’ or in the sense of ‘vampire’?

Among Slavonic peoples the only one said to have transferred the word _vrykolakas_ from its original meaning to that of ‘vampire’ is the Serbian; and the Greeks therefore, in order to have borrowed the word in that sense, would have had to borrow direct from the Serbian language. But linguistic evidence renders that hypothesis untenable. All the many Greek dialectic forms of the word _vrykolakas_ concur in showing a liquid (ρ or λ) in the first syllable; while Serbian is among the two or three Slavonic languages which have discarded that liquid. It follows therefore that the Greeks borrowed the word from some Slavonic language other than Serbian, and consequently from some language which used and still uses that word in the sense of ‘were-wolf.’

Further, there is evidence that in the Greek language itself the word _vrykolakas_ does even now locally and occasionally bear its original significance. This usage indeed is flatly denied by Bernhard Schmidt, who, having accurately distinguished the were-wolf and the vampire, states that ‘the modern Greek _vrykolakas_ answers only to the latter[1003].’ This pronouncement however was made in the face of two strong pieces of independent evidence to the contrary, which Schmidt notices and dismisses in a footnote[1004]. The first witness is Hanush[1005], who was plainly told by a Greek of Mytilene that there were two kinds of _vrykolakes_, the one kind being men already dead, and the other still living men who were subject to a kind of somnambulism and were seen abroad particularly on moonlight nights. The other authority is Cyprien Robert[1006], who describes the _vrykolakes_ of Thessaly and Epirus thus: ‘These are living men mastered by a kind of somnambulism, who seized by a thirst for blood go forth at night from their shepherd’s-huts, and scour the country biting and tearing all that they meet both man and beast.’

To these two pieces of testimony--strong enough, it might be thought, in their mutual agreement to merit more than passing notice and arbitrary rejection--I can add confirmation of more recent date. In Cyprus, during excavations carried out in the spring of 1899 under the auspices of the British Museum, the directors of the enterprise heard from their workmen several stories dealing with the detection of a _vrykolakas_. The outline of these stories (to which Tenos furnishes many parallels[1007], though in these latter I have not found the word _vrykolakas_ employed) is as follows. The inhabitants of a particular village, having suffered from various nocturnal depredations, determine to keep watch at night for the marauder. Having duly armed themselves they maintain a strict vigil, and are rewarded by seeing a _vrykolakas_. Thereupon one of them with gun or sword succeeds in inflicting a wound upon the monster, which however for the nonce escapes. But the next day a man of the village, who had not been among the watchers of the night, is observed to bear a wound exactly corresponding with that which the assailant of the _vrykolakas_ had dealt; and being taxed with it the man confesses himself to be a _vrykolakas._

Similarly on the borders of Aetolia and Acarnania, in the neighbourhood of Agrinion, I myself ascertained that the word _vrykolakas_ was occasionally applied to living persons in the sense of were-wolf, although there as elsewhere it more commonly denotes a resuscitated corpse. Lycanthropy, as has been observed in a previous chapter[1008], is in Greece often imputed to children. In the district mentioned this is conspicuously the case. If one or more children in a family die without evident cause, the mother will often regard the smallest or weakliest of the survivors--more especially one in any way deformed or demented--as guilty of the brothers’ or sisters’ deaths, and the suspect is called a _vrykolakas_. Εἶσαι βρυκόλακας καὶ ’φάγες τὸν ἀδερφό σου, ‘you are a _vrykolakas_ and have devoured your brother,’ is the charge hurled at the helpless infant, and ill-treatment to match is meted out in the hope of deterring it from its bloodthirsty ways.

In effect from four widely separated parts of the Greek world--Mytilene, Cyprus, the neighbourhood of Agrinion, and the district of Thessaly and Epirus--comes one and the same statement, that to the word _vrykolakas_ is still, or has recently been, attached its etymologically correct meaning ‘were-wolf’; and, since these isolated local usages cannot be explained otherwise than as survivals of an usage which was once general, they constitute a second proof that the Greeks originally adopted the word in the sense in which the vast majority of the Slavonic races continue down to this day to employ it.

But while it is thus certain that the Greeks first learnt and acquired the word _vrykolakas_ in the sense of ‘were-wolf,’ it is equally certain that the main characteristics of the monster to which that name is now applied are those of the Slavonic ‘vampire.’ The appearance and the habits of the re-animated corpse according to Slavonic superstition differ hardly at all from those described in the last chapter. Indeed the question is not so much whether the Greeks are indebted to the Slavs in respect of this belief, as what is the extent of their indebtedness. Is the whole superstition a foreign importation, or is it only partly alien and partly native?

The former alternative is rendered improbable in the first place by the fact that the Greeks have not adopted the word ‘vampire.’ If the whole idea of dead men remaining under certain conditions incorrupt and emerging from their graves to work havoc among living men had been first communicated to them by the Slavs, they must almost inevitably have borrowed the name by which the Slavs described those men. But since in fact they did not adopt the Slavonic name ‘vampire,’ it is probable that they already possessed in their own language some word adequate to express that idea, and therefore possessed also some native superstition concerning resuscitation of the dead which Slavonic influence merely modified.

Further, there is positive evidence that such a word or words existed; for there have been, and still are, dialects which employ a word of Greek formation in preference not merely to the word ‘vampire,’ which seems to be unknown in Greece proper, but even to the misapplied Slavonic word _vrykolakas_. Thus Leo Allatius was familiar with the word τυμπανιαῖος, ‘drum-like,’ but whether in his day it belonged especially to his native island Chios[1009] or was still in general usage, he does not record. At the present day it survives only, so far as I know, in Cythnos, where also ἄλυτος, ‘incorrupt,’ is used as another synonym[1010]. From Cythera are reported three names, ἀνάρραχο, λάμπασμα, and λάμπαστρο[1011], evidently Greek in formation but to me, I must confess, unintelligible. In Cyprus (where, as we have seen, the word _vrykolakas_ may still bear its old sense ‘were-wolf’) the _revenant_ is named σαρκωμένος[1012], because his swollen appearance suggests that he has ‘put on flesh,’ or more rarely στοιχειωμένος[1013], perhaps with the idea that he has become the ‘genius’ (στοιχειό)[1014] of some particular locality. Again, from the village of Pyrgos in Tenos is reported the word ἀναικαθούμενος[1015] meaning apparently one who ‘sits up’ in his grave. Finally, in Crete the name popularly employed is καταχανᾶς[1016], the origin of which is not certain. Bernhard Schmidt[1017], following Koraës[1018], derives it from κατὰ and χάνω (= ancient Greek χαόω), ‘lose,’ ‘destroy,’ and would have it mean accordingly ‘destroyer.’ I would suggest that derivation from κατὰ and the root χαν-, ‘gape,’ ‘yawn,’ is at least equally probable, inasmuch as other local names such as τυμπανιαῖος, ‘drumlike,’ and σαρκωμένος, ‘fleshy,’ have reference to the monster’s personal appearance, and the ‘gaper’ in like manner would be a name eminently suitable to a creature among whose features are numbered by Leo Allatius ‘a gaping mouth and gleaming teeth[1019].’ The same name was some forty years ago[1020], and probably still is, used in Rhodes, and in a Rhodian poem of the fifteenth century occurs both in its literal sense and as a term of abuse[1021]. This secondary usage however is in no way a proof that the word meant originally ‘destroyer’ rather than ‘gaper’; for by the fifteenth century there can be little doubt that the _revenant_ was everywhere an object of horror, and therefore his name, whatever it originally meant, furnished a convenient term of vituperation. But one thing at least is clear, that καταχανᾶς, whichever interpretation of it be right, is certainly a word of Greek origin no less than the others which I have enumerated.

Now all these dialectic Greek names are found, it will have been observed, only in certain of the Greek islands, while on the mainland _vrykolakas_ has come to be universally employed. But it was the mainland which was particularly exposed to Slavonic immigration and influence, while islands like Crete and Cyprus were practically immune. Hence, while the mainland gradually adopted a Slavonic word, it was likely enough that some of the islands should retain their own Greek terms, even though in the course of their relations with the mainland they became acquainted also with the new Slavonic word. These insular names for the _vrykolakas_ may therefore be regarded as survivals from a pre-Slavonic period, and, though they are now merely dialectic, it is reasonable to suppose that one or more of them formerly held a place in the language of mainlanders and islanders alike. But the existence of such words presupposes the existence of a belief in some kind of resuscitated beings denoted by them. In other words, the Greeks when first brought into contact with the Slavs already possessed a belief in the re-animation and activity of certain dead persons, which so far resembled the Slavonic belief in vampirism, that the Slavonic vampire could be adequately denoted by some Greek word or words already existing and there was no need to adopt the Slavonic name.

I claim then to have established two important points: first, that the word _vrykolakas_ was originally borrowed by the Greeks from the Slavs in the sense of ‘were-wolf,’ though now it is almost universally employed in the sense of ‘vampire’; secondly, that, whatever ideas concerning vampires the Greeks may have learnt from the Slavs, they did not adopt the Slavonic word ‘vampire’ but employed one of those native Greek words, such as τυμπανιαῖος or καταχανᾶς, which are still in local usage; whence it follows that some superstition anent re-animated corpses existed in Greece before the coming of the Slavs.

These points being established, I am now in a position to trace the development of the superstition in Greece from the time of the Slavonic immigrations onward, and to show how it came to pass that, whereas in the tenth century, let us say, when the Greeks had had ample time to imbibe Slavonic superstitions, _vrykolakas_ meant a ‘were-wolf,’ and a ‘vampire’ was denoted by τυμπανιαῖος or some other Greek word, nowadays _vrykolakas_ almost always means a ‘vampire’ and τυμπανιαῖος is well-nigh obsolete.

The Slavs brought with them into Greece two superstitions, the one concerning were-wolves and the other concerning vampires. The old Hellenic belief in lycanthropy was apparently at that time weak--confined perhaps to a few districts only--for the Greeks borrowed from the invaders their word _vrykolakas_ in the place of the old λυκάνθρωπος[1022], by which to express the idea of a ‘were-wolf.’ They also learnt the Slavonic superstition concerning vampires, but in this case did not borrow the word ‘vampire’ but expressed the notion adequately by means of one of those words which now survive only in insular dialects--adequately, I say, but not exactly. For--and here I must anticipate what will be proved later--the Greeks denoted by those words a _revenant_ but not a vampire. They believed in the incorruptibility and the re-animation of certain classes of dead men, but they did not impute to these _revenants_ the savagery which is implied by the name ‘vampire.’ The dead who returned from their graves acted, it was held, as reasonable men, not as ferocious brutes. This did not of course exclude the idea that a _revenant_ might return to seek revenge where vengeance was due; he was not necessarily peaceable; but if he exacted even the life of one who had wronged him, the act of vengeance was reasonable. To the proof of this, as I have said, I shall come later on; here I will only point out that the names which survive in the island-dialects are perfectly consistent with my view. Of the words τυμπανιαῖος, ‘drumlike,’ σαρκωμένος, ‘fleshy,’ στοιχειωμένος, ‘_genius_,’ ἀναικαθούμενος, ‘sitting up’ in the grave, and, if my interpretation is right, καταχανᾶς, ‘gaper,’ not one suggests any inherent ferocity in the resuscitated dead.

Nevertheless, when the Greeks first heard of the Slavonic ‘vampire,’ they naturally regarded it merely as a new and particularly vicious species of the genus _revenant_. Their own words for the genus implied no idea beyond that of the resuscitation of the dead, and were therefore no less applicable to the uniformly ferocious Slavonic variety than to the more reasonable and human type with which they themselves were familiar. They therefore did not require the word ‘vampire,’ but were content at first to comprise all _revenants_, whatever their character, under one or other of the existing Greek names.

Subsequently however, it appears, a change took place. The Slavonic superstition concerning were-wolves included then, we may suppose, as it includes now[1023], the idea that were-wolves become after death vampires. The Greeks, who borrowed from the Slavs the very name of the were-wolf, must therewith have learnt that these _vrykolakes_ as they then called them were among the classes of men who were liable to vampirism; and in this particular case it would surely have seemed natural to them that the _revenant_ should be conspicuous for ferocity. The conduct of a reasonable being could not be expected after death from one who in his lifetime had suffered from lycanthropic mania; or rather, if there could be any reason in his conduct, the most reasonable and consistent thing would be for him to turn vampire.

Thus one class of _revenants_ came to be distinguished in the now composite Greek superstition by its wanton and blood-thirsty character; and in order to mark this distinction in speech also the Greeks, it would seem, began to call one who from a were-wolf had become a genuine vampire by the same name after as before death, _vrykolakas_, while to the more reasonable and human _revenants_ they still applied some such term as τυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike.’

By the seventeenth century the superstition had undergone a further change, which is reflected in the usage of the word τυμπανιαῖος. In proportion as the horror of real _vrykolakes_ had grown and spread, the very memory of the more innocent kind of _revenants_ had faded, until the genus _revenant_ was represented only by the species _vrykolakas_. The word τυμπανιαῖος was indeed still known, but Leo Allatius was undoubtedly following the popular usage of his time when he made it synonymous with _vrykolakas_; for those narratives of the seventeenth century from which I have quoted above make it abundantly clear that the common-folk had come to suspect all _revenants_ alike of predatory propensities.

This change in popular beliefs placed the Church in an awkward predicament, and was the cause of a marked divergence between the popular and the clerical usages of the word τυμπανιαῖος. It had long been claimed that a sentence of excommunication was binding upon a man even beyond death and could arrest the natural process of decomposition; indeed the formula officially employed ended, as Father Richard of Santorini notes, with the phrase, ‘and after death to remain indissoluble.’ But when the fear of real vampires spread over Greece, the priests would naturally have been unwilling to be held responsible for the resuscitation of such pests, while they were equally unwilling to diminish the terrors of excommunication by omitting the final imprecation. Their only course therefore was to emphasize what seems indeed to have been always the authorised doctrine of the Church, that excommunicated persons remained indeed incorrupt and ‘drum-like,’ but were not, like _vrykolakes_, subject to diabolical re-animation. It is Father Richard’s acceptance of this clerical view which explains why, writing as he did some few years after Leo Allatius, he distinguished the two words which Leo had treated as synonymous, making resuscitation the criterion of the _vrykolakas_ and stating that the ‘drum-like’ body, though withheld from natural decay, lay quiet in its grave. But the ecclesiastical doctrine made no impression upon the popular belief; to this very day the common-folk regard any corpse which is found incorrupt as a potential _vrykolakas_, and excommunication is everywhere numbered among the causes of vampirism.

Thus it has come to pass that any _revenants_ other than the savage _vrykolakes_ are well-nigh forgotten, and in most districts their very name is no longer heard. The word _vrykolakes_, which first meant were-wolves, came to denote also the vampires into which were-wolves changed, and gradually, as these vampires by exciting men’s horror and concentrating on themselves the people’s attention became the predominant class of _revenants_, ousted from the very speech of Greece as a whole the old Greek names for the more harmless sort, and established itself as the regular equivalent of _revenant_.

Such is my solution of the somewhat complex problem of nomenclature; and in presenting it I have incidentally stated my view that the genuinely Greek element in the modern superstition is a belief in the incorruptibility and re-appearance of dead persons under certain special conditions, and that the imported and now dominant element is the Slavonic belief that the resuscitation of the dead renders them necessarily predatory vampires. This I now have to prove.

It is a well-established characteristic of the Slavonic vampire that his violence is directed first and foremost against his nearest of kin. The same trait is so pronounced too in the modern Greek _vrykolakas_ that it has given rise to the proverb, ὁ βρυκόλακας ἀρχίζει ἀπὸ τὰ γένειά του, ‘the _vrykolakas_ begins with his own beard’--a saying which carries a double meaning, so a peasant told me. It may be taken literally, inasmuch as the _vrykolakas_ usually appears bald and beardless; but the words τὰ γένειά του, ‘his beard,’ are popularly understood as a substitute, half jocose and half euphemistic, for τὴ γενεά του, ‘his family.’ In other words, this most deadly of pagan pests, like the most lively of Christian virtues, begins at home.

Such being the acknowledged and even proverbial habits of the _vrykolakas_, nothing, it might be supposed, could be more repugnant and fearful to the near relations of a dead man than the possibility that he would turn _vrykolakas_ and return straightway to devour them. The first sufferers from such an eventuality would be the man’s own kinsfolk, the next his acquaintances and fellow-villagers, but he himself would appear to be aggressor rather than sufferer. Nevertheless, in face of this consideration, there is no more commodious form of curse in popular usage than the ejaculation of a prayer that the person who has incurred one’s displeasure may be withheld from corruption after death and return from his grave. I have heard it extended even to a recalcitrant mule; but it is also used gravely by parents as an imprecation of punishment hereafter upon undutiful children. A few samples of this curse will not be out of place, as showing at once its frequency and its range[1024].

Νὰ μήν τον δεχτῇ ἡ γῆς, ‘May the earth not receive him’: νὰ μήν τον φάγῃ τὸ χῶμα, ‘May the ground not consume him’: ἡ γῆ νὰ μή σε χωνέψῃ[1025], ‘May the earth not digest thee’: ἡ μαύρη γῆ νά σ’ ἀναξεράσῃ[1026], ‘May the black earth spew thee up’: νὰ μείνῃς ἄλυ̯ωτος, ‘Mayest thou remain incorrupt’: νὰ μή σε λυώσῃ ἡ γῆ, ‘May the earth not loose thee’ (i.e. not let thy body decompose): νά σε βγάλῃ τὸ χῶμα, ‘May the ground reject thee’: κουτοῦκι νὰ βγῇς[1027], ‘Mayest thou become (after death) like a log (in solidity)’: τὸ χῶμα ’ξεράσ’ τόνε, ‘May the ground spew him out’--this last phrase being made more terrible by being a parody, as it were, of the prayer uttered by the mourners at every Greek funeral ὁ θεὸς ’χωρέσ’ τόνε, ‘May God forgive him.’ Such are the popular forms of the curse; and akin to them are the ecclesiastical imprecations, with which the formula of excommunication used to end: καὶ ἔσῃ μετὰ θάνατον ἄλυτος αἰωνίως, ὡς αἱ πέτραι καὶ τὰ σίδηρα[1028], ‘And after death thou shalt be bound (i.e. incorrupt) eternally, even as stone and iron’; or, in a shorter form, καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαράλυτος[1029], ‘And after death bound and indissoluble.’ Here, it will be observed, the Church spoke only of incorruptibility, but several of the popular expressions contain explicit mention of resuscitation as well; and the very forms of the curse which I have quoted show how closely knit together, how almost identical, are these two notions in the mind of the peasants. That which the earth will not ‘receive,’ she necessarily ‘rejects’; that which she does not ‘consume’ or ‘digest,’ she necessarily ‘spews up.’ The man whose body does not decompose is necessarily a _revenant_.

Now curses, it must be remembered, among a primitive people are considered as operative, and not merely expletive; each bullet of malediction deliberately aimed is expected to find its billet; each imprecation seriously uttered has a magical power of fulfilling itself. That this belief is firmly held by the Greek folk is sufficiently proved by certain quaint solemnities enacted beside the deathbed. It is a common custom[1030] for a dying man to put a handful of salt into a vessel of water, and when it is dissolved to sprinkle with the liquid all those who are present, saying, ὡς λυ̯ώνει τ’ ἀλάτι, νὰ λυ̯ώσουν ᾑ κατάραις μου, ‘As the salt dissolves, so may my curses dissolve.’ By this ceremony all persons whom he has cursed are released from the bonds of an imprecation which after death he would no longer be able to revoke or annul. Then in turn the relations and friends formally pronounce their forgiveness of aught that the dying man has done to their hurt. Thus pardoning and pardoned the sick man may expect a short and easy passing; and, if the death-struggle be prolonged, it is taken as a sign that some one whom he has injured has not forgiven him. Accordingly the friends and kinsmen, having decided among themselves who the delinquent must be, send to fetch him, if he be still living, in order that he too may pronounce his forgiveness and so smooth the passage of the parting soul. If however he be dead, a portion of his shroud or of his ashes is brought and burnt, and the sick man, who needs his forgiveness ere he can die in peace, is fumigated with the smoke therefrom.

Since then curses in general are regarded by the Greek folk no less than by other primitive peoples as effective instruments of wrath which work out their own fulfilment, the particular curses which we are considering, when they are gravely uttered, do seriously contemplate the possibility of the person cursed becoming after death a _revenant_ and are designed to bring about that future state.

But, if already at the time when such imprecations first became popular it had been believed that their effect was to render the corpse, whose decay was arrested and whose resuscitation was assured, a wanton and blood-thirsty monster, preying first of all upon his nearest of kin, the question of relationship or no relationship between the curser and the cursed would necessarily have been taken into account.

On the one hand, where a man was in no degree akin to the object of his wrath, he would have welcomed the opportunity of including his enemy’s whole family in his vengeance by causing him to return and devour them. For in Greece recrimination is wholly unsparing, and no man pretending to any elegance or taste in the matter of abuse could neglect to level his taunts and threats and curses at least as much against the relatives--especially the female relatives--of his enemy as against the man himself. Just as the tenderest blessings among the peasants are prayers, not for him to whom they wish well, but rather for those whom he has loved and lost, so that the beggar’s thanks are often ‘May God forgive your father and your mother’ (which, however it may sound, is not intended otherwise than graciously) or again, prettier still in its vague genderless plural which no translation can adequately render, ὁ θεὸς ’χωρέσ’ τὰ πεθαμμένα σου, ‘May God forgive your dead,’ so the harshest and bitterest of curses are vented, not upon the man who has excited them, but upon those who are nearest and dearest to him. And bitterness in cursing being as much a part of the Greek character as gentleness in blessing, it is almost inconceivable that, if any idea of real vampirism had originally been associated with _revenants_, the merest novice in malediction could have missed the opportunity of adding to his imprecations of incorruptibility and resuscitation a prayer that his enemy might devastate with horrid carnage the home of those who mourned him. Yet not one of the curses which I have quoted above suggests any savagery to be shown by the resuscitated body; not one of them hints at the blood-thirsty predatory character of the modern _vrykolakas_; nay, most significant of all, not one of them contains the word _vrykolakas_, nor have I ever heard or found recorded, so far as I can remember, any form of the curse in which that word appears[1031]. Now this is certainly not due to any difficulty of language in using the word, for there is a convenient enough verb formed from it, βρυκολακιάζω, ‘I turn vampire,’ and νὰ βρυκολακιάσης, ‘May you turn vampire,’ should commend itself as both sonorous and compendious. The reason why all mention and all thought of the ordinary _vrykolakas_ are lacking in these curses must rather be that, when they first came into vogue, _revenants_ were not yet credited with the savage character which under Slavonic influence they afterwards acquired; and that, when the word _vrykolakas_ was introduced, the old traditional forms of curse underwent no modification, but were bandied to and fro by boys with the same glib uniformity as by their fathers before them. They had been cast in set forms before the idea of vampirism had been introduced and when men believed only in reasonable and usually harmless _revenants_. On the other hand, where the curser was akin to the cursed, the nearer the tie of blood the more incomprehensible would be the attitude of one who by an imprecation should recall from the grave so malignant a thing as the modern _vrykolakas_, only to fall himself perhaps the first victim to its blood-thirstiness. If the phrase ‘May the earth reject thee’ had suggested anything beyond simple resuscitation, if there had been any resemblance in character between the Greek _revenant_ and the Slavonic vampire, such an imprecation would have been impossible where close kinship existed; it would at once recoil with fatal force upon the curser’s own head; above all, that most solemn curse, the curse of parent upon child, would have been the first to ‘come home to roost’; and yet the use of such parental imprecations is both celebrated in ballad and not unknown, I am told, in actual experience. Once more then the use of these curses is explicable only on the hypothesis that the original Greek _revenants_ were not the formidable monsters now known as _vrykolakes_, and that, when under Slavonic influence the popular conception of them changed, the old set phrases of commination--coins, as it were, of speech, struck in the mint of the original superstition--continued current in spite of their inconsistency with the new ideas. These colloquial survivals of the original Greek superstition are at once a proof and a measure of its later contamination. The Greeks had believed in reasonable human _revenants_; the Slavs taught them to believe in brutish inhuman vampires.

This conclusion is confirmed by the ballad to which I have just referred; in it a mother’s imprecation recalls her son from the grave; the _revenant_, who is the protagonist in a most dramatic story, is, as will be seen, of the type which I claim to have been the original Greek type and exhibits no Slavonic traits.

The ballad[1032], which as an important document I translate at length, runs as follows:

Mother with children richly blest, nine sons and one dear daughter, The darling of thy heart was she, and fondly did’st thou tend her; For full twelve years thou guardedst her, and the sun looked not on her, But in the dusk thou bathedst her, by moonlight trim’dst her tresses, By evening-star and morning-star her curls in order settest. And lo! a message brought to thee, from Babylon a message, Bidding thee wed thy child afar, afar in a strange country; Eight of her brethren will it not, but Constantine doth hearken: --‘Nay, mother, send thine Areté, send her to that strange country, That country whither I too fare, that land wherein I wander, That I may find me comfort there, that I may find me lodging.’ --‘Prudent art thou, my Constantine, yet ill-conceived thy counsel: If there o’ertake me death, my son, if there o’ertake me sickness, If there hap bitterness or joy, who shall go bring her to me?’ He made the Saints his witnesses, he gave her God for surety, If peradventure there come death, if haply there come sickness, If there hap bitterness or joy, himself would go and bring her. Now when they had sent Areté to wed in the strange country, There came a year of heaviness, a month of God’s displeasure, And there befell the Pestilence, that the nine brethren perished; Lone as a willow in the plain, lone, desolate their mother. Over eight graves she beats her breast, o’er eight makes lamentation, But from the tomb of Constantine she tears the very grave-stones: --‘Rise, I adjure thee, Constantine, ’tis Areté I long for; Thou madest the Saints thy witnesses, thou gavest me God for surety, If there hap bitterness or joy, thyself would’st go and bring her.’ Forth from the mound that covered him the stern adjuring drave him; He takes the clouds to be his steed, the stars to be his bridle, The moon for escort on his road, and goes his way to bring her. He leaves the mountains in his wake, he gains the heights before him, He finds her ’neath the moonlight fair combing her golden tresses. E’en from afar he bids her hail, cries from afar his message: --‘Up, Aretoúla, up and come, for lo! our mother needs thee.’ --‘Alack, alack, dear brother mine, what chance hath then befallen? If haply ’tis an hour of joy, let me go don my jewels, If bitterness, speak, I will come and tarry not for robing.’ --‘Up, Aretoúla, up and come, and tarry not for robing.’ Beside the way whereon they passed, beside the road they travelled, They heard the singing of the birds, they heard the birds a-saying: --‘Who hath e’er seen a maiden fair by a dead man escorted?’ --‘Didst hear, my brother Constantine, what thing the birds are saying? “Who hath e’er seen a maiden fair by a dead man escorted?”’ --‘Nay, foolish birds, let them sing on, nor heed their idle chatter.’ Anon as they went faring on, yet other birds were calling: --‘What woeful sight is this we see, so piteous and so plaintive, That lo! as comrades on their way, the dead escort the living?’ --‘Didst hear, my brother Constantine, what thing the birds are saying? “That lo! as comrades on their way, the dead escort the living.”’ --‘Nay, what are birds? let them sing on, nor heed their idle chatter.’ --‘Ah, but I fear thee, brother mine, thou savourest of censing.’ --‘Nay, at the chapel of Saint John we gathered yester even, And the good father hallowed us with incense beyond measure.’ And yet again as they fared on, yet other birds were crying: --‘O God, great God omnipotent, great wonders art thou working; So gracious and so fair a maid with a dead man consorting!’ --‘Didst hear, my brother Constantine, what thing the birds are saying? Tell me, where are those locks of thine, thy trimly-set mustachio?’ --’Twas a sore sickness fell on me, nigh unto death it brought me, And spoiled me of my golden locks, my trimly-set mustachio.’ Lo! they are come; but locked their home, the door fast barred and bolted, And all the windows of their home in spider-webs enshrouded. --‘Op’n, prithee, open, mother mine, ’tis Areté thy daughter.’ --‘An thou art Charon, go thy way, for I have no more children; My one, my little Areté, bides far in the strange country.’ --‘Op’n, prithee, open, mother mine, ’tis Constantine that calls thee; I made the Saints my witnesses, I gave thee God for surety, If there hap bitterness or joy, myself would go and bring her.’ Scarce had she passed to ope the door, and lo! her soul passed from her.

