Chapter IV: The Relation of Soul and Body (5)

The first penalty is the physical torment of leprous blains that consume the body and age the sufferer prematurely. At first we are inclined to wonder why leprosy is selected by the dead man as his means of retaliation against his enemy; but a little reflection will lead us to guess that in this particular act of vengeance Aeschylus could not actually reproduce the popular doctrine. The common-folk believed in the bodily activity of the dead; and, if they believed also that bodily sufferings were part of the punishment which the murderer incurred, the two beliefs must surely have been correlated; the physical sufferings of the murderer must have been conceived to be caused by the physical activity of the murdered; or, to put it more plainly, if we may elucidate ancient superstition by the aid of modern, the murdered man, in the form of a _revenant_ bent on vengeance, was believed to leap upon his victim and rend him with his teeth and suck out his very life-blood. Clearly Aeschylus could not commit himself to so crude a presentation of a _revenant_; he could not conjure up before his audience the spectacle of the dead Agamemnon athirst for actual blood; but equally clearly he knew that popular superstition, and had it in his mind when he depicted the horrors of leprosy. For the bodily assault of a _revenant_ he substituted a natural malady engendered by a dead man’s unseen wrath; but he described the operation of that malady in language suggested by the popular presentment of a personal avenger more reasonable indeed in his purpose but scarcely less ferocious in his acts than a Slavonic vampire--‘blains that leap upon the flesh and with savage jaws eat out its erstwhile vigour[1148].’ The means of inflicting the punishment is changed, but the actual punishment of the murderer is the same as if it were not leprosy but in very truth a vampire, which leapt upon him and gnawed his flesh and drained his life-blood. So faithful is Aeschylus to the crude popular idea of a retribution which required that he who had spilled another’s blood should have his own blood drunk by his victim.

The second penalty is the mental agony of one whom ‘madness and vain terror sprung of the darkness do shake and confound[1149].’ Here again the punishment is in strict accord with that law that a man must suffer as he has wrought. That old tradition recorded and revered by Plato, on which I have already touched, taught that every man who was slain by violence was himself filled thereby with quaking and terror and confusion of spirit, and accordingly sought his revenge in terrifying and confounding the slayer. No clearer commentary on the lines of Aeschylus could be desired. Plato explains how the terror and the confusion--for he employs the selfsame words as Aeschylus--by which the murderer is overwhelmed are the exact counterpart of the mental anguish which his violence brought upon his victim. Aeschylus then once again was following closely an old tradition of the popular religion. It matters not at all that in this case he names the Erinyes as the agents, just as previously he made leprosy the instrument, of the dead man’s vengeance. The actual sufferings which the murderer must undergo are in this case also identical in character with those which he caused to his victim.

The third punishment of the blood-guilty man consists in wandering friendless and outcast; and this again is no arbitrary invention of Aeschylus, but was clearly prescribed by that old tradition which, in Plato’s reckoning, justified the legal imposition of a year’s retirement even upon those who had shed blood involuntarily. Where then is that correspondence, which our examination of the first two penalties has led us to expect, between this third punishment and the sufferings of the dead man who exacts it? Is there the same nicety of retribution? Clearly so. The dead man became in popular belief a _revenant_, a wanderer from out the grave, pitiable in his loneliness, cut off from all friendly intercourse with living men, not yet admitted to the fellowship of the departed, the sorriest of outcasts. Such was the misery to which the murderer by his act of violence had brought his victim; such therefore too the misery which the murderer himself must taste in his wanderings and loneliness here on earth, though it were but a foretaste of more consummate misery hereafter. Truly even in life the murderer was made to suffer as he had wrought.

And then comes the fourth penalty, death; for though Aeschylus, in the list of punishments which we have now before us, touches but lightly on this, the most obvious form of retribution, yet elsewhere he repeatedly affirms, and many another re-echoes, the doctrine that blood cries for blood[1150]. Perhaps in this passage he felt that by depicting the gnawing pangs of leprosy he had sufficiently proclaimed the sure approach of death; perhaps he passed it by as a slight thing in comparison with the horror that yet remained to be told. For death did not close the tale of punishments; the blood-guilty man, so chant the Furies, ‘though he be dead is none too free[1151].’

