Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/484

 though the instances of its use are far more numerous than those of Miastor, I am still unable to select three passages and to say 'Here are my proofs of the triple application of the word.' Indeed all that I can prove by the evidence of any single passage taken alone is curiously enough the existence of what I take to have been the rarest of the three usages—the application of the name Alastor to the kinsman of the dead man, as being the agent of his vengeance. Just as Sophocles speaks of Orestes being preserved as a Miastor to take vengeance on Clytemnestra for his father's death, so does Aeschylus make the same Orestes name himself an Alastor on the score of the vengeance which he has taken. 'Queen Athene,' he prays, 'at Loxias' bidding am I come; receive thou me graciously, avenger as I am, no murderer, nor of defiled hand [Greek: alastora, ou prostropaion, oud' aphoibanton chera] .' Such, I am convinced, is the right rendering of the passage. The lexicons indeed cite the line as an example of the alleged passive meaning of [Greek: alastôr]—one who suffers from divine vengeance, an accursed wretch ; and I acknowledge that such a meaning would make passable sense of the passage; for Orestes was indeed suffering from the vengeance of the Erinyes. But I hold, and I shall endeavour to prove later, that [Greek: alastôr] never possessed a passive meaning, and I claim moreover that the active meaning of 'Avenger,' which I attribute to the word here as elsewhere, is immensely preferable in itself. For Orestes throughout pleads justification ; he has avenged murder, not committed it; he has discharged a duty to his dead sire, not perpetrated a wanton crime against his mother; he slew her indeed, but his motive was pious, and the ordaining of his act divine. On the grounds therefore, first, of the word's own active meaning, secondly, of the whole trend of Orestes' defence of his conduct, and last, but by no means least, of the exact parallel furnished by Sophocles' use of the word Miastor, I am confident that Alastor as applied by Orestes to himself means an 'Avenger.'

That the word however was not primarily applied to the kinsman acting on behalf of the murdered man will be universally conceded; in the vast majority of passages some supernatural being is clearly intended. But it has been too hastily assumed that the