Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/437

 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 .'

The last phrase of this denunciation,

[Greek: kai kalô tou Tartarou stygnon patrôon Erebos, hôs s' apoikisê],

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 [Greek: apoikizô] 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