Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study...

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

Is this the man whose words, spoken but a moment later, shall be interpreted to mean, ‘I will not run away, because the danger that threatens my friend cannot hurt me’? The thought is deeper, more generous, than that. Theseus is thinking not of himself, but of his friend. It is the word ‘pollution,’ used first by himself and caught up by Heracles, which arrests his attention. Was his friend ‘polluted’ by a deed of blood, wrought in madness, expiated in tears? Polluted? Yes, in the sense that religious purification was required[1190]. He cannot deny the pollution. But could the deed also be punished as the murder of close kinsfolk was wont to be punished? Could the children, albeit slain by their own father’s hand, desire revenge upon him who loved them and was loved of them? ‘No,’ he answers boldly, ‘pollution (μίασμα) there is, but no Alastor, no Avenger of blood, can come from them that love against them that love.’ How then does Theseus picture the Alastor who, but for the bond of love between the father and his dead children, would seek vengeance for their death? The phrase which he uses is ambiguous—perhaps deliberately ambiguous—οὐδεὶς ... ἐκ τῶν φίλων. It may mean equally well ‘no one of those who love’ or ‘no one coming from those who love.’

But when the close correspondence of μίασμα, ‘pollution,’ and ἀλάστωρ ‘avenger,’ is noted in this passage, and when it is also remembered that the dead children of Medea are elsewhere plainly named Miastores, it is hard to suppose that an audience familiar with the belief that the dead themselves avenged their own wrongs would not have interpreted the ambiguous phrase to mean ‘none of these children shall rise up from the grave as an Alastor, for love is stronger than vengeance.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some evidence for the first stage in this development of meaning is furnished by the Tragic usage of the verb from which the substantive is derived; for in both its forms, ἀλᾶσθαι and ἀλαίνειν, it continued to be applied to any of the restless dead, when the substantive ἀλάστωρ, as I conceive, had come to be appropriated to the Avenger only. Indeed it might almost be thought that both Aeschylus and Euripides had an inkling of the derivation and earlier meaning of the substantive; for while idiom debarred them from using ἀλάστωρ in the large sense of any revenant, they certainly used the corresponding verb in contexts which suggest that those who thus ‘wander’ were not imagined by them as vague impalpable ghosts, but possessed for them rather the real substance and physical traits of a revenant. Thus in the Eumenides, though Clytemnestra could not be permitted to play the part of a revenant and appears only as a ghost, yet the more gross and popular conception of her is clearly present to the poet’s mind. Though a ghost, she points to the wounds which her son’s hands inflicted[1197]; though a ghost, she is made to exhort the Erinyes to vengeance ‘on behalf of her very soul’ (τῆς ἐμῆς πέρι ψυχῆς)[1198]. Strange gestures and strange language indeed, if the so-called ghost had been conceived as a mere disembodied soul! But the popular conception of the revenant penetrated even here. And was it not the same conception which suggested the phrase αἰσχρῶς ἀλῶμαι, ‘I wander in dishonour[1199]’?

In the popular belief, as we know, the murderer was bound to wander after death, suffering as he had wrought; and it is as a murderess[1200] that Clytemnestra avows herself condemned to shameful wanderings. ‘To wander,’ ἀλᾶσθαι, sums up the suffering which the murderer, like his victim, must incur after death. It is likely then that the name ἀλάστωρ too was originally applied to any ‘wanderer’—whether murderer or murdered—before it acquired the connotation of vindictiveness and so became appropriated to the latter only.

