Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/500

 bore an entirely different meaning, which has yet to be discussed, the meaning of 'blood-guilty.'

A few examples of each usage must be given. Both Antiphon and Aeschylus apply the word to murdered men; Antiphon, in a speech in which the kinsman, who has, as in duty bound, undertaken the prosecution of the murderer, claims that, if the jury wrongfully acquit, the dead man will not become [Greek: prostropaios], an Avenger, against his kinsmen who have done their best in his service, but will visit his anger on the jury for condoning and thereby sharing the blood-guilt ; Aeschylus, in that list of penalties which has been discussed, when he depicts the 'madness and vain terror,' which will befall Orestes if he fail in his task, as an arrow that flieth in darkness sped by powers of hell 'at the behest of fallen kindred that turn their vengeance upon him' ([Greek: ek prostropaiôn en genei peptôkotôn] ). But equally clearly in other passages the Avenger indicated is not the murdered man, but some divine being. Antiphon again is an authority for this usage. Twice, in a context similar to that which has just been noticed, he speaks not of the murdered man himself becoming an Avenger, but of certain divine powers—whom he also calls [Greek: alitêrioi], the powers that deal with sin—acting as Avengers ([Greek: prostropaioi]) of the dead. And similarly in later time Pausanias also speaks of 'the pollution ([Greek: miasma]) incurred by Pelops and of the Avenger ([Greek: prostropaios]) of Myrtilus .'

Since then there is no question but that the word [Greek: prostropaios] was actually applied both to dead men and to gods, to which of the two did it refer primarily? We already know the answer. The dead man himself, as a revenant, was the prime and proper Avenger of his own wrongs; demons of vengeance acted only in his name, as his subordinates and agents. To him therefore the name primarily belonged. And even if we had not already learnt this from other sources, the passage of Aeschylus, to which I have just referred, might well guide us to the same conclusion. The arrow that flieth in darkness is sped indeed, he says, 'by powers of hell' ([Greek: tôn enerterôn])—the demonic agents of the dead—but 'at the behest of fallen kindred.' The activity both of the principal and of the agent is recognised in the same