The versions of this ballad which have been collected are very numerous[1033], and some of them differ so widely from others in language as not to have a single line in common. That which I have selected for translation is one of the most complete, presenting fairly all the essential points of the story, and free from the eccentricities which some versions have developed. At the same time it must be allowed that here the mother’s curse is only implied by her action of tearing up the gravestones and adjuring Constantine to rise, whereas in one or two versions, otherwise inferior, it is clearly and forcibly expressed.

Thus in one[1034] her words run:

πέτρα νὰ γίνῃ ὁ Κωσταντής, λιθάρι νὰ μὴ λει̯ώσῃ, πώστειλε τὴν Ἀρέτω μου, τὴν Ἀρετὼ ’στὰ ξένα.

‘May Constantine become as rock, yea even as stone, and have no loosing (i.e. dissolution), for that he sent my Areto to a strange land.’

And in another[1035]:

Ὅλοι μου οἱ γυιοὶ νὰ λυώσουνε κῂ ὁ Κώστας νὰ μὴ λυώσῃ, Ὅπ’ ἔδωκε τὴν Ἀρετὴ πολὺ μακρυὰ ’στὰ ξένα.

‘May all my other sons have “loosing” and Constantine be not “loosed,” for that he let my Areté be taken afar to a strange country.’

Again, another version[1036] ends, not with the arrival of Areté in time to close her dying mother’s eyes, but with the revoking of the curse upon Constantine in gratitude for the fulfilment of his oath:

‘νὰ σὲ λυώσῃ τὸ χῶμα σου καὶ νὰ σὲ φάγ’ ἡ πλάκα σ’.’ ὅσο νὰ σώσ’ τὸ λόγο της χοῦφτα χῶμα γενότον.

‘May the earth where thou liest loose thee and thy tomb consume thee.’ Scarce had she finished her speech and he became but a handful of earth.

Clearly then the curse, which in this story is conceived as binding Constantine’s body and driving him forth from the grave and which must be revoked before his body can be loosed by natural decay, is one of that class which we have been considering; but the story confers the further advantage of letting us see such a curse in operation. Constantine is presented as a revenant, but not of the modern type; for what turn must the story have taken if he had been a normal _vrykolakas_? His first act would have been to devour his nearest of kin--his mother, who was tearing up his grave-stones and cursing him: and his next, if he had troubled to go as far as Babylon, to make a like end of Areté. And what do we actually find? Constantine acts not only as a reasonable man in seeking to allay his sister’s suspicions, but also as a good man in keeping his oath. He is driven forth from the grave on a quest which (in most versions of the story) earns him no thanks from those whom he benefits; he does his weary mission and (in most versions) goes back again to the cold grave from which the curse had raised him. Our sympathy is engaged by Constantine no less than by his mother. He too is a sufferer, first stricken down in his youth by pestilence, and then cursed because his oath remained unfulfilled. He claims our pity, and in this differs fundamentally from the ordinary _vrykolakas_ which could only excite our horror.

Furthermore it is noteworthy that in the many versions of this poem, just as in the popular curses which I have quoted, the word _vrykolakas_ is nowhere found[1037].

Hence I am inclined to believe that the original poem, from which have come so many modern versions, differing widely in many respects, but agreeing completely in the exclusion both of the Slavonic word _vrykolakas_ and of all the suggestions of horror which surround it, was composed in a period anterior to the intrusion of Slavonic ideas; and that the modern versions therefore, which prove their fidelity to the spirit of the original precisely by having refused admittance to anything Slavonic, furnish that which we are seeking, the purely and genuinely Greek element in the now composite superstition. That Greek element then is the conception of the _revenant_ as a sufferer deserving even of pity, the very antithesis in character of the Slavonic vampire, an aggressor exciting only loathing and horror.

In the composite modern Greek superstition, as described in the last chapter, the Slavonic element is clearly predominant. But the conclusion to which my analysis of the superstition has now led, explains what would otherwise have been almost inexplicable, the existence of a few stories in which the _revenant_, though called _vrykolakas_, is none the less represented as harmless or even amiable.

One such case is mentioned in Father Richard’s narrative[1038]--the case of a shoemaker in Santorini, who having turned _vrykolakas_ continued to frequent his house, mend his children’s shoes, draw water at the reservoir, and cut wood for the use of his family; and though it is added that the people became frightened and exhumed and burned him, this was only a measure of precaution dictated by their experience of other _vrykolakes_; no charge was brought against this particular _revenant_. It might also be supposed that the _vrykolakes_ of Amorgos, mentioned next in the same narrative, who were seen in open day five or six together in a field feeding apparently on green beans, were of the less noxious kind; but they may of course have been carnivorous also.

Another story, recently published[1039], records how a native of Maina, also a shoemaker by trade, having turned _vrykolakas_ issued from his grave every night except Saturday, resumed his work, and continued to live with his wife, whose pregnancy forced her to reveal the truth to her neighbours. When once this was known, many accusations, it is true, were brought against the _vrykolakas_; but the story at least recognises some domestic and human traits in his character.

But a much more remarkable tale[1040] is told of a field-labourer of Samos who was so devoted to the farmer for whom he worked, that when he died he became a _vrykolakas_ and continued secretly to give his services. At night he would go to the farm-buildings, take out the oxen from their stall, yoke them, and plough three acres while his master slept; in the daytime an equal piece of work was done by the master--so that incidentally the oxen were nearly killed. The neighbours however having had their suspicions aroused by the rapidity of the work, which the farmer himself could in no wise explain, kept watch one night, and having detected the _vrykolakas_ opened his grave, found him, as would be expected, whole and incorrupt, and burned him.

Such stories as these testify that the old and purely Greek conception of _revenants_ is not quite extinct even in places where the only name for them is the Slavonic word _vrykolakes_.

* * * * *

The Slavonic element in the modern superstition having been now removed, it remains to consider what was the attitude of the Church towards the Greek belief in _revenants_ and what effect her teaching had upon it.

I have already pointed out that the Jesuit, Father Richard, discriminated between _vrykolakes_ and certain bodies called ‘drums,’ which were found incorrupt after many years of burial. This distinction he had no doubt learnt from clergy of the Greek Church; for, while the common-folk held that those whom the earth did not receive and consume were necessarily ejected by her, or, in other words, that a dead man whose body did not decay was necessarily also a _revenant_, the Church distinguished, as we shall see, between belief in incorruptibility and belief in resuscitation, inculcating the former, and varying between condonation and condemnation of the latter. These two ideas must therefore be handled separately.

The incorruptibility of the body of any person bound by a curse was made a definite doctrine of the Orthodox Church. In an ecclesiastical manuscript, seen by Father Richard, were specifications of the discoloration and other unpleasant symptoms by which the precise quality of that curse--parental, episcopal, and so forth--which had arrested the decay of a corpse might be diagnosed; and in one of the forms of absolution which may be read over any corpse found in such a condition there is a clause which provides for all possible cases without requiring expert diagnosis: ‘Yea, O Lord our God, let Thy great mercy and marvellous compassion prevail; and, whether this Thy servant lieth under curse of father or mother, or under his own imprecation, or did provoke one of Thy holy ministers and sustained at his hands a bond that hath not been loosed, or did incur the most grievous ban of excommunication by a bishop, and through heedlessness and sloth obtained not pardon, pardon Thou him by the hand of me Thy sinful and unworthy servant; resolve Thou his body into that from which it was made; and stablish his soul in the tabernacle of saints[1041].’ But the curse to which the Church naturally gave most prominence and attached most weight was the ban of excommunication; and therefore, consistently with the accepted doctrine, the formula of excommunication ended by sentencing the offender to remain whole and undissolved after death--a condition from which the body was not freed unless and until absolution was read over it and the decree of excommunication thereby rescinded.

This doctrine was held to have the authority of Christ’s own teaching[1042]. The power which was conferred upon the apostles in the words, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven[1043],’ was believed to have been so transmitted to their successors, the bishops[1044] of the Church, that they too had the faculty of binding and loosing men’s bodies--that is, of arresting or promoting their decomposition after death. Such an interpretation of the text was facilitated by the very simplicity of its wording; for λύω, in modern Greek λυόνω, ‘loose,’ expresses equally well the ideas of dissolution and of absolution, while δέω, in modern Greek δένω, ‘bind,’ embraces their respective opposites. A _nomocanon de excommunicatis_[1045], promulgated in explanation of the fact that excommunication sometimes failed to produce its expected result, presents clearly the authorised doctrine and at the same time illustrates effectively the twofold usage of the words ‘loosing’ and ‘binding.’

‘Concerning excommunicated persons, the which suffer excommunication by their bishops and after death are found with their bodies “not loosed” (ἄλυτα).

‘Certain persons have been justly, reasonably, and lawfully excommunicated by their bishops, as transgressors of the divine law, and have died in the state of excommunication without amending their ways and receiving forgiveness, and have been buried, and in a short time their bodies have been found “loosed” (λελυμένα) and sundered bone from bone....

‘Now this is exceeding marvellous that he who hath been lawfully excommunicated should after his death be found with his body “loosed” (λελυμένος τὸ σῶμα) and the joints thereof sundered....’

This ‘exceeding marvellous’ occurrence was therefore submitted to the consideration of learned divines, whose verdict was to the effect that any excommunicated person whose body did not remain whole had no more hope of salvation, because he was no longer in a state to be ‘loosed’ and forgiven by the bishop who had excommunicated him[1046], but had become already ‘an inheritor of everlasting torment.’

‘But,’ continues the _nomocanon_ formulated by these theologians, ‘they that are found excommunicate, to wit, with their bodies whole and “not loosed” (ἄλυτα), these stand in need of forgiveness, in order that the body may attain unto freedom from the “bond” (δεσμόν) of excommunication. For even as the body is found “bound” (δεδεμένον) in the earth, so is the soul “bound” (δεδεμένη) and tormented in the hands of the Devil. And whensoever the body receive forgiveness and be “loosed” (λυθῇ) from excommunication, by power of God the soul likewise is freed from the hands of the Devil, and receiveth the life eternal, the light that hath no evening, and the joy ineffable.’

The whole doctrine of the physical results both of excommunication and of absolution appeared to Leo Allatius to be indisputable, and he mentions[1047] several notable cases in which the truth of it was demonstrated. Athanasius, Metropolitan of Imbros, is quoted as recording how at the request of citizens of Thasos he read the absolution over several incorrupt bodies, ‘and before the absolution was even finished all the corpses were dissolved into dust.’ A similar case was that of a converted Turk who was subsequently excommunicated at Naples, and had been dead some years before he obtained absolution and dissolution at the hands of two Metropolitans. More remarkable still was a case in which a priest, who had pronounced a sentence of excommunication, afterwards turned Mohammedan, while the victim of his curse, though he had died in the Christian faith, remained ‘bound.’ The matter was reported to the Patriarch Raphael, and at his instance the Turk, though after much demur, read the absolution over the Christian’s body, and towards the end of the reading, ‘the swelling of the body went down, and it turned completely to dust.’ The Turk thereupon embraced Christianity once more, and was put to death for doing so.

Most graphic of all is a story attributed to one Malaxus[1048]. The Sultan having been informed--among other evidences of the power of Christianity--that the bodies of the excommunicated never obtained dissolution till absolution was read over them, bade seek out such an one and absolve him. The Patriarch of the time accordingly made enquiries, which resulted in his hearing of a priest’s widow who had been excommunicated by a predecessor, the Patriarch Gennadius. Her story was that having been rebuked by him for prostitution she publicly charged him with an attempt to seduce her. Gennadius had answered the charge by praying aloud one Sunday in the presence of all the clergy, that, if her accusation were true, God would pardon her all her sins and give her happiness hereafter and let her body, when she died, dissolve; but, if the charge were slander and calumny against himself, then by the will and judgement of Almighty God he exercised his power of severing her from the communion of the faithful, to remain unpardoned and incorruptible. Forty days afterwards she had died of dysentery and having been buried remained incorrupt.

Exhumed at the Sultan’s instance the body was found to be still sound and whole, of a dark colour and with the skin stretched like the parchment of a drum. It was then removed and kept for a certain time under the Sultan’s seal, until the Patriarch decided to absolve it. As he read the absolution the crackling of the body as it broke up could be heard from within the coffin. It was then again kept for a few days under the Sultan’s seal, and when finally the coffin was opened the body was found ‘dissolved and decomposed, having at last obtained mercy.’ And the Sultan was so impressed by the miracle that he is recorded to have exclaimed, ‘Certainly the Christian religion is true beyond all question.’

Suchlike stories, together with the formula of excommunication and the _nomocanon_ above quoted, prove conclusively that the Church did not merely acquiesce in one part of the popular superstition but authoritatively sanctioned it and utilised it for her own ends. The incorruptibility of the dead body under certain conditions was made an article of faith and an instrument of terrorism, which, as will appear later[1049], the ill-educated peasant-priests did not scruple to wield widely as an incentive to baptism, a deterrent from apostasy, and a challenge to repentance.

The name by which ecclesiastical writers designated a person whose body was thus ‘bound’ by excommunication, was one which has already been explained, τυμπανιαῖος[1050] or, in another form, τυμπανίτης[1051]--swollen until the skin is as tight as a drum. This word, which now survives, so far as I know, only in one island, and in the seventeenth century, to judge by Leo Allatius’ reference to it, was certainly less common than the word _vrykolakas_, had probably at one time, before Slavonic influence was felt, belonged to the popular as well as to the ecclesiastical vocabulary; and it was, I suspect, borrowed by the Church from popular speech at the same time as she borrowed from popular superstition the idea of dead bodies being ‘bound’ and withheld from corruption by a curse.

At what date this appropriation took place I cannot determine; but it must certainly have been before Slavonic influence was widely felt; for, when once the Greek _revenant_ had acquired the baneful characteristics of the Slavonic vampire, the clergy would surely never have claimed as a new thing the power to ‘bind’ the dead by excommunication, when the laity (and indeed many of their own calling too) believed that persons so ‘bound’ became rampant and ravening _vrykolakes_. The belief must therefore have been incorporated in ecclesiastical doctrine at a time when the Greek people spoke of the incorrupt dead as τυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike,’ and conceived of them as reasonable _revenants_.

The process by which the belief came to obtain the sanction of the Church is not hard to guess. The ambiguity of the words λύω, ‘loose,’ and δέω, ‘bind,’ may well have been the starting-point. If, on the one hand, the apostles, or the bishops who succeeded them, treated certain sins as ‘having no forgiveness neither in this world nor the world to come,’ and in the exercise of their power to bind and to loose included in their formula of excommunication some such phrase as Leo Allatius records, καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαράλυτος, ‘and after death never to be “loosed”’ (meaning thereby ‘absolved’); while, on the other hand, the Greek people were hereditarily familiar with a pagan belief that the dead bodies of persons who lay under a curse were not ‘loosed’ (in the sense of ‘dissolved’); then the common-folk for their part would necessarily have understood the ecclesiastical curse as a sentence of ‘non-dissolution’; while the clergy would have been less than Greek if they had not seen, and more than Greek if they had not seized, the handle which popular superstition gave them, and by adding to their accustomed formula (μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος, ‘after death never to be “loosed”’) such apparently innocent words as ὥσπερ αἱ πέτραι καὶ τὰ σίδηρα[1052], ‘even as stone and iron,’ substituted the idea of ‘dissolution’ for that of ‘absolution’ and definitely committed the Church to the old pagan doctrine.

If this conjecture as to the process by which the popular belief became an article of the Orthodox faith be correct, a further suggestion may be made as to the date at which the process began. If the word ‘loosing’ was misunderstood by the Greeks when used in the formula of excommunication, it would equally have been misunderstood in the words of Christ, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven[1053].’ Was it then the knowledge that these words were commonly misinterpreted by the Greeks which led the author of the fourth Gospel to reproduce them in a less equivocal form: “Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained[1054]”? This would indicate an early date indeed. Yet the date matters little as compared with the main fact that the ecclesiastical doctrine of the incorruptibility of excommunicated persons was at some time borrowed from paganism.

The other half of the popular superstition, namely that those whose bodies were ‘bound’ by excommunication or otherwise, and whom the earth did not ‘receive,’ were ejected by her and re-appeared as _revenants_, caused the Church some embarrassment. Sometimes the alleged resuscitation of such persons was condemned as a mere hallucination of timorous and superstitious minds; at other times it was accepted as a fact and explained as a work of the Devil designed to lead men astray, and acting upon this idea the clergy often lent their services to absolve and to dissolve the suspected corpse.

Leo Allatius[1055] reflects both these views and shows their effect upon the conduct of the clergy. After describing the actual appearance of such bodies, which gained for them the name τυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike,’ he introduces the second half of the superstition by saying that into such bodies the devil enters, and issuing from the tomb goes about working all manner of destruction; and he adds that when the body is exhumed, ‘the priests recite prayers, and the body is thrown on a burning pyre; before the supplications are finished, the joints of the body gradually fall apart, and all the remains are burnt to ashes.’ Yet shortly afterwards he states, ‘This belief is not of fresh and recent growth in Greece; in ancient and modern times alike men of piety who have received the confessions of Christians have tried to root it out of the popular mind.’ There is a clear contrast between the conduct of ‘the priests’ in one passage and that of the ‘men of piety’ in the other. The clergy did not as a body adopt a single and consistent attitude towards the popular superstition.

Similar inconsistency marks the _nomocanon_ concerning _vrykolakes_, from which I have given selections along with the rest of Leo’s account in the last section; these passages, for convenience of reference, are here repeated:

‘Concerning a dead man, if such be found whole and incorrupt, the which they call _vrykolakas_...

‘It is impossible that a dead man become a _vrykolakas_ save it be that the Devil, wishing to delude some that they may do things unmeet and incur the wrath of God, maketh these portents and oft-times at night _causeth men to imagine_ that the dead man whom they knew before cometh and speaketh with them, and in their dreams too they see visions. Other times they see him in the road, walking or standing still, and, more than this, he even throttles men.

‘Then there is a commotion and they run to the grave and dig to see the remains of the man ... and the dead man--one who has long been dead and buried--_appears to them_ to have flesh and blood and nails and hair ... and they collect wood and set fire to it and burn the body and do away with it altogether....’

Then, after denying again the reality of such things which exist κατὰ φαντασίαν, _in imagination only_, the _nomocanon_ continues:

‘But know that _when such remains be found_, the which, as we have said, is a work of the Devil, ye must summon the priests to chant an invocation of the Mother of God, ... and _to perform memorial services for the dead_ with funeral meats.’

The self-contradiction of the pronouncement is exposed in the phrases which I have italicised. Clearly if such remains are found and the dead man is so affected by the work of the Devil that special services for his repose[1056] are required, the theory of hallucination is untenable. But this very inconsistency of the _nomocanon_, though according to Allatius it is of uncertain authorship, proves it, as I will show, a very valuable document of the Church’s traditional teaching on this matter.

S. Anastasius Sinaita, who became bishop of Antioch in 561 and died in 599, refers to _revenants_ in a passage which, literally rendered, runs as follows[1057]: ‘Again it appears that devils, by means of false prophets who obey them and with their aid work signs and heal bodily diseases to the delusion of themselves and others, present even a dead man as risen again, and (in his person) talk with the living, in imagination (ἐν φαντασίᾳ). For a devil enters into the dead body of the man, and moves it, presenting the dead man risen again as it were in answer to the foolish prayer of the deceiver. And the evil spirit talks as it were in the person of the dead man with him whom he is deluding, telling him such things as he himself wishes to tell and answering also further questions....’

In this passage Anastasius is clearly thinking of _revenants_ called up by sorcerers; in his time, when the first Slavonic invaders had only just entered Greece and anything like friendly intercourse between the two races was still a thing of the future, the conception of a real vampire was not yet known to the Greeks of Greece proper, much less to those of Antioch; and it is easy therefore to believe that the calling up of harmless _revenants_ was then a recognised department of witchcraft, which afterwards lost its attractions. The

## particular circumstances however to which Anastasius refers are of

minor importance; the interest of the passage lies in its inconsistency of thought, which results indeed in a certain confusion of language; for to say that ‘it appears that devils ... present even a dead man as risen again, and talk with the living in imagination,’ would be not a little obscure, if the context did not throw light upon the meaning. More lucidly expressed the ideas are these: men see a dead person apparently risen from his grave and able to talk with them; the raising of the dead is the work of a devil (whose _modus operandi_ is described in the second sentence); the talking is also done by the devil (as explained in the third sentence); and finally the whole thing is an hallucination.

Here then are the same contradictory doctrines as in the _nomocanon_; the resuscitation of the dead man is the work of a devil who enters into the corpse and moves it and raises it from the grave; and yet it is the ‘imagination’ of the men who see it which is at fault. But it can be no casual coincidence that S. Anastasius in the sixth century and a _nomocanon_ which was quoted as authoritative in the seventeenth attempted to combine two incompatible doctrines concerning the re-appearance of the dead. Rather is it proof that from a very early age the Church remained halting between two opinions; and the attitude adopted towards the superstition by the clergy, some of whom, according to Leo Allatius, had long tried to root it out of the popular mind, while others rendered aid in absolving suspected corpses, naturally varied according as they personally believed that _revenants_ (including _vrykolakes_) were a figment of the people’s imagination or a real work of the Devil.

Now of these two ecclesiastical views, which are really alternative and incompatible although attempts were made to combine them, the former has clearly had little or no effect upon the people; in spite of the efforts of the ‘men of piety who received the confessions of Christians[1058]’ to extirpate the superstition, it remains vigorous, as we have seen, down to this day. But the explanation of the phenomenon as a work of the Devil was readily entertained; even educated men were convinced of it. ‘It is the height of folly,’ says Leo Allatius, speaking for himself, ‘to deny altogether that such bodies are sometimes found incorrupt in the graves, and that by use of them the Devil, if God permit him, devises horrible plans to the hurt of the human race’; and similarly Father Richard opens his account of _vrykolakes_ with the statement that the Devil sometimes works by means of dead bodies which he preserves in their entirety and re-animates. As for the common-folk, the explanation accorded so well with the diabolical characteristics of the _vrykolakas_ that they could hardly have failed to accept it.

The popularisation of this view is well illustrated by a local interpretation set upon a custom which I have already discussed, the so-called custom of ‘Charon’s obol.’ I have shown that the practice of placing a coin or other object in the mouth of the dead continues down to the present day; that the classical notion, that the coin was intended as payment for the ferryman of the Styx, was only a temporary and probably local misinterpretation of the custom; and that the coin or other object employed was really a charm designed to prevent any evil spirit from entering (or possibly the soul from re-entering) the dead body. Now in Chios and in Rhodes this original intention has not been forgotten, and is combined with the belief in _vrykolakes_. In the former island the woman who prepares the corpse for burial places on its lips a cross of wax or cotton-stuff, and the priest also during the funeral service prepares a fragment of pottery to be laid in the same place by marking on it the sign of the cross and the letters I. X. N. K. (Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς νικᾷ, ‘Jesus Christ conquers’), both of them with the avowed purpose of preventing any evil spirit from entering the dead body and making of it a _vrykolakas_[1059]. In Rhodes a piece of ancient pottery, inscribed with the same words but marked with the pentacle[1060] instead of the cross, is placed in the mouth of the dead for the same purpose[1061]. Clearly then in these two islands this ecclesiastical view has been fully accepted by the people; and what I can illustrate by customs in these cases I know to be equally true of Greece in general. Whenever an explanation is sought of the resuscitation of the dead, the answer, if any be forthcoming, lays the responsibility for it on the Devil.

This opinion, as I have said, is abundantly justified by the conduct of modern _vrykolakes_; but I am inclined to think that it was held also, by the Church at any rate, in the pre-Slavonic age when _revenants_ were of a less diabolical character. The actual practice of excommunication was thought to have been instituted by St Paul[1062], who twice speaks of ‘delivering persons unto Satan[1063].’ The early ecclesiastical interpretation of this phrase is clearly given by Theodoretus[1064]; commenting upon the sentence, “To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus,” he draws special attention to the fact that the body, and not the soul, is to be subjected to diabolic affliction, and then adds, ‘We are taught by this, that those who are excommunicated, that is to say, severed from the body of the Church, will be assailed by the devil when he finds them void of grace.’ In other words, the bodily punishment inflicted by the act of excommunication was ‘possession’ by the devil.

Now Theodoretus, it is true, says nothing in this passage as to the continuance of the punishment after death. But clearly if demoniacal possession was the effect of excommunication, and if also, as we have seen, the sentence of excommunication remained valid after death, it must have followed that the dead body no less than the living body was possessed of the devil; and if the devil in possession of the corpse chose to agitate it and drive it out of the grave, the dead demoniac was at once a _revenant_.

There is therefore some probability that, though the Church never threatened the excommunicated with resuscitation but only with incorruptibility, she may at a very early date have offered this explanation of their alleged re-appearance; and the theory of diabolical agency may have gained popular approval from the first; for resuscitation was originally viewed by the Greek people as a calamity befalling the dead man, not as a source of danger to the living; and therefore an ecclesiastical doctrine, that it was by delivering an offender unto Satan that the curse of the Church rendered him a _revenant_, would have been felt to be a perfectly satisfactory, if novel, explanation of the process by which a known cause, imprecation, produced its known effect, resuscitation.

But, whatever the date at which the theory of diabolical possession was first developed and disseminated, the Church, and the Church only, was responsible for it. The Devil is a Christian conception, just as the vampire is Slavonic. Both must go, if the modern superstition is to be stripped of its accretions, and the genuinely Hellenic elements discovered. What then remains? Simply the belief that the bodies of certain classes of persons did not decay away in their graves but returned therefrom, and the feeling that such persons were sufferers deserving of pity. What then were the classes of persons so affected, according to the original Greek superstition?

The classes now regarded as liable to become _vrykolakes_ were enumerated at the end of the last section. But both Slavonic and Christian influences have been felt here, as in the rest of the superstition. I must therefore take those classes one by one, and indicate the origin of each. None of them will require long discussion; their _provenance_ is in many cases self-evident.

(1) Those who have not received the full and due rites of burial.

Here there can be no reason for supposing any alien influence; on the contrary, the high importance attached by the ancient Greeks to funeral-rites is everywhere apparent. It was these which Patroclus’ spirit returned to implore; these which Antigone risked her life to give. The sin of Clytemnestra culminated in that she ‘dared to bury her husband without mourning or lamentation[1065]’--an essential part of the Greek funeral; and again in historical times Lysander’s honour was tarnished not so much because he put to death some prisoners of war, but because ‘he did not throw earth even upon their dead bodies[1066].’ What effect such neglect was anciently believed to have upon the dead is a question to be considered later; but the general idea is plainly Hellenic.

(2) Those who meet with any sudden or violent death (including suicides), or, in Maina, where the vendetta is still in vogue, those who having been murdered remain unavenged.

The most important element in this class is formed by those who have been murdered, especially when, as in Maina, they are believed to return from the grave with the purpose of seeking revenge upon their murderers. Such an idea, as will be shown later, is thoroughly consonant with ancient views of bloodguilt. But it appears also from a passage of Lucian[1067] that any ‘violent’ or ‘sudden,’ as opposed to ‘natural,’ death was commonly held to debar the victim from rest no less effectually than actual murder. The whole class may therefore be accepted as Hellenic, and may probably be considered to have always comprised all persons whose lives were cut short suddenly before their proper hour had come.

(3) Children conceived or born on one of the great Church-festivals, and children still-born.

The first division of this class may be variously explained; either the child may be supposed to suffer for the sin committed by its parents on a day when the Church enjoins continence, or else the notion, that children born between Christmas and Epiphany are subject to lycanthropy[1068] and therefore also, according to Slavonic views, to vampirism, has become associated with other church-festivals also. Children still-born are probably to be numbered among victims of ‘sudden’ death. Thus the first division, being of ecclesiastical or Slavonic origin, is to be set aside; the second may probably be included in a larger Hellenic class already considered; neither therefore requires any further discussion.

