Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/466

 course; and probably it was in deference to this doctrine that Plato formulated his own law, that, even in the case of a father being killed by his own son, the dying man might with his last breath remit the curse which such a deed incurred and exempt his son from all except the purifications and the temporary retirement imposed in cases of involuntary homicide.

But more frequently the execution of the curse is conceived to be the work of certain powers of the nether world. These powers however do not act on their own initiative; they are instigated to the task of vengeance by the murdered man himself. Here, no less than in the other renderings of the old tradition, the sufferer himself is the supreme avenger of his own sufferings. The most famous example of this conception is furnished by the plot of the Eumenides. The Furies are represented as the servants of Clytemnestra, faithful witnesses to her wrongs, exactors of blood for blood on her behalf. When they slumber and allow Orestes to escape the while, her ghost approaches them in no suppliant manner for all their godhead, but chides them and urges them afresh, like hounds, upon the quarry's trail. And, most significant of all, there is one passage in which they say of themselves that the name whereby they are known in their home beneath the earth is the name of Curses ([Greek: Arai]) ; they are in fact the personification of those curses which a murdered man himself directs against his murderer. Nor is this notion confined to drama. Xenophon is little prone to poetic imaginings; yet he can find an argument for the immortality of the soul in what he considers an established fact of human experience, namely, that the spirits of those who have been unjustly slain inspire terrors in their murderers' hearts and 'send against them' certain 'avengers of blood' ([Greek: palamnaious epipempousi] ). And elsewhere again and again we hear of the same avengers under a variety of names—[Greek: miastores], [Greek: alastores], [Greek: prostropaioi]—names which will receive consideration later and by their very meaning and usage will confirm once more my contention that, by whatever instrument or agency the murder is represented as being avenged, ancient literature only departed from the primitive belief in bodily