Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/471

 appear later, the murdered man is described not only as an avenger of his own wrongs, but as one who strives to keep alive the religious defilement of the murderer, there is no confusion of the moral and the religious aspects of murder, but rather the injured man is conceived as wreaking his vengeance by every possible means, not only directly by the sufferings which he can personally inflict, but also indirectly by the privation which the state of pollution necessarily involves.

The nature of the direct acts of vengeance, which are now to be examined, can best be learnt from that passage of the Choephori which depicts the horrible penalties awaiting Orestes if by inaction he should make himself a consenter to the crime of Clytemnestra. We have already learnt that in such a case the defaulting kinsman incurred precisely the same punishment as he should have assisted to inflict on the actual murderer. That therefore with which Orestes was threatened was that to which Clytemnestra was already condemned. The punishments named are those with which, according to popular superstition, a murdered man, risen in bodily substance from the grave, could requite his enemy. For no one, I suppose, would suggest that Aeschylus, who followed popular tradition so scrupulously in all that did not absolutely conflict with dramatic propriety, invented for himself the whole scheme of penalties here set forth. That he was bound to modify the means whereby the punishments were inflicted, in order to avoid the incongruity of a revenant upon the stage, we already know and shall see again; but how closely he adhered to the popularly accepted scheme of punishments, even when he was forced to find some new means of inflicting them, will incidentally be shown by that detailed examination to which his list of penalties must now be subjected.

The first penalty is the physical torment of leprous blains that consume the body and age the sufferer prematurely. At first we are inclined to wonder why leprosy is selected by the dead man as his means of retaliation against his enemy; but a little reflection will lead us to guess that in this particular act of vengeance Aeschylus could not actually reproduce the popular doctrine. The common-folk believed in the bodily activity of the dead; and, if they believed also that bodily sufferings were part of the punishment which the murderer incurred, the two