Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/467

 revenants executing their own vengeance at the one point at which the grossness of popular superstition must have offended educated sensibilities, and followed the old tradition as faithfully as might be in conceding to the dead man, if not bodily, yet personal, activity.

The same popular beliefs, mutatis mutandis, probably attached also to another class of revenants, dead men whose bodies had not received due burial. The necessary modifications of the superstition would be two in number. First, the anger of the dead man would not endure for ever, unless his body had been so treated that burial was no longer possible, but would cease with the performance of that which he returned to demand; and secondly, he would not be represented as using for his agent his next of kin, who in most cases of the kind would be the very person responsible to him for the neglect of burial. Literature therefore had here no choice of versions; the bodily re-appearance of the dead man was reckoned too gross an idea; the employment of his nearest kinsman to act on his behalf became in this case impossible; a curse was the only expedient. And this is the expedient which we actually find adopted. In the Iliad Hector adjures Achilles not to fulfil his threat of throwing his dead body to the dogs and to the fowls of the air, but to give him burial, 'lest,' he says, 'I become a cause of the gods' wrath against thee'— —and the self-same phrase is put into the mouth of Elpenor's spirit in the Odyssey when he craves due burial of Odysseus. The same idea occurs once more in Pindar's reference to Phrixus, who bade go unto the halls of Aeetes (for there in a strange land he had died, and had not received the burial-rites of his own country) and bring his spirit to rest, and whose bidding Jason is besought by Pelias to fulfil, for that 'already doth old age wait upon me; but with thee the blossom of youth is but burgeoning, and thou canst put away the wrath of powers beneath .' In each of these passages then the actual enforcement of the dead man's will is by means of a curse or 'manifestation of wrath'—for the same word [Greek: mênima] (or [Greek: mênis]) is used; in each case also, as it happens, the curse does not operate automatically but is executed by gods—the method