(4) Those who die under a curse, especially the curse of a parent, or one self-invoked, as in the case of a man who in perjuring himself calls down on his own head all manner of damnation if what he says be false.

The dread which a curse, above all a parent’s curse, excited in the ancient Greeks is well known. No one can have read Aeschylus’ story of the house of Atreus, nor followed with Sophocles the fortunes of Oedipus and his children, without perceiving therein the working of a curse that claims fulfilment and cannot be averted. The idea therefore here involved is purely Hellenic.

(5) Those who die under the ban of the Church, that is to say, excommunicate.

This class is an ecclesiastical variety of the last.

(6) Those who die unbaptised or apostate.

The apostate is of course _ipso facto_ excommunicate, even though no formal sentence have been pronounced against him. The unbaptised have probably been included by priestcraft for purposes of intimidation; baptism is commonly held to prevent children from becoming were-wolves, and therefore also _vrykolakes_ at death.

(7) Men of evil and immoral life in general, more particularly if they have dealt in the blacker kinds of sorcery.

Clerical influence is clearly discernible here, but is not, I think, responsible for the whole idea. A story from Zacynthos[1069] records how the treacherous murderer of a good man was first smitten by a thunderbolt so that he lost both his sight and his reason, and after his death was turned by God into a _vrykolakas_ as a punishment for his crime, and has so remained for a thousand years. Here, in spite of the word _vrykolakas_ being used, the _revenant_ is represented, like Constantine in the popular ballad, as a sufferer. This idea has been shown to be pre-Slavonic--and incidentally it is not a little curious that the story itself claims to date from a thousand years ago, when this idea was only beginning to be ousted by Slavonic superstition. But if the idea of ‘punishment’ is old, the idea that the punishment was merited by a crime must be equally old. For this reason, and for others which will be developed later, I hold that the perpetrators of certain deadly sins were from early times regarded as accursed and subject to the same punishment as befell those on whom a curse had actually been called down. The Church, I think, merely added to the number of those sins, and at the same time undertook the task of pronouncing in many cases the curse which they had earned.

(8) Those who have eaten the flesh of a sheep which was killed by a wolf.

This class is purely Slavonic in origin. To become a were-wolf in consequence of having eaten flesh which a wolf’s fangs have infected with madness is to a simple mind rational enough; and a were-wolf becomes after death a vampire. Further the belief, so far as I know, belongs only to Elis, one of the districts where Slavonic ascendancy was most complete and continued longest.

(9) Those over whose dead bodies a cat or other animal has passed.

This class also is Slavonic. The jumping of a cat over a dead body is still believed by some Slavonic peoples to be a cause of vampirism[1070], while in Greece the idea is rare and local only.

Thus out of the many conditions by which, in modern belief, a man is predisposed to turn _vrykolakas_, only three can be genuinely Hellenic: first, lack of burial; second, a sudden or violent death; and third, a parental or other curse, or such sin as renders a man accursed. The _revenant_ therefore was regarded, as we inferred also from the story of Constantine and Areté, as a sufferer. His suffering might be the result of pure mischance, as in the case of sudden death, or of neglect on the part of those whose duty it was to lament and to bury him, or again of some sin of his own which had merited a curse. But whether he was the victim of sheer misfortune or of punishment, he was still a sufferer, an object to excite the pity of mankind in general, although in special cases, as when he had been murdered or had not received the last offices of love at the hands of his kinsfolk, he might reasonably be feared by those who had injured him as an avenger.

Since then in the pre-Slavonic period the general feeling towards _revenants_ was a feeling of pity, the treatment of them in that period requires investigation.

Starting once more from the modern superstition, we find that the treatment of _vrykolakes_ by the Greeks differs widely from that accorded by the Slavs to vampires. The Slavonic method is generally to pierce the suspected corpse with a stake of aspen or whitethorn, taking care to drive it right through the heart at one blow. The usual Greek method is to burn the body. The Greeks therefore, who learnt from the Slavs all that is most horrible in their conception of _vrykolakes_, none the less thought that they knew a better way of disposing of these new-found pests than that which was practised by their teachers. Convinced by foreign influence of the danger, they relied on a native method of obviating it. They would not impale the _vrykolakas_; they would burn him. Clearly there must have been some strong conviction and assurance in the heart of a people who, freshly persuaded of the peril threatening them at the hands of so loathly and savage a monster, yet chose to pursue their own method of combating it rather than to adopt the foreign and repugnant practice of impaling the dead. That conviction plainly was that cremation, by ensuring the immediate and complete dissolution of the body, put an end to all relations of the dead with the living; and their confidence in it can only have been based upon their own experience in the treatment of the Greek species of _revenants_. Cremation then was the means by which the Greek folk had always been wont to succour those of the dead who suffered from incorruptibility and resuscitation.

Such a custom would not, so far as I can judge, have encountered any serious ecclesiastical opposition. The Church, it is true, in her earlier days had condemned cremation as a pagan rite, and with the spread of Christianity inhumation became the ordinary rite. But in the case of those who, having been buried, yet returned from the grave, since the Christian rite had proved of no avail, some concession to pagan traditions would have been natural. Many of the clergy, as we have seen, condoned cremation in the case of _vrykolakes_ as a measure of self-defence; surely they would equally have allowed it as an act of charity to more innocent men to whom the earth had denied dissolution and death had brought no repose.

Thus the actual custom of burning dates from the pre-Slavonic era; it is only the motive of the act which is changed. Formerly men felt pity for the _revenant_, and sought to promote his dissolution in order to release him from a state of suffering; now, as for some centuries past, men feel only horror of the _vrykolakas_, and seek to promote his dissolution in order to release themselves from a state of peril. Hence no doubt came the more horrible barbarities occasionally inflicted on the corpse; to tear out the heart, to boil it in vinegar, to tear the body to shreds--these are the acts of a panic-stricken and vindictive people eager to torment their foe before annihilating him. But in the old custom of cremation there was nothing inhumane; it was the merciful act of a people who had compassion upon the unquiet dead and gave to them, in solicitude for their welfare, that boon of bodily dissolution by which alone they were finally severed from the living and admitted to the world of the departed.

§ 3. REVENANTS IN ANCIENT GREECE.

The Slavonic and the ecclesiastical elements have now been removed from the modern Greek superstition, and the Hellenic residue is briefly this: the human body sometimes remains incorruptible in the earth, and in this state is liable to resuscitation; persons so affected stand as it were halfway between the living and the dead, resembling the former when they walk the earth, and the latter when they are lying quiet in their graves or, if unburied, elsewhere; during their periods of resuscitation they act as reasonable human beings, but their whole condition is pitiable, and the most humane way of treating them is to burn their bodies; disintegration being thus secured, they return no more to this world, but are numbered among the departed. Further the causes of such a condition are threefold--lack of burial, sudden death, and execration or deadly sin deserving of it. The only question which we have left unsolved is that of the agency by which the body is resuscitated. The Devil is now held responsible; but the Devil is a Christian, not a pagan, conception.

My purpose in the present section is, first, to verify by the aid of classical literature the conclusions which have been reached, and, secondly, to solve the one problem which remains.

There is, so far as I know, only one story in ancient literature which contains anything like a full account of a _revenant_. This is related by Phlegon[1071], a freedman of Hadrian; and the narrator professes to have been an eye-witness of the occurrences which he describes. In his story are embodied most of those very ideas which on wholly other grounds have been argued to form the genuine Hellenic element in the modern superstition concerning _vrykolakes_, and I shall therefore reproduce it at length. Unfortunately however the beginning of the story is lost, and therewith possibly the cause assigned for the strange conduct of the resuscitated corpse which plays the heroine’s part.

What remains of the story opens abruptly with a weird scene in the guest-chamber of the house of Demostratus and his wife Charito.

Their daughter Philinnion had been dead and buried somewhat less than six months, when one evening she was observed by her old nurse in the guest-chamber, where a young man named Machates was lodged, to all appearances alive. The nurse at once ran to the girl’s parents and bade them come with her and see their child. Charito however was so overcome by the tidings that she first fainted and then wept hysterically for her lost daughter and finally began to abuse the old woman, calling her mad and ordering her out of the room; but the nurse expostulated with spirit, and Charito at last went with her. In the meanwhile however Philinnion and her lover had retired to rest, so that when the mother arrived she could not obtain a good view of her; but from the peep which she got of the girl’s clothes and the shape of her face she thought that she recognised her daughter. Then, feeling that she could not at that hour ascertain the truth of the matter, she decided to keep quiet until morning, and then to rise betimes and surprise the girl if still there, or, failing that, to extort from Machates the whole truth.

But when dawn came the girl had gone away unobserved, and Charito began to take Machates to task, telling him the whole story and imploring him to confess the truth and to keep nothing back. The young man (who seems to have been unaware that Charito had lost a daughter named Philinnion) was much distressed, and at first would only admit that such was indeed the name of the girl whom they had seen; but afterwards he told the whole story of the girl’s visits to him, mentioning that she had said that she came without her parents’ knowledge. To confirm his story, he produced the gold ring which she had given him and her breast-band which she had left behind on the previous night. These were at once recognised by Charito as having belonged to her daughter, and with a loud cry she rent her clothes and loosed her hair and threw herself upon the ground beside the tokens and began making lamentation anew. Her example was soon followed by others of the family as if in preparation for a funeral, and Machates, at his wits’ end how to quiet them, promised to let them see the girl if she should come to him again.

That night accordingly they kept watch, and at the usual hour the girl came, went into Machates’ room, and sat down upon the bed. The young man himself was now anxious to learn the truth; he could not wholly credit the supposition that it was a dead woman who had come so regularly, and who had eaten and drunk with him and lain at his side, and thought rather that the real Philinnion’s tomb had been robbed and the booty sold to the father of the girl, whoever she might be, who visited him. No sooner therefore was she come than he quietly summoned the watchers. The girl’s parents at once entered, and were for a while dumb with astonishment at the sight of her, and then threw their arms round her with loud cries. Then said Philinnion, ‘O my mother and father, it was wrong of you to grudge me three days with this man here in my own home and doing no harm. And so, because of your meddlesomeness, you shall mourn for me anew, and I shall go away again to my appointed place. For it is by divine consent that I have done thus.’ Scarcely had she spoken when she became a corpse and her body lay stretched upon the bed in the sight of all. Confusion and loud lamentation at once ensued, and before long the rumour had got about the town and was reported to the narrator of the story, Phlegon, who appears to have held some official position. To him at any rate it fell to keep order during the night among the excited townsfolk, and early next morning he was present at a crowded meeting in the theatre, at which it was decided to inspect first of all the family vault in which Philinnion had been laid.

The vault having been opened, on all the shelves, save that appropriated to Philinnion, were found bodies or bones; but on hers there was nothing except an iron ring belonging to Machates and a gilt cup--presents which she had received from him at her first visit. Horror-stricken the party left the vault and went straight to Demostratus’ house, and in the guest-chamber saw the girl stretched upon the floor. Thence they returned to another public assembly as crowded as the first, at which one Hyllus, who was reputed not only the best seer of the place but also a clever diviner[1072] and possessed of a comprehensive knowledge of other branches of the profession, advised that the girl’s body should be taken outside the boundaries of the town and should be burnt to ashes--it was inexpedient, he said, for her to be buried in the town--and that certain propitiatory rites, accompanied by a general purification, should be paid to Hermes Chthonios and the Eumenides.

The strange episode ended with the acceptance of this advice by the townspeople and the suicide of Machates.

This story was known to Father Richard of Santorini[1073], who recognised in it an ancient case parallel to some which he himself had witnessed or learnt from other eye-witnesses in his own times. Even the harmless character of Philinnion did not appear to him incompatible with the popular conception of _vrykolakes_. Indeed, as we saw above, he himself mentions, among the many instances known to him, one in which a shoemaker of Santorini, having turned _vrykolakas_, manifested no vicious tendencies, but rather the greatest affection and solicitude for his wife and children.

Nor again is the incident of Philinnion’s intercourse with Machates unparalleled in modern times. Many travellers and writers[1074] have concurred in recording the belief that the _vrykolakas_ sometimes revisits his widow, or does violence to other women in their husbands’ absence, or even marries again in some place where he is unknown, and that of such unions children have been born. Indeed in the Middle Ages this belief seems to have spread even beyond the confines of Greece; for a Roman priest, early in the seventeenth century, sums up the views of his Church on the subject as follows[1075]: ‘Devils, though incorporeal and spiritual, can take to themselves the bodies of dead men ... and in such bodies can have intercourse with women, as commonly with _striges_[1076] and witches, and by such union can even beget children.’ This statement would be a fair ecclesiastical summary of modern Greek belief. In Thessaly I myself was told of a family in the neighbourhood of Domoko, who reckoned a _vrykolakas_ among their ancestors of the second or third generation back, and by virtue of such lineage inherited a special skill (such as is more commonly ascribed to σαββατογεννημένοι, ‘men born on a Saturday,’ when _vrykolakes_ usually rest in their graves, or to ἀλαφροστοίχει̯ωτοι[1077], those who are in close touch with a ‘familiar spirit,’) in dealing with those _vrykolakes_ which from time to time troubled the country-side; indeed they had been summoned, I was assured, even to remote districts for consultation as specialists.

The story of Philinnion was not overlooked by Bernhard Schmidt, but he does not appear to have recognised in it anything more relevant than in the ancient ghost-stories (_gespenstergeschichten_) among which he reckons it[1078]. Most emphatically this is no ghost-story. The distinction between ghosts and Greek _revenants_ is of a primary and universal nature, patent to all who can discriminate between soul and body. In this story Philinnion acts as a _revenant_ and is treated as a _revenant_; the inspection of the vault in which her body had been laid and the purpose of her nocturnal visits to Machates furnish conclusive evidence of her corporeal resuscitation; and the method of disposing of her corpse is the method generally approved and employed in the case of _revenants_--cremation. In effect all that remains of the story is in complete accord with what I have claimed on other grounds as the Hellenic element in the modern superstition; only one detail is wanting--the cause of Philinnion’s resuscitation--and if we had the first part of the story, it is not unlikely that in it we should find that her early death had been also sudden or violent. Clearly then the belief in _revenants_ was known in Greece in the age of Hadrian.

A casual allusion to the same superstition occurs also in Lucian[1079]. ‘I know of a man,’ says a doctor named Antigonus, ‘who rose again twenty days after he was buried; I attended him after his resurrection as well as before his death.’ ‘But how was it,’ rejoins another, ‘that in twenty days the body did not decompose or in any case the man perish of hunger?’ Unfortunately no answer is given and the subject drops, but the man in question was clearly a corporeal _revenant_ and not a mere ghost.

A reference to the same vulgar belief is also seemingly intended by Aristophanes in the _Ecclesiazusae_, where the personal appearance of one of the reprobate old women calls forth the exclamation,

‘Is yon an ape be-plastered with white lead, Or an old hag uprisen from the dead?’[1080]

The passage is of course too brief to make any such allusion certain; but it becomes highly probable if it can be shown from other sources that the superstition was popularly current in Aristophanes’ time. This I can do.

The fixity of popular phrases of imprecation has been amply demonstrated in the last section[1081]. A large selection of curses, all conceived in the same spirit, furnished, by their contrast with some features of the now contaminated superstition, a clue for the detection of the Slavonic elements therein. These imprecations, we learnt, were based upon the purely Hellenic belief, and had remained unaffected by the foreign influence which had modified and in some respects almost transformed it. Spoken often in a moment of passion, springing spontaneously and familiarly to the lips, too hasty to be informed by conscious thought, such curses have been handed down from generation to generation as fixed expressions subject to none of the changes which come of deliberate reflection. Though the old beliefs have been altered by the infusion of alien doctrines, the old curses stand fast in bold antagonism to all foreign lore, true records of a superstition now garbled, coins stamped with the effigy and superscription of by-gone thought, but current still.

As the simplest types of these old-established curses may be taken the two phrases, νὰ μὴν τὸν δεχτῇ ἡ γῆς, ‘May the earth not receive him,’ and νὰ τὸν βγάλῃ ἡ γῆς, ‘May the earth cast him out.’ The one is negative in form, the other positive, but both equally suggest, in the peasant’s mind, both the incorruptibility of the body and its resuscitation. Can a prototype of these curses be found in ancient literature? If so, in view of the general continuity of Greek belief and custom, we shall be justified in concluding that, as those ancient curses are identical with the modern, so the superstition which suggested them in old time is identical with that part of the modern superstition on which they are now based.

Two examples of these curses are furnished by Euripides. In a scene where Orestes conjures his comrade Pylades to leave him and not to involve himself in the meditated act of vengeance, the latter replies[1082], ‘Never may the fruitful earth receive my blood, nor yet the gleaming air, if ever I turn traitor to thee and save myself and forsake thee!’ In like tone rings out Hippolytus’ assertion of his innocence toward his father[1083]: ‘Now by Zeus the judge of oaths and by the earth beneath our feet, I swear that never have I touched thy marriage-bed, nor would have willed it nor conceived the thought. May I verily perish without glory and without name, cityless and homeless, an outcast and wanderer upon the earth, yea and in death may neither sea nor earth receive my flesh, if I have proved false!’

‘May the earth not receive my flesh!’ Such is the common burden of the two oaths; such the final chord struck by Hippolytus in that symphony of imprecations with which he vindicates his innocence; such too would be the strongest oath by which any peasant of to-day might bind himself. The very words have scarcely varied in a score of centuries; who then will venture to claim that their purport is changed? Is it not clear that just as in later times the Church, by incorporating the popular curse in her formula of excommunication, seized the weapons of paganism and turned them against those rebels and infidels whom her own direst fulminations had no power to dismay, so Euripides, conscious that no imaginings of his own art could suffice to excite in his hearers that horror which the climax of self-execration demanded, did not disdain ‘the touchings of things common,’ but turned to tragic use a popular curse which then, as now, pierced home to every heart? It would be strange indeed if words, which since early in the Christian era have continuously implied a belief in the indissolubility and resuscitation of those who die accursed, should be held to have borne some other meaning a few centuries earlier.

Thus then Euripides, by the identity of his language with that of to-day, discovers most conspicuously his knowledge of that which on other grounds I have shown to be the Hellenic element in the superstition concerning _vrykolakes_. But he was not alone in employing it for dramatic purposes. In the pages of Sophocles too and of Aeschylus there are passages which only a knowledge of this superstition can adequately explain. First among these is the climax of that speech in which Oedipus, blind and outcast, denounces his undutiful son:

‘Begone, abhorred and renounced of me thy father, thou basest villain, and take with thee these curses that I call down upon thee, that thou win not with thy spear that land of thine own kin, nor yet return ever again to the vale of Argos, but that thou and he that drave thee forth, smiting and smitten, fall each by a brother’s hand. Such is my curse; yea, and I call on Tartarus, in whose hated gloom my father lies, to drive thee from his home[1084].’

The last phrase of this denunciation,

καὶ καλῶ τοῦ Ταρτάρου στυγνὸν πατρῷον Ἔρεβος, ὥς σ’ ἀποικίσῃ,

is that with which I am concerned. It is an old-established difficulty. Commentators have translated variously ‘to remove thee from thy home,’ ‘to take thee away to his home,’ ‘to give thee another home’; but in effect they are all agreed in trying to make the words refer to removal from this to the nether world, or, in one word, to death. Now even if the word ἀποικίζω could in this context bear any of the meanings ascribed to it, such an euphemism following upon the explicit threat that Polynices should be slain by his own brother’s hand would be an imbecile anticlimax; but I question the very possibility of the supposed usage. It is true that an emigrant from one place becomes an immigrant into another; but that cannot justify the interchange of the two terms. Tartarus is here besought, as plainly as language can express it, to drive Polynices out, not to take him in. There can be only one explanation of that prayer. Polynices’ death has already been foretold; but his father’s curse pursues him beyond death. Tartarus, in whose keeping the dead should lie, is conjured to drive him forth from the home of the dead, even as the peasants now pray that the earth may cast out those whom they hate.

And the context shows clearly that the curse was so understood by Polynices. Turning to Antigone and Ismene with impassioned entreaty he implores them--them at least, though all others forsake him and turn against him--if so be his father’s cruel imprecations come to fulfilment and they, his sisters, ever return to their home, not to leave him dishonoured, but to lay him in the grave and to grant him the guerdons of the dead[1085]. Why then this insistence, unless the father’s curse had extended beyond death? Merely to introduce a reference to the plot of the _Antigone_? Clearly more than that. Polynices was to die bound by his father’s curse, slain by his brother’s hand, doubly debarred, if modern beliefs be a key to ancient, from dissolution and from reception into the nether world. The words of his father’s invocation of Tartarus had conveyed to his mind the certainty of a doom outlasting death, that Tartarus should not receive him, but reject him from the home of the dead. Only one faint gleam of hope was left, that by the fulfilment of those last offices of love toward the departed, which were for all men a passport to the lower world, he, burdened and bound with a father’s curse, both slayer and slain of his own brother, might yet be not debarred from his last home, but free to enter into rest.

Thus Sophocles in language less popular, but hardly less clear, than that of Euripides proclaims that the belief in the non-dissolution or rejection of the body by the earth and the powers under the earth was a terror as potent then as it is now, and an ever effective weapon of malediction. Aeschylus had gone even further, and, by enlisting this terror among the threats uttered on behalf of a dead man by a god in his most holy sanctuary, had claimed as it were for the popular superstition the highest religious sanction.

In the _Choephori_[1086] Orestes is made to review in a speech as difficult as it is powerful the motives which are urging him on to the requital of blood with blood. Most cogent among these motives is the explicit command issued from Apollo’s Delphic shrine, bidding him not spare his father’s murderess, mother though she be, and foretelling the direst penalties for disobedience. And what are these penalties? First, the physical torment of ‘blains that leap upon the flesh and with savage jaws eat out its erstwhile vigour’; second, the mental horror of coming madness, ‘the arrow that flieth in darkness winged by the powers of hell with the curse of fallen kindred, even raving and vain terror born of the night’; third, banishment from home and city, with no place at friendly board, no part in drink-offering and sacrifice; and yet one penalty more wherein should culminate the threatened agonies, ‘to die at last with none to honour, none to love him, damned, even in the doom that wastes all, to know no corruption.’

Of the earlier penalties and of their intimate connexion with one branch of this popular superstition I shall have occasion to speak later. Here I have only to justify the new rendering which I have given to the last lines of the passage,

πάντων δ’ ἄτιμον κἄφιλον θνήσκειν χρόνῳ κακῶς ταριχευθέντα παμφθάρτῳ μόρῳ[1087].

It has generally been held that ταριχευθέντα is here metaphorically used of the wasting or withering of the body through physical suffering, the first penalty, or, it may be, through mental distress, the second. In other words, the last line of the passage merely sums up in a concise expression a penalty, or penalties, previously detailed. On the same view it is but consistent to regard πάντων ἄτιμον κἄφιλον as a similar summary of the third penalty. Stripped of these recapitulations and vain repetitions Apollo’s final threat amounts to--what? θνήσκειν χρόνῳ, ‘to die in course of time.’ A blood-curdling and unique climax of human suffering in very truth! And this a last threat after leprosy and madness and outcast loneliness? Surely rather a promise of release and rest.

But let the anti-climax pass. Whence comes the alleged metaphorical meaning of ταριχεύεσθαι, so foreign to its normal use? How comes it to denote the wasting of disease, and what authority has this supposed use? Its mainstay apparently is a single passage in a pseudo-Demosthenic speech, which, in describing the cowardly assault of a young man upon an old, depicts the aggressor as νεαλὴς καὶ πρόσφατος and his victim as τεταριχευμένου καὶ πολὺν χρόνον συμπεπτωκότος[1088]. But here the metaphor, whatever may be thought of its elegance or of its likelihood to excite mirth rather than indignation, is at least clearly explained both by its antithesis and by its context; νεαλὴς and πρόσφατος are terms properly applied to ‘fresh’ fish or meat, τεταριχευμένος to the same commodities ‘preserved’ by drying or pickling, and we understand at once that the old man is represented to be dried and shrivelled in appearance. Such is the support for the alleged Aeschylean usage of ταριχευθέντα without the same antithesis to illuminate its meaning. Are we then to understand that all the fulminations and thunderings of Apollo’s oracle dwindle away into an appeal to Orestes’ pride in his personal appearance and a warning that leprosy will render him as unattractive as a bloater? Or, if it be claimed that the slow painful process of wasting is suggested rather than its ultimate effect, is it reasonable that a word which properly denotes artificial preservation should be used metaphorically of natural decay? This is not metaphor, but metamorphosis.

Let us then abandon far-fetched explanations; let us conceive it possible that Aeschylus used the word in the sense which it normally bore in relation to the human body--‘preserved from corruption,’ like the mummies of Egypt--and further that he placed the word παμφθάρτῳ in immediate juxtaposition with it in order to emphasise the more strikingly the contrast between the threatened ‘non-corruption’ and the ordinary ‘wasting’ powers of death. So understood, the final penalty presents a true climax. As the victim is to be excluded in his lifetime from all intercourse with the living, so in his death, by the withholding of that dissolution without which there is no entrance to the lower world, he is to be cut off from communion with the dead. He is to die with none to honour him with the rites due to the dead, none to love him and shed the tears that are their just meed, but even in that last doom which consumes all others is damned to be withheld from corruption. As ‘Euripides the human’ uses the common phrase of to-day ‘May the earth not receive,’ so Aeschylus the divine anticipates the ecclesiastical formula, ‘and after death thou shalt be indissoluble.’

The same contrast between the all-wasting functions of death and the ‘bound’ condition of the damned now becomes intelligible in two other passages of Aeschylus.

In the _Supplices_ the king of the Pelasgians, who is beset by the daughters of Danaus with the twofold claim of kinsfolk and suppliants, and besought to deliver them from the lust and violence of their pursuers, acknowledges himself in a sore strait. If he rescue his suppliants, he may involve his people in war; if he refuse to hearken, he fears that, as a tacit accomplice in the violence and pollution[1089] threatened, he may make to himself ‘the God of all destruction a stern Avenger ever present, an Avenger that sets not free the dead even in Hades’ home[1090].’

Again in the _Eumenides_, when Orestes having slain his mother is no longer seeking for vengeance but flying therefrom with no hope of safety save in the promises of Apollo whose will he has done, the band of pursuing Furies, like to be presently thwarted by that god, yet comfort their black hearts with the assurance of future retribution. ‘Yea,’ cries one, ‘me doth Apollo vex, but Orestes shall he not redeem; though he flee from me beneath the earth, there is no freeing for him, but because of his blood-guiltiness he shall find another in my stead to visit his pollution on his head[1091].’

The conception of future punishment in these two passages is clearly the same. What then is meant by the fear that even the dead may not be set free? and who is ‘the God of all destruction’ who is named in the first passage as the author of that punishment? The answer has already been found. ‘The all-destroying, God’ (ὁ πανώλεθρος θεὸς) is none other than the ‘all-wasting doom’ (πάμφθαρτος μόρος) of Apollo’s oracle--Death personified instead of death abstract; and Death’s refusal ‘to set free’ the dead is to be interpreted in the light of Apollo’s warning to Orestes that, if he fail in his duty to his murdered sire, he will himself in death be ‘damned to incorruption.’ The language employed is indeed vaguer and more allusive; the word ἐλευθεροῦν, ‘to set free,’ might suggest many ideas besides bodily ‘freeing’ or dissolution; yet it may be noticed that this is the very word which the above-quoted[1092] _nomocanon de excommunicatis_ uses interchangeably with the more common λύειν in this very sense. Only for us, who have not in our hearts the same faiths and fears quick to vibrate in response to each touch of religious awe, is a commentary needed; for a Greek audience the suggestion contained in ἐλευθεροῦν, above all in its implied contrast with πανώλεθρος, fully sufficed.

Thus then we have found two passages of Euripides containing imprecations almost identical in form with the curses that may be heard from the lips of modern Greek peasants; we have found a similar passage in Sophocles which has hitherto proved a difficulty to commentators simply because they have tried to pervert the meaning of the word ἀποικίζω, when its normal sense will make the phrase a parallel to those of Euripides and of modern Greece; and finally in the _Choephori_ of Aeschylus--here again by reading a word in its proper sense--we have found religious sanction claimed for the belief which underlies these imprecations--the belief that the fate to be most dreaded by mankind after death is incorruptibility and resuscitation.

