Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/460

 fail in the duty which his dead father imposed upon him, the dead man would turn other ministers of his vengeance upon his cowardly son, to plague him, as if he were an accomplice, with the same punishment as had been designed for the actual author of the murder. And similarly in Aeschylus we have the retort of Orestes to his mother's last warning before he slays her. 'Beware,' she says, 'the fiends thy mother's wrath shall rouse'; and he answers, 'But, an I flag, how should I 'scape my sire's?' Thus according to the ancient tragedians the vendetta of Orestes was prompted by the same beliefs and fears as still stir the Maniotes thereto.

So far then as concerns the vengeance for Agamemnon's death, ancient drama added no new element to the popular beliefs, but was able to satisfy the requirements of art by judicious selection from them. The idea, to which the Maniotes still cling, that the murdered man in the form of a revenant avenges his own wrongs, is, save for the rare verbal allusions which we have noticed, rejected, and forms no part of the plot; but the belief, that fear of the dead man's wrath is a cogent motive to action on the part of his kinsman, is retained. And here it is interesting to observe that Aeschylus even justifies his rejection of the first half of the popular doctrine, and that too by a plea perfectly satisfactory to the popular mind. Agamemnon's case was peculiar. Not only had he been murdered, but his dead body according to Aeschylus, who is followed in this by Sophocles, had been mutilated ([Greek: emaschalisthê]) by his murderers. The effect of such mutilation, as we have seen, was to render the revenant powerless to wreak vengeance with his own hands. Hence the work devolving upon Orestes would have been, in popular esteem, doubled; if murder alone had been committed, he would have worked in conjunction, as it were, with the dead man; but the super-added mutilation incapacitated the dead man for bodily work, and placed the whole burden of retribution on the shoulders of his son. This, plainly put, is the meaning of the words spoken by the Chorus in the Choephori to Orestes: 'Yea, and he was mutilated, for thou must know the worst. Cruel was she in the slaying of him, cruel still in the burial, in that she thought to make his doom a burden past bearing upon thy life .' Thus it may be claimed that Aeschylus,