Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/491

 could be aptly described as a 'wanderer'; moreover we know that the murdered man was actually so conceived, and that, among the punishments by which he sought to make his murderer suffer the same lot as he himself endured, one of the most conspicuous was the punishment of wandering and exile. The name Alastor therefore, like Miastor, denoted first of all the dead man himself, and was only secondarily extended to human or divine agents seeking vengeance on his behalf.

It remains only to enquire how the meaning 'Avenger' was evolved from the meaning 'Wanderer,' and so completely superseded it that the name Alastores was extended to those agents who were in no obvious sense 'Wanderers' but simply 'Avengers.'

The first occurrence of the word is in the Iliad, as the proper name of a Greek warrior. This fact tends to show that the word had as yet acquired none of that ill-omened sense which it undoubtedly bears in Greek Tragedy. It was used rather, we may believe, in its original and literal sense of 'wanderer,' and the adoption of such a word as a proper name is entirely consistent with the principles of Homeric nomenclature. Hector, Nestor, Mēstor, are famous names of the same class.

Otherwise than as a proper name the word is not used in Homer, nor does it occur at all again, so far as I am aware, before the time of Aeschylus. It is during this interval then that the evolution of meaning must have taken place; for by the age of Aeschylus the idea of vengeance—and vengeance of a horrible kind—had become the ordinary signification of the word. My view then is that the intervening centuries had witnessed a gradual differentiation of the several words which alike originally meant a 'wanderer,' a differentiation such that [Greek: alêtês] remained the ordinary and general term, while [Greek: alastôr] was little by little restricted to the wanderer from the dead, the revenant; and that subsequently from meaning a revenant of any and every kind it became limited to that single class of revenants whose wanderings. The hiatus in the third foot has been made the basis of a suggestion, to which Mr P. Giles has kindly called my attention, that [Greek: alastôr] should begin with a digamma. There is however no need for the supposition, since hiatus after the trochaic caesura is not infrequent (e.g. Il. 569) and some license is generally allowed in any case in the metrical treatment of proper names; moreover, in Il. 333, we have a line [Greek: dios Alastôr] which makes against the original existence of a digamma in the word.]