And so we pass to the last requirement of vengeance, that the outcast shall have no friend to honour his dead body with the due funeral-rites, whereby alone the desired dissolution could be secured, but is doomed to lie unburied, incorruptible. Such is my interpretation of the closing lines of the passage before us; and there is no need to repeat the defence of my contention that the word ταριχευθέντα must be understood in its literal and proper sense. But it will not be out of place to note here how, in the _Eumenides_, Aeschylus’ mind was still pervaded by the same popular belief. The word ταριχεύεσθαι means, in the literal sense in which I have taken it, to be withheld from corruption by some process of curing or drying; and, fantastic though it may seem, it is that process of ‘drying,’ if I may use the word, which the Furies are charged by Clytemnestra to carry out against her murderer. Let Aeschylus’ own words prove it. Hear first how Clytemnestra’s ghost with her last words spurs on the Furies to this special task:

σὺ δ’ αἱματηρὸν πνεῦμ’ ἐπουρίσασα τῷ,
ἀτμῷ κατισχναίνουσα, νηδύος πυρὶ,
ἕπου, μάραινε δευτέροις διώγμασιν[1152].

‘Up and pursue! let thy breath lap his blood
With sering reek, as were thy bowels a furnace,
Till he be shrivelled in the redoubled chase.’

And the Furies prove by their threats to Orestes that they are not unmindful of their charge. ‘Nay, in return for the blood thou hast shed, thou must give me to suck the red juices from thy living limbs. Thyself must be my meat, my horrid drink.’ ‘Yea, while thou livest, I will drain thee dry, ere I hale thee ’neath the earth[1153].’ And the same thought is emphasized yet again in that binding-spell which the Furies chant to draw him whom they already account their prey from his vain refuge at Athene’s altar:

ἐπὶ δὲ τῷ τεθυμένῳ
τόδε μέλος, παρακοπὰ, παραφορὰ φρενοδαλής,
ὕμνος ἐξ Ἐρινύων,
δέσμιος φρενῶν, ἀφόρμικτος, αὐονὰ βροτοῖς[1154].

‘Over our victim thus chant we our spell,
Rocking and wrecking the torturèd soul,
The jubilant song of Avengers,
Fettering the soul with no ’witchments of lute,
A spell as of drought[1155] upon mortals.’

Such is the wild, weird refrain of the Furies’ incantation; and in its closing phrase are re-echoed the closing words of Clytemnestra’s charge.

Will anyone then venture to say that Aeschylus had no special reason for thus repeating thrice within the compass of some two hundred lines the same threat? For the punishment threatened is substantially the same, though the means of inflicting it vary. Now it is the breath of the Furies which shall scorch up the victim’s very blood; now it is their lips that shall suck him dry; now a magic spell to parch and shrivel him; but ever the effect is the same; the bloodguilty man shall lie in death a sere and sapless carcase, already ‘damned to incorruption[1156] even in that doom which wastes all else.’ And the only reason which I can conceive for the poet’s insistence upon this thought is that here again, as in all the former punishments, he was reproducing a popular belief substantially the same then as it is in Maina now, namely, that the murdered man, having become a _revenant_, sucked his murderer’s blood and made him also in his turn a _revenant_.

Nor is Aeschylus the only ancient authority for the idea of some such retribution after death. Plato, in a passage of the _Phaedrus_ already cited, contemplates the activity of a murdered man’s wrath (μήνιμα) not only in the present time but also hereafter[1157]; and in his _Laws_ there is a provision, not assuredly of his own devising but dating from the very beginning of Greek legislation, which can only have been designed to insure the complete vengeance of the murdered man on his murderer even beyond death. A man convicted of the wilful murder of a near kinsman[1158] was punishable not only with death but with a further penalty: ‘the attendants of the jury and the magistrates having killed him shall cast out his corpse naked at an appointed cross-roads without the city, and all the magistrates, representing the whole city, shall take each a stone and cast it upon the head of the corpse and thereby free the whole city from guilt, and thereafter they shall carry the corpse to the borders of their land and cast it out, in accordance with the law, unburied[1159].’ Now the law, we know, in ordaining the penalty of death, ordained it as a satisfaction of the murdered man’s claims to vengeance. The State, so to speak, sided with the dead man and assisted him to exact blood for blood. Again the stoning of the dead body by representatives of the city was intended, we are expressly told, to free the whole city from guilt--from guilt, that is, in the eyes of the murdered man, who might otherwise visit his wrath upon the city as though it had consented to the crime or had too lightly punished it. Can it then be supposed that the State was actuated by any other motive in carrying out the rest of the penalty? It was surely still in deference to the murdered man’s desires that the murderer’s corpse was left unburied. To refuse burial was the surest means of condemning the man to resuscitation and thereby of satisfying his former victim’s uttermost demands.

