Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/472

 beliefs must surely have been correlated; the physical sufferings of the murderer must have been conceived to be caused by the physical activity of the murdered; or, to put it more plainly, if we may elucidate ancient superstition by the aid of modern, the murdered man, in the form of a revenant bent on vengeance, was believed to leap upon his victim and rend him with his teeth and suck out his very life-blood. Clearly Aeschylus could not commit himself to so crude a presentation of a revenant; he could not conjure up before his audience the spectacle of the dead Agamemnon athirst for actual blood; but equally clearly he knew that popular superstition, and had it in his mind when he depicted the horrors of leprosy. For the bodily assault of a revenant he substituted a natural malady engendered by a dead man's unseen wrath; but he described the operation of that malady in language suggested by the popular presentment of a personal avenger more reasonable indeed in his purpose but scarcely less ferocious in his acts than a Slavonic vampire—'blains that leap upon the flesh and with savage jaws eat out its erstwhile vigour .' The means of inflicting the punishment is changed, but the actual punishment of the murderer is the same as if it were not leprosy but in very truth a vampire, which leapt upon him and gnawed his flesh and drained his life-blood. So faithful is Aeschylus to the crude popular idea of a retribution which required that he who had spilled another's blood should have his own blood drunk by his victim.

The second penalty is the mental agony of one whom 'madness and vain terror sprung of the darkness do shake and confound .' Here again the punishment is in strict accord with that law that a man must suffer as he has wrought. That old tradition recorded and revered by Plato, on which I have already touched, taught that every man who was slain by violence was himself filled thereby with quaking and terror and confusion of spirit, and accordingly sought his revenge in terrifying and confounding the slayer. No clearer commentary on the lines of Aeschylus could be desired. Plato explains how the terror and the confusion—for he employs the selfsame words as Aeschylus—by which the murderer is overwhelmed are the exact counterpart of the mental anguish which his violence brought upon his victim.