Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/450

 tenement. This disagreement can only mean that Homer and Euripides were not following an acknowledged doctrine of popular religion in representing Patroclus and Polydorus in the form of ghosts; for in that case they would surely have agreed with the popular doctrine, and therefore also with each other, in assigning a reason for the ghost's interest in the burial of its discarded body. Either then there was no popular belief on the whole subject—which is incredible—or else it was such as literary propriety forbade them to follow. Now if the popular belief was that the unburied appeared as corporeal revenants, their eagerness for burial is intelligible; but if a ghost be substituted by literary convention for the revenant, a good reason for such eagerness becomes hard to find. Hence the inconsequence of Homer's reason; hence the silence of Euripides.

But if, as now seems likely, the substitution of mere ghost for bodily revenant was a literary convention, it by no means follows that that convention is valueless as a guide to the popular beliefs of the time. It may represent a part of those beliefs, though not the whole. The established doctrines on this whole subject were not remodelled by the tragedians save in obedience to the laws of their art. This we definitely know; for the causes which they assign for the unrest of the dead are numbered among the popularly received causes which remain to this day; and even the idea of physical resuscitation was retained and effectively utilised by them within certain limitations. Clearly then they kept what they could, and only changed what they must. Judicious selection rather than arbitrary invention was the method by which the literary tradition was established. Since then that tradition uniformly speaks of the soul's return, while discrepancies only arise in accounting for the soul's interest in the corpse, was it perhaps only in the latter respect that literary tradition parted company with popular belief? Did the spirit as well as the body of the dead play some part in the popular superstition? Did the common-*folk too hold that, after the separation of soul from body at death, the soul itself under certain conditions returned from its flight towards the house of Hades—returned however not to appear alone in ghostly guise, but to re-animate the dead body and raise it up as a revenant? Was this the popular doctrine from which literature selected, recording the soul's return, but suppressing the