Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/439

 sanctuary, had claimed as it were for the popular superstition the highest religious sanction.

In the Choephori Orestes is made to review in a speech as difficult as it is powerful the motives which are urging him on to the requital of blood with blood. Most cogent among these motives is the explicit command issued from Apollo's Delphic shrine, bidding him not spare his father's murderess, mother though she be, and foretelling the direst penalties for disobedience. And what are these penalties? First, the physical torment of 'blains that leap upon the flesh and with savage jaws eat out its erstwhile vigour'; second, the mental horror of coming madness, 'the arrow that flieth in darkness winged by the powers of hell with the curse of fallen kindred, even raving and vain terror born of the night'; third, banishment from home and city, with no place at friendly board, no part in drink-offering and sacrifice; and yet one penalty more wherein should culminate the threatened agonies, 'to die at last with none to honour, none to love him, damned, even in the doom that wastes all, to know no corruption.'

Of the earlier penalties and of their intimate connexion with one branch of this popular superstition I shall have occasion to speak later. Here I have only to justify the new rendering which I have given to the last lines of the passage,

[Greek: pantôn d' atimon kaphilon thnêskein chronô kakôs taricheuthenta pamphthartô morô].

It has generally been held that [Greek: taricheuthenta] is here metaphorically used of the wasting or withering of the body through physical suffering, the first penalty, or, it may be, through mental distress, the second. In other words, the last line of the passage merely sums up in a concise expression a penalty, or penalties, previously detailed. On the same view it is but consistent to regard [Greek: pantôn atimon kaphilon] as a similar summary of the third penalty. Stripped of these recapitulations and vain repetitions Apollo's final threat amounts to—what? [Greek: thnêskein chronô], 'to die in course of time.' A blood-curdling and unique climax of human suffering in very truth! And this a last threat after leprosy and madness and outcast loneliness? Surely rather a promise of release and rest.