Thus our detailed examination of the Aeschylean catalogue of penalties establishes beyond doubt that of which we had already had some evidence, namely, that all the punishments which were inflicted on the murderer--and, in popular belief, inflicted by the murdered man on his own behalf--were an exact reproduction of the sufferings which the murdered man himself had undeservingly endured, and culminated therefore, as they should, in the blood-guilty man becoming, like his victim, a _revenant_.

The main problem then of this section is now fully solved; but incidentally much light has been thrown upon the character ascribed by the Greek people in antiquity to those _revenants_ who were not merely pitiable sufferers but were active in bringing a like doom upon those who had wronged them. And the character of these Avengers approximates very closely to that of the modern _vrykolakes_. True, there is one fundamental difference; the ancient Avenger directed his wrath solely against the author of his sufferings, or at the most extended it only to those who, owing to him the duty of furthering his vengeance, had proved lax and cowardly therein; the modern _vrykolakas_ is unreasoning in his wrath and plagues indiscriminately all who fall in his way. But the actual sufferings which the _vrykolakas_ inflicts are identical with those which furnished Aeschylus with his tale of threatened horrors. Modern stories there are in plenty, which tell how the _vrykolakas_ springs upon his victim and rends him and drinks his blood; how sheer terror of his aspect has driven men mad; how, in order to escape him, whole families have been driven forth from their native island to wander in exile[1160]; how death has often been the issue of his assaults; and how those whom a _vrykolakas_ has slain become themselves _vrykolakes_. Only his unreasoning and indiscriminate fury is necessarily of Slavonic origin; his acts are the acts of those ancient _revenants_ whose own wrongs rightfully made them the Avengers of blood. Apart from the one Slavonic trait, the characters of the _vrykolakas_ and the ancient Avenger are identical.

And perhaps this identity is most clearly seen in the one case in which the old Avenger punished not only the immediate author of his own wrongs, but a whole community which had subsequently given the guilty man an asylum. We have noticed how Antiphon ventured to threaten an Athenian jury with such punishment at the hands of the dead man if they wrongfully acquitted his murderer. In the same spirit Aeschylus makes the Furies, as the agents of the dead Clytemnestra, menace the whole land of Attica with a venomous curse that shall blast man and beast and herb in revenge for the wresting of Orestes from their grasp[1161]. And such too is the dread which in the _Phoenissae_ of Euripides stirs Creon to make to the blood-guilty Oedipus this appeal: ‘Nay, remove thee hence: verily ’tis not in scorn that I say this, nor in enmity to thee, but because of thine Avengers, in fear lest the land suffer some hurt[1162].’ In such cases the punishments with which a whole community is threatened, although still a reasonable measure, approach most nearly to the indiscriminate violence of the modern _vrykolakas_.