It remains to examine the supposed causes of this dreaded fate, and to see whether the three causes which, when we discussed the modern classes of men liable to become _vrykolakes_, appeared to be Hellenic--namely, lack of burial, violent death, and parental or other execration or any sin deserving it--actually figure as causes in ancient Greek literature.

It will be convenient to consider the last-mentioned first.

An instance of formal execration has already been provided. No better example than the curse called down by Oedipus upon his son could be desired. But it was suggested above that in certain other cases, even where no actual imprecation had been uttered, men were accounted accursed; and indeed it would be an absurdity that a son who acted undutifully towards his father should fall a victim to his curse, but that one, let us say, who slew his father and gave him no time to pronounce the damning words, should go scatheless. From the earliest times, I believe, there were held to be certain deadly sins, sins against the few primitive god-given principles of right and wrong, which brought their own curse. Among these was numbered from the first the murder of a kinsman. To this Hesiod[1093] adds others which were so regarded in his day. ‘Equal is the guilt when one ill treateth the suppliant and the stranger, or goeth up unto his brother’s bed, ... or sinneth against orphan children and heedeth not, or chideth his old father, who hath passed the gloomy gates of age, and raileth upon him with hard words; against such an one verily Zeus himself is wroth, and at the end layeth upon him stern retribution for his unrighteous deeds.’ A more civilised age included all murder in the list; and later again the Church seems to have extended it until ‘transgressors of the divine law’ might become _ipso facto_ excommunicate and accursed.

To Aeschylus the chief of such sins was unquestionably the murder of a close kinsman; but other sins also, especially those involving pollution (μίασμα), rendered the perpetrator liable to the same punishment as followed upon a formal imprecation. And this view was not of Aeschylus’ own invention; it must have belonged to the popular religion. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain how the Greek Church in the Middle Ages had come to adopt almost the same views as Aeschylus. For what said the Church? The _nomocanon_ quoted in the last section[1094] teaches that persons who ‘have been justly, reasonably, and lawfully excommunicated by their bishops, as transgressors of the divine law, and have died in the state of excommunication, without amending their ways and receiving forgiveness,’ may be expected to remain whole and incorrupt after death. But another ecclesiastical document[1095] shows clearly that a formal sentence of excommunication was not essential to this result; a distinction is drawn between him whose corpse appears white, showing that he was ‘excommunicated by the divine laws,’ and him whose corpse is black, showing that he was ‘excommunicated by a bishop.’ Clearly then the Church taught that certain ‘transgressors of the divine law’ might become automatically excommunicate. Certain deadly sins deserved the ecclesiastical curse and, whether it were pronounced or not, incurred the same punishment after death. The list of such sins was certainly extended by the Church so as to include, for example, apostasy, omission of baptism, the more reprehensible acts of sorcery, and suicide, which was, and still is sometimes, a bar to Christian burial. But at the same time the number of those sins which were actually left to work out their own curse was probably diminished; the Church constituted herself judge, and in most cases formally sentenced the sinner to that punishment which the sin alone, without her condemnation, was popularly believed to entail. If then we strip this doctrine of its ecclesiastical dress and put out of sight the intervention of an hierarchy arrogating to itself the office of binding and loosing, there remains the simple belief that certain transgressors of the divine law, certain sinners of deadly sins, were _ipso facto_ accursed and condemned to incorruption.

Is not this precisely the Aeschylean doctrine? Pelasgus, if he should consent unto the violence of those suitors who sought the daughters of Danaus in unhallowed wedlock, if he should defy Zeus the God of suppliants and set at naught those other deities at whose altar his kinswomen sat--would not he indeed be a transgressor of the divine law? He acknowledges it himself, and, conformably to the doctrine enunciated, anticipates that Death himself will turn Avenger and free him not when dead. Orestes, owing to his murdered father the sacred duty of vengeance and expressly urged by Apollo to perform it--would not he too be a transgressor of the divine law, if he should fail or flag in his enterprise of blood? Fitly then did Apollo threaten him that after manifold troubles in life he should die damned to incorruption. The same Orestes, viewed now not from Apollo’s standpoint but from that of the Erinyes, bloodguilty with his mother’s murder--had he not perpetrated a deadly sin, was he not a transgressor of the divine law? Rightly then may his foes exult that he shall not escape, but, though he be fled from them beneath the earth, still ‘hath he no freeing.’ In fine, Aeschylus agrees, save for the mediaeval multiplication of deadly sins, with the doctrine of the Church; and this agreement is proof that in the popular creed of Greece, from which both Aeschylus and the Church must have borrowed, the commission of certain sins has always involved the penalty of incorruptibility, whether the curse which those sins merited had been formally pronounced or no. The actual source and operation of such unspoken curses will be considered in the next section.

The other two causes, lack of burial and violent death, may be considered together; for the whole trend of ancient literature in regard to both these calamities is the same, namely, that they caused the return of the dead man’s spirit--of his spirit only, be it noted, and not of his body. It is the ghost of Patroclus which in the _Iliad_[1096] appears to Achilles and demands the funeral-rites due to his body; it is the ghost of Elpenor which in the _Odyssey_[1097] makes the same claim upon Odysseus; it is the ghost of Polydorus which in the _Hecuba_[1098] of Euripides bemoans his body cast away in the sea. Again it is the ghost of Clytemnestra which in the _Eumenides_[1099] of Aeschylus comes seeking vengeance for her violent death; and Lucian in the _Philopseudes_[1100] gives special prominence to this cause of the soul’s unrest. ‘Perhaps, Eucrates,’ says one of the speakers in the dialogue, ‘what Tychiades means is this, that the only souls which wander about are those of men who met with a violent death--anyone, for example, who hanged himself, or was beheaded or impaled, or departed this life in any other such way--but that the souls of those who died a natural death do not wander; if that is his theory, it cannot be lightly dismissed.’ It is needless to multiply examples[1101]; literary tradition, from Homer down to Lucian, is all in favour of the re-appearance of the soul, and not of the body, as the result of either lack of burial or violent death.

It is perfectly clear then that there is a considerable discrepancy between the ancient literary view and the modern popular creed. Ancient literature is extremely reticent on the subject of bodily resuscitation occasioned solely by a violent death[1102] or by lack of burial. In Phlegon’s story it is indeed probable that the cause of Philinnion’s re-appearance was a violent death; but the first part of the narrative is missing, and no such statement is actually made.

In modern beliefs, on the contrary, there is little or no trace of the idea that the dead return for these causes in purely spiritual form. The very conception of ghosts is weak and indefinite among the peasantry. I have certainly been told by peasants of cases in which a person at the point of death has appeared, presumably in spiritual form, to friends at a distance; and there is a fairly common belief, seemingly derived from the Bible, that at Easter many of the graves are opened and release for a time the spirits of the dead. But it is a significant fact that there is not even a name for ghosts which cannot be equally well applied to any supernatural apparitions. The thought of them in general seems to be nothing more definite than a vague uneasiness in the minds of timid women and children at that hour when

‘a faint erroneous ray, Glanced from the imperfect surfaces of things, Flings half an image on the straining eye.’

There is no fixed creed or tradition here. In an account of the definite superstitions of modern Greece ghosts are a _quantité négligeable_.

But, while ancient literature and modern superstition are thus in direct conflict on one point, they are agreed in making lack of burial and violent death the causes of a certain unrest on the part of the dead; and though the one usually attributes that unrest to the ghost, and the other to the corpse, their agreement in all else could not surely be a mere casual coincidence; there must be a connexion to be discovered between them.

The consistency of the popular view which has obtained practically throughout the Christian era has already been established. The Church found the Greek people already firmly convinced that the two causes which we are considering, no less than formal execration or execrable sin, led to bodily incorruption and resuscitation. The only moot point is what agency was held to produce the resuscitation before the Church taught that it was the work of the Devil. But can equal consistency be claimed for ancient literature? It has just now been shown that the tragedians recognised that a curse or a deadly sin led to the resuscitation of the body; and yet they make lack of burial and violent death lead rather to the re-appearance of a ghost. Why then this discrimination between the effects produced by causes all of which in more recent popular belief produce the same effect? My answer is that popular belief in antiquity was the same as popular belief now in respect of all the causes, but that literary propriety forbade more than a mere verbal reference to so gross a superstition as bodily resuscitation. When a dead man was required in literature to re-appear, he was conventionally pourtrayed as a ghost, not as a walking corpse; and the convention was, I think, right and necessary.

For let it be granted for a moment that the popular belief of to-day dates from the earliest times, and that then as now the _revenant_ was popularly pictured as a monster ‘swollen and distended all over so that the joints can scarcely be bent; the skin being stretched like the parchment of a drum, and when struck giving out the same sound.’ Could even Homer have re-animated the dead Patroclus, with this unearthly ghastliness added to his wounds and to his mangling by the chariot, and have brought him to Achilles in the darkness of the night, without exciting in his breast horror instead of pity and loathing for love? Euripides again was greatly daring when he assigned the prologue of a tragedy to Polydorus’ ghost; but even he could not have restrained the unquenchable mirth of his audience, if his play had opened with a soliloquy by an agitated corpse. Epic and dramatic propriety must have demanded some refinement of so grossly material a conception. The canons of drama, we know, would not allow the enactment of a murder on the stage before the eyes of the spectators; would it then have been compatible with the restraint of Greek art to represent the murdered body as a _revenant_? Aeschylus himself, the lover of weird misbegotten shapes, would have recoiled from such an enterprise. But those same canons did permit a verbal description of the murder; and similarly the tragedians permitted themselves to refer, in imprecations and suchlike, to the horror of bodily resuscitation.

The case then stands thus. References are, as we have seen, made by the tragedians to the possibility of men becoming _revenants_, whereas they shrank from presenting the actuality. But the references to the possibility occur, chiefly at any rate, in imprecations, with the result that at first sight a curse would seem to have been the only recognised cause of bodily resuscitation in ancient times; whereas the most famous literary examples of the actual re-appearance of the dead--Clytemnestra and Polydorus in tragedy, or, if we go back to Homer, Patroclus and Elpenor--happen to be cases in which the cause was lack of burial or a violent death, with the result that literary tradition inclined to substitute ghosts for the corporeal _revenants_ of the popular creed in these two cases.

Such is my explanation of the discrepancy; and the probability of it is warranted by three considerations--first, that Greek Tragedy does contain one or two references to the possible resuscitation of other than the accursed--second, that Plato modifies the popular notions concerning the accursed in almost the same way that the tragedians modified the fate of the unburied and of those slain by violence--third, that the literary tradition concerning ghosts is in itself inconsistent and bears the marks of arbitrary modification.

The most important reference in Tragedy occurs in the _Choephori_, where Orestes and Electra pray their murdered father to rise from the grave in bodily form[1103]. This passage, together with a close parallel from Sophocles, will be fully discussed later[1104]. Here I need only point out the justification by Aeschylus of my theory that the substitution of ghost for _revenant_ is a necessary literary convention. He suggests verbally the possible uprising of the murdered Agamemnon as a _revenant_; but, when it comes to an actual presentation of the murdered Clytemnestra on the stage, his _dramatis persona_ is a ghost.

Next, Plato, in a well-known passage of the _Phaedo_[1105], speaks of the souls of dead men having actually been seen in the form of shadowy apparitions haunting the neighbourhood of tombs--souls, he explains, which have not been fully cleansed and freed from the visible material world, but still have some part therein and hence are themselves visible; and, he adds, these are the souls of the wicked, which are compelled to wander thus in punishment for their former evil life. Naturally Plato of all men--and of all his works in the _Phaedo_--could not accept the notion that the body under any conditions remained incorruptible; his whole doctrine is imbued with his belief that the gross and material perishes, and only the pure and spiritual endures. When therefore he came to utilise the popular doctrine, which the tragedians had endorsed, that certain sinners were condemned to incorruption, some modification of the idea was necessary; and accordingly he makes the wicked to wander as ghosts, not as corporeal _revenants_, just as Homer and the tragedians seem to have done in the case of the unburied and those who had met their death by violence. Plato’s extension of the literary tradition suggests that its earlier development had been such as I have indicated.

Lastly, the literary tradition, as represented by earlier writers than Plato, is by no means uniform. If it had been a definite religious doctrine, and not merely a literary convention, that the unburied returned as ghosts, the presentment of Patroclus and of Polydorus should have been in all respects similar. But what do we find? Each certainly appears as a ghost and asks for burial; but there the resemblance ends. According to Homer[1106] the spirit of Patroclus, in craving burial of his body, declares that, ere that rite be performed, the spirit itself cannot pass the gates of Hades but is held aloof by the spirits of the other dead, and moreover that having once passed it can no more return to this world. According to Euripides[1107], familiar though he must have been with Homer’s teaching, the spirit of Polydorus had passed within the gates of Hades and by permission of the nether gods had returned to demand the burial of his body. Homer’s reason for the soul’s anxiety about the body’s burial is none too convincing in itself; for it only raises a further question: if death means the final separation of soul from body, and the lower world is tenanted by souls only--for so Homer at any rate teaches--why should the denizens of that world make the admission of a newly-sped soul conditional upon the burial of the body which it had finally quitted? But, what is more important, Homer’s reason, such as it is, is flatly disavowed by Euripides, who yet advances no reason of his own why the spirit of Polydorus, having once passed into Hades’ halls, should have any further interest in its old carnal tenement. This disagreement can only mean that Homer and Euripides were not following an acknowledged doctrine of popular religion in representing Patroclus and Polydorus in the form of ghosts; for in that case they would surely have agreed with the popular doctrine, and therefore also with each other, in assigning a reason for the ghost’s interest in the burial of its discarded body. Either then there was no popular belief on the whole subject--which is incredible--or else it was such as literary propriety forbade them to follow. Now if the popular belief was that the unburied appeared as corporeal _revenants_, their eagerness for burial is intelligible; but if a ghost be substituted by literary convention for the _revenant_, a good reason for such eagerness becomes hard to find. Hence the inconsequence of Homer’s reason; hence the silence of Euripides.

But if, as now seems likely, the substitution of mere ghost for bodily _revenant_ was a literary convention, it by no means follows that that convention is valueless as a guide to the popular beliefs of the time. It may represent a part of those beliefs, though not the whole. The established doctrines on this whole subject were not remodelled by the tragedians save in obedience to the laws of their art. This we definitely know; for the causes which they assign for the unrest of the dead are numbered among the popularly received causes which remain to this day; and even the idea of physical resuscitation was retained and effectively utilised by them within certain limitations. Clearly then they kept what they could, and only changed what they must. Judicious selection rather than arbitrary invention was the method by which the literary tradition was established. Since then that tradition uniformly speaks of the soul’s return, while discrepancies only arise in accounting for the soul’s interest in the corpse, was it perhaps only in the latter respect that literary tradition parted company with popular belief? Did the spirit as well as the body of the dead play some part in the popular superstition? Did the common-folk too hold that, after the separation of soul from body at death, the soul itself under certain conditions returned from its flight towards the house of Hades--returned however not to appear alone in ghostly guise, but to re-animate the dead body and raise it up as a _revenant_? Was this the popular doctrine from which literature selected, recording the soul’s return, but suppressing the re-animation of the body, and thereby creating for itself the difficulty of explaining the soul’s interest in the body?

The hypothesis commends itself as providing at the same time an answer to the one question which remained unanswered in the last section. We saw that, through ecclesiastical influence, Christian Greece has long assigned the work of resuscitating the dead to the Devil. But to whom or to what did pagan Greece previously assign it? Surely in the whole range of Greek mythology it were hard to find any supernatural being either specially suited or probably condemned to such a task. The soul is, _prima facie_, the most appropriate and likely agent.

But there is even stronger evidence than this. The probable becomes proven when we turn back to the only full pagan account of a bodily _revenant_, the story of Philinnion. What are her words, when she is discovered by her parents? ‘Mother and father, it was wrong of you to grudge me three days with this man here in my own home and doing no harm. And so, because of your meddlesomeness, you shall mourn for me anew, and I shall go away to my appointed place. For it is by divine consent that I have done thus.’ And how is her threat of going away fulfilled? ‘Scarce had she spoken when she became a corpse, and her body lay stretched upon the bed in the sight of all.’ The words ‘I shall go away’ were therefore intended by the writer to mean ‘My soul will go away’; for the body remained. Clearly then, in the belief of that age, resuscitation of the dead meant the re-animation of the body by the soul which had been temporarily separated from it.

In the light of this fact Plato’s reference to the wandering of the souls of the wicked is found to approximate more nearly to the popular superstition. Such souls, he says, have been seen in the neighbourhood of tombs; and they are visible because they are not cleansed and freed from the visible and material world[1108], but participate therein. What then is the particular material thing in which they participate and which keeps them near the tombs? Evidently the body whose impurities they contracted in life, the body from which they are not cleansed and freed. Plato admits only participation, not re-animation; but in all else he adheres to the genuine popular belief. The same idea furnishes also what I believe to be the true explanation of the custom of the so-called ‘Charon’s obol.’ The coin or other object placed in the mouth of the dead was originally, I have argued[1109], a charm to prevent the entry of some evil spirit or the re-entry of the soul into the corpse. In Chios and in Rhodes, as we have seen, this is the popular explanation still given--the particular spirit against whom the precaution is taken being, owing to Christian influence, a devil. But if, as is likely, a devil has merely been substituted for the soul, while the rest of the superstition has remained unchanged, it follows that the precaution was originally directed against the return of the soul, and so was a means of ensuring bodily dissolution; for, though I cannot actually prove it, it is natural to suppose that re-animation was not the result, but the cause, of incorruption.

To sum up, the conclusions which have been reached stand thus:--Death, according to the popular religion of ancient Greece, was not a final separation of body and soul; in certain cases the body remained incorrupt and the soul re-animated it. This condition, in which the dead belonged neither to this nor to the nether world, was one of misery; and bodily dissolution was to be desired. Dissolution could in no case be properly effected without the rite of interment or cremation. The unburied therefore formed one class of _revenants_. But even due interment did not necessarily produce dissolution; a sudden or violent death rendered the body incorruptible, presumably because the proper hour had not yet come for the soul to leave it; an imprecation withheld the body from decay by its own ‘binding’ power; and finally, the commission of a deadly sin, above all of murder, rendered the sinner subject to the same dire fate as if the curse which his sin merited had actually been pronounced. The only unfailing method of dissolution was cremation.

§ 4. REVENANTS AS AVENGERS OF BLOOD.

The conclusions which have now been reached show, among others, the somewhat surprising result, that the popular religion of Greece both ancient and modern has always comprised the belief that both the murdered and the murderer were doomed to the same unhappy lot after death. The murderer, in the class of men polluted and accursed by heinous sin, and his victim, in the class of those who have met with violent deaths, have alike been regarded as pre-disposed to become _revenants_. The two facts thus simply stated constitute a problem which deserves investigation. It can be no accident that two classes of men, so glaringly contrasted here, should be believed to share the same fate hereafter. Some relation between the two beliefs must surely subsist.

The solution to which the mind naturally leaps is the idea that in some way retributive justice causes the murderer to be punished with the selfsame suffering as he has brought upon his victim; that, as blood calls for blood, so the resuscitation of the murdered calls for the resuscitation of the murderer; that the old law, δράσαντι παθεῖν, ‘as a man hath wrought, so must he suffer,’ is not limited to this world nor fully vindicated by the mere shedding of the murderer’s blood, but dooms him to become, like his victim, a _revenant_ from the grave.

Such an explanation of the two facts before us is, it may almost be said, obviously and self-evidently right, so far as it goes; but the proof of its correctness is best to be obtained by going further, so as not merely to indicate the appropriateness of the murderer’s punishment, but to discover also the agency whereby it is inflicted; for, if it can be established that according to the popular belief it is the murdered man himself who, in the form of a _revenant_, plagues his murderer, then the retributive character of all the murderer’s sufferings both here and hereafter will be manifest.

The most striking testimony to the existence of such a belief is to be found in a gruesome practice to which, we are told, murderers in old time were addicted--the practice of mutilating (μασχαλίζειν) the murdered man by cutting off his hands and feet, and either placing them under his armpits or tying them with a band (μασχαλιστήρ) round his breast. What object was had in view in so disposing of the severed extremities, if indeed our information as to the act itself be correct, remains uncertain; perhaps indeed that information amounts to nothing more than a faulty conjectural interpretation of the word μασχαλίζειν itself, which might equally well mean to sever the arms from the body at the armpit and to treat the lower limbs in similar fashion. But at any rate the intention of the whole act of mutilation is known and clear; the murderer sought to deprive his victim of the power to exact vengeance for his wrongs. Clearly then the vengeance apprehended was not that of a disembodied spirit entreating the gods to act on its behalf or appearing in visions to its surviving kinsfolk and urging them to requite the murderer, but the vengeance of a bodily _revenant_ with feet swift to pursue and hands strong to strike. On no other grounds is the mutilation of the dead body intelligible.

But if any doubt could still rest upon this interpretation of the old custom, it must be finally dispersed by a consideration of the one instance of the same custom known to me in modern times. This occurs in a story which I have already related[1110]--the story of a human sacrifice in Santorini at the time of the Greek War of Independence, as narrated to me by an old man of the island who claimed to have himself taken part in the affair. According to his narrative not only the head of the victim was cut off but also his hands, and in that order. Why then this mutilation of the dead body? That question I put in vain to the old man; he had obliged me by giving me his reminiscences, but he had no intention of letting himself be cross-questioned upon them. Yet the real answer is not hard to conjecture. Santorini is the most famous haunt of _vrykolakes_ in the whole of Greece, and familiarity with them has bred in the minds of the islanders no contempt for them, but rather a more lively terror. Nowhere therefore is any expedient for combating the powers of the _vrykolakas_ more likely to be remembered and adopted. Since then the human victim in the story is not represented as a willing victim, but was evidently seized and slain by violence, his slayers, in performing their task, must have recognised that he would in all probability turn _vrykolakas_, and in their mutilation of his corpse (a deed inexpressibly repugnant to Greek feeling now as in old time) can only have been actuated by the hope of thus incapacitating the _revenant_ for his otherwise sure and terrible vengeance.

The reason then why the murderer as well as the murdered becomes a _revenant_ is plain. The victim, rising from his grave in bodily substance, pursues his enemy with untiring rancour until he brings him to the same sorry state as that to which he himself has come. Such, I venture to say, has been the conviction deep down in the hearts of the Greek people from the earliest times down to this day. A custom, which consists in a deliberate and sacrilegious act of mutilation, more ghastly than murder itself, perpetrated upon the helpless dead, and which yet has continued unchanged throughout the changes and chances which the Greek people have undergone for more than a score of centuries, can only be based upon the most immutable of superstitious beliefs and dreads, and reveals more unerringly than even the whole literature of Greece the fundamental ideas of the Greek people concerning the avenging of blood. The murdered man in bodily shape avenges his own wrongs.

But while the existence of this belief is thus established by the best evidence of all, namely the fact that men have continued to act upon it, the views of ancient writers on the subject of blood-guilt are not on that account to be neglected; on the contrary, the whole literature bearing thereupon, and above all the story of the house of Atreus as told by Aeschylus, much as they have been studied, deserve fresh consideration just for the very reason that our judgement of them must be modified by this new fact. Starting with the knowledge of the part which the murdered man himself played according to popular belief in securing the punishment of his murderer, we are enabled more fully to appreciate the genius of Aeschylus in so handling a superstition which, like other things primitive in Greek religion, was still venerated by an age which could discern its grossness, that, without either losing the religious sympathies of his audience by too wide a departure from venerable traditions, or offending their artistic taste by too close an adherence to primitive crudities, he wrought out of that material the fabric of the greatest of tragedies.

What we shall find in thus studying anew some of the literature of the subject is a modification of the grosser elements in the popular superstition such as the last section has already prepared us to expect. We saw there how restricted was the use which the tragedians and others dared to make of the popular belief in corporeal _revenants_ of any kind; we saw that dramatic propriety absolutely forbade the introduction of a dead man to play a part otherwise than in the form of a ghost; and yet more than once we found, especially as the climax of some imprecation, a verbal allusion to the belief in incorruptibility and bodily resuscitation. And now similarly we shall see that the tragedians allowed themselves no greater license in dealing with _revenants_ in quest of vengeance than in dealing with the more innocuous sort; we shall see that dramatic propriety forced them to find some other agency than that of the bodily _revenant_ whereby the vengeance of Agamemnon upon Clytemnestra, and of Clytemnestra upon Orestes, might be executed; but we shall find withal that here again there are a few verbal references to the uprising of the dead themselves as avengers of their own wrongs, and moreover that, though in the actual development of the plot they can have no part save only that of a ghost, and some other avenger is made to act on their behalf, yet it is they themselves who instigate and urge him to his task. The bodily activity of the murdered man is suppressed, save for some few hints, as a thing too gross for representation by tragic art; but at the same time fidelity to old religious tradition is in a way maintained by proclaiming his personal, though ghostly, activity in inciting and even compelling others to avenge him.

The clearest references to the bodily activity of the murdered man occur in precisely the same connexion in both Aeschylus and Sophocles--in a prayer offered by Agamemnon’s children at their dead father’s tomb. In Sophocles the occasion is that scene in which Electra rebukes her sister for bearing Clytemnestra’s peace-offerings to Agamemnon’s tomb--peace-offerings, be it noted, which in themselves imply that the dead man is still a powerful foe to his murderess--and bids her instead thereof join with Electra herself in laying a lock of hair upon the tomb; and then come the notable lines,

αἰτοῦ δὲ προσπίτνουσα, γῆθεν εὐμενῆ ἡμῖν ἀρωγὸν αὐτὸν εἰς ἐχθροὺς μολεῖν[1111],

‘and falling at his tomb beseech thou him to come from out the earth in his own strength a kindly helper unto us against his foes.’ No one, I suppose, can misdoubt the emphasis which falls on αὐτὸν, ‘his very self’; and to the Greek mind the ‘very self’ was not a disembodied spirit, but a thing of flesh and bones and solid substance. Unless Sophocles was hinting verbally at that which he durst not represent dramatically--the resurrection of the dead man in bodily substance as an avenger of his own wrongs--the word could have had no meaning for his hearers.

The parallel passage in Aeschylus comes from the prayer of Orestes and Electra beside their father’s grave[1112]. ‘O Earth,’ cries Orestes, ‘send up, I pray thee, my father to watch o’er my fight’; and Electra makes response, ‘O Persephone, grant thou him still his body’s strength unmarred,’

ὦ Περσέφασσα, δὸς δ’ ἔτ’ εὔμορφον κράτος.

It has been customary among translators and commentators to render εὔμορφον as if the second half of the compound were negligible; yet I can find no instance in which the word denotes anything but beauty of bodily shape. Let Aeschylus’ own usage of it elsewhere be the index of his meaning here. The Chorus of the _Agamemnon_, musing on the fate of those who have fallen at Ilium, tell how in place of some there have been sent home to their kin mere parcels of ashes, ‘while others, about the walls where they fell, possess sepulchres of Trojan soil, in comeliness of shape unmarred’--οἱ δ’ αὐτοῦ περὶ τεῖχος θηκὰς Ἰλιάδος γᾶς εὔμορφοι κατέχουσιν[1113]. My rendering then of εὔμορφον κράτος is right and cannot be evaded. Aeschylus, like Sophocles in the preceding passage, lightly yet surely, by the use of a single word, hints at the popular belief that the murdered man may rise again in bodily form to wreak his own vengeance.

Once again then the tragedians have come to our aid in the unravelling of this superstition. From them we learnt that incorruptibility and resuscitation were as great a terror to their contemporaries as they are to the modern peasants of Greece, and that actually the same imprecations of that calamity were in vogue then as at this day; and now again we receive from them corroboration of that which the horrible practice of mutilating a murdered man’s corpse had already revealed, namely, that some of the dead who returned from their graves were believed to go to and fro, not in mere vain and pitiable wanderings, but with the fell purpose of revenging themselves upon their murderers.

