Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/486

 regarded as evidence in favour of Clement's classification of Alastores among gods is on fuller enquiry rather a refutation of that view. In the Persae of Aeschylus the messenger, who reports to the queen the disaster which has befallen the Persian fleet, sets it down to supernatural agency:

[Greek: êrxen men ô despoina, tou pantos kakou phaneis alastôr ê kakos daimôn pothen].

This has generally been taken to mean that the beginning of the disaster was due to the sudden appearance of 'some vengeful or malicious deity.' But elsewhere in Tragedy [Greek: alastôr] is treated not as adjective but as substantive; and, since there is no compulsion to suppose other than the ordinary use of the word here, it appears better to translate the phrase 'some Avenger or some malicious god.' In other words the real, if unemphatic, contrast implied in the phrase is not between [Greek: alastôr] and [Greek: kakos]—no contrast is possible there —but between [Greek: alastôr] and [Greek: daimôn]. The inference therefore is rather that the Alastor in this passage was not conceived as a deity.

There are other passages of Greek Tragedy also in which the balance of probability seems to me to incline towards interpreting the name Alastor in the sense of a revenant and not of a god. Two such occur in the Medea of Euripides—the same play, be it noted, which contains that perfectly plain statement that the dead children of Medea are themselves the Miastores who will punish her. The first is in the scene in which Medea works herself up to the perpetration of her crime. Passionate love of her children, passionate jealousy and fury against their father, alternate in tragic turmoil, until the tense agony of spirit is let loose in that fierce oath,

'No, by the Avengers that lurk deep in hell, Ne'er shall it come to pass that I should leave My children to mine enemies' despite. Most surely they must die; and since they must, 'Twas my womb bare them, 'tis my hand shall slay .' in cap. 33 (p. 85 ). He does not however infer that the words really contrasted are [Greek: alastôr] and [Greek: daimôn], but claims for the particle [Greek: ê] an epexegetic sense ('or, in other words,') besides its usual disjunctive sense ('or else'). I am far from being satisfied that the epexegetic use of [Greek: ê] existed at all in Classical Greek, which idiomatically employed [Greek: kai] in that way. At any rate its existence is not proved by the other passages which Geddes cites—Aesch. Pers. 430 and Soph. Phil. 934—where the [Greek: ê] perhaps equals vel rather than aut, but has none of the epexegetic sense of sive.]