Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/476

 of death, ordained it as a satisfaction of the murdered man's claims to vengeance. The State, so to speak, sided with the dead man and assisted him to exact blood for blood. Again the stoning of the dead body by representatives of the city was intended, we are expressly told, to free the whole city from guilt—from guilt, that is, in the eyes of the murdered man, who might otherwise visit his wrath upon the city as though it had consented to the crime or had too lightly punished it. Can it then be supposed that the State was actuated by any other motive in carrying out the rest of the penalty? It was surely still in deference to the murdered man's desires that the murderer's corpse was left unburied. To refuse burial was the surest means of condemning the man to resuscitation and thereby of satisfying his former victim's uttermost demands.

Thus our detailed examination of the Aeschylean catalogue of penalties establishes beyond doubt that of which we had already had some evidence, namely, that all the punishments which were inflicted on the murderer—and, in popular belief, inflicted by the murdered man on his own behalf—were an exact reproduction of the sufferings which the murdered man himself had undeservingly endured, and culminated therefore, as they should, in the blood-*guilty man becoming, like his victim, a revenant.

The main problem then of this section is now fully solved; but incidentally much light has been thrown upon the character ascribed by the Greek people in antiquity to those revenants who were not merely pitiable sufferers but were active in bringing a like doom upon those who had wronged them. And the character of these Avengers approximates very closely to that of the modern vrykolakes. True, there is one fundamental difference; the ancient Avenger directed his wrath solely against the author of his sufferings, or at the most extended it only to those who, owing to him the duty of furthering his vengeance, had proved lax and cowardly therein; the modern vrykolakas is unreasoning in his wrath and plagues indiscriminately all who fall in his way. But the actual sufferings which the vrykolakas inflicts are identical with those which furnished Aeschylus with his tale of threatened horrors. Modern stories there are in plenty, which tell how the vrykolakas springs upon his victim and rends him and drinks his blood; how sheer terror of his aspect has driven men mad; how, in order to