The general tendency however of Greek literature, as we saw in the last section, was to replace the bodily _revenant_ by a mere ghost. In many cases the consequences of this literary modification were comparatively small; the ghost of Polydorus for example can sustain the part of pleading plaintively for burial no less effectively, perhaps indeed even more so, than a lusty _revenant_. But the case of _revenants_ bent upon vengeance was different; the consequences of substituting a mere spirit were far-reaching; the part to be played consisted not in piteous words but in stern work; and for this part so frail and flimsy a creature as the Greeks pictured the ghost to be was absolutely unfitted. The only means of escaping from this difficulty was to represent the dead man as employing some instrument or agent of retribution; and accordingly, where the gross popular superstition would have had the murdered man emerge from his grave in bodily form to chase and to slay his murderer, literature in general confined the dead man to the unseen world and allowed him only to work by less directly personal means--sometimes by the hands of his next of kin, in other cases by a curse either automatically operative or executed by demonic agents. But it is important to observe that, whatever the means employed, literature cleaves to the old traditions, so far as artistic taste permits, by conceding to the murdered man the power of instigating the agents and controlling the instruments of his vengeance. His power is made spiritual instead of physical; but his personal activity is still recognised; he remains the prime avenger of his own wrongs.

These indirect methods of retribution must now be examined severally.

As regards the part taken by the next of kin to the murdered man in furthering the work of vengeance, I find no reason to suppose that literature deviated in any way from popular tradition. The idea of the vendetta is essentially primitive and at the same time perfectly harmonious with the belief that the murdered man is capable of executing his own revenge. The acknowledged power of the dead man has never in the minds of the Greek people served as an excuse for his kinsmen to sit idle; rather it has been an incentive to them to assist more strenuously in the task of vengeance, lest they themselves also should fall under the dead man’s displeasure. On this point ancient lore and modern lore are completely agreed.

The best exponents of this view at the present day are a people who can claim to be the most distinctively Hellenic inhabitants of the Greek mainland. The peninsula which terminates in the headland of Taenarum is the home of a race which is historically known to be of more purely Greek descent than the inhabitants of any other district, and which both in physical type and in social and religious customs stands apart--the Maniotes. Among their customs is the vendetta, and the beliefs on which it rests are in brief as follows. A man who has been murdered cannot rest in his grave until he has been avenged, but issues forth as a _vrykolakas_ athirst for his enemy’s blood; for, in Maina, one who has turned _vrykolakas_ for this cause is still credited with some measure of reasonableness. To secure his bodily dissolution and repose, it is incumbent upon the next of kin to slay the murderer or, at the least, some near kinsman of the murderer. Until that be done, the son (to take the most common instance) lies under his dead father’s curse; and, if he be so craven or so unfortunate as to find no opportunity for vengeance, the curse under which he has lived clings to him still in death, and he too becomes a _vrykolakas_.

The Maniote doctrine then amounts to this, that the murdered man rises from his grave to execute his own vengeance, which consists in bringing upon his murderer the same fate as he himself has suffered through his enemy’s deed--a violent death and consequently resuscitation; but at the same time he demands the assistance of his nearest kinsman, under pain of suffering a like fate hereafter if his efforts in the cause of vengeance are feeble or fruitless. Thus the belief in powerful and vindictive _revenants_ forms the very mainspring of the vendetta.

To this view both Euripides and Aeschylus subscribe in telling the story of Orestes. In the former we have the answer made by Orestes himself to the tirade of Tyndareus[1114] against the vendetta: ‘Nay, if by silence,’ he says, ‘I had consented unto my mother’s deeds, what would my dead sire have done to me? Would he not have hated me and made me the sport of Furies? Hath my mother these goddesses at her side to help her cause, and hath not he that was more despitefully used?’[1115] Surely no clearer statement could be made of Orestes’ apprehension that, if he should fail in the duty which his dead father imposed upon him, the dead man would turn other ministers of his vengeance upon his cowardly son, to plague him, as if he were an accomplice, with the same punishment as had been designed for the actual author of the murder. And similarly in Aeschylus we have the retort of Orestes to his mother’s last warning before he slays her. ‘Beware,’ she says, ‘the fiends thy mother’s wrath shall rouse’; and he answers, ‘But, an I flag, how should I ’scape my sire’s?’[1116] Thus according to the ancient tragedians the vendetta of Orestes was prompted by the same beliefs and fears as still stir the Maniotes thereto.

So far then as concerns the vengeance for Agamemnon’s death, ancient drama added no new element to the popular beliefs, but was able to satisfy the requirements of art by judicious selection from them. The idea, to which the Maniotes still cling, that the murdered man in the form of a _revenant_ avenges his own wrongs, is, save for the rare verbal allusions which we have noticed, rejected, and forms no part of the plot; but the belief, that fear of the dead man’s wrath is a cogent motive to action on the part of his kinsman, is retained. And here it is interesting to observe that Aeschylus even justifies his rejection of the first half of the popular doctrine, and that too by a plea perfectly satisfactory to the popular mind. Agamemnon’s case was peculiar. Not only had he been murdered, but his dead body according to Aeschylus, who is followed in this by Sophocles[1117], had been mutilated (ἐμασχαλίσθη) by his murderers. The effect of such mutilation, as we have seen, was to render the _revenant_ powerless to wreak vengeance with his own hands. Hence the work devolving upon Orestes would have been, in popular esteem, doubled; if murder alone had been committed, he would have worked in conjunction, as it were, with the dead man; but the super-added mutilation incapacitated the dead man for bodily work, and placed the whole burden of retribution on the shoulders of his son. This, plainly put, is the meaning of the words spoken by the Chorus in the _Choephori_ to Orestes: ‘Yea, and he was mutilated, for thou must know the worst. Cruel was she in the slaying of him, cruel still in the burial, in that she thought to make his doom a burden past bearing upon thy life[1118].’ Thus it may be claimed that Aeschylus, in the peculiar conditions of the case which he here presents, follows unswervingly the popular doctrine. It is only Euripides who can fairly be said to have really suppressed anything in this part of the story without troubling to justify himself by the circumstances of Agamemnon’s fate. But even Euripides, though he simply ignores in his plot the possibility of Agamemnon’s bodily resuscitation, is faithful to the doctrine that the next of kin was actuated in seeking vengeance not by simple piety but by a lively fear of the dead man’s wrath.

Moreover, this conception of the relations subsisting between the murdered man and his nearest kinsman did not merely furnish the _motif_ of some fine passages of Tragedy; it served also a more prosaic purpose, and actually formed the basis first of Attic law concerning blood-guilt, and then of Plato’s Laws in the same connexion.

At Athens, as is well known, the duty of prosecuting a murderer (or homicide) was imposed by law upon the nearest relative of the murdered man. But the obligation was not only legal; it was also, and indeed primarily, religious. The law did no more than affirm and regulate a custom which religious tradition had long established. To this fact Antiphon especially bears witness in certain passages[1119] with which I must deal more fully later; but the whole tenor of his appeals to the religious feelings and fears of the jury is strictly in accord with the Maniote doctrine of the present day, save that in one small point he takes a more merciful view. In Maina it is held that, if the next of kin fail to avenge the dead man, no matter to what cause the failure be due, he falls a prey to the dead man’s wrath. Antiphon on the contrary asserts that, if the next of kin have honestly done his best to bring the murderer to justice, he will not be punished for failure therein; and yet he does not represent the dead man as inactive in such a case, but dares to threaten the jury that the murdered man’s anger will now descend, not upon his kinsman who has loyally striven to avenge him, but upon the jury who, by unjustly acquitting and harbouring[1120] the murderer, make themselves accomplices in his crime and sharers in his pollution. This difference of opinion however is of minor importance, and seems to be almost a necessary result of different social conditions. In ancient Athens the next of kin was required to proceed against the murderer by legal means, and not to commit a breach of law and order by personal violence. In modern Maina the kinsman who should have recourse to law and call in the police would be accounted a recreant; public opinion requires him to find an opportunity, openly or by ambush, of slaying the murderer with his own hand; this is to be his life’s work, if need be, and the possibility of failure, save through want of enterprise and energy, is hardly contemplated. But as regards the main issue, namely the belief that the dead man himself is the prime avenger of his own wrongs and that his kinsman acts only under his instigation as an assistant in the work, modern superstition has the entire support both of the drama and of the law of ancient Athens.

Further corroboration is perhaps unnecessary; yet Plato’s legislation in the matter of homicide must not be passed over; for it possesses this peculiar interest and importance of its own, that it was confessedly based upon a religious doctrine which Plato esteemed ‘old even among the traditions of antiquity[1121].’ From what source he obtained the doctrine he does not definitely say; but, from a mention of Delphi in the passage immediately preceding as the supreme authority in all matters of purification from blood-guilt, it may fairly be surmised that this too is a piece of Delphic lore. At any rate Plato accepted it as an authoritative pronouncement to which the homicide must pay due heed.

‘The doctrine,’ says Plato, ‘is that one who has lived his life in the spirit of a free man and meets with a violent death is wroth, while his death is yet recent, against the man who caused it, and when he sees him going his way in the places where he himself was wont to move, he strikes[1122] him with the same quaking and terror with which he himself has been filled by the violence done to him, and in his own confusion confounds his enemy and all his doings to the utmost of his power, aided therein by the slayer’s own conscience. And that is why it is right that the doer of the deed should in deference to the sufferer withdraw for the full space of the year, and should keep clear of the whole country which the dead man had frequented as his native land; and if the dead man be a foreigner the slayer must hold aloof from the foreigner’s country for the same period. Such then is the law; and, if a man voluntarily observe it, the dead man’s nearest kinsman, whose duty it is to look to all this, must respect the slayer, and will do right to be at peace with him; but, if the slayer disregard this law and either presume to enter holy places and to sacrifice before he be purified, or, again, refuse to fulfil the allotted period in retirement, the nearest of kin must proceed against him on a charge of homicide, and, if a conviction be obtained, the penalties are to be doubled. But if the nearest of kin do not seek vengeance for the deed, it is held that the pollution devolves upon him, and that the sufferer (i.e. the dead man) turns upon him the suffering (i.e. that which the homicide himself should have incurred), and anyone who will may bring a suit against him and obtain a sentence of banishment for five years[1123].’

Now for a right appreciation of this passage it must be borne in mind that Plato introduces his old tradition _à propos_ of unintentional homicide. The actual penalties therefore are of a milder nature than those with which we have hitherto been concerned. Indeed it is not the difference in the penalties which should cause any surprise, but rather that an unintentional act should be punished at all; and it would seem perhaps that in citing this doctrine Plato sought to justify himself in retaining a provision of Attic law which at first sight appeared unjust. In Athens[1124], we know, the involuntary homicide was required not only to undergo purification but to withdraw for a whole year from the country of the man whom he had slain. The hardship of this was manifest, and yet Plato acquiesced in the righteousness of it for the reason apparently that the year’s retirement[1125] was not a penalty imposed by the state, but a satisfaction which, according to religious tradition, the dead man demanded and might even himself enforce.

Plato in fact recognises no less frankly than others the personal

## activity of the slain man. He differs indeed in limiting the duration

of that activity, when he says that the dead man’s anger is hot against the slayer only while his death is still recent, and when by the provisions of his law he implies that the victim’s desire for vengeance is fully satisfied by the slayer’s withdrawal for the space of one year. But this difference is completely explained by the fact that Plato introduces the tradition in connexion with unintentional homicide, whereas previously we have had it treated in relation to wilful murder. Reasonably enough the man who has been accidentally slain is represented as angry only for a time, while the victim of deliberate murder nourishes a wrath implacable. The one drives the author of his misfortune into exile for a year and then repents him of the evil; the other dogs his enemy with vengeance not only for a year but throughout his life and even after death; and indeed Plato himself, when he passes from the subject of involuntary homicide to that of deliberate murder, proves his recognition of this difference by his enactments; for, at any rate in the most heinous case, namely the murder of a near kinsman, he expressly states[1126] that the old principle ‘as a man hath done, so must he suffer’ admits of no abatement; the guilty man must die, and his body be left unburied.

But I must not yet enter upon a discussion of the actual punishments inflicted. Here I am only concerned to point out how completely Plato’s ‘old doctrine’ harmonises with that which we have learnt from other sources concerning the personal activity of the dead man. First we read that the dead man terrifies and confounds the slayer to the utmost of his power, with the aid of the slayer’s own conscience; and then again that his next of kin is under an obligation to obtain satisfaction for him, and is punished by him if he neglects that duty. Clearly the slayer’s own conscience is no more than an instrument--a somewhat ineffective instrument, one might think, in a case of unintentional homicide--and the next of kin is no more than a minister, both of them employed and directed by the dead man himself. He it is who exacts his own vengeance.

The other literary method of mitigating the crude popular belief in a bodily _revenant_ hunting down his enemy was to treat the murderer’s punishment as the result of a curse. Such a curse was denoted usually by the word μήνιμα, which may perhaps be more exactly rendered by the phrase ‘a manifestation of wrath (μῆνις)’ on the part of some supernatural being[1127], whether a god or the departed spirit of a man; when once provoked by deadly sin such as the murder of a kinsman or refusal of burial, this curse was held to cleave to the tainted family from generation to generation.

In the case of blood-guilt, which we are at present considering, the curse, as was said above, was held either to work spontaneously or to be executed by some powers of the nether world. The former view is more rarely adopted, but is clearly enough indicated in one or two passages of ancient literature. Plato in the _Phaedrus_ speaks of most grievous sicknesses and sufferings being produced in certain families as the consequence of ancient curses (παλαιῶν ἐκ μηνιμάτων)[1128]; and from the reminiscences and verbal echoes of Euripides’ _Orestes_ which appear in the passage[1129] it is abundantly clear that the particular family which Plato had in mind was the blood-guilty house of Atreus. Here then there is no mention of any gods, no suggestion that the curse was executed by them or in the first instance proceeded from them. And the negative evidence of Plato’s silence concerning the gods is turned to certainty by the positive statement of Aeschylus that, if a son neglect the task of vengeance, ‘betwixt him and the gods’ altars standeth the unseen barrier of his father’s wrath[1130]’; for if, in the case of the kinsman who by neglecting the duty of vengeance has made himself a partaker in the guilt and pollution of the murderer, the Wrath (μῆνις) by which he is punished both proceeds from the dead man and, far from needing the gods’ furtherance in order to take effect, stands as it were on guard to hold the polluted man aloof from their altars, then surely the Wrath which pursues the murderer himself must emanate from the same source and possess the same spontaneous efficacy. The dead man himself then both launches the curse and controls its course; and probably it was in deference to this doctrine that Plato formulated his own law, that, even in the case of a father being killed by his own son, the dying man might with his last breath remit the curse which such a deed incurred and exempt his son from all except the purifications and the temporary retirement imposed in cases of involuntary homicide[1131].

But more frequently the execution of the curse is conceived to be the work of certain powers of the nether world. These powers however do not act on their own initiative; they are instigated to the task of vengeance by the murdered man himself. Here, no less than in the other renderings of the old tradition, the sufferer himself is the supreme avenger of his own sufferings. The most famous example of this conception is furnished by the plot of the _Eumenides_. The Furies are represented as the servants of Clytemnestra, faithful witnesses to her wrongs, exactors of blood for blood on her behalf[1132]. When they slumber and allow Orestes to escape the while, her ghost approaches them in no suppliant manner for all their godhead, but chides them and urges them afresh, like hounds, upon the quarry’s trail[1133]. And, most significant of all, there is one passage in which they say of themselves that the name whereby they are known in their home beneath the earth is the name of Curses (Ἀραί)[1134]; they are in fact the personification of those curses which a murdered man himself directs against his murderer. Nor is this notion confined to drama. Xenophon is little prone to poetic imaginings; yet he can find an argument for the immortality of the soul in what he considers an established fact of human experience, namely, that the spirits of those who have been unjustly slain inspire terrors in their murderers’ hearts and ‘send against them’ certain ‘avengers of blood’ (παλαμναίους ἐπιπέμπουσι[1135]). And elsewhere again and again we hear of the same avengers under a variety of names--μιάστορες, ἀλάστορες, προστρόπαιοι--names which will receive consideration later and by their very meaning and usage will confirm once more my contention that, by whatever instrument or agency the murder is represented as being avenged, ancient literature only departed from the primitive belief in bodily _revenants_ executing their own vengeance at the one point at which the grossness of popular superstition must have offended educated sensibilities, and followed the old tradition as faithfully as might be in conceding to the dead man, if not bodily, yet personal, activity.

The same popular beliefs, _mutatis mutandis_, probably attached also to another class of _revenants_, dead men whose bodies had not received due burial. The necessary modifications of the superstition would be two in number. First, the anger of the dead man would not endure for ever, unless his body had been so treated that burial was no longer possible, but would cease with the performance of that which he returned to demand; and secondly, he would not be represented as using for his agent his next of kin, who in most cases of the kind would be the very person responsible to him for the neglect of burial. Literature therefore had here no choice of versions; the bodily re-appearance of the dead man was reckoned too gross an idea; the employment of his nearest kinsman to act on his behalf became in this case impossible; a curse was the only expedient. And this is the expedient which we actually find adopted. In the _Iliad_ Hector adjures Achilles not to fulfil his threat of throwing his dead body to the dogs and to the fowls of the air, but to give him burial, ‘lest,’ he says, ‘I become a cause of the gods’ wrath against thee’--μή τοί τι θεῶν μήνιμα γένωμαι[1136]--and the self-same phrase is put into the mouth of Elpenor’s spirit in the _Odyssey_ when he craves due burial of Odysseus[1137]. The same idea occurs once more in Pindar’s reference to Phrixus, who bade go unto the halls of Aeetes (for there in a strange land he had died, and had not received the burial-rites of his own country) and bring his spirit to rest, and whose bidding Jason is besought by Pelias to fulfil, for that ‘already doth old age wait upon me; but with thee the blossom of youth is but burgeoning, and thou canst put away the wrath of powers beneath[1138].’ In each of these passages then the actual enforcement of the dead man’s will is by means of a curse or ‘manifestation of wrath’--for the same word μήνιμα (or μῆνις) is used; in each case also, as it happens, the curse does not operate automatically but is executed by gods--the method preferred also, as we saw, in cases of blood-guilt; but here also, as there, the personal activity of the dead man is frankly acknowledged; the phrase of Homer ‘lest I become ...’ and that of Pindar ‘Phrixus doth bid ...’ clearly suggest that the gods were instigated to intervene by the sufferer himself.

The case then stands thus. We learnt in the last chapter that the unburied dead no less than the murdered were popularly believed to become _revenants_. We have since learnt that the murdered, in the capacity of _revenants_, were popularly believed to avenge their own wrongs with their own hands, but that ancient literature commonly presents a modified version of that belief according to which the personal activity indeed of the dead man is recognised, but the instrument of his vengeance is a curse executed by demonic agents. We find now that literature assigns also to the unburied dead the same personal activity in punishing those whose neglect has caused their suffering, and by the same means. The reasonable inference is that here too we have a modified version of a popular belief that the unburied, like the murdered, not only became _revenants_, which we know, but, in the capacity of _revenants_, themselves punished those who refused or neglected to render them their due funeral rites.

Thus the same principle governed the whole system of the punishment incurred by men who were guilty either of murder or of leaving the dead unburied--the principle that the dead man whom they had injured in either of these ways himself requited those injuries. Hence, when we proceed to examine the actual punishments inflicted, we need no longer concern ourselves with the fact that literature attributes the infliction now to the nearest kinsman of the dead man and anon to some divine avenger; but, whatsoever instrument or agency is employed, we know that the dead man himself was believed to control and direct it, and therefore that the punishment thus effected was conceived to be such as the dead man himself willed and, in popular belief, could with his own hands enforce. Thus in the _Oresteia_ the punishment of Clytemnestra is actually effected by Orestes, and again the punishment of Orestes is entrusted to the Furies; but Orestes is only the minister of his dead father, carrying out the work of retribution under pain of incurring the same punishment himself if by inaction he should consent unto his mother’s crime; and the Furies in like manner are only the servants of the dead Clytemnestra, instigated by her to their pursuit. The slaying of Clytemnestra and the sufferings of Orestes are the punishments which the dead Agamemnon and the dead Clytemnestra, even in the literary version of the story, impose, and, in a more primitive and gross form of it, might themselves have inflicted.

But before examining the nature of those punishments in detail, it will be well to recall the fact that to the eyes of the ancient Greeks murder or homicide always presented itself in two distinct aspects[1139]. Regarded from one point of view, it was the gravest possible injury to the man who was slain. Viewed from the other, it was a source of ‘pollution’ (μίασμα, μύσος, ἅγος), an abomination to the gods and a peril to living men; for the taint of bloodshed was conceived as a contagious physical malady, which the polluted person by touch or even by speech[1140] might communicate to his fellow-men, and not to them only, but to places which he visited, the market, the harbours, the temples[1141]; nay, even the sanctity of the gods’ images was not proof against the contamination of his bloodstained hands[1142]. In brief, the two aspects of homicide were the moral and the religious aspects; and both moral and religious atonements were required. The wrong done to the dead man was requited by the sufferings which he in turn imposed; the pollution, being primarily a state of religious disability (for it involved, as Plato says[1143], the enmity of the gods), was removed by a religious ceremony of purification.

How clearly marked was this distinction in antiquity is evident from Plato’s laws on homicide, as a brief consideration of two or three special cases will show.

First, in the most venial case of homicide, where a man had killed his own slave, he incurred no punishment at all, but was bound none the less to get himself purified[1144].

Secondly, in cases of the utmost enormity, as where a man wilfully murdered his father or mother, religion provided no means of purification. Blood-guilt in general was ‘hard to cure’; but parricide belonged to the class of sins ‘incurable[1145].’ Such a murderer therefore must die, for, as Plato says, ‘there is no other kind of purification’ in this case than the paying of blood for blood. Religious purification in the ordinary sense of the word was refused, but the extreme punishment was demanded.

Thirdly, in the majority of cases of blood-guilt, where both purification and punishment were required, the two were clearly independent of each other. The purification of the involuntary homicide was to precede the year’s retirement[1146]. The religious ceremony cleansed the man from pollution, but could no more exempt him from making satisfaction to the dead man whom he had wronged, than absolution of sin pronounced in the Christian confessional can exempt from the legal consequences of crime. The Delphic priesthood itself, if we may trust the testimony of Aeschylus, claimed no more than the power to cleanse; for Apollo himself, holding Orestes guilty of manslaughter though not of murder, after granting him religious purification, does not intervene to save him from that exile which even the unintentional homicide was bidden by Attic law to undergo; nay, he even acquiesces in the necessity of Orestes’ flight, bids him not faint before his wanderings are done, and promises only to set a limit thereto and to free him from the pursuing Furies in the end[1147].

The distinction between the pollution and the injury, and between the purification and the punishment, being thus clearly recognised, it is necessary, in investigating the relations between the dead man and his murderer, to set the purely religious aspect of blood-guilt on one side, and to treat the punishments inflicted upon the murderer simply as the settling of an account between man and man. One point only as regards the pollution need be borne in mind, namely, that purification was granted to the homicide in the interests of gods and men whose abodes would otherwise be defiled by his presence, and that the dead man could not conceivably derive any satisfaction therefrom. On the contrary, his desire for vengeance would naturally lead him to interpose ‘the unseen barrier of his wrath’ betwixt the guilty man and those altars of the gods where alone purification could be won, and thus to keep his enemy still polluted; for his pollution, just because it was a peril to his fellowmen, carried with it the punishment of utter solitude until he was cleansed. When therefore, as will appear later, the murdered man is described not only as an avenger of his own wrongs, but as one who strives to keep alive the religious defilement of the murderer, there is no confusion of the moral and the religious aspects of murder, but rather the injured man is conceived as wreaking his vengeance by every possible means, not only directly by the sufferings which he can personally inflict, but also indirectly by the privation which the state of pollution necessarily involves.

The nature of the direct acts of vengeance, which are now to be examined, can best be learnt from that passage of the _Choephori_ which depicts the horrible penalties awaiting Orestes if by inaction he should make himself a consenter to the crime of Clytemnestra. We have already learnt that in such a case the defaulting kinsman incurred precisely the same punishment as he should have assisted to inflict on the actual murderer. That therefore with which Orestes was threatened was that to which Clytemnestra was already condemned. The punishments named are those with which, according to popular superstition, a murdered man, risen in bodily substance from the grave, could requite his enemy. For no one, I suppose, would suggest that Aeschylus, who followed popular tradition so scrupulously in all that did not absolutely conflict with dramatic propriety, invented for himself the whole scheme of penalties here set forth. That he was bound to modify the means whereby the punishments were inflicted, in order to avoid the incongruity of a _revenant_ upon the stage, we already know and shall see again; but how closely he adhered to the popularly accepted scheme of punishments, even when he was forced to find some new means of inflicting them, will incidentally be shown by that detailed examination to which his list of penalties must now be subjected.

The first penalty is the physical torment of leprous blains that consume the body and age the sufferer prematurely. At first we are inclined to wonder why leprosy is selected by the dead man as his means of retaliation against his enemy; but a little reflection will lead us to guess that in this particular act of vengeance Aeschylus could not actually reproduce the popular doctrine. The common-folk believed in the bodily activity of the dead; and, if they believed also that bodily sufferings were part of the punishment which the murderer incurred, the two beliefs must surely have been correlated; the physical sufferings of the murderer must have been conceived to be caused by the physical activity of the murdered; or, to put it more plainly, if we may elucidate ancient superstition by the aid of modern, the murdered man, in the form of a _revenant_ bent on vengeance, was believed to leap upon his victim and rend him with his teeth and suck out his very life-blood. Clearly Aeschylus could not commit himself to so crude a presentation of a _revenant_; he could not conjure up before his audience the spectacle of the dead Agamemnon athirst for actual blood; but equally clearly he knew that popular superstition, and had it in his mind when he depicted the horrors of leprosy. For the bodily assault of a _revenant_ he substituted a natural malady engendered by a dead man’s unseen wrath; but he described the operation of that malady in language suggested by the popular presentment of a personal avenger more reasonable indeed in his purpose but scarcely less ferocious in his acts than a Slavonic vampire--‘blains that leap upon the flesh and with savage jaws eat out its erstwhile vigour[1148].’ The means of inflicting the punishment is changed, but the actual punishment of the murderer is the same as if it were not leprosy but in very truth a vampire, which leapt upon him and gnawed his flesh and drained his life-blood. So faithful is Aeschylus to the crude popular idea of a retribution which required that he who had spilled another’s blood should have his own blood drunk by his victim.

The second penalty is the mental agony of one whom ‘madness and vain terror sprung of the darkness do shake and confound[1149].’ Here again the punishment is in strict accord with that law that a man must suffer as he has wrought. That old tradition recorded and revered by Plato, on which I have already touched, taught that every man who was slain by violence was himself filled thereby with quaking and terror and confusion of spirit, and accordingly sought his revenge in terrifying and confounding the slayer. No clearer commentary on the lines of Aeschylus could be desired. Plato explains how the terror and the confusion--for he employs the selfsame words as Aeschylus--by which the murderer is overwhelmed are the exact counterpart of the mental anguish which his violence brought upon his victim. Aeschylus then once again was following closely an old tradition of the popular religion. It matters not at all that in this case he names the Erinyes as the agents, just as previously he made leprosy the instrument, of the dead man’s vengeance. The actual sufferings which the murderer must undergo are in this case also identical in character with those which he caused to his victim.

The third punishment of the blood-guilty man consists in wandering friendless and outcast; and this again is no arbitrary invention of Aeschylus, but was clearly prescribed by that old tradition which, in Plato’s reckoning, justified the legal imposition of a year’s retirement even upon those who had shed blood involuntarily. Where then is that correspondence, which our examination of the first two penalties has led us to expect, between this third punishment and the sufferings of the dead man who exacts it? Is there the same nicety of retribution? Clearly so. The dead man became in popular belief a _revenant_, a wanderer from out the grave, pitiable in his loneliness, cut off from all friendly intercourse with living men, not yet admitted to the fellowship of the departed, the sorriest of outcasts. Such was the misery to which the murderer by his act of violence had brought his victim; such therefore too the misery which the murderer himself must taste in his wanderings and loneliness here on earth, though it were but a foretaste of more consummate misery hereafter. Truly even in life the murderer was made to suffer as he had wrought.