For the fulfilment of such threats as these we must turn to the _Supplices_ of Aeschylus, and there we shall find a description of just such a devastation as is said to have been suffered by the inhabitants of Santorini and many other places in the seventeenth century. The story of Aeschylus tells how ‘there came unto the Argive land, from the shore of Naupactus, Apis, son of Apollo, both healer and seer, and cleansed the land of monsters that destroyed mankind, even of those that Earth, tainted with the pollutions of blood shed of old, sent up in wrath to work havoc, fearsome as a dragon-brood to dwell among[1163].’ What then were these monsters? I will venture to say that any Greek peasant of to-day, could he but read and understand the Aeschylean description, would furnish a better commentary upon those lines than the most learned discourse thereon that any scholar has written; and his commentary would be summed up in the one word _vrykolakes_. For, vigorous as the description is, its vigour comes less of dramatic word-building than of fidelity to the horrors of popular superstition, and no other single passage could so fully establish the unity of ancient and modern belief. For while the actual language contains all the words[1164] which in antiquity were bound up with the superstition--the ‘pollution’ which comes of bloodshed, the ‘wrath’ which follows thereon and in which Earth herself is here made to share, and the ‘sending up’ by Earth of the Avengers--the thought of the passage is a faithful reflection of what the Greek peasants still believe, that a violent death is among the chief causes of resuscitation, that the earth sends up the dead man raging to deal destruction, and that with others of his kind he consorts and conspires in veritable dragon-bands; and men still tell of gifted seers and healers, such as Apis, summoned in hot haste to panic-stricken hamlets to allay the pest. The κνώδαλα βροτοφθόρα of Aeschylus, ‘the monsters that destroy mankind,’ are indeed but little removed from the modern _vrykolakes_.

Is it not then clear also on what sources Aeschylus drew for his picture of the Furies themselves? We have seen how, for dramatic purposes, they were substituted for a _revenant_ wreaking his own vengeance. Clytemnestra herself in bodily form should have been the Avenger, if popular superstition had not been in this respect too gross; but the Erinyes take her place in the actual execution of vengeance, and she herself appears only as a ghost to instigate them to their work. But, when that substitution was effected, did not Aeschylus clearly transfer to the Erinyes the whole character and even the appearance popularly attributed to the human Avenger? They are black and loathly to look upon[1165]; their breath is deadly to approach[1166]; the smell of blood is a joy to them[1167]; they follow like hounds upon their victim’s trail[1168]; they torment him both body and soul[1169]; they fasten upon his living limbs and gorge themselves with his blood[1170]; and if any would harbour him from their pursuit, the venom of their wrath falls like a plague upon the land, and devastates it[1171]; they are monsters, κνώδαλα[1172]--and the recurrence of this word is significant--abhorrent alike to gods and to men[1173]. The description is surely not that which Aeschylus would himself have invented for beings who should come afterwards to be worshipped as ‘revered goddesses,’ σεμναὶ θεαί. The difficulty of that transition in the play itself cannot but arrest the attention of every reader; it is a difficulty which even the genius of Aeschylus could not remove. Why then did he draw so loathsome a portrait of the Erinyes in the earlier part of the play? Why did he create that difficulty? The reason, I suggest, was that he followed once more, and this time almost too faithfully, the popular traditions, and, while he would not represent a real _revenant_ on the stage, transferred to those demonic agents, by whom the work of vengeance was vicariously performed, all the attributes popularly associated with the prototypes of the modern _vrykolakas_.

Thus then the history of the modern belief in _vrykolakes_ has been fully traced. The ancients also believed that for certain causes--the same causes in the main as are still assigned--men were doomed to remain incorruptible after death and to rise again in bodily form from their graves, and that one class of these _revenants_, those namely who had wrongs of their own to avenge, inflicted upon their enemies (and upon any who shielded or harboured them) the same sufferings as are now generally believed to be inflicted in an unreasoning manner by all classes of _vrykolakes_ alike upon mankind at large, with no justification, such as a natural desire for vengeance might afford, in the case of those whose resuscitation is not the outcome of any injury or neglect at the hands of other men, and with no discrimination between friend and foe on the part of those who have real wrongs to avenge. Remove the unreasoning element in the character of the _vrykolakas_, and the _revenant_ in which the folk of ancient Greece believed remains.

But, if they believed in him, they must have called him by some name. Aeschylus’ phrase κνώδαλα βροτοφθόρα, ‘monsters that destroy mankind,’ is a description rather than a name. What were the reasonable _vrykolakes_ of ancient Greece called? That is now the one question which must be answered in order to make our enquiry complete.

