Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/473

 Aeschylus then once again was following closely an old tradition of the popular religion. It matters not at all that in this case he names the Erinyes as the agents, just as previously he made leprosy the instrument, of the dead man's vengeance. The actual sufferings which the murderer must undergo are in this case also identical in character with those which he caused to his victim.

The third punishment of the blood-guilty man consists in wandering friendless and outcast; and this again is no arbitrary invention of Aeschylus, but was clearly prescribed by that old tradition which, in Plato's reckoning, justified the legal imposition of a year's retirement even upon those who had shed blood involuntarily. Where then is that correspondence, which our examination of the first two penalties has led us to expect, between this third punishment and the sufferings of the dead man who exacts it? Is there the same nicety of retribution? Clearly so. The dead man became in popular belief a revenant, a wanderer from out the grave, pitiable in his loneliness, cut off from all friendly intercourse with living men, not yet admitted to the fellowship of the departed, the sorriest of outcasts. Such was the misery to which the murderer by his act of violence had brought his victim; such therefore too the misery which the murderer himself must taste in his wanderings and loneliness here on earth, though it were but a foretaste of more consummate misery hereafter. Truly even in life the murderer was made to suffer as he had wrought.

And then comes the fourth penalty, death; for though Aeschylus, in the list of punishments which we have now before us, touches but lightly on this, the most obvious form of retribution, yet elsewhere he repeatedly affirms, and many another re-echoes, the doctrine that blood cries for blood. Perhaps in this passage he felt that by depicting the gnawing pangs of leprosy he had sufficiently proclaimed the sure approach of death; perhaps he passed it by as a slight thing in comparison with the horror that yet remained to be told. For death did not close the tale of punishments; the blood-guilty man, so chant the Furies, 'though he be dead is none too free .'

And so we pass to the last requirement of vengeance, that the outcast shall have no friend to honour his dead body with the.]