And then comes the fourth penalty, death; for though Aeschylus, in the list of punishments which we have now before us, touches but lightly on this, the most obvious form of retribution, yet elsewhere he repeatedly affirms, and many another re-echoes, the doctrine that blood cries for blood[1150]. Perhaps in this passage he felt that by depicting the gnawing pangs of leprosy he had sufficiently proclaimed the sure approach of death; perhaps he passed it by as a slight thing in comparison with the horror that yet remained to be told. For death did not close the tale of punishments; the blood-guilty man, so chant the Furies, ‘though he be dead is none too free[1151].’

And so we pass to the last requirement of vengeance, that the outcast shall have no friend to honour his dead body with the due funeral-rites, whereby alone the desired dissolution could be secured, but is doomed to lie unburied, incorruptible. Such is my interpretation of the closing lines of the passage before us; and there is no need to repeat the defence of my contention that the word ταριχευθέντα must be understood in its literal and proper sense. But it will not be out of place to note here how, in the _Eumenides_, Aeschylus’ mind was still pervaded by the same popular belief. The word ταριχεύεσθαι means, in the literal sense in which I have taken it, to be withheld from corruption by some process of curing or drying; and, fantastic though it may seem, it is that process of ‘drying,’ if I may use the word, which the Furies are charged by Clytemnestra to carry out against her murderer. Let Aeschylus’ own words prove it. Hear first how Clytemnestra’s ghost with her last words spurs on the Furies to this special task:

σὺ δ’ αἱματηρὸν πνεῦμ’ ἐπουρίσασα τῷ, ἀτμῷ κατισχναίνουσα, νηδύος πυρὶ, ἕπου, μάραινε δευτέροις διώγμασιν[1152].

‘Up and pursue! let thy breath lap his blood With sering reek, as were thy bowels a furnace, Till he be shrivelled in the redoubled chase.’

And the Furies prove by their threats to Orestes that they are not unmindful of their charge. ‘Nay, in return for the blood thou hast shed, thou must give me to suck the red juices from thy living limbs. Thyself must be my meat, my horrid drink.’ ‘Yea, while thou livest, I will drain thee dry, ere I hale thee ’neath the earth[1153].’ And the same thought is emphasized yet again in that binding-spell which the Furies chant to draw him whom they already account their prey from his vain refuge at Athene’s altar:

ἐπὶ δὲ τῷ τεθυμένῳ τόδε μέλος, παρακοπὰ, παραφορὰ φρενοδαλής, ὕμνος ἐξ Ἐρινύων, δέσμιος φρενῶν, ἀφόρμικτος, αὐονὰ βροτοῖς[1154].

‘Over our victim thus chant we our spell, Rocking and wrecking the torturèd soul, The jubilant song of Avengers, Fettering the soul with no ’witchments of lute, A spell as of drought[1155] upon mortals.’

Such is the wild, weird refrain of the Furies’ incantation; and in its closing phrase are re-echoed the closing words of Clytemnestra’s charge.

Will anyone then venture to say that Aeschylus had no special reason for thus repeating thrice within the compass of some two hundred lines the same threat? For the punishment threatened is substantially the same, though the means of inflicting it vary. Now it is the breath of the Furies which shall scorch up the victim’s very blood; now it is their lips that shall suck him dry; now a magic spell to parch and shrivel him; but ever the effect is the same; the bloodguilty man shall lie in death a sere and sapless carcase, already ‘damned to incorruption[1156] even in that doom which wastes all else.’ And the only reason which I can conceive for the poet’s insistence upon this thought is that here again, as in all the former punishments, he was reproducing a popular belief substantially the same then as it is in Maina now, namely, that the murdered man, having become a _revenant_, sucked his murderer’s blood and made him also in his turn a _revenant_.

Nor is Aeschylus the only ancient authority for the idea of some such retribution after death. Plato, in a passage of the _Phaedrus_ already cited, contemplates the activity of a murdered man’s wrath (μήνιμα) not only in the present time but also hereafter[1157]; and in his _Laws_ there is a provision, not assuredly of his own devising but dating from the very beginning of Greek legislation, which can only have been designed to insure the complete vengeance of the murdered man on his murderer even beyond death. A man convicted of the wilful murder of a near kinsman[1158] was punishable not only with death but with a further penalty: ‘the attendants of the jury and the magistrates having killed him shall cast out his corpse naked at an appointed cross-roads without the city, and all the magistrates, representing the whole city, shall take each a stone and cast it upon the head of the corpse and thereby free the whole city from guilt, and thereafter they shall carry the corpse to the borders of their land and cast it out, in accordance with the law, unburied[1159].’ Now the law, we know, in ordaining the penalty of death, ordained it as a satisfaction of the murdered man’s claims to vengeance. The State, so to speak, sided with the dead man and assisted him to exact blood for blood. Again the stoning of the dead body by representatives of the city was intended, we are expressly told, to free the whole city from guilt--from guilt, that is, in the eyes of the murdered man, who might otherwise visit his wrath upon the city as though it had consented to the crime or had too lightly punished it. Can it then be supposed that the State was actuated by any other motive in carrying out the rest of the penalty? It was surely still in deference to the murdered man’s desires that the murderer’s corpse was left unburied. To refuse burial was the surest means of condemning the man to resuscitation and thereby of satisfying his former victim’s uttermost demands.

Thus our detailed examination of the Aeschylean catalogue of penalties establishes beyond doubt that of which we had already had some evidence, namely, that all the punishments which were inflicted on the murderer--and, in popular belief, inflicted by the murdered man on his own behalf--were an exact reproduction of the sufferings which the murdered man himself had undeservingly endured, and culminated therefore, as they should, in the blood-guilty man becoming, like his victim, a _revenant_.

The main problem then of this section is now fully solved; but incidentally much light has been thrown upon the character ascribed by the Greek people in antiquity to those _revenants_ who were not merely pitiable sufferers but were active in bringing a like doom upon those who had wronged them. And the character of these Avengers approximates very closely to that of the modern _vrykolakes_. True, there is one fundamental difference; the ancient Avenger directed his wrath solely against the author of his sufferings, or at the most extended it only to those who, owing to him the duty of furthering his vengeance, had proved lax and cowardly therein; the modern _vrykolakas_ is unreasoning in his wrath and plagues indiscriminately all who fall in his way. But the actual sufferings which the _vrykolakas_ inflicts are identical with those which furnished Aeschylus with his tale of threatened horrors. Modern stories there are in plenty, which tell how the _vrykolakas_ springs upon his victim and rends him and drinks his blood; how sheer terror of his aspect has driven men mad; how, in order to escape him, whole families have been driven forth from their native island to wander in exile[1160]; how death has often been the issue of his assaults; and how those whom a _vrykolakas_ has slain become themselves _vrykolakes_. Only his unreasoning and indiscriminate fury is necessarily of Slavonic origin; his acts are the acts of those ancient _revenants_ whose own wrongs rightfully made them the Avengers of blood. Apart from the one Slavonic trait, the characters of the _vrykolakas_ and the ancient Avenger are identical.

And perhaps this identity is most clearly seen in the one case in which the old Avenger punished not only the immediate author of his own wrongs, but a whole community which had subsequently given the guilty man an asylum. We have noticed how Antiphon ventured to threaten an Athenian jury with such punishment at the hands of the dead man if they wrongfully acquitted his murderer. In the same spirit Aeschylus makes the Furies, as the agents of the dead Clytemnestra, menace the whole land of Attica with a venomous curse that shall blast man and beast and herb in revenge for the wresting of Orestes from their grasp[1161]. And such too is the dread which in the _Phoenissae_ of Euripides stirs Creon to make to the blood-guilty Oedipus this appeal: ‘Nay, remove thee hence: verily ’tis not in scorn that I say this, nor in enmity to thee, but because of thine Avengers, in fear lest the land suffer some hurt[1162].’ In such cases the punishments with which a whole community is threatened, although still a reasonable measure, approach most nearly to the indiscriminate violence of the modern _vrykolakas_.

For the fulfilment of such threats as these we must turn to the _Supplices_ of Aeschylus, and there we shall find a description of just such a devastation as is said to have been suffered by the inhabitants of Santorini and many other places in the seventeenth century. The story of Aeschylus tells how ‘there came unto the Argive land, from the shore of Naupactus, Apis, son of Apollo, both healer and seer, and cleansed the land of monsters that destroyed mankind, even of those that Earth, tainted with the pollutions of blood shed of old, sent up in wrath to work havoc, fearsome as a dragon-brood to dwell among[1163].’ What then were these monsters? I will venture to say that any Greek peasant of to-day, could he but read and understand the Aeschylean description, would furnish a better commentary upon those lines than the most learned discourse thereon that any scholar has written; and his commentary would be summed up in the one word _vrykolakes_. For, vigorous as the description is, its vigour comes less of dramatic word-building than of fidelity to the horrors of popular superstition, and no other single passage could so fully establish the unity of ancient and modern belief. For while the actual language contains all the words[1164] which in antiquity were bound up with the superstition--the ‘pollution’ which comes of bloodshed, the ‘wrath’ which follows thereon and in which Earth herself is here made to share, and the ‘sending up’ by Earth of the Avengers--the thought of the passage is a faithful reflection of what the Greek peasants still believe, that a violent death is among the chief causes of resuscitation, that the earth sends up the dead man raging to deal destruction, and that with others of his kind he consorts and conspires in veritable dragon-bands; and men still tell of gifted seers and healers, such as Apis, summoned in hot haste to panic-stricken hamlets to allay the pest. The κνώδαλα βροτοφθόρα of Aeschylus, ‘the monsters that destroy mankind,’ are indeed but little removed from the modern _vrykolakes_.

Is it not then clear also on what sources Aeschylus drew for his picture of the Furies themselves? We have seen how, for dramatic purposes, they were substituted for a _revenant_ wreaking his own vengeance. Clytemnestra herself in bodily form should have been the Avenger, if popular superstition had not been in this respect too gross; but the Erinyes take her place in the actual execution of vengeance, and she herself appears only as a ghost to instigate them to their work. But, when that substitution was effected, did not Aeschylus clearly transfer to the Erinyes the whole character and even the appearance popularly attributed to the human Avenger? They are black and loathly to look upon[1165]; their breath is deadly to approach[1166]; the smell of blood is a joy to them[1167]; they follow like hounds upon their victim’s trail[1168]; they torment him both body and soul[1169]; they fasten upon his living limbs and gorge themselves with his blood[1170]; and if any would harbour him from their pursuit, the venom of their wrath falls like a plague upon the land, and devastates it[1171]; they are monsters, κνώδαλα[1172]--and the recurrence of this word is significant--abhorrent alike to gods and to men[1173]. The description is surely not that which Aeschylus would himself have invented for beings who should come afterwards to be worshipped as ‘revered goddesses,’ σεμναὶ θεαί. The difficulty of that transition in the play itself cannot but arrest the attention of every reader; it is a difficulty which even the genius of Aeschylus could not remove. Why then did he draw so loathsome a portrait of the Erinyes in the earlier part of the play? Why did he create that difficulty? The reason, I suggest, was that he followed once more, and this time almost too faithfully, the popular traditions, and, while he would not represent a real _revenant_ on the stage, transferred to those demonic agents, by whom the work of vengeance was vicariously performed, all the attributes popularly associated with the prototypes of the modern _vrykolakas_.

Thus then the history of the modern belief in _vrykolakes_ has been fully traced. The ancients also believed that for certain causes--the same causes in the main as are still assigned--men were doomed to remain incorruptible after death and to rise again in bodily form from their graves, and that one class of these _revenants_, those namely who had wrongs of their own to avenge, inflicted upon their enemies (and upon any who shielded or harboured them) the same sufferings as are now generally believed to be inflicted in an unreasoning manner by all classes of _vrykolakes_ alike upon mankind at large, with no justification, such as a natural desire for vengeance might afford, in the case of those whose resuscitation is not the outcome of any injury or neglect at the hands of other men, and with no discrimination between friend and foe on the part of those who have real wrongs to avenge. Remove the unreasoning element in the character of the _vrykolakas_, and the _revenant_ in which the folk of ancient Greece believed remains.

But, if they believed in him, they must have called him by some name. Aeschylus’ phrase κνώδαλα βροτοφθόρα, ‘monsters that destroy mankind,’ is a description rather than a name. What were the reasonable _vrykolakes_ of ancient Greece called? That is now the one question which must be answered in order to make our enquiry complete.

Briefly my answer is this, that the particular class of _revenants_ with which the present section has mainly dealt, the Avengers of blood, were known by three several names, μιάστωρ, ἀλάστωρ, and προστρόπαιος, but that literature contains no word which could serve as a collective designation for all classes alike. I hope however to show that the Greek language was not originally defective in this respect, but that the term ἀλάστωρ, although regularly used from the fifth century onwards in the narrow sense of an Avenger, had originally a wider application and denoted simply a _revenant_.

Now the interpretation which I give to these three words is not that which is commonly accepted. Anyone who will turn to a lexicon will find that to each of the three is assigned a double signification in connexion with blood-guilt. All three are said to denote either a god who punishes the blood-guilty or the blood-guilty man who is punished. Thus a god, it is alleged, may be called μιάστωρ (literally a ‘polluter’) because he punishes the polluted--a somewhat obvious misnomer; or again ἀλάστωρ, because he ‘does not forget’ but punishes the sinner--a derivation which, as I shall show later, cannot be accepted; or thirdly προστρόπαιος, as the being who was ‘turned to’ by the murdered man and was besought to avenge his cause--a somewhat circuitous way for the word to arrive at its active sense of ‘Avenger.’ And, secondly, a man, it is said, was called μιάστωρ when, being himself polluted, he was liable to be ‘a polluter’ of other men with whom he came in contact--a view which is certainly defensible; ἀλάστωρ as one whose sin ‘could not be forgotten’--an interpretation almost beyond the pale of serious discussion; and προστρόπαιος because, being blood-guilty, he ‘turned towards’ some god for purification--an explanation which may be right--whence the word came to denote in general a polluted person who still needed purification.

Thus in my view, as I have indicated, the greater part of the information in the lexicons with regard to these three words is inaccurate; and my reasons for disputing the received interpretations will be set forth point by point as I offer my own interpretations in their stead.

In dealing with the first group of meanings assigned to the three words, by which they came, somehow or other, to be used with the common

## active signification of ‘Avenger,’ my main contention will be that,

as regards their primary and strictest usage, all three words were applied not to gods but to men--men who, having been murdered, sought to requite their murderers--and were only secondarily extended to the agents, whether divine or human, to whom those dead men committed the task of vengeance; but I shall also endeavour to show, as regards the literal meaning of the three words severally, that the interpretation by means of which their final sense of ‘Avenger’ has generally been elicited from them is in each case wrong, and that, in the case of the word ἀλάστωρ in particular, a right understanding of its original meaning gives very important results.

And in dealing with the second group of meanings, by which the three words are said to denote three only slightly different aspects of one and the same person--a murderer who is μιάστωρ as polluted and spreading pollution, ἀλάστωρ as pursued by vengeance, and προστρόπαιος as still needing purification--I shall maintain that these alleged uses of the first two words do not exist, and, as regards the third, I will offer a suggestion, but a suggestion only, as to the means by which it acquired this signification which it unquestionably bore.

It will be convenient to deal first with μιάστωρ and ἀλάστωρ as being parallel in usage throughout, and to reserve προστρόπαιος for later consideration.

The clearest example of that which I take to be the original usage of μιάστωρ is furnished by Euripides. In that scene of mutual recrimination between Medea and Jason, after that in revenge for her husband’s faithlessness she has slain their children, there comes at last from her lips the brutal taunt, as she points to the dead, ‘They live no more: that truth at least will sting thee’; and Jason answers, ‘Nay, but they live, to wreak vengeance on thy head (σῷ κάρᾳ μιάστορες)[1174].’ No language could be more simple, more explicit. The very children who lay there murdered at Medea’s feet, they and none other should be the _Miastores_, the Avengers of their own foul deaths.

But of course the word has other applications also. When Aeschylus[1175] made the Erinyes threaten that even when Orestes should have fled beneath the earth, he should find another Avenger (μιάστορα) to plague him in their stead, the whole tenor of the passage compels us to understand that that other Avenger is some deity or demon of the nether world--a divine, not a human, _Miastor_, though at the same time one who will act, like the Erinyes themselves, on behalf of the murdered Clytemnestra.

And, yet again, the same term is applied to a living man, when, as next of kin to him who has been murdered, he is in duty bound to exact vengeance. This time Sophocles is our authority, and the person of whom the word is used is Orestes. ‘Oft,’ says Electra to Clytemnestra, ‘oft hast thou reproached me with saving him to take vengeance upon thee (σοὶ τρέφειν μιάστορα)[1176].’

These three passages then illustrate the threefold application of the name _Miastor_, and the question to be answered is which represents the primary usage of the word. To multiply instances of each or any would be of no avail; the question is not of the frequency of each usage; the commonest is not necessarily the earliest. How then is the question to be answered? It is, I think, already answered. We have seen that in popular belief the murdered man was the prime avenger of his own wrongs, and that even in literature, when the execution of vengeance is wholly transferred either to the nearest kinsman or to some demonic power, the murdered man is still recognised as the principal and the others are only his agents. It is this relation between them which settles the question. A principal does not act in the name of his agents, but the agents in the name of their principal. The name _Miastor_ therefore belonged first to the dead man himself, and was only extended afterwards to those who wrought vengeance on his behalf.

So much for the usage of the word. Next, how did it acquire the meaning of ‘Avenger,’ which it undoubtedly possessed? This can be only a matter of opinion. But since it appears to me unscholarly and illogical to suppose that a word, which on the grounds of formation must have first meant ‘one who causes pollution,’ could have come to mean ‘one who punishes pollution,’ I may at least offer an alternative suggestion. The murdered man, I admit, can hardly be said to have ‘caused’ the pollution of his murderer, or at any rate he could only have caused it involuntarily. But he might well be regarded as active in debarring the murderer from the means of purification and in keeping the pollution, as it were, fresh and virulent, with intent to isolate his enemy and to ban him from the abodes of his fellow-men. And some indication of such an activity is afforded by the Erinyes--acting, as always, on Clytemnestra’s behalf; they refuse to acknowledge the purification granted by Apollo to Orestes, and they say moreover that their task is to ‘keep dark and fresh the stain of blood[1177].’ The murdered man may therefore have been believed, if not actually to cause and to create, yet at least to promote and to re-create, the pollution of his foe, and, by keeping the stains of blood as it were from fading or being cleansed away, to wreak some part of his vengeance. In this way the transition from the sense of ‘polluter’ to that of ‘avenger’ is at least, I submit, intelligible. This however is only a side-issue. The important point is that the word _Miastor_, however it may have come to mean ‘Avenger,’ was primarily applied to the _revenant_ himself, and only secondarily to any god.

The next name to be considered, ἀλάστωρ, is commonly accounted a synonym of μιάστωρ, denoting in actual usage a ‘god of vengeance,’ and meaning literally ‘one who does not forget’ blood-guiltiness. I too hold it to be a synonym of _Miastor_, but to denote therefore primarily not a god but a human _revenant_ seeking vengeance, and only afterwards, by a transference of usage, a god or living man acting in the name of the dead; while, as for the supposed derivation, I count it absolutely untenable.

And first as regards the application of the word; after what has been, I hope, a fairly exhaustive study of the passages of classical literature in which it occurs, I am bound to confess that, though the instances of its use are far more numerous than those of _Miastor_, I am still unable to select three passages and to say ‘Here are my proofs of the triple application of the word.’ Indeed all that I can prove by the evidence of any single passage taken alone is curiously enough the existence of what I take to have been the rarest of the three usages--the application of the name _Alastor_ to the kinsman of the dead man, as being the agent of his vengeance. Just as Sophocles speaks of Orestes being preserved as a _Miastor_ to take vengeance on Clytemnestra for his father’s death, so does Aeschylus make the same Orestes name himself an _Alastor_ on the score of the vengeance which he has taken. ‘Queen Athene,’ he prays, ‘at Loxias’ bidding am I come; receive thou me graciously, avenger as I am, no murderer, nor of defiled hand ... ἀλάστορα, οὐ προστρόπαιον, οὐδ’ ἀφοίβαντον χέρα[1178].’ Such, I am convinced, is the right rendering of the passage. The lexicons indeed cite the line as an example of the alleged passive meaning of ἀλάστωρ--one who suffers from divine vengeance, an accursed wretch[1179]; and I acknowledge that such a meaning would make passable sense of the passage; for Orestes was indeed suffering from the vengeance of the Erinyes. But I hold, and I shall endeavour to prove later, that ἀλάστωρ never possessed a passive meaning, and I claim moreover that the active meaning of ‘Avenger,’ which I attribute to the word here as elsewhere, is immensely preferable in itself. For Orestes throughout pleads justification[1180]; he has avenged murder, not committed it; he has discharged a duty to his dead sire, not perpetrated a wanton crime against his mother; he slew her indeed, but his motive was pious, and the ordaining of his act divine. On the grounds therefore, first, of the word’s own active meaning, secondly, of the whole trend of Orestes’ defence of his conduct, and last, but by no means least, of the exact parallel furnished by Sophocles’ use of the word _Miastor_, I am confident that _Alastor_ as applied by Orestes to himself means an ‘Avenger.’

That the word however was not primarily applied to the kinsman acting on behalf of the murdered man will be universally conceded; in the vast majority of passages some supernatural being is clearly intended. But it has been too hastily assumed that the supernatural avengers were always gods or demons; that they were often so conceived I do not doubt; but, as a matter of fact, I have discovered no single passage of classical literature which can be said finally and absolutely in itself to demand that interpretation. In many instances the probabilities are in favour of the _Alastores_ being regarded as a class of avenging demons; in many others it is equally good or even better to suppose that they are the dead men themselves in person.

What then are the foundations upon which the received notion, that the _Alastores_ were always gods, is based? It might perhaps be urged that the word _Alastor_ found a place among the many epithets and titles conferred by worshippers upon Zeus[1181] in order to indicate the particular exercise of his all-reaching power which their hearts desired. It might also be urged that Clement of Alexandria names the _Alastores_ among those classes of gods whom the pagan Greeks had evolved from the naughtiness of their own imagination as types and personifications of the baser human passions[1182]. But neither of these facts can serve to substantiate the contention that the _Alastores_ were primarily and necessarily gods. The occasional use of a word as an epithet of Zeus cannot be held to prove the general appropriation of that word to a class of lesser gods; while the statement of Clement is the statement of a man designedly vilifying the whole Greek religion, neither appreciating nor desirous to appreciate its refinements, but willing rather to overwhelm it utterly, its better and its worse elements alike, with the torrent of his invective and reprobation. To him the _Alastores_ appeared as supernatural beings instinct with the pagan passion of revenge, false gods therefore or devils, fit objects whereon to pour out the vials of righteous wrath and Christian scorn. He was not concerned to be wholly just or wholly accurate. Indeed the very sources from which he drew the idea that the _Alastores_ were gods are still open to us; it is the Greek Tragedians whom he holds guilty of this naughty invention; it is the Greek Tragedians who remain for us the fountain-head of information concerning these Avengers, and who will on examination make it clear that they were not primarily or necessarily gods.

The single passage in Greek Tragedy which has been often regarded as evidence in favour of Clement’s classification of _Alastores_ among gods is on fuller enquiry rather a refutation of that view. In the _Persae_ of Aeschylus the messenger, who reports to the queen the disaster which has befallen the Persian fleet, sets it down to supernatural agency:

ἦρξεν μὲν ὦ δέσποινα, τοῦ παντὸς κακοῦ φανεὶς ἀλάστωρ ἢ κακὸς δαίμων ποθέν[1183].

This has generally been taken to mean that the beginning of the disaster was due to the sudden appearance of ‘some vengeful or malicious deity.’ But elsewhere in Tragedy ἀλάστωρ is treated not as adjective but as substantive; and, since there is no compulsion to suppose other than the ordinary use of the word here, it appears better to translate the phrase ‘some Avenger or some malicious god.’ In other words the real, if unemphatic, contrast implied in the phrase is not between ἀλάστωρ and κακός--no contrast is possible there[1184]--but between ἀλάστωρ and δαίμων. The inference therefore is rather that the _Alastor_ in this passage was not conceived as a deity.

There are other passages of Greek Tragedy also in which the balance of probability seems to me to incline towards interpreting the name _Alastor_ in the sense of a _revenant_ and not of a god. Two such occur in the _Medea_ of Euripides--the same play, be it noted, which contains that perfectly plain statement that the dead children of Medea are themselves the _Miastores_ who will punish her. The first is in the

## scene in which Medea works herself up to the perpetration of her crime.

Passionate love of her children, passionate jealousy and fury against their father, alternate in tragic turmoil, until the tense agony of spirit is let loose in that fierce oath,

‘No, by the Avengers that lurk deep in hell, Ne’er shall it come to pass that I should leave My children to mine enemies’ despite. Most surely they must die; and since they must, ’Twas my womb bare them, ’tis my hand shall slay[1185].’

Strong and terrible would be the oath even if the _Alastores_, whose wrath Medea thus defies, were gods or spirits; but the force and the horror are doubled, if the _Alastores_ here are of the same order as those whom Jason names _Miastores_ but a little later in the same drama, and if therefore among those Avengers, in whose name the murderous oath was sworn, were soon to be numbered those very children whom Medea loved best and yet bound herself to slay most foully.

The second passage occurs in Jason’s outburst of fury against Medea when he first learns her crime. ‘’Tis thine Avenger whom the gods have let light on me; for truly thou didst slay thine own brother at his own hearth, or ever thou didst set foot in Argo’s shapely hull[1186].’ Surely we are meant to understand that the dead Absyrtus is himself the _Alastor_--for one _Alastor_ only is named this time, and that too as distinct from the gods (θεοί)--and that Jason diverted to himself a portion of the dead man’s wrath by wedding the blood-guilty woman. Again then the interpretation of _Alastor_ in the same sense in which, only a little later in the same scene, _Miastor_ is undoubtedly employed is, if not necessary, yet vastly preferable.

To review here all the passages of Greek Tragedy in which the word may advantageously be so understood, when at the same time no single one of them constitutes a final proof of my view, would be to encumber this enquiry to no purpose; but I may perhaps be permitted to select one instance from a story of blood-guilt other than that of which Medea is the centre.

This shall be from that scene in the _Hercules Furens_ in which the hero, sane now and overwhelmed with horror at the ghastly slaughter of his own children which in a moment of sudden madness he had wrought, receives from Theseus some measure of consolation and advice. Early in that colloquy, ere yet Theseus has had time to soothe the sufferings or to guide the course of his stricken friend, Heracles cries to him in bitterness of soul,

Theseus, hast view’d my triumph o’er my children?

and Theseus answers with gentle simplicity,

I heard, and now I see the woes thou showst me.

And then follow the lines:

ΗΡ. τί δῆτά μου κρᾶτ’ ἀνεκάλυψας ἡλίῳ; ΘΗ. τί δ’ οὐ; μιαίνεις θνητὸς ὢν τὰ τῶν θεῶν; ΗΡ. φεῦγ’, ὦ ταλαίπωρ’, ἀνόσιον μίασμ’ ἐμόν. ΘΗ. οὐδεὶς ἀλάστωρ τοῖς φίλοις ἐκ τῶν φίλων[1187].

_Her._ Why then hast bared my head before the Sun? _Thes._ Nay, wherefore not? canst thou--mere man--taint godhead? _Her._ Yet flee thyself, risk not my taint of blood-guilt. _Thes._ Where love joins, bloodshed to no vengeance moves.

It is the connexion and significance of the last two lines which I wish briefly to discuss. Theseus has used the word ‘taint’ (μιαίνεις), and Heracles at once seizes on it, emphasizes it, and warns his friend to begone lest he be contaminated; and then Theseus answers (to give a literal rendering) ‘No Avenger of blood proceeds from them that love against them that love.’ What does this mean? The line is often translated as if Theseus meant, ‘No, I will stay, for though an Avenger of blood may probably pursue you, Heracles, I have no fear that he will touch me who love you as a friend[1188].’ A generous and sympathetic utterance indeed! And how consistent with that fine burst of feeling with which he had but a moment before refused to be warned away:

‘Why warn’st thou me of blood with hand uplift? In fear lest I be tainted by thy speech? Nought reck I of ill fortune at thy side Where once ’twas good; that hour must draw my heart When thou didst bring me safe from death to light; Nay, I hate friends whose gratitude grows old, I hate the man that will enjoy good hap But will not face foul weather with his friend[1189].’

