Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/455

 Such, I venture to say, has been the conviction deep down in the hearts of the Greek people from the earliest times down to this day. A custom, which consists in a deliberate and sacrilegious act of mutilation, more ghastly than murder itself, perpetrated upon the helpless dead, and which yet has continued unchanged throughout the changes and chances which the Greek people have undergone for more than a score of centuries, can only be based upon the most immutable of superstitious beliefs and dreads, and reveals more unerringly than even the whole literature of Greece the fundamental ideas of the Greek people concerning the avenging of blood. The murdered man in bodily shape avenges his own wrongs.

But while the existence of this belief is thus established by the best evidence of all, namely the fact that men have continued to act upon it, the views of ancient writers on the subject of blood-*guilt are not on that account to be neglected; on the contrary, the whole literature bearing thereupon, and above all the story of the house of Atreus as told by Aeschylus, much as they have been studied, deserve fresh consideration just for the very reason that our judgement of them must be modified by this new fact. Starting with the knowledge of the part which the murdered man himself played according to popular belief in securing the punishment of his murderer, we are enabled more fully to appreciate the genius of Aeschylus in so handling a superstition which, like other things primitive in Greek religion, was still venerated by an age which could discern its grossness, that, without either losing the religious sympathies of his audience by too wide a departure from venerable traditions, or offending their artistic taste by too close an adherence to primitive crudities, he wrought out of that material the fabric of the greatest of tragedies.

What we shall find in thus studying anew some of the literature of the subject is a modification of the grosser elements in the popular superstition such as the last section has already prepared us to expect. We saw there how restricted was the use which the tragedians and others dared to make of the popular belief in corporeal revenants of any kind; we saw that dramatic propriety absolutely forbade the introduction of a dead man to play a part otherwise than in the form of a ghost; and yet more than once we found, especially as the climax of some impreca