Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/440

 But let the anti-climax pass. Whence comes the alleged metaphorical meaning of [Greek: taricheuesthai], so foreign to its normal use? How comes it to denote the wasting of disease, and what authority has this supposed use? Its mainstay apparently is a single passage in a pseudo-Demosthenic speech, which, in describing the cowardly assault of a young man upon an old, depicts the aggressor as [Greek: nealês kai prosphatos] and his victim as [Greek: tetaricheumenou kai polyn chronon sympeptôkotos]. But here the metaphor, whatever may be thought of its elegance or of its likelihood to excite mirth rather than indignation, is at least clearly explained both by its antithesis and by its context; [Greek: nealês] and [Greek: prosphatos] are terms properly applied to 'fresh' fish or meat, [Greek: tetaricheumenos] to the same commodities 'preserved' by drying or pickling, and we understand at once that the old man is represented to be dried and shrivelled in appearance. Such is the support for the alleged Aeschylean usage of [Greek: taricheuthenta] without the same antithesis to illuminate its meaning. Are we then to understand that all the fulminations and thunderings of Apollo's oracle dwindle away into an appeal to Orestes' pride in his personal appearance and a warning that leprosy will render him as unattractive as a bloater? Or, if it be claimed that the slow painful process of wasting is suggested rather than its ultimate effect, is it reasonable that a word which properly denotes artificial preservation should be used metaphorically of natural decay? This is not metaphor, but metamorphosis.

Let us then abandon far-fetched explanations; let us conceive it possible that Aeschylus used the word in the sense which it normally bore in relation to the human body—'preserved from corruption,' like the mummies of Egypt—and further that he placed the word [Greek: pamphthartô] in immediate juxtaposition with it in order to emphasise the more strikingly the contrast between the threatened 'non-corruption' and the ordinary 'wasting' powers of death. So understood, the final penalty presents a true climax. As the victim is to be excluded in his lifetime from all intercourse with the living, so in his death, by the withholding of that dissolution without which there is no entrance to the lower world, he is to be cut off from communion with the dead. He is to die, p. 788. [Greek: sympeptôkotos] is a necessary correction of the [Greek: empeptôkotos] of the MSS.]