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.’