Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/462

 almost a necessary result of different social conditions. In ancient Athens the next of kin was required to proceed against the murderer by legal means, and not to commit a breach of law and order by personal violence. In modern Maina the kinsman who should have recourse to law and call in the police would be accounted a recreant; public opinion requires him to find an opportunity, openly or by ambush, of slaying the murderer with his own hand; this is to be his life's work, if need be, and the possibility of failure, save through want of enterprise and energy, is hardly contemplated. But as regards the main issue, namely the belief that the dead man himself is the prime avenger of his own wrongs and that his kinsman acts only under his instigation as an assistant in the work, modern superstition has the entire support both of the drama and of the law of ancient Athens.

Further corroboration is perhaps unnecessary; yet Plato's legislation in the matter of homicide must not be passed over; for it possesses this peculiar interest and importance of its own, that it was confessedly based upon a religious doctrine which Plato esteemed 'old even among the traditions of antiquity .' From what source he obtained the doctrine he does not definitely say; but, from a mention of Delphi in the passage immediately preceding as the supreme authority in all matters of purification from blood-guilt, it may fairly be surmised that this too is a piece of Delphic lore. At any rate Plato accepted it as an authoritative pronouncement to which the homicide must pay due heed.

'The doctrine,' says Plato, 'is that one who has lived his life in the spirit of a free man and meets with a violent death is wroth, while his death is yet recent, against the man who caused it, and when he sees him going his way in the places where he himself was wont to move, he strikes him with the same quaking and terror with which he himself has been filled by the violence done to him, and in his own confusion confounds his enemy and all his doings to the utmost of his power, aided therein by the slayer's own conscience. And that is why it is right that the doer of the deed should in deference to the sufferer withdraw for the full space of the year, and should keep clear of the whole country which the dead man had frequented as his native land;.], which in this passage seems clearly transitive, is perhaps a verbal reminiscence of the old language in which Plato had heard the tradition.]