Is this the man whose words, spoken but a moment later, shall be interpreted to mean, ‘I will not run away, because the danger that threatens my friend cannot hurt me’? The thought is deeper, more generous, than that. Theseus is thinking not of himself, but of his friend. It is the word ‘pollution,’ used first by himself and caught up by Heracles, which arrests his attention. Was his friend ‘polluted’ by a deed of blood, wrought in madness, expiated in tears? Polluted? Yes, in the sense that religious purification was required[1190]. He cannot deny the pollution. But could the deed also be punished as the murder of close kinsfolk was wont to be punished? Could the children, albeit slain by their own father’s hand, desire revenge upon him who loved them and was loved of them? ‘No,’ he answers boldly, ‘pollution (μίασμα) there is, but no _Alastor_, no Avenger of blood, can come from them that love against them that love.’ How then does Theseus picture the _Alastor_ who, but for the bond of love between the father and his dead children, would seek vengeance for their death? The phrase which he uses is ambiguous--perhaps deliberately ambiguous--οὐδεὶς ... ἐκ τῶν φίλων. It may mean equally well ‘no one of those who love’ or ‘no one coming from those who love.’ But when the close correspondence of μίασμα, ‘pollution,’ and ἀλάστωρ ‘avenger,’ is noted in this passage, and when it is also remembered that the dead children of Medea are elsewhere plainly named _Miastores_, it is hard to suppose that an audience familiar with the belief that the dead themselves avenged their own wrongs would not have interpreted the ambiguous phrase to mean ‘none of these children shall rise up from the grave as an _Alastor_, for love is stronger than vengeance.’

But such doubt as still remains is set at rest when we turn from the usage of the word _Alastor_ to its origin and enquire how it obtained the sense of ‘Avenger.’ What is its derivation?

Two conjectures seem to have been made by the ancients and are recorded by early commentators and lexicographers[1191]. The one connects the word with the root of λανθάνω, ‘I escape notice,’ and extracts a meaning in a variety of ways, leaving it open to choice, for example, whether it shall mean a god whose notice nothing escapes or a man who commits acts which cannot escape some god’s notice. The other conjecture refers the word to the root of ἀλάομαι, ‘I wander.’ It is between these two proposed derivations that our choice lies; nor can we obtain much help from the greatest modern authorities. Curtius[1192] unhesitatingly adopts the latter, Brugmann[1193] the former, nor does either of them so much as mention the possibility of the alternative. I must therefore discuss the question without reference to these authorities, knowing that, if I run counter to the one, I have the countenance of the other.

Is then ἀλάστωρ, in the sense of a ‘non-forgetter,’ a possible formation from the root of λανθάνω? My own answer to that question is a decided negative, and my reasons are as follows. Substantives denoting the agent and formed with the suffix -τωρ (-τορ-) can only be so formed direct from a verb-stem, as ῥήτωρ from ϝρε or ϝερ appearing in ἐρῶ etc., μήστωρ from the stem of μήδομαι, ἀφήτωρ answering to the verb ἀφίημι, ἐπιβήτωρ to ἐπιβαίνω. It is among these and other such examples that Brugmann places the anomalous ἀλάστωρ, to be connected with ἄλαστος, λήθω. But evidently, in order that ἀλάστωρ may be parallel, let us say, to ἀφήτωρ, we must postulate the existence of an impossible verb ἀ-λήθω or ἀ-λανθάνομαι, ‘I non-forget.’ Nor would it mend matters to suppose, first, the formation, direct from λήθω, of a _nomen agentis_ of the form λάστωρ, a ‘forgetter’; for the privative ἀ- appears only in adjectives and adverbs and in such verbs and substantives as are formed directly from them, as ἀμνημονεῖν from ἀμνήμων etc., and cannot be prefixed at pleasure to a substantive or verb not so formed; ἀλάστωρ could no more be formed from an hypothetical substantive λάστωρ[1194], than could an hypothetical verb ἀ-λανθάνεσθαι be formed from λανθάνεσθαι. Etymologically then the derivation of ἀλάστωρ from ἀ- privative and the root of λήθω is impossible, and its sense of ‘Avenger’ was not developed from the meaning ‘one who does not forget.’

On the other hand, to the connexion of ἀλάστωρ with the verb ἀλᾶσθαι, ‘to wander,’ no exception can be taken. Not only is the formation simple, but an exact parallel is forthcoming. As the substantive μιάστωρ stands to the verb μιαίνω, so does the substantive ἀλάστωρ stand to a by-form of ἀλάομαι, which is fairly frequent in Tragedy, ἀλαίνω[1195]. It follows then that ἀλάστωρ meant originally a ‘wanderer.’

But, when once that primary meaning is discovered, there can be no further doubt as to the primary application of the term. Of the three possible exactors of vengeance--the _revenant_ himself, some demonic agent, and the nearest kinsman--the first alone could be aptly described as a ‘wanderer’; moreover we know that the murdered man was actually so conceived, and that, among the punishments by which he sought to make his murderer suffer the same lot as he himself endured, one of the most conspicuous was the punishment of wandering and exile. The name _Alastor_ therefore, like _Miastor_, denoted first of all the dead man himself, and was only secondarily extended to human or divine agents seeking vengeance on his behalf.

It remains only to enquire how the meaning ‘Avenger’ was evolved from the meaning ‘Wanderer,’ and so completely superseded it that the name _Alastores_ was extended to those agents who were in no obvious sense ‘Wanderers’ but simply ‘Avengers.’

The first occurrence of the word is in the _Iliad_, as the proper name of a Greek warrior[1196]. This fact tends to show that the word had as yet acquired none of that ill-omened sense which it undoubtedly bears in Greek Tragedy. It was used rather, we may believe, in its original and literal sense of ‘wanderer,’ and the adoption of such a word as a proper name is entirely consistent with the principles of Homeric nomenclature. Hector, Nestor, Mēstor, are famous names of the same class.

Otherwise than as a proper name the word is not used in Homer, nor does it occur at all again, so far as I am aware, before the time of Aeschylus. It is during this interval then that the evolution of meaning must have taken place; for by the age of Aeschylus the idea of vengeance--and vengeance of a horrible kind--had become the ordinary signification of the word. My view then is that the intervening centuries had witnessed a gradual differentiation of the several words which alike originally meant a ‘wanderer,’ a differentiation such that ἀλήτης remained the ordinary and general term, while ἀλάστωρ was little by little restricted to the wanderer from the dead, the _revenant_; and that subsequently from meaning a _revenant_ of any and every kind it became limited to that single class of _revenants_ whose wanderings were guided by the desire for revenge--the class to whom the name _Miastores_ had always belonged.

Some evidence for the first stage in this development of meaning is furnished by the Tragic usage of the verb from which the substantive is derived; for in both its forms, ἀλᾶσθαι and ἀλαίνειν, it continued to be applied to any of the restless dead, when the substantive ἀλάστωρ, as I conceive, had come to be appropriated to the Avenger only. Indeed it might almost be thought that both Aeschylus and Euripides had an inkling of the derivation and earlier meaning of the substantive; for while idiom debarred them from using ἀλάστωρ in the large sense of any _revenant_, they certainly used the corresponding verb in contexts which suggest that those who thus ‘wander’ were not imagined by them as vague impalpable ghosts, but possessed for them rather the real substance and physical traits of a _revenant_. Thus in the _Eumenides_, though Clytemnestra could not be permitted to play the part of a _revenant_ and appears only as a ghost, yet the more gross and popular conception of her is clearly present to the poet’s mind. Though a ghost, she points to the wounds which her son’s hands inflicted[1197]; though a ghost, she is made to exhort the Erinyes to vengeance ‘on behalf of her very soul’ (τῆς ἐμῆς πέρι ψυχῆς)[1198]. Strange gestures and strange language indeed, if the so-called ghost had been conceived as a mere disembodied soul! But the popular conception of the _revenant_ penetrated even here. And was it not the same conception which suggested the phrase αἰσχρῶς ἀλῶμαι, ‘I wander in dishonour[1199]’? In the popular belief, as we know, the murderer was bound to wander after death, suffering as he had wrought; and it is as a murderess[1200] that Clytemnestra avows herself condemned to shameful wanderings. ‘To wander,’ ἀλᾶσθαι, sums up the suffering which the murderer, like his victim, must incur after death. It is likely then that the name ἀλάστωρ too was originally applied to any ‘wanderer’--whether murderer or murdered--before it acquired the connotation of vindictiveness and so became appropriated to the latter only.

Again Euripides uses the same verb of one whose body has not received burial. This time there is no connexion with blood-guilt at all, but the lines are simply the plaint of captive wife for husband slain in battle: ‘oh beloved, oh husband mine, dead art thou and wanderest unburied, unwatered with tears’--σὺ μὲν φθίμενος ἀλαίνεις, ἄθαπτος, ἄνυδρος[1201]. ‘To wander unburied’--could there be a simpler description of a _revenant_? Does not the whole misery of the unburied dead consist in this--that they must wander? It is almost inconceivable then that the name _Alastor_, ‘wanderer,’ should have been originally applied only to a single class of the wandering dead--to those whose wanderings were directed towards vengeance, and not also to those whose wanderings were more aimless, more pitiable, whose whole existence might have been summed up in that one word ‘wandering.’ At some time then between the age of Homer and that of Aeschylus _Alastor_, I hold, meant simply _revenant_.

How then shall we explain that caprice of language which, according to this Tragic usage, permitted all the unhappy dead to be said ‘to wander’ (ἀλᾶσθαι, ἀλαίνειν), but apparently forbade them to be collectively named ‘wanderers’ (ἀλάστορες)? How did _Alastor_ acquire its sense of ‘Avenger’ and become restricted to one class of _revenant_ only?

It might be sufficient answer to point out that those _revenants_ who were bent on avenging their own wrongs are likely always to have occupied a prominent place in popular superstition simply because they inspired most terror in the popular mind; other _revenants_ were harmless, and, as harmless, liable to be little regarded and seldom named; and the most conspicuous class might thus have appropriated to itself the name which properly belonged to all. But there is another influence which, if it did not cause, may at least have facilitated and quickened the change--the influence of the word ἄλαστος, ‘unforgotten,’ which, as I have noted above, was commonly and naturally, in an age when etymology was not science but guess-work, connected with ἀλάστωρ. Etymologically the two words have nothing in common; but that is no obstacle to the supposition that, in their usage, their casual but close similarity of form rendered the meaning of the one susceptible to the influence of the other. Nay more, the fact that the two words, it matters not how erroneously, were actually in early times referred to a common origin[1202] warrants the suggestion that such influence had been exercised. Now ἄλαστος always remained in meaning true to its derivation. Itself employed in the passive sense, ‘unforgotten,’ it seems to have made over the active meaning, ‘unforgetting,’ ‘vindictive’ (which, on the analogy of ἄπρακτος and a score of similar forms, it should naturally have possessed), to the apparently kindred word ἀλάστωρ. This adventitious meaning accorded well with the popular conception of the most conspicuous class of ‘wanderers’ from the grave--those whose wanderings had a vindictive aim; and thus, by the help of the accidental resemblance of two words, it seems to have come to pass that the term _Alastores_ ceased to be applicable to all kinds of _revenants_ and denoted only the ‘Avengers.’ At this point it became in fact synonymous with _Miastores_, and, like that word, enlarged its scope so as to denote not only the prime Avenger, the _revenant_ himself, but also any divine or human agents employed by him as subsidiary Avengers.

So much then for the first meaning which the lexicons attach to the words _Alastor_ and _Miastor_; the second interpretation of them, in relation to a blood-guilty man, may be more briefly treated. _Alastor_ in this passive sense is alleged to mean a man who suffers from the vengeance of one who is an _Alastor_ in the active sense; and _Miastor_ to mean a man who is himself polluted and therefore pollutes those with whom he associates.

As regards _Alastor_, this explanation stands already condemned by the fact that it pre-supposes the derivation from λανθάνομαι, and even then it does fresh and incredible violence to language; a sane philologist may commit the error of deriving ἀλάστωρ from λανθάνομαι and making it mean ‘one who does not forget’; but only the maddest could dream of interpreting it as ‘one who does deeds which others do not forget.’ But, if in spite of this we trouble to turn up the references which the lexicons give under this heading, it is obvious at once that there is no more support for such a meaning in idiomatic usage than in etymological origin. Three references are cited. The first is to that passage of the _Eumenides_ in which Orestes declares himself ἀλάστορα, οὐ προστρόπαιον[1203], a phrase which means, as I have already shown, ‘an avenger, not a murderer.’ This then should be classified as an example of the active, not of the hypothetical passive, meaning of _Alastor_. Of the other two passages, one is from the _Ajax_ of Sophocles, where the hero in his anger and despair speaks of the guileful enemies who robbed him of his prize as _Alastores_[1204], and the other a passage from Demosthenes in which he criticizes Aeschines for applying the word as an opprobrious name to Philip of Macedon[1205]. But in what possible sense could either Ajax’ enemies or Philip of Macedon be described as ‘suffering from Avengers’? On the contrary, at the times when the word _Alastor_ was applied to them, their success should surely have suggested that they were favoured by heaven, and their opponents rather were the sufferers. What then was the meaning of the word thus opprobriously employed? A meaning, I answer, very little removed from that of ‘Avenger’ and arising out of it. For how was the Avenger--be he the _revenant_ himself or a demon acting on his behalf--constantly pictured? Was it not as a fiend tormenting with every torment the object of his wrath, plaguing him, maddening him, sucking his very blood? Little wonder then if the justice of that vengeance was sometimes obscured in men’s minds by their horror of it, and if the word _Alastor_ suggested to them a fiend, a merciless tormentor. In that sense Ajax might well apply the name to his enemies, and Aeschines to Philip. Nor are other instances of it lacking. Demosthenes himself, for all his criticism of Aeschines’ vulgarity in calling Philip βάρβαρόν τε καὶ ἀλάστορα, ‘a foreign devil,’ used the same word of Aeschines and his friends[1206]; again, in Sophocles, the lion of Nemea for the loss and havoc that he inflicted is unique among beasts that perish in having merited the same sorry title--βουκόλων ἀλάστωρ, the ‘herdsmen’s Tormentor[1207]’; and indeed, apart from living men and animals, there are many instances in Tragedy[1208] in which the word _Alastor_, applied to some supernatural foe, _revenant_ or demon, may be more appropriately rendered by ‘fiend’ or ‘tormentor’ than by ‘avenger.’

And the same thing is true, I hold, of the word _Miastor_. The theory of the lexicons, namely, that the word denotes a polluted and blood-guilty man because such an one is inevitably a ‘polluter’ of others, is certainly not intrinsically bad; for it recognises the primary meaning of the word, ‘polluter,’ and bases the secondary meaning ‘polluted’ upon a right understanding of the old belief that pollution was contagious. But at the same time it gives some occasion to wonder why the word should have been diverted from its most natural meaning in order to denote that which the cognate word μιαρός already expressed more simply. Moreover, when examination is made of those passages which are claimed as examples of such an usage, the theory becomes wholly unnecessary. The two most specious examples are two passages from Aeschylus[1209] and Euripides[1210], in both of which the persons called _Miastores_ are Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Now the authors of Agamemnon’s death were certainly polluted, and might with justice have been called μιαροί--that is admitted. But because they might have been called μιαροί and actually are called μιάστορες, it does not follow that, though the words have the same root, they also bear the same meaning. Obviously the word ‘fiends,’ if μιάστορες ever has that sense, would be an equally apt description of the murderous pair. The choice therefore between these two renderings here must be guided by more certain examples of usage elsewhere.

Two may be selected as eminently clear. In one Orestes calls Helen τὴν Ἑλλάδος μιάστορα[1211], where the word cannot mean a ‘polluted wretch,’ for the construction postulates an active meaning in _Miastor_; nor yet can the phrase be intelligibly rendered ‘the polluter of Greece,’ for there was no pollution involved in the warfare which Helen had caused; clearly Orestes means ‘the tormentor of Greece,’ the fiend who had proved the bane of ships and men and cities. In the other passage Peleus applies the word to Menelaus: ‘I look upon thee,’ he says, ‘as on the murderer--the fiend-like destroyer (μιάστορ’ ὥς τινα)--of Achilles[1212].’ Here again _Miastor_ clearly bears an active sense, and at the same time cannot be rendered ‘polluter.’ Menelaus had brought upon Achilles not pollution but death, and the word _Miastor_ explains the word ‘murderer’ (αὐθέντην) which precedes it--explains that the murder laid to Menelaus’ charge was not the open violence of a stronger foe, but resembled the death-dealing of some lurking fiend. In these two passages then the interpretation of _Miastor_ in the sense of ‘fiend,’ ‘tormentor,’ ‘destroyer,’ is necessary and proven; and, this being known, common reason bids us read more ambiguous scriptures in the light thus obtained. There is therefore no call to suppose that μιάστωρ ever meant ‘polluted’; from the active meaning ‘Avenger’ it developed, like _Alastor_, the broader sense of ‘Tormentor’ or ‘Fiendish Destroyer’; and these meanings completely satisfy the conditions of Tragic and other usage of the words.

There remains the word προστρόπαιος, to which the lexicons, I admit, rightly ascribe a twofold meaning. It is clearly used both of the Avenger of blood and also of the blood-guilty person who is seeking purification. But as regards both the means by which the first signification was obtained, and the primary application of the word in that signification, I join issue. The second meaning is more satisfactorily explained, and my criticism of it will not go beyond an alternative suggestion.

The lexicons elucidate the first meaning as follows: _he to whom one turns_, especially with supplications, θεός or δαίμων προστρόπαιος the god _to whom the murdered person turns_ for vengeance, hence _an avenger_, like ἀλάστωρ ... hence also of the _manes_ of murdered persons, _visiting with vengeance, implacable_.

The objections to this explanation are obvious. It may well be questioned whether προστρόπαιος is at all likely to have had any passive meaning--as it were a person who ‘is turned to’--when the verb προστρέπω itself was, so far as I can ascertain, never so used; and further, if a god had really been called προστρόπαιος because the murdered man turned for vengeance to him, the extension of the term to the _manes_ of murdered persons must imply a conception of the murdered man turning for vengeance towards--himself. This is not a little cumbrous; and for my part I deny the existence of any passive sense of προστρόπαιος.

I do however find two senses of the word, the one active, corresponding to the transitive use of the verb προστρέπειν or προστρέπεσθαι (for the middle as well as the active voice might be used transitively, as will shortly appear), the other middle, corresponding to the ordinary usage of the middle προστρέπεσθαι. Thus the active meaning of προστρόπαιος will be _turning_ something _towards_ or _against_ someone; the middle meaning, _turning oneself towards_ someone.

The active usage is best illustrated by a passage of Aeschines, in which he accuses Demosthenes of wilful perjury in calumniating him, and then appeals to the jury in these words--ἐάσετε οὖν τὸν τοιοῦτον αὑτοῦ προστρόπαιον (μὴ γὰρ δὴ τῆς πόλεως) ἐν ὑμῖν ἀναστρέφεσθαι[1213]; ‘Will you then allow this perjurer, who has turned upon his own head (for I pray that it be not on the city) the anger of the gods in whose name he swore, to continue in your midst?’ Here the very brevity of the Greek, which I am compelled to expand in translation, proves that Aeschines’ audience were perfectly familiar with an active meaning of προστρόπαιος with an evil connotation, ‘turning some misfortune or punishment or vengeance upon someone.’

The middle sense of προστρόπαιος is equally clearly exhibited by Aeschylus, who in telling the story of Thyestes says that after his banishment by his brother Atreus he came again προστρόπαιος ἑστίας[1214], ‘turning himself (as a suppliant) towards the hearth’ of his father’s home, so that his own life at least was spared out of respect for the place.

Thus the two meanings of the word are established, and it remains only to show how they were specially used in connexion with blood-guilt.

In the active sense προστρόπαιος was primarily applied, I hold, like _Miastor_ and _Alastor_, to the murdered man himself, who ‘turned’ his wrath ‘against’ the murderer, or, if it so happened, against the next of kin who had failed in his duty of bringing the murderer to justice. It is precisely thus that Plato uses the verb προστρέπεσθαι in recording the old tradition in which he apparently reposed so much faith as to base his own laws upon it. ‘If the nearest of kin,’ so runs the passage, ‘do not seek vengeance for the deed, it is held that the pollution devolves upon him, and that _the sufferer_ (i.e. the dead man) _turns upon him the suffering_ (i.e. that which the homicide himself should have incurred), and anyone who will may bring a suit against him, etc.[1215]’ The words which I have italicised are in the Greek τοῦ παθόντος προστρεπομένου τὴν πάθην, where the middle presumably was preferred to the active because the sufferings which the dead man inflicts are, as we already know and as the language of the particular phrase itself suggests, exactly those which he himself suffers. This usage of the verb, though it is distinctly rare and probably a technicality of religion or law, is so perfectly clear in this one example[1216], that there should be no hesitation about understanding the cognate word προστρόπαιος in the same sense. And indeed one lexicographer, Photius, shows that he did so understand it; for he tells us that Zeus was sometimes invoked under this title, as turning against murderers the pollution (including perhaps the punishments) of their crime: Ζεὺς ... προστρόπαιος, ὁ προστρέπων τὸ ἄγος αὐτοῖς (sc. τοῖς παλαμναίοις)[1217]--such are his actual words, and this time of course the verb is rightly in the active, for Zeus is in no way personally concerned but acts only in the interests of the dead man. Clearly then it was in virtue of this active meaning that προστρόπαιος came to be practically a synonym of _Miastor_ and _Alastor_ in the sense of an Avenger of blood.

Once more then we return to the same question which has been propounded and answered with regard to those two other names--to whom was the term προστρόπαιος primarily applied?

I find the application of it more restricted than that of the other two words. It was used of the dead man himself, and it was used of demons avenging his cause; but it was never used[1218] of the next of kin in the character of avenger--and that for the very good reason that when the word was applied to a living man it bore an entirely different meaning, which has yet to be discussed, the meaning of ‘blood-guilty.’

A few examples of each usage must be given. Both Antiphon and Aeschylus apply the word to murdered men; Antiphon, in a speech in which the kinsman, who has, as in duty bound, undertaken the prosecution of the murderer, claims that, if the jury wrongfully acquit, the dead man will not become προστρόπαιος, an Avenger, against his kinsmen who have done their best in his service, but will visit his anger on the jury for condoning and thereby sharing the blood-guilt[1219]; Aeschylus, in that list of penalties which has been discussed, when he depicts the ‘madness and vain terror,’ which will befall Orestes if he fail in his task, as an arrow that flieth in darkness sped by powers of hell ‘at the behest of fallen kindred that turn their vengeance upon him’ (ἐκ προστροπαίων ἐν γένει πεπτωκότων[1220]). But equally clearly in other passages the Avenger indicated is not the murdered man, but some divine being. Antiphon again is an authority for this usage. Twice, in a context similar to that which has just been noticed, he speaks not of the murdered man himself becoming an Avenger, but of certain divine powers--whom he also calls ἀλιτήριοι, the powers that deal with sin--acting as Avengers (προστρόπαιοι) of the dead[1221]. And similarly in later time Pausanias also speaks of ‘the pollution (μίασμα) incurred by Pelops and of the Avenger (προστρόπαιος) of Myrtilus[1222].’

Since then there is no question but that the word προστρόπαιος was actually applied both to dead men and to gods, to which of the two did it refer primarily? We already know the answer. The dead man himself, as a _revenant_, was the prime and proper Avenger of his own wrongs; demons of vengeance acted only in his name, as his subordinates and agents. To him therefore the name primarily belonged. And even if we had not already learnt this from other sources, the passage of Aeschylus, to which I have just referred, might well guide us to the same conclusion. The arrow that flieth in darkness is sped indeed, he says, ‘by powers of hell’ (τῶν ἐνερτέρων)--the demonic agents of the dead--but ‘at the behest of fallen kindred.’ The activity both of the principal and of the agent is recognised in the same passage, and either might have been called προστρόπαιος: but, because the activity of both was plainly asserted, Aeschylus reserved the name for the one to whom it primarily belonged, the murdered man, who turns his wrath, who turns indeed those powers of hell who execute his wrath, against his enemies.

There now remains for consideration only the second meaning of προστρόπαιος; how could a word, which in reference to dead men or to deities meant ‘an Avenger of blood,’ bear, in relation to living men, the sense of ‘blood-guilty’? Very likely the dictionaries are right in accepting the explanation of this use which Hesychius[1223] and others give. We have seen one case[1224] in which the word clearly has a middle sense ‘turning oneself towards’ a place or a person in supplication; and there is no difficulty in supposing that the word was used technically in the same sense of a blood-guilty man who turned to some god or to some sanctuary in quest of purification. This, I say, is very probably the right explanation. But I may perhaps offer an alternative explanation which I do not count preferable but merely possible. The active meaning of προστρόπαιος, ‘turning something upon someone,’ might conceivably have produced this sense of ‘blood-guilty’ as well as the other sense ‘an Avenger of blood.’ As the dead man was held to turn something, namely his wrath, against his enemy, so might the murderer have been pictured as trying to turn something, namely the pollution which he had incurred, upon some object and so to cleanse himself therefrom. Now the chief feature in the Delphic ceremony of purification was the slaying of a sucking-pig[1225]. This may of course have been merely a propitiatory sacrifice; but it is possible also that the animal was really a surrogate victim for the murderer himself, that by laying his polluted hand on its head he transferred the religious uncleanness from himself to it, and that, by the subsequent slaughter of the now blood-guilty animal, he vicariously satisfied the old law that blood could only be washed out by blood. This is only a conjecture, and I leave others to judge of its probability; but, if the ceremony had followed the lines which I have suggested, it is easily intelligible that, in the technical language of religion, the murderer who sought to turn his own pollution upon the victim might have been called προστρόπαιος.

Thus then the problem of the ancient nomenclature of _revenants_ is solved, and the results are briefly these: all _revenants_ were originally called ἀλάστορες, ‘Wanderers’; but subsequently that name was restricted only to the vengeful class of _revenants_, to which the names μιάστορες and προστρόπαιοι had always belonged; and for the more harmless and purely pitiable _revenants_ no name remained, but men said of such an one simply, ‘He wanders.’

FOOTNOTES:

[959] Heard by me from a fisherman of Myconos.

[960] Πολίτης, Παραδόσεις, I. pp. 573 and 593.

[961] The list of dialectic forms compiled by Bern. Schmidt (_das Volksleben der Neugriechen_, p. 158) comprises, besides that which I have adopted as in my experience the most general, the following: βουρκόλακας, βρουκόλακας, βουρκούλακας, βουλκόλακας, βουθρόλακας, βουρδόλακας, βορβόλακας. To these may be added βαρβάλακας from Syme (Πολίτης, Παραδόσεις, I. 601), βουρδούλακας, from Cythnos (Βάλληνδας, Κυθνιακά, p. 125), and an occasional diminutive form such as βρυκολάκι. The κ is often doubled in spelling.

[962] A plural in -οι, -ους, with accent either paroxytone or proparoxytone, also occurs.

[963] _De quorumdam Graecorum opinationibus_, cap. 12 sqq.

[964] ὁποῦ τὸν ἐγνώριζε προτίτερα, leg. ἐγνώριζαν.

[965] For these memorial services (μνημόσυνα) and the appropriate funeral-meats (κόλλυβα) see below, pp. 534 ff.

[966] The reference given by Allatius is to _Turco-Grecia_, Bk 8, but I cannot find the passage.

[967] With this description compare a phrase used in a recent Athenian account of a _vrykolakas_, σὰν τουλοῦμι, ‘like a (distended) wine-skin,’ Πολίτης, Παραδ. I. 575.

[968] See p. 339.

[969] _Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable a Sant-Erini Isle de l’Archipel, depuis l’établissement des Peres de la compagnie de Jesus en icelle_ (Paris, MDCLVII.), cap. XV. pp. 208-226.

