Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/495

 avenger, not a murderer.' This then should be classified as an example of the active, not of the hypothetical passive, meaning of Alastor. Of the other two passages, one is from the Ajax of Sophocles, where the hero in his anger and despair speaks of the guileful enemies who robbed him of his prize as Alastores, and the other a passage from Demosthenes in which he criticizes Aeschines for applying the word as an opprobrious name to Philip of Macedon. But in what possible sense could either Ajax' enemies or Philip of Macedon be described as 'suffering from Avengers'? On the contrary, at the times when the word Alastor was applied to them, their success should surely have suggested that they were favoured by heaven, and their opponents rather were the sufferers. What then was the meaning of the word thus opprobriously employed? A meaning, I answer, very little removed from that of 'Avenger' and arising out of it. For how was the Avenger—be he the revenant himself or a demon acting on his behalf—constantly pictured? Was it not as a fiend tormenting with every torment the object of his wrath, plaguing him, maddening him, sucking his very blood? Little wonder then if the justice of that vengeance was sometimes obscured in men's minds by their horror of it, and if the word Alastor suggested to them a fiend, a merciless tormentor. In that sense Ajax might well apply the name to his enemies, and Aeschines to Philip. Nor are other instances of it lacking. Demosthenes himself, for all his criticism of Aeschines' vulgarity in calling Philip [Greek: barbaron te kai alastora], 'a foreign devil,' used the same word of Aeschines and his friends ; again, in Sophocles, the lion of Nemea for the loss and havoc that he inflicted is unique among beasts that perish in having merited the same sorry title—[Greek: boukolôn alastôr], the 'herdsmen's Tormentor '; and indeed, apart from living men and animals, there are many instances in Tragedy in which the word Alastor, applied to some supernatural foe, revenant or demon, may be more appropriately rendered by 'fiend' or 'tormentor' than by 'avenger.'

And the same thing is true, I hold, of the word Miastor. The theory of the lexicons, namely, that the word denotes a polluted