Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/461

 in the peculiar conditions of the case which he here presents, follows unswervingly the popular doctrine. It is only Euripides who can fairly be said to have really suppressed anything in this part of the story without troubling to justify himself by the circumstances of Agamemnon's fate. But even Euripides, though he simply ignores in his plot the possibility of Agamemnon's bodily resuscitation, is faithful to the doctrine that the next of kin was actuated in seeking vengeance not by simple piety but by a lively fear of the dead man's wrath.

Moreover, this conception of the relations subsisting between the murdered man and his nearest kinsman did not merely furnish the motif of some fine passages of Tragedy; it served also a more prosaic purpose, and actually formed the basis first of Attic law concerning blood-guilt, and then of Plato's Laws in the same connexion.

At Athens, as is well known, the duty of prosecuting a murderer (or homicide) was imposed by law upon the nearest relative of the murdered man. But the obligation was not only legal; it was also, and indeed primarily, religious. The law did no more than affirm and regulate a custom which religious tradition had long established. To this fact Antiphon especially bears witness in certain passages with which I must deal more fully later; but the whole tenor of his appeals to the religious feelings and fears of the jury is strictly in accord with the Maniote doctrine of the present day, save that in one small point he takes a more merciful view. In Maina it is held that, if the next of kin fail to avenge the dead man, no matter to what cause the failure be due, he falls a prey to the dead man's wrath. Antiphon on the contrary asserts that, if the next of kin have honestly done his best to bring the murderer to justice, he will not be punished for failure therein; and yet he does not represent the dead man as inactive in such a case, but dares to threaten the jury that the murdered man's anger will now descend, not upon his kinsman who has loyally striven to avenge him, but upon the jury who, by unjustly acquitting and harbouring the murderer, make themselves accomplices in his crime and sharers in his pollution. This difference of opinion however is of minor importance, and seems to be