Briefly my answer is this, that the particular class of _revenants_ with which the present section has mainly dealt, the Avengers of blood, were known by three several names, μιάστωρ, ἀλάστωρ, and προστρόπαιος, but that literature contains no word which could serve as a collective designation for all classes alike. I hope however to show that the Greek language was not originally defective in this respect, but that the term ἀλάστωρ, although regularly used from the fifth century onwards in the narrow sense of an Avenger, had originally a wider application and denoted simply a _revenant_.

Now the interpretation which I give to these three words is not that which is commonly accepted. Anyone who will turn to a lexicon will find that to each of the three is assigned a double signification in connexion with blood-guilt. All three are said to denote either a god who punishes the blood-guilty or the blood-guilty man who is punished. Thus a god, it is alleged, may be called μιάστωρ (literally a ‘polluter’) because he punishes the polluted--a somewhat obvious misnomer; or again ἀλάστωρ, because he ‘does not forget’ but punishes the sinner--a derivation which, as I shall show later, cannot be accepted; or thirdly προστρόπαιος, as the being who was ‘turned to’ by the murdered man and was besought to avenge his cause--a somewhat circuitous way for the word to arrive at its active sense of ‘Avenger.’ And, secondly, a man, it is said, was called μιάστωρ when, being himself polluted, he was liable to be ‘a polluter’ of other men with whom he came in contact--a view which is certainly defensible; ἀλάστωρ as one whose sin ‘could not be forgotten’--an interpretation almost beyond the pale of serious discussion; and προστρόπαιος because, being blood-guilty, he ‘turned towards’ some god for purification--an explanation which may be right--whence the word came to denote in general a polluted person who still needed purification.

Thus in my view, as I have indicated, the greater part of the information in the lexicons with regard to these three words is inaccurate; and my reasons for disputing the received interpretations will be set forth point by point as I offer my own interpretations in their stead.

In dealing with the first group of meanings assigned to the three words, by which they came, somehow or other, to be used with the common active signification of ‘Avenger,’ my main contention will be that, as regards their primary and strictest usage, all three words were applied not to gods but to men--men who, having been murdered, sought to requite their murderers--and were only secondarily extended to the agents, whether divine or human, to whom those dead men committed the task of vengeance; but I shall also endeavour to show, as regards the literal meaning of the three words severally, that the interpretation by means of which their final sense of ‘Avenger’ has generally been elicited from them is in each case wrong, and that, in the case of the word ἀλάστωρ in particular, a right understanding of its original meaning gives very important results.

And in dealing with the second group of meanings, by which the three words are said to denote three only slightly different aspects of one and the same person--a murderer who is μιάστωρ as polluted and spreading pollution, ἀλάστωρ as pursued by vengeance, and προστρόπαιος as still needing purification--I shall maintain that these alleged uses of the first two words do not exist, and, as regards the third, I will offer a suggestion, but a suggestion only, as to the means by which it acquired this signification which it unquestionably bore.

It will be convenient to deal first with μιάστωρ and ἀλάστωρ as being parallel in usage throughout, and to reserve προστρόπαιος for later consideration.

The clearest example of that which I take to be the original usage of μιάστωρ is furnished by Euripides. In that scene of mutual recrimination between Medea and Jason, after that in revenge for her husband’s faithlessness she has slain their children, there comes at last from her lips the brutal taunt, as she points to the dead, ‘They live no more: that truth at least will sting thee’; and Jason answers, ‘Nay, but they live, to wreak vengeance on thy head (σῷ κάρᾳ μιάστορες)[1174].’ No language could be more simple, more explicit. The very children who lay there murdered at Medea’s feet, they and none other should be the _Miastores_, the Avengers of their own foul deaths.

But of course the word has other applications also. When Aeschylus[1175] made the Erinyes threaten that even when Orestes should have fled beneath the earth, he should find another Avenger (μιάστορα) to plague him in their stead, the whole tenor of the passage compels us to understand that that other Avenger is some deity or demon of the nether world--a divine, not a human, _Miastor_, though at the same time one who will act, like the Erinyes themselves, on behalf of the murdered Clytemnestra.

