Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/470

 murderer therefore must die, for, as Plato says, 'there is no other kind of purification' in this case than the paying of blood for blood. Religious purification in the ordinary sense of the word was refused, but the extreme punishment was demanded.

Thirdly, in the majority of cases of blood-guilt, where both purification and punishment were required, the two were clearly independent of each other. The purification of the involuntary homicide was to precede the year's retirement. The religious ceremony cleansed the man from pollution, but could no more exempt him from making satisfaction to the dead man whom he had wronged, than absolution of sin pronounced in the Christian confessional can exempt from the legal consequences of crime. The Delphic priesthood itself, if we may trust the testimony of Aeschylus, claimed no more than the power to cleanse; for Apollo himself, holding Orestes guilty of manslaughter though not of murder, after granting him religious purification, does not intervene to save him from that exile which even the unintentional homicide was bidden by Attic law to undergo; nay, he even acquiesces in the necessity of Orestes' flight, bids him not faint before his wanderings are done, and promises only to set a limit thereto and to free him from the pursuing Furies in the end.

The distinction between the pollution and the injury, and between the purification and the punishment, being thus clearly recognised, it is necessary, in investigating the relations between the dead man and his murderer, to set the purely religious aspect of blood-guilt on one side, and to treat the punishments inflicted upon the murderer simply as the settling of an account between man and man. One point only as regards the pollution need be borne in mind, namely, that purification was granted to the homicide in the interests of gods and men whose abodes would otherwise be defiled by his presence, and that the dead man could not conceivably derive any satisfaction therefrom. On the contrary, his desire for vengeance would naturally lead him to interpose 'the unseen barrier of his wrath' betwixt the guilty man and those altars of the gods where alone purification could be won, and thus to keep his enemy still polluted; for his pollution, just because it was a peril to his fellowmen, carried with it the punishment of utter solitude until he was cleansed. When therefore, as will