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

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,

‘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,’

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.

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]).