And, yet again, the same term is applied to a living man, when, as next of kin to him who has been murdered, he is in duty bound to exact vengeance. This time Sophocles is our authority, and the person of whom the word is used is Orestes. ‘Oft,’ says Electra to Clytemnestra, ‘oft hast thou reproached me with saving him to take vengeance upon thee (σοὶ τρέφειν μιάστορα)[1176].’

These three passages then illustrate the threefold application of the name _Miastor_, and the question to be answered is which represents the primary usage of the word. To multiply instances of each or any would be of no avail; the question is not of the frequency of each usage; the commonest is not necessarily the earliest. How then is the question to be answered? It is, I think, already answered. We have seen that in popular belief the murdered man was the prime avenger of his own wrongs, and that even in literature, when the execution of vengeance is wholly transferred either to the nearest kinsman or to some demonic power, the murdered man is still recognised as the principal and the others are only his agents. It is this relation between them which settles the question. A principal does not act in the name of his agents, but the agents in the name of their principal. The name _Miastor_ therefore belonged first to the dead man himself, and was only extended afterwards to those who wrought vengeance on his behalf.

So much for the usage of the word. Next, how did it acquire the meaning of ‘Avenger,’ which it undoubtedly possessed? This can be only a matter of opinion. But since it appears to me unscholarly and illogical to suppose that a word, which on the grounds of formation must have first meant ‘one who causes pollution,’ could have come to mean ‘one who punishes pollution,’ I may at least offer an alternative suggestion. The murdered man, I admit, can hardly be said to have ‘caused’ the pollution of his murderer, or at any rate he could only have caused it involuntarily. But he might well be regarded as active in debarring the murderer from the means of purification and in keeping the pollution, as it were, fresh and virulent, with intent to isolate his enemy and to ban him from the abodes of his fellow-men. And some indication of such an activity is afforded by the Erinyes--acting, as always, on Clytemnestra’s behalf; they refuse to acknowledge the purification granted by Apollo to Orestes, and they say moreover that their task is to ‘keep dark and fresh the stain of blood[1177].’ The murdered man may therefore have been believed, if not actually to cause and to create, yet at least to promote and to re-create, the pollution of his foe, and, by keeping the stains of blood as it were from fading or being cleansed away, to wreak some part of his vengeance. In this way the transition from the sense of ‘polluter’ to that of ‘avenger’ is at least, I submit, intelligible. This however is only a side-issue. The important point is that the word _Miastor_, however it may have come to mean ‘Avenger,’ was primarily applied to the _revenant_ himself, and only secondarily to any god.

The next name to be considered, ἀλάστωρ, is commonly accounted a synonym of μιάστωρ, denoting in actual usage a ‘god of vengeance,’ and meaning literally ‘one who does not forget’ blood-guiltiness. I too hold it to be a synonym of _Miastor_, but to denote therefore primarily not a god but a human _revenant_ seeking vengeance, and only afterwards, by a transference of usage, a god or living man acting in the name of the dead; while, as for the supposed derivation, I count it absolutely untenable.

And first as regards the application of the word; after what has been, I hope, a fairly exhaustive study of the passages of classical literature in which it occurs, I am bound to confess that, though the instances of its use are far more numerous than those of _Miastor_, I am still unable to select three passages and to say ‘Here are my proofs of the triple application of the word.’ Indeed all that I can prove by the evidence of any single passage taken alone is curiously enough the existence of what I take to have been the rarest of the three usages--the application of the name _Alastor_ to the kinsman of the dead man, as being the agent of his vengeance. Just as Sophocles speaks of Orestes being preserved as a _Miastor_ to take vengeance on Clytemnestra for his father’s death, so does Aeschylus make the same Orestes name himself an _Alastor_ on the score of the vengeance which he has taken. ‘Queen Athene,’ he prays, ‘at Loxias’ bidding am I come; receive thou me graciously, avenger as I am, no murderer, nor of defiled hand ... ἀλάστορα, οὐ προστρόπαιον, οὐδ’ ἀφοίβαντον χέρα[1178].’ Such, I am convinced, is the right rendering of the passage. The lexicons indeed cite the line as an example of the alleged passive meaning of ἀλάστωρ--one who suffers from divine vengeance, an accursed wretch[1179]; and I acknowledge that such a meaning would make passable sense of the passage; for Orestes was indeed suffering from the vengeance of the Erinyes. But I hold, and I shall endeavour to prove later, that ἀλάστωρ never possessed a passive meaning, and I claim moreover that the active meaning of ‘Avenger,’ which I attribute to the word here as elsewhere, is immensely preferable in itself. For Orestes throughout pleads justification[1180]; he has avenged murder, not committed it; he has discharged a duty to his dead sire, not perpetrated a wanton crime against his mother; he slew her indeed, but his motive was pious, and the ordaining of his act divine. On the grounds therefore, first, of the word’s own active meaning, secondly, of the whole trend of Orestes’ defence of his conduct, and last, but by no means least, of the exact parallel furnished by Sophocles’ use of the word _Miastor_, I am confident that _Alastor_ as applied by Orestes to himself means an ‘Avenger.’

