Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/493

 not received burial. This time there is no connexion with blood-guilt at all, but the lines are simply the plaint of captive wife for husband slain in battle: 'oh beloved, oh husband mine, dead art thou and wanderest unburied, unwatered with tears'—[Greek: sy men phthimenos alaineis, athaptos, anydros]. 'To wander unburied'—could there be a simpler description of a revenant? Does not the whole misery of the unburied dead consist in this—that they must wander? It is almost inconceivable then that the name Alastor, 'wanderer,' should have been originally applied only to a single class of the wandering dead—to those whose wanderings were directed towards vengeance, and not also to those whose wanderings were more aimless, more pitiable, whose whole existence might have been summed up in that one word 'wandering.' At some time then between the age of Homer and that of Aeschylus Alastor, I hold, meant simply revenant.

How then shall we explain that caprice of language which, according to this Tragic usage, permitted all the unhappy dead to be said 'to wander' ([Greek: alasthai, alainein]), but apparently forbade them to be collectively named 'wanderers' ([Greek: alastores])? How did Alastor acquire its sense of 'Avenger' and become restricted to one class of revenant only?

It might be sufficient answer to point out that those revenants who were bent on avenging their own wrongs are likely always to have occupied a prominent place in popular superstition simply because they inspired most terror in the popular mind; other revenants were harmless, and, as harmless, liable to be little regarded and seldom named; and the most conspicuous class might thus have appropriated to itself the name which properly belonged to all. But there is another influence which, if it did not cause, may at least have facilitated and quickened the change—the influence of the word [Greek: alastos], 'unforgotten,' which, as I have noted above, was commonly and naturally, in an age when etymology was not science but guess-work, connected with [Greek: alastôr]. Etymologically the two words have nothing in common; but that is no obstacle to the supposition that, in their usage, their casual but close similarity of form rendered the meaning of the one susceptible to the influence of the other. Nay more, the fact that the two words, it matters not how erroneously, were actually