Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/441

 with none to honour him with the rites due to the dead, none to love him and shed the tears that are their just meed, but even in that last doom which consumes all others is damned to be withheld from corruption. As 'Euripides the human' uses the common phrase of to-day 'May the earth not receive,' so Aeschylus the divine anticipates the ecclesiastical formula, 'and after death thou shalt be indissoluble.'

The same contrast between the all-wasting functions of death and the 'bound' condition of the damned now becomes intelligible in two other passages of Aeschylus.

In the Supplices the king of the Pelasgians, who is beset by the daughters of Danaus with the twofold claim of kinsfolk and suppliants, and besought to deliver them from the lust and violence of their pursuers, acknowledges himself in a sore strait. If he rescue his suppliants, he may involve his people in war; if he refuse to hearken, he fears that, as a tacit accomplice in the violence and pollution threatened, he may make to himself 'the God of all destruction a stern Avenger ever present, an Avenger that sets not free the dead even in Hades' home .'

Again in the Eumenides, when Orestes having slain his mother is no longer seeking for vengeance but flying therefrom with no hope of safety save in the promises of Apollo whose will he has done, the band of pursuing Furies, like to be presently thwarted by that god, yet comfort their black hearts with the assurance of future retribution. 'Yea,' cries one, 'me doth Apollo vex, but Orestes shall he not redeem; though he flee from me beneath the earth, there is no freeing for him, but because of his blood-guiltiness he shall find another in my stead to visit his pollution on his head .'

The conception of future punishment in these two passages is clearly the same. What then is meant by the fear that even the dead may not be set free? and who is 'the God of all destruction' who is named in the first passage as the author of that punishment? The answer has already been found. 'The all-destroying, God' ([Greek: ho panôlethros theos]) is none other than the 'all-wasting doom' ([Greek: pamphthartos moros]) of Apollo's oracle—Death personified instead of death abstract; and Death's refusal 'to set.].]