Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/492

 were guided by the desire for revenge—the class to whom the name Miastores had always belonged.

Some evidence for the first stage in this development of meaning is furnished by the Tragic usage of the verb from which the substantive is derived; for in both its forms, [Greek: alasthai] and [Greek: alainein], it continued to be applied to any of the restless dead, when the substantive [Greek: alastôr], as I conceive, had come to be appropriated to the Avenger only. Indeed it might almost be thought that both Aeschylus and Euripides had an inkling of the derivation and earlier meaning of the substantive; for while idiom debarred them from using [Greek: alastôr] in the large sense of any revenant, they certainly used the corresponding verb in contexts which suggest that those who thus 'wander' were not imagined by them as vague impalpable ghosts, but possessed for them rather the real substance and physical traits of a revenant. Thus in the Eumenides, though Clytemnestra could not be permitted to play the part of a revenant and appears only as a ghost, yet the more gross and popular conception of her is clearly present to the poet's mind. Though a ghost, she points to the wounds which her son's hands inflicted ; though a ghost, she is made to exhort the Erinyes to vengeance 'on behalf of her very soul' ([Greek: tês emês peri psychês]). Strange gestures and strange language indeed, if the so-called ghost had been conceived as a mere disembodied soul! But the popular conception of the revenant penetrated even here. And was it not the same conception which suggested the phrase [Greek: aischrôs alômai], 'I wander in dishonour '? In the popular belief, as we know, the murderer was bound to wander after death, suffering as he had wrought; and it is as a murderess that Clytemnestra avows herself condemned to shameful wanderings. 'To wander,' [Greek: alasthai], sums up the suffering which the murderer, like his victim, must incur after death. It is likely then that the name [Greek: alastôr] too was originally applied to any 'wanderer'—whether murderer or murdered—before it acquired the connotation of vindictiveness and so became appropriated to the latter only.

Again Euripides uses the same verb of one whose body has