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

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

It might be sufficient answer to point out that those revenants who were bent on avenging their own wrongs are likely always to have occupied a prominent place in popular superstition simply because they inspired most terror in the popular mind; other revenants were harmless, and, as harmless, liable to be little regarded and seldom named; and the most conspicuous class might thus have appropriated to itself the name which properly belonged to all. But there is another influence which, if it did not cause, may at least have facilitated and quickened the change—the influence of the word ἄλαστος, ‘unforgotten,’ which, as I have noted above, was commonly and naturally, in an age when etymology was not science but guess-work, connected with ἀλάστωρ. Etymologically the two words have nothing in common; but that is no obstacle to the supposition that, in their usage, their casual but close similarity of form rendered the meaning of the one susceptible to the influence of the other. Nay more, the fact that the two words, it matters not how erroneously, were actually in early times referred to a common origin[1202] warrants the suggestion that such influence had been exercised. Now ἄλαστος always remained in meaning true to its derivation. Itself employed in the passive sense, ‘unforgotten,’ it seems to have made over the active meaning, ‘unforgetting,’ ‘vindictive’ (which, on the analogy of ἄπρακτος and a score of similar forms, it should naturally have possessed), to the apparently kindred word ἀλάστωρ.

This adventitious meaning accorded well with the popular conception of the most conspicuous class of ‘wanderers’ from the grave—those whose wanderings had a vindictive aim; and thus, by the help of the accidental resemblance of two words, it seems to have come to pass that the term Alastores ceased to be applicable to all kinds of revenants and denoted only the ‘Avengers.’ At this point it became in fact synonymous with Miastores, and, like that word, enlarged its scope so as to denote not only the prime Avenger, the revenant himself, but also any divine or human agents employed by him as subsidiary Avengers.

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

As regards Alastor, this explanation stands already condemned by the fact that it pre-supposes the derivation from λανθάνομαι, and even then it does fresh and incredible violence to language; a sane philologist may commit the error of deriving ἀλάστωρ from λανθάνομαι and making it mean ‘one who does not forget’; but only the maddest could dream of interpreting it as ‘one who does deeds which others do not forget.’ But, if in spite of this we trouble to turn up the references which the lexicons give under this heading, it is obvious at once that there is no more support for such a meaning in idiomatic usage than in etymological origin. Three references are cited. The first is to that passage of the Eumenides in which Orestes declares himself ἀλάστορα, οὐ προστρόπαιον[1203], a phrase which means, as I have already shown, ‘an avenger, not a murderer.’ This then should be classified as an example of the active, not of the hypothetical passive, meaning of Alastor. Of the other two passages, one is from the Ajax of Sophocles, where the hero in his anger and despair speaks of the guileful enemies who robbed him of his prize as Alastores[1204], and the other a passage from Demosthenes in which he criticizes Aeschines for applying the word as an opprobrious name to Philip of Macedon[1205]. But in what possible sense could either Ajax’ enemies or Philip of Macedon be described as ‘suffering from Avengers’?

On the contrary, at the times when the word Alastor was applied to them, their success should surely have suggested that they were favoured by heaven, and their opponents rather were the sufferers. What then was the meaning of the word thus opprobriously employed? A meaning, I answer, very little removed from that of ‘Avenger’ and arising out of it. For how was the Avenger—be he the revenant himself or a demon acting on his behalf—constantly pictured? Was it not as a fiend tormenting with every torment the object of his wrath, plaguing him, maddening him, sucking his very blood? Little wonder then if the justice of that vengeance was sometimes obscured in men’s minds by their horror of it, and if the word Alastor suggested to them a fiend, a merciless tormentor. In that sense Ajax might well apply the name to his enemies, and Aeschines to Philip. Nor are other instances of it lacking. Demosthenes himself, for all his criticism of Aeschines’ vulgarity in calling Philip βάρβαρόν τε καὶ ἀλάστορα, ‘a foreign devil,’ used the same word of Aeschines and his friends[1206]; again, in Sophocles, the lion of Nemea for the loss and havoc that he inflicted is unique among beasts that perish in having merited the same sorry title—βουκόλων ἀλάστωρ, the ‘herdsmen’s Tormentor[1207]’; and indeed, apart from living men and animals, there are many instances in Tragedy[1208] in which the word Alastor, applied to some supernatural foe, revenant or demon, may be more appropriately rendered by ‘fiend’ or ‘tormentor’ than by ‘avenger.’