[970] In many places at the present day it is believed that _vrykolakes_ (and sometimes other supernatural beings) cannot cross salt water. Hence to bury (not burn) the corpse in an island is often held sufficient.

[971] Some modern authorities state that Turks are believed to be more subject to become _vrykolakes_ than Christians. Schmidt (_Das Volksleben_, p. 162) appears to me to overstate this point of view, which I should judge to be rarer and more local than its contrary. Even where found, it is unimportant, being a mere invention of priestcraft for purposes of intimidation. See below, pp. 400 and 409.

[972] Evidently a local form of τουμπί (= τύμπανον, cf. Du Cange, _Med. et infim. Graec._, s.v. τυμπανίτης), with metathesis of the nasal. Cf. the word τυμπανιαῖος above.

[973] To this phrase I return later.

[974] leg. ἄσπρος.

[975] _Histoire nouvelle des anciens ducs et autres souverains de l’Archipel_, pp. 255-6 (Paris, 1699).

[976] _Voyage du Levant_, I. pp. 158 ff. (Lyon, 1717). Cf. also Salonis, _Voyage à Tine_ (Paris, 1809), translated by Δ. Μ. Μαυρομαρᾶς, as Ἱστορία τῆς Τήνου, pp. 105 ff.

[977] Paul Lucas, _Voyage du Levant_ (la Haye, 1705), vol. II. pp. 209-210.

[978] Cf. Tournefort, _Voyage du Levant_, I. p. 164 (Lyon, 1717).

[979] Ἀντών. Βάλληνδας, Κυθνιακά, p. 125.

[980] Γρηγ. Παπαδοπετράκης, Ἱστορία τῶν Σφακίων, pp. 72-3.

[981] The writer points out in a note the correspondence of the number of priests who assemble for τὸ εὐχέλαιον, the anointing of the sick with oil.

[982] The Cretan word used throughout this passage is καταχαν-ᾶς (plur. -ᾶδες), on which see below, p. 382.

[983] διπλοσαραντίσῃ. I have given what I take to be the meaning of a popular word otherwise unknown to me.

[984] Ᾱντ. Μηλιαράκης, Ὑπομνήματα περιγραφικὰ τῶν Κυκλάδων νήσων.--Ἄνδρος, Κέως, p. 56.

[985] Good examples may be found in Bern. Schmidt, _Märchen_, etc., no. 7, and Πολίτης, Παραδόσεις, I. 590 sqq.

[986] _The Cyclades_, p. 299.

[987] Πολίτης, Παραδόσεις, I. p. 577.

[988] _Ibid._, p. 578.

[989] In Scyros and in Cythnos, as I have noted above, this means of riddance has given place to milder remedies. But in the former I heard of fairly recent cases of vampirism, and in the latter, according to Βάλληνδας (Κυθνιακά, p. 125), the names of several persons (including one woman) who became _vrykolakes_ are still remembered.

[990] Communicated to me by word of mouth in Maina.

[991] ἑορτοπιάσματα (see above, p. 208), who are commonly regarded as subject to lycanthropy in life and continue the same predatory habits as vampires after death.

[992] Bern. Schmidt, _Das Volksleben_, p. 162 (from Aráchova).

[993] This belief belongs chiefly, in my experience, to the Cyclades.

[994] Curt. Wachsmuth, _Das alte Griechenland im Neuen_, p. 117 (from Elis).

[995] _Ibid._ p. 114 (from Elis). Bern. Schmidt, _op. cit._ p. 162 (Parnassus district). Πολίτης, Παραδόσεις, I. 578 (Calávryta).

[996] _Das Volksleben der Neugriechen_, p. 170.

[997] This derivation is reviewed and rejected by Bern. Schmidt, _Das Volksleben_ etc., p. 158.

[998] Cf. Miklosich, _Etym. Wörterbuch d. Slav. Spr._, p. 380, s.v. *velkŭ, Old Slav., vlъkъ, _wolf_....

Old Slav., vlЪkodlakЪ; Slovenian, volkodlak, vukodlak, vulkodlak; Bulg., vrЪkolak; Kr., vukodlak; Serb., vukodlak; Cz., vlkodlak; Pol., wilkodłak; Little Russian, vołkołak; White Russian, vołkołak; Russian, volkulakЪ; Roum. ve̥lkolak, ve̥rkolak; Alb., vurvolak; cf. Lith., vilkakis.

‘Der vlЪkodlak ist der Werwolf der Deutschen, woraus m. Lat. guerulfus, mannwolf, der in Wolfgestalt gespenstisch umgehende Mann.’ The second half of the compound is less certainly identified with _dlaka_, Old Slav., New Slav., Serb., = ‘hair’ (of cow or horse).

I am indebted for this note to the kindness of Mr E. H. Minns, of Pembroke College, Cambridge. It will be found to corroborate the view pronounced by B. Schmidt, _Das Volksleben der Neugriechen_, p. 159.

[999] Bern. Schmidt, _Das Volksleben der Neugriechen_, p. 160 (with note 1).

[1000] Ralston, _Songs of the Russian people_, p. 409.

[1001] Whether this word is originally Slavonic appears to be uncertain, but it is at any rate found in all Slavonic languages and is proved by the forms which it has assumed to have been in use there for fully a thousand years. This note also I owe to my friend, Mr Minns.

[1002] Abbott, _Macedonian Folklore_, p. 217.

[1003] _Das Volksleben d. Neugr._ p. 159.

[1004] _Ibid._ note 2.

[1005] Mannhardt’s _Zeitschrift f. d. Mythol. und Sittenk._ IV. 195.

[1006] _Les Slaves de Turquie_, I. p. 69 (Paris, 1844).

[1007] Cf. above, p. 183.

[1008] Cf. pp. 183 and 208.

[1009] In Chios at the present day the word _vrykolakas_ is in general usage, except that in the village of Pyrgi, owing to a confusion of _vrykolakes_ and _callicantzari_, a local name of the latter is applied also to the former. Cf. Κανελλάκης, Χιακὰ Ἀνάλεκτα, p. 367, and see above p. 193.

[1010] Ἀντ. Βάλληνδας, Κυθνιακά, p. 125. The two words are given in the neuter plural τυμπανιαῖα and ἄλυτα, as equivalents of the word _vrykolakas_ which, in the form βουρδούλακκας, is also employed.

[1011] The periodical Πανδώρα, vol. 12, no. 278, p. 335 and vol. 13, no. 308, p. 505, cited by Schmidt, _op. cit._ p. 160.

[1012] Schmidt, _op. cit._ p. 160, referring to Φιλίστωρ (periodical), III. p. 539; Πολίτης, Παραδόσεις, I. p. 574.

[1013] Πολίτης, _ibid._

[1014] Cf. above, p. 277.

[1015] Βάλληνδας in Ἐφημερὶς τῶν Φιλομαθῶν, 1861, p. 1828. Schmidt interprets the word as ‘der Aufhockende,’ one who sits upon and crushes his victims, a habit sometimes ascribed to _vrykolakes_, but more often to _callicantzari_. My own interpretation has the support of many popular stories, in which, when the exhumation of a _vrykolakas_ takes place, he is found sitting up in his tomb. See e.g. Πολίτης, Παραδόσεις, I. p. 590.

[1016] Cf. Χουρμούζης, Κρητικά, p. 27 (Athens, 1842); Γρηγ. Παπαδοπετράκης, Ἱστορία τῶν Σφακίων, pp. 72-3.

[1017] _Op. cit._ p. 160.

[1018] Ἄτακτα, II. p. 114.

[1019] _Os hians, dentes candidi_, cf. above, p. 367.

[1020] The word is mentioned by Newton, _Travels and Discoveries in the Levant_, I. p. 212. I have been unable to obtain any more recent information.

[1021] Τὸ Θανατικὸν τῆς Ῥόδου (_The Black Death of Rhodes_), ll. 267 and 579, published in Wagner’s _Medieval Greek Texts_, I. p. 179 (from Schmidt, _op. cit._ p. 160, note 4).

[1022] I have shown above (pp. 239 ff.) that in certain districts the word λυκάνθρωπος was superseded by a new Greek compound λυκοκάντζαρος; but this new term was probably always confined, as it now is, to the vocabulary of a few districts only, while the Slavonic word _vrykolakas_ enjoyed a wider vogue.

[1023] See above, p. 378.

[1024] I quote my authority only for choice specimens which I have not myself heard. Variations may be found in almost any work bearing on popular speech or belief.

[1025] Δελτίον τῆς Ἱστορ. καὶ Ἐθνολ. Ἑταιρίας, II. 123 (from Crete).

[1026] _Ibid._

[1027] Ἰ. Σ. Ἀρχέλαος, Ἡ Σινασός, p. 199 (from Sinasos in Asia Minor).

[1028] Christophorus Angelus, _De statu hodiernorum Graecorum_, cap. 25.

[1029] Cf. above, p. 370.

[1030] In the details of my account of this custom I follow Βάλληνδας, Κυθνιακά, pp. 113-114. But it prevails also in substantially the same form in many places besides Cythnos.

[1031] I have been at some pains to make wide enquiries on this point, but have found no example.

[1032] The version which I translate is No. 517 in Passow’s _Popularia Carmina Graec. recent._

[1033] Prof. Πολίτης has collected seventeen in a monograph entitled Τὸ δημοτικὸν ἅσμα περὶ τοῦ νεκροῦ ἀδελφοῦ (originally published in the Δελτίον τῆς Ἱστορ. καὶ Ἐθνολ. Ἑταιρίας).

[1034] Πολίτης, _op. cit._ p. 43 (Version No. 4, ll. 18, 19).

[1035] The periodical Πανδώρα, 1862, vol. 13, p. 367 ( Πολίτης, _op. cit._ p. 66, no. 17, ll. 19, 20).

[1036] Ἰ. Σ. Ἀρχέλαος, Ἡ Σινασός, p. 164 (from Sinasos in Asia Minor).

[1037] I make this statement with as full confidence as can be felt in any such negation, after perusing nearly a score of versions.

[1038] See above, p. 368.

[1039] Πολίτης, Παραδόσεις, I. p. 589.

[1040] _Ibid._ p. 591.

[1041] Goar, _Eucholog._ p. 685.

[1042] Cf. Leo Allatius, _De quor. Graecorum opinat._ XIII. Balsamon, I. 569 (Migne). _Epist. S. Niconis_, quoted by Balsamon, II. p. 1096 (ed. Paris, 1620). Christophorus Angelus, cap. 25.

[1043] S. Matthew xviii. 18.

[1044] The power of excommunicating belonged to priests as well as to bishops, but they might not exercise it without their bishop’s sanction. Cf. Balsamon, I. 27 and 569 (Migne).

[1045] Quoted by Leo Allatius, _De quor. Graec. opinat._ XIII. and XIV.

[1046] The reversal of the decree of excommunication by the same person who had pronounced it was always preferred, largely as a precaution against an excommunicated person obtaining absolution too easily. Cf. Balsamon, I. 64-5 and 437 (Migne).

[1047] _op. cit._ cap. XV. Cf. also Christophorus Angelus, Ἐγχειρίδιον περὶ τῆς καταστάσεως τῶν σήμερον εὑρισκομένων Ἑλλήνων (Cambridge, 1619), cap. 25, where is told the story of a bishop who was excommunicated by a council of his peers, and whose body remained ‘bound, like iron, for a hundred years,’ when a second council of bishops at the same place pronounced absolution and immediately the body ‘turned to dust.’

[1048] According to Georgius Fehlavius, p. 539 (§ 422) of his edition of Christophorus Angelus, _De statu hodiernorum Graecorum_ (Lipsiae, 1676), Emanuel Malaxus was the writer of a work entitled _Historia Patriarcharum Constantinopolitanorum_, which I have not been able to discover. It was apparently used by Crusius for his _Turco-Grecia_; for the story here told is narrated by him in two versions (I. 56 and II. 32, pp. 27 and 133 ed. Basle) and he alludes also (p. 151) to a story concerning Arsenios, Bishop of Monemvasia, which likewise according to Fehlavius (_l.c._) was narrated by Malaxus.

[1049] See below, p. 409.

[1050] Christophorus Angelus (_op. cit._ cap. 25) vouches for the early use of this word by one Cassianus, whom he describes as Ἕλλην παλαιὸς ἱστορικός. I cannot identify this author.

[1051] Du Cange, _Med. et infim. Graec._, s.v. τυμπανίτης.

[1052] Christophorus Angelus, _l.c._

[1053] Matthew xviii. 18.

[1054] John xx. 23.

[1055] See above, p. 365.

[1056] The word μνημόσυνα, which I have rendered with verbal correctness ‘memorial services,’ really implies more, and corresponds to a mass for the repose of the dead.

[1057] Anastasius Sinaita, in Migne’s _Patrologia Gr.-Lat._, vol. 89, 279-280.

[1058] i.e. the πνευματικοί, as they were called, the more discreet and ‘spiritual’ priests who alone were authorised by their bishops to discharge this function. Cf. Christophorus Angelus, _op. cit._ cap. 22.

[1059] Κωνστ. Κανελλάκης, Χιακὰ Ἀνάλεκτα, pp. 335 and 339.

[1060] On this symbol see above, pp. 112 f.

[1061] Newton, _Travels and Discoveries in the Levant_, I. p. 212 (1865). (Cf. B. Schmidt, _das Volksleben_, p. 164.)

[1062] Cf. Christophorus Angelus, _op. cit._ cap. 25 (init.).

[1063] _I. Cor._ v. 5 and _I. Tim._ i. 20.

[1064] Theodoretus, on _I. Cor._ v. 5 (Migne, _Patrologia Gr.-Lat._, vol. 82, 261).

[1065] Aesch. _Choeph._, 432-3.

[1066] Paus. IX. 32. 6.

[1067] _Philopseudes_, cap. 29.

[1068] See above, p. 208.

[1069] Πολίτης, Παραδόσεις, I. p. 576.

[1070] Ralston, _Songs of the Russian people_, p. 412.

[1071] Mirabilia, cap. I.

[1072] By ‘seer’ I render μάντις, a man directly inspired; by ‘diviner’ οἰωνοσκόπος, one who is skilled in the science of interpreting signs and omens.

[1073] _Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable a Sant-Erini etc._, p. 213. He calls Philinnion a Thessalian girl, and makes Machates come from Macedonia. But his reference to the story contains a patent inaccuracy (for he speaks of the girl being buried a second time, whereas she was burnt), and in all probability he was quoting from memory, not from a more complete text than that now preserved.

[1074] See Pashley, _Travels in Crete_, II. p. 221; Carnarvon, _Reminiscences of Athens and the Morea_, p. 162; Schmidt, _das Volksleben_, p. 165; Πολίτης, Παραδόσεις, I. pp. 589, 591 and 593; Βάλληνδας, Κυθνιακά, p. 125.

[1075] Alardus Gazaeus, _Commentary on_ Ioh. Cassianus, _Collatio_, VIII. 21 (Migne, _Patrologia_, Ser. I. vol. 49).

[1076] On ‘striges’ see above, pp. 179 ff.

[1077] On this word see above, p. 288.

[1078] _Das Volksleben der Neugriechen_, p. 170, with note 1.

[1079] _Philopseudes_, cap. 26.

[1080] Ar. _Eccles._, 1072-3.

[1081] See above, pp. 387-91.

[1082] Eur. _Or._, 1086.

[1083] Eur. _Hipp._, 1038.

[1084] Soph. _O. C._, 1383 ff.

[1085] Soph. _O. C._, 1405.

[1086] 261-297.

[1087] Aesch. _Choeph._, 287-8.

[1088] Κατὰ Ἀριστογείτονος, I. p. 788. συμπεπτωκότος is a necessary correction of the ἐμπεπτωκότος of the MSS.

[1089] Cf. l. 366 μιαίνεται.

[1090] Aesch. _Suppl._, 407 ff.

[1091] Aesch. _Eum._, 173 ff. reading ἄλλον μιάστορ’ ἐξ ἐμοῦ.

[1092] See above, p. 398.

[1093] _Works and Days_, 325 ff.

[1094] See above, p. 397.

[1095] See above, p. 370.

[1096] Hom. _Il._ XXIII. 69 ff.

[1097] Hom. _Od._ XI. 51 ff.

[1098] Eur. _Hec._ 1-58.

[1099] Aesch. _Eum._ 94 ff. It must be observed, however, that Clytemnestra’s restlessness is represented as being due to her being a murderess quite as much as to her having been violently slain. There was a double cause. See below, p. 474.

[1100] cap. 29.

[1101] Other references are given by Schmidt, _das Volksleben_, p. 169, among them Servius on Virg. _Aen._, IV. 386 and Heliod. _Aethiop._, II. 5.

[1102] Certain hints however are to be found, on which see below, pp. 438-9.

[1103] Aesch. _Choeph._ 480 ff.

[1104] See below, pp. 438-9.

[1105] p. 81 C, D.

[1106] _Iliad_ XXIII. 65 ff.

[1107] Eurip. _Hecuba_ 1 ff.

[1108] τοῦ ὁρατοῦ as opposed to τοῦ ἀειδοῦς τε καὶ Ἅιδου.

[1109] See above, pp. 110 ff.

[1110] See above, p. 340.

[1111] Soph. _El._ 453-4.

[1112] Aesch. _Choeph._ 480-1.

[1113] Aesch. _Ag._ 455.

[1114] Eur. _Or._ 491-541.

[1115] _Ibid._ 580 ff.

[1116] Aesch. _Choeph._ 924-5. Cf. also 293.

[1117] Soph. _El._ 445.

[1118] Aesch. _Choeph._ 439 ff.

[1119] Antiphon, pp. 119, 125, and 126.

[1120] Cf. below, p. 459.

[1121] Plato, _Leges_, 865 D, παλαιόν τινα τῶν ἀρχαίων μύθων.

[1122] The word δειμαίνει, which in this passage seems clearly transitive, is perhaps a verbal reminiscence of the old language in which Plato had heard the tradition.

[1123] Plato, _Leges_, 865 D ff.

[1124] Cf. Demosth., _in Aristocr._, pp. 634 and 643.

[1125] The word technically used of this withdrawal without formal sentence of banishment was ἀπενιαυτεῖν, or simply ἐξιέναι (cf. ὑπεξελθεῖν τῷ παθόντι in the above passage of Plato), or, as again in the same passage, ἀποξενοῦσθαι; whereas legal banishment was denoted by φεύγειν.

[1126] Plato, _Leges_, 872 D ff.

[1127] In early Greek, as witness the first line of the _Iliad_, the use of μῆνις, was less restricted than in later times; but the word, μήνιμα even in Homer occurs only, I think, in the phrase μήνιμα θεῶν. See below, p. 449.

[1128] Plato, _Phaedrus_, § 49, p. 244 D.

[1129] Cf. especially Eur. _Or._ 281-2, as pointed out by Bekker in his note on Plato, _Phaedrus_, _l.c._

[1130] Aesch. _Choeph._ 293.

[1131] Plato, _Leges_, 869 A (Bekker’s text); cf. also 869 E.

[1132] See Aesch. _Eum._ 101 and 317 ff.; cf. Eur. _Or._ 583.

[1133] _Ibid._ 94-139.

[1134] _Ibid._ 417.

[1135] Xenoph. _Cyrop._ VIII. 7, 18.

[1136] Hom. _Il._ XXII. 358.

[1137] Hom. _Od._ XI. 73.

[1138] Pind. _Pyth._ IV. 280 ff.

[1139] Cf. Plato, _Leges_, IX. _passim_, and especially p. 871.

[1140] Cf. Aesch. _Eum._ 285 and 448 ff.

[1141] Plato, _Leges_, 868 A and 871 A.

[1142] Cf. Aesch. _Eum._ 445.

[1143] Plato, _Leges_, 871 B.

[1144] _Ibid._ 865 C.

[1145] Cf. Plato, _Leges_, p. 854 A, δυσίατα καὶ ἀνίατα.

[1146] Cf. Plato, _Leges_, 866-874, _passim_.

[1147] Aesch. _Eum._ 74 ff.

[1148] Aesch. _Choeph._ 280-1.

[1149] Aesch. _Choeph._ 288-9.

[1150] Cf. especially Aesch. _Choeph._ 400 ff.

[1151] Aesch. _Eum._ 336, θανὼν δ’ οὐκ ἄγαν ἐλεύθερος.

[1152] Aesch. _Eum._ 137-9.

[1153] _Ibid._ 264-7.

[1154] _Ibid._ 328 ff., and again 343 ff.

[1155] This rendering of the word αὐονά has been challenged, but has the support of the Scholiast who explains it by the words ὁ ξηραίνων τοὺς βροτούς, (the hymn) which dries and withers men.

[1156] The tense of ταριχευθέντα in the phrase from which I started (_Choeph._ 296) is hereby explained.

[1157] Plato, _Phaedrus_, 244 E, πρός τε τὸν παρόντα καὶ τὸν ἔπειτα χρόνον.

[1158] Plato’s list is ‘father, mother, brother, sister, or child,’ _Leges_, IX. 873 A.

[1159] Plato, _Leges_, IX. 873 B.

[1160] Cf. especially Tournefort, _Voyage du Levant_, I. p. 163, who was an eye-witness of such an occurrence in Myconos.

[1161] Cf. Aesch. _Eumen._ 780 ff., and (for the withdrawal of the curse) 938 ff.

[1162] Eur. _Phoen._ 1592 ff. The word here translated ‘avengers’ is ἀλάστορες, which is fully discussed below, pp. 465 ff.

[1163] Aesch. _Suppl._ 262 ff., reading in 266 μηνιτὴ δάκη, the emendation of Porson.

[1164] _l.c._ 265-6, μιάσμασιν ... μηνιτή ... ἀνῆκε.

[1165] Aesch. _Eum._ 52.

[1166] Aesch. _Eum._ 53, 137-9.

[1167] _Ibid._ 254.

[1168] _Ibid._ 75, 111, 131, 246-7.

[1169] _passim._

[1170] 183-4, 264.

[1171] _Ibid._ 780 ff., 938 ff.

[1172] _Ibid._ 644.

[1173] _Ibid._ 70, 73, 644.

[1174] Eur. _Med._ 1370.

[1175] Aesch. _Eum._ 177.

[1176] Soph. _El._ 603.

[1177] Aesch. _Eum._ 349, reading μαυροῦμεν νέον αἷμα.

[1178] Aesch. _Eum._ 236.

[1179] L. and S. s.v.

[1180] Cf. Aesch. _Choeph._ 1026 ff., and _Eumen._ _passim_.

[1181] Cf. Preller, _Griech. Mythol._, I. p. 145 (edit. 4, Carl Robert).

[1182] Clem. Alex. _Protrept._ II. § 26.

[1183] Aesch. _Pers._ 353.

[1184] This fact is recognised by Geddes in his edition of the _Phaedo_, in the course of his note (p. 280 ff.) on the difficulty concerning the words ἢ λόγου θείου τινὸς in cap. 33 (p. 85 D). He does not however infer that the words really contrasted are ἀλάστωρ and δαίμων, but claims for the particle ἢ an epexegetic sense (‘or, in other words,’) besides its usual disjunctive sense (‘or else’). I am far from being satisfied that the epexegetic use of ἢ existed at all in Classical Greek, which idiomatically employed καὶ in that way. At any rate its existence is not proved by the other passages which Geddes cites--Aesch. _Pers._ 430 and Soph. _Phil._ 934--where the ἢ perhaps equals _vel_ rather than _aut_, but has none of the epexegetic sense of _sive_.

[1185] Eur. _Med._ 1059 ff.

[1186] Eur. _Med._ 1333 ff.

[1187] Eur. _H. F._ 1229 ff.

[1188] Cf. Paley, in his note to elucidate this dialogue. It should be added however that in a second note on the same page, dealing with this line only, he apparently contradicts his previous explanation.

[1189] Eur. _H. F._ 1218 ff.

[1190] Cf. 1324.

[1191] See Eustath. on _Il._ IV. 295.

[1192] _Gk Etymol._ 547.

[1193] _Vergleichende Grammatik_, II. § 122.

[1194] The nearest parallel could only be the dubious form ἀδώτης in Hesiod, _W. and D._, 353. But that form, if correct, is probably best treated as adjective (giftless) not as substantive (non-giver).

[1195] I am indebted to Mr P. Giles, of Emmanuel College, for pointing out to me that the analogy with μιάστωρ is mentioned in the last edition of Meyer’s _Griechische Philologie_.

[1196] Hom. _Il._ IV. 295, Ἀμφὶ μέγαν Πελάγοντα, Ἀλάστορά τε, Χρόμιόν τε. The hiatus in the third foot has been made the basis of a suggestion, to which Mr P. Giles has kindly called my attention, that ἀλάστωρ should begin with a digamma. There is however no need for the supposition, since hiatus after the trochaic caesura is not infrequent (e.g. _Il._ I. 569) and some license is generally allowed in any case in the metrical treatment of proper names; moreover, in _Il._ VIII. 333, we have a line δῖος Ἀλάστωρ which makes against the original existence of a digamma in the word.

[1197] Aesch. _Eum._ 103.

[1198] Aesch. _Eum._ 114.

[1199] Aesch. _Eum._ 98.

[1200] This is distinctly stated in the passage, though of course her own violent death might equally well have been given as a cause of ‘wandering.’

[1201] Eur. _Tro._ 1023.

[1202] Cf. Plutarch, _de defect. orac._, cap. 15 (p. 418).

[1203] Aesch. _Eum._ 236, cf. above, p. 466.

[1204] Soph. _Ajax_, 373.

[1205] Demosth. _de Falsa Legat._, p. 438, 28.

[1206] Demosth. _de Corona_, § 296, p. 324.

[1207] Soph. _Trach._ 1092.

[1208] e.g. Eur. _Iph. in Aul._ 878; _Phoen._ 1550; _El._ 979; _Or._ 1668.

[1209] _Choeph._ 928.

[1210] _Electra_, 677.

[1211] Eur. _Or._ 1584.

[1212] Eur. _Andr._ 614.

[1213] Aeschines, _De falsa legatione_, § 168 (p. 49). Cf. § 162 (p. 48).

[1214] Aeschylus, _Agam._ 1587.

[1215] Plato, _Leges_, IX. p. 866 B, cf. above, p. 445.

[1216] So far as I can discover, it is a solitary example of the use in Classical Greek; but I very strongly suspect that in Antiphon, p. 127 (init.), προστρέψομαι should be read instead of προστρίψομαι. A man accused of murder is saying, ἀδίκως μὲν γὰρ ἀπολυθεὶς, διὰ τὸ μὴ ὀρθῶς διδαχθῆναι ὑμᾶς ἀποφυγὼν, τοῦ μὴ διδάξαντος καὶ οὐχ ὑμέτερον τὸν προστρόπαιον τοῦ ἀποθανόντος καταστήσω· μὴ ὀρθῶς δὲ καταληφθεὶς ὑφ’ ὑμῶν, ὑμῖν καὶ οὐ τούτῳ τὸ μήνιμα τῶν ἀλιτηρίων προστρίψομαι. The sense is, ‘If I were really guilty of this murder and yet owing to the feeble case presented by the prosecutor I were acquitted by you, my escape would bring the Avenger of the dead man upon the prosecutor and not on you; whereas, if you condemn me wrongly when I am innocent, it will be on you and not on him that I, after death, shall turn the wrath of the Avengers.’ Clearly προστρέψομαι is required to answer προστρόπαιον, and it could have no more natural object than τὸ μήνιμα, the special word denoting the wrath which follows on bloodguilt.

[1217] Photius, s.v. παλαμναῖος.

[1218] I venture upon this emphatic negation, not so much because I have found no such usage in my reading of Greek literature, as because the line of the _Eumenides_ in which Orestes calls himself ἀλάστορα, οὐ προστρόπαιον, would be hopelessly ambiguous if such an usage had been possible.

[1219] Antiphon, 119. 6.

[1220] Aesch. _Choeph._ 287.

[1221] Antiphon, 125. 32 and 126. 39.

[1222] Pausan. II. 18. 2.

[1223] Hesychius, s.v. προστρόπαιος.

[1224] Aesch. _Agam._ 1587; see above, p. 480.

[1225] Cf. Aesch. _Eum._ 283 and 450.

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