Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/459

 who can claim to be the most distinctively Hellenic inhabitants of the Greek mainland. The peninsula which terminates in the headland of Taenarum is the home of a race which is historically known to be of more purely Greek descent than the inhabitants of any other district, and which both in physical type and in social and religious customs stands apart—the Maniotes. Among their customs is the vendetta, and the beliefs on which it rests are in brief as follows. A man who has been murdered cannot rest in his grave until he has been avenged, but issues forth as a vrykolakas athirst for his enemy's blood; for, in Maina, one who has turned vrykolakas for this cause is still credited with some measure of reasonableness. To secure his bodily dissolution and repose, it is incumbent upon the next of kin to slay the murderer or, at the least, some near kinsman of the murderer. Until that be done, the son (to take the most common instance) lies under his dead father's curse; and, if he be so craven or so unfortunate as to find no opportunity for vengeance, the curse under which he has lived clings to him still in death, and he too becomes a vrykolakas.

The Maniote doctrine then amounts to this, that the murdered man rises from his grave to execute his own vengeance, which consists in bringing upon his murderer the same fate as he himself has suffered through his enemy's deed—a violent death and consequently resuscitation; but at the same time he demands the assistance of his nearest kinsman, under pain of suffering a like fate hereafter if his efforts in the cause of vengeance are feeble or fruitless. Thus the belief in powerful and vindictive revenants forms the very mainspring of the vendetta.

To this view both Euripides and Aeschylus subscribe in telling the story of Orestes. In the former we have the answer made by Orestes himself to the tirade of Tyndareus against the vendetta: 'Nay, if by silence,' he says, 'I had consented unto my mother's deeds, what would my dead sire have done to me? Would he not have hated me and made me the sport of Furies? Hath my mother these goddesses at her side to help her cause, and hath not he that was more despitefully used?' Surely no clearer statement could be made of Orestes' apprehension that, if he should