Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/468

 preferred also, as we saw, in cases of blood-guilt; but here also, as there, the personal activity of the dead man is frankly acknowledged; the phrase of Homer 'lest I become ' and that of Pindar 'Phrixus doth bid ' clearly suggest that the gods were instigated to intervene by the sufferer himself.

The case then stands thus. We learnt in the last chapter that the unburied dead no less than the murdered were popularly believed to become revenants. We have since learnt that the murdered, in the capacity of revenants, were popularly believed to avenge their own wrongs with their own hands, but that ancient literature commonly presents a modified version of that belief according to which the personal activity indeed of the dead man is recognised, but the instrument of his vengeance is a curse executed by demonic agents. We find now that literature assigns also to the unburied dead the same personal activity in punishing those whose neglect has caused their suffering, and by the same means. The reasonable inference is that here too we have a modified version of a popular belief that the unburied, like the murdered, not only became revenants, which we know, but, in the capacity of revenants, themselves punished those who refused or neglected to render them their due funeral rites.

Thus the same principle governed the whole system of the punishment incurred by men who were guilty either of murder or of leaving the dead unburied—the principle that the dead man whom they had injured in either of these ways himself requited those injuries. Hence, when we proceed to examine the actual punishments inflicted, we need no longer concern ourselves with the fact that literature attributes the infliction now to the nearest kinsman of the dead man and anon to some divine avenger; but, whatsoever instrument or agency is employed, we know that the dead man himself was believed to control and direct it, and therefore that the punishment thus effected was conceived to be such as the dead man himself willed and, in popular belief, could with his own hands enforce. Thus in the Oresteia the punishment of Clytemnestra is actually effected by Orestes, and again the punishment of Orestes is entrusted to the Furies; but Orestes is only the minister of his dead father, carrying out the work of retribution under pain of incurring the same punishment himself if by inaction he should consent unto his mother's crime; and the