That the word however was not primarily applied to the kinsman acting on behalf of the murdered man will be universally conceded; in the vast majority of passages some supernatural being is clearly intended. But it has been too hastily assumed that the supernatural avengers were always gods or demons; that they were often so conceived I do not doubt; but, as a matter of fact, I have discovered no single passage of classical literature which can be said finally and absolutely in itself to demand that interpretation. In many instances the probabilities are in favour of the _Alastores_ being regarded as a class of avenging demons; in many others it is equally good or even better to suppose that they are the dead men themselves in person.

What then are the foundations upon which the received notion, that the _Alastores_ were always gods, is based? It might perhaps be urged that the word _Alastor_ found a place among the many epithets and titles conferred by worshippers upon Zeus[1181] in order to indicate the particular exercise of his all-reaching power which their hearts desired. It might also be urged that Clement of Alexandria names the _Alastores_ among those classes of gods whom the pagan Greeks had evolved from the naughtiness of their own imagination as types and personifications of the baser human passions[1182]. But neither of these facts can serve to substantiate the contention that the _Alastores_ were primarily and necessarily gods. The occasional use of a word as an epithet of Zeus cannot be held to prove the general appropriation of that word to a class of lesser gods; while the statement of Clement is the statement of a man designedly vilifying the whole Greek religion, neither appreciating nor desirous to appreciate its refinements, but willing rather to overwhelm it utterly, its better and its worse elements alike, with the torrent of his invective and reprobation. To him the _Alastores_ appeared as supernatural beings instinct with the pagan passion of revenge, false gods therefore or devils, fit objects whereon to pour out the vials of righteous wrath and Christian scorn. He was not concerned to be wholly just or wholly accurate. Indeed the very sources from which he drew the idea that the _Alastores_ were gods are still open to us; it is the Greek Tragedians whom he holds guilty of this naughty invention; it is the Greek Tragedians who remain for us the fountain-head of information concerning these Avengers, and who will on examination make it clear that they were not primarily or necessarily gods.

The single passage in Greek Tragedy which has been often regarded as evidence in favour of Clement’s classification of _Alastores_ among gods is on fuller enquiry rather a refutation of that view. In the _Persae_ of Aeschylus the messenger, who reports to the queen the disaster which has befallen the Persian fleet, sets it down to supernatural agency:

ἦρξεν μὲν ὦ δέσποινα, τοῦ παντὸς κακοῦ
φανεὶς ἀλάστωρ ἢ κακὸς δαίμων ποθέν[1183].

This has generally been taken to mean that the beginning of the disaster was due to the sudden appearance of ‘some vengeful or malicious deity.’ But elsewhere in Tragedy ἀλάστωρ is treated not as adjective but as substantive; and, since there is no compulsion to suppose other than the ordinary use of the word here, it appears better to translate the phrase ‘some Avenger or some malicious god.’ In other words the real, if unemphatic, contrast implied in the phrase is not between ἀλάστωρ and κακός--no contrast is possible there[1184]--but between ἀλάστωρ and δαίμων. The inference therefore is rather that the _Alastor_ in this passage was not conceived as a deity.

