Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/469

 Furies in like manner are only the servants of the dead Clytemnestra, instigated by her to their pursuit. The slaying of Clytemnestra and the sufferings of Orestes are the punishments which the dead Agamemnon and the dead Clytemnestra, even in the literary version of the story, impose, and, in a more primitive and gross form of it, might themselves have inflicted.

But before examining the nature of those punishments in detail, it will be well to recall the fact that to the eyes of the ancient Greeks murder or homicide always presented itself in two distinct aspects. Regarded from one point of view, it was the gravest possible injury to the man who was slain. Viewed from the other, it was a source of 'pollution' ([Greek: miasma, mysos, hagos]), an abomination to the gods and a peril to living men; for the taint of bloodshed was conceived as a contagious physical malady, which the polluted person by touch or even by speech might communicate to his fellow-men, and not to them only, but to places which he visited, the market, the harbours, the temples ; nay, even the sanctity of the gods' images was not proof against the contamination of his bloodstained hands. In brief, the two aspects of homicide were the moral and the religious aspects; and both moral and religious atonements were required. The wrong done to the dead man was requited by the sufferings which he in turn imposed; the pollution, being primarily a state of religious disability (for it involved, as Plato says, the enmity of the gods), was removed by a religious ceremony of purification.

How clearly marked was this distinction in antiquity is evident from Plato's laws on homicide, as a brief consideration of two or three special cases will show.

First, in the most venial case of homicide, where a man had killed his own slave, he incurred no punishment at all, but was bound none the less to get himself purified.

Secondly, in cases of the utmost enormity, as where a man wilfully murdered his father or mother, religion provided no means of purification. Blood-guilt in general was 'hard to cure'; but parricide belonged to the class of sins 'incurable .' Such a.]