Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/482

 thy head ([Greek: sô kara miastores]) .' No language could be more simple, more explicit. The very children who lay there murdered at Medea's feet, they and none other should be the Miastores, the Avengers of their own foul deaths.

But of course the word has other applications also. When Aeschylus made the Erinyes threaten that even when Orestes should have fled beneath the earth, he should find another Avenger ([Greek: miastora]) to plague him in their stead, the whole tenor of the passage compels us to understand that that other Avenger is some deity or demon of the nether world—a divine, not a human, Miastor, though at the same time one who will act, like the Erinyes themselves, on behalf of the murdered Clytemnestra.

And, yet again, the same term is applied to a living man, when, as next of kin to him who has been murdered, he is in duty bound to exact vengeance. This time Sophocles is our authority, and the person of whom the word is used is Orestes. 'Oft,' says Electra to Clytemnestra, 'oft hast thou reproached me with saving him to take vengeance upon thee ([Greek: soi trephein miastora]) .'

These three passages then illustrate the threefold application of the name Miastor, and the question to be answered is which represents the primary usage of the word. To multiply instances of each or any would be of no avail; the question is not of the frequency of each usage; the commonest is not necessarily the earliest. How then is the question to be answered? It is, I think, already answered. We have seen that in popular belief the murdered man was the prime avenger of his own wrongs, and that even in literature, when the execution of vengeance is wholly transferred either to the nearest kinsman or to some demonic power, the murdered man is still recognised as the principal and the others are only his agents. It is this relation between them which settles the question. A principal does not act in the name of his agents, but the agents in the name of their principal. The name Miastor therefore belonged first to the dead man himself, and was only extended afterwards to those who wrought vengeance on his behalf.

So much for the usage of the word. Next, how did it acquire