Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/169

 The Citrsing of Venizelos. 137

A traveller in Palestine has described how between Sidon and Tyre his Mohammedan companions discharged stones and curses, with equal force and volubility, at the grave of a celebrated robber who had been knocked on the head there some fifty years before, and who still continued to receive this double testimony to his character from passers- by, whose stones remained in a heap on the spot, while their curses had melted into thin air.^ After all a stone is perhaps a more effective missile to hurl at a man than a curse, unless, indeed, as Voltaire justly observed, the curse is accompanied with a sufficient dose of arsenic.

In view of the extraordinary persistence — we may almost say the indestructibility — of superstition, it seems likely that the remarkable rite of cursing recently directed against M. Venizelos has not been simply invented by his enemies, but that it is based on a tradition which has been handed down from antiquity, though I am not able to cite any exact parallel in ancient Greek literature. Euripides represents the adulterer and murderer, ^gisthus, flushed with wine, leaping on the grave of his victim and pelting it with stones, but he does not say that the villain reinforced with curses these expressions of his malignant hate.'^ Perhaps a nearer resemblance to the modern ecclesiastical comedy, in which the Metropolitan of Athens took the principal part, may be found in the treatment which Plato in his Lazvs recommended should be meted out to the wretch who had murdered his father or mother, his brother or sister, his son or daughter. According to the philosopher, the criminal should be put to death and his body cast out naked at a cross-road outside of the city ; then the magistrates should assemble, and each of them should cast a stone at the head of the corpse in order to purge the city from the pollution it had contracted by so

"G. P. Badger, note on The Travels of Ltidovico di Varthenta (Hakluyl Society, London, 1863), p. 45. ' Euripides, Electra, 326-328.