Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/448

 *nants, whereas they shrank from presenting the actuality. But the references to the possibility occur, chiefly at any rate, in imprecations, with the result that at first sight a curse would seem to have been the only recognised cause of bodily resuscitation in ancient times; whereas the most famous literary examples of the actual re-appearance of the dead—Clytemnestra and Polydorus in tragedy, or, if we go back to Homer, Patroclus and Elpenor—happen to be cases in which the cause was lack of burial or a violent death, with the result that literary tradition inclined to substitute ghosts for the corporeal revenants of the popular creed in these two cases.

Such is my explanation of the discrepancy; and the probability of it is warranted by three considerations—first, that Greek Tragedy does contain one or two references to the possible resuscitation of other than the accursed—second, that Plato modifies the popular notions concerning the accursed in almost the same way that the tragedians modified the fate of the unburied and of those slain by violence—third, that the literary tradition concerning ghosts is in itself inconsistent and bears the marks of arbitrary modification.

The most important reference in Tragedy occurs in the Choephori, where Orestes and Electra pray their murdered father to rise from the grave in bodily form. This passage, together with a close parallel from Sophocles, will be fully discussed later. Here I need only point out the justification by Aeschylus of my theory that the substitution of ghost for revenant is a necessary literary convention. He suggests verbally the possible uprising of the murdered Agamemnon as a revenant; but, when it comes to an actual presentation of the murdered Clytemnestra on the stage, his dramatis persona is a ghost.

Next, Plato, in a well-known passage of the Phaedo, speaks of the souls of dead men having actually been seen in the form of shadowy apparitions haunting the neighbourhood of tombs—souls, he explains, which have not been fully cleansed and freed from the visible material world, but still have some part therein and hence are themselves visible; and, he adds, these are the souls of the wicked, which are compelled to wander thus in punishment for their former evil life. Naturally Plato of all men—and of all