Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/435

 A casual allusion to the same superstition occurs also in Lucian. '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?'

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. 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, [Greek: na mên ton dechtê hê gês], 'May the earth