Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/477

 escape him, whole families have been driven forth from their native island to wander in exile ; how death has often been the issue of his assaults; and how those whom a vrykolakas has slain become themselves vrykolakes. Only his unreasoning and indiscriminate fury is necessarily of Slavonic origin; his acts are the acts of those ancient revenants whose own wrongs rightfully made them the Avengers of blood. Apart from the one Slavonic trait, the characters of the vrykolakas and the ancient Avenger are identical.

And perhaps this identity is most clearly seen in the one case in which the old Avenger punished not only the immediate author of his own wrongs, but a whole community which had subsequently given the guilty man an asylum. We have noticed how Antiphon ventured to threaten an Athenian jury with such punishment at the hands of the dead man if they wrongfully acquitted his murderer. In the same spirit Aeschylus makes the Furies, as the agents of the dead Clytemnestra, menace the whole land of Attica with a venomous curse that shall blast man and beast and herb in revenge for the wresting of Orestes from their grasp. And such too is the dread which in the Phoenissae of Euripides stirs Creon to make to the blood-guilty Oedipus this appeal: 'Nay, remove thee hence: verily 'tis not in scorn that I say this, nor in enmity to thee, but because of thine Avengers, in fear lest the land suffer some hurt .' In such cases the punishments with which a whole community is threatened, although still a reasonable measure, approach most nearly to the indiscriminate violence of the modern vrykolakas.

For the fulfilment of such threats as these we must turn to the Supplices of Aeschylus, and there we shall find a description of just such a devastation as is said to have been suffered by the inhabitants of Santorini and many other places in the seventeenth century. The story of Aeschylus tells how 'there came unto the Argive land, from the shore of Naupactus, Apis, son of Apollo, both healer and seer, and cleansed the land of monsters that destroyed mankind, even of those that Earth, tainted with the, which is fully discussed below, pp. 465 ff.]