There are other passages of Greek Tragedy also in which the balance of probability seems to me to incline towards interpreting the name _Alastor_ in the sense of a _revenant_ and not of a god. Two such occur in the _Medea_ of Euripides--the same play, be it noted, which contains that perfectly plain statement that the dead children of Medea are themselves the _Miastores_ who will punish her. The first is in the scene in which Medea works herself up to the perpetration of her crime. Passionate love of her children, passionate jealousy and fury against their father, alternate in tragic turmoil, until the tense agony of spirit is let loose in that fierce oath,

‘No, by the Avengers that lurk deep in hell,
Ne’er shall it come to pass that I should leave
My children to mine enemies’ despite.
Most surely they must die; and since they must,
’Twas my womb bare them, ’tis my hand shall slay[1185].’

Strong and terrible would be the oath even if the _Alastores_, whose wrath Medea thus defies, were gods or spirits; but the force and the horror are doubled, if the _Alastores_ here are of the same order as those whom Jason names _Miastores_ but a little later in the same drama, and if therefore among those Avengers, in whose name the murderous oath was sworn, were soon to be numbered those very children whom Medea loved best and yet bound herself to slay most foully.

The second passage occurs in Jason’s outburst of fury against Medea when he first learns her crime. ‘’Tis thine Avenger whom the gods have let light on me; for truly thou didst slay thine own brother at his own hearth, or ever thou didst set foot in Argo’s shapely hull[1186].’ Surely we are meant to understand that the dead Absyrtus is himself the _Alastor_--for one _Alastor_ only is named this time, and that too as distinct from the gods (θεοί)--and that Jason diverted to himself a portion of the dead man’s wrath by wedding the blood-guilty woman. Again then the interpretation of _Alastor_ in the same sense in which, only a little later in the same scene, _Miastor_ is undoubtedly employed is, if not necessary, yet vastly preferable.

To review here all the passages of Greek Tragedy in which the word may advantageously be so understood, when at the same time no single one of them constitutes a final proof of my view, would be to encumber this enquiry to no purpose; but I may perhaps be permitted to select one instance from a story of blood-guilt other than that of which Medea is the centre.

This shall be from that scene in the _Hercules Furens_ in which the hero, sane now and overwhelmed with horror at the ghastly slaughter of his own children which in a moment of sudden madness he had wrought, receives from Theseus some measure of consolation and advice. Early in that colloquy, ere yet Theseus has had time to soothe the sufferings or to guide the course of his stricken friend, Heracles cries to him in bitterness of soul,

Theseus, hast view’d my triumph o’er my children?

and Theseus answers with gentle simplicity,

I heard, and now I see the woes thou showst me.

And then follow the lines:

ΗΡ. τί δῆτά μου κρᾶτ’ ἀνεκάλυψας ἡλίῳ;
ΘΗ. τί δ’ οὐ; μιαίνεις θνητὸς ὢν τὰ τῶν θεῶν;
ΗΡ. φεῦγ’, ὦ ταλαίπωρ’, ἀνόσιον μίασμ’ ἐμόν.
ΘΗ. οὐδεὶς ἀλάστωρ τοῖς φίλοις ἐκ τῶν φίλων[1187].

_Her._ Why then hast bared my head before the Sun?
_Thes._ Nay, wherefore not? canst thou--mere man--taint godhead?
_Her._ Yet flee thyself, risk not my taint of blood-guilt.
_Thes._ Where love joins, bloodshed to no vengeance moves.

It is the connexion and significance of the last two lines which I wish briefly to discuss. Theseus has used the word ‘taint’ (μιαίνεις), and Heracles at once seizes on it, emphasizes it, and warns his friend to begone lest he be contaminated; and then Theseus answers (to give a literal rendering) ‘No Avenger of blood proceeds from them that love against them that love.’ What does this mean? The line is often translated as if Theseus meant, ‘No, I will stay, for though an Avenger of blood may probably pursue you, Heracles, I have no fear that he will touch me who love you as a friend[1188].’ A generous and sympathetic utterance indeed! And how consistent with that fine burst of feeling with which he had but a moment before refused to be warned away:

‘Why warn’st thou me of blood with hand uplift?
In fear lest I be tainted by thy speech?
Nought reck I of ill fortune at thy side
Where once ’twas good; that hour must draw my heart
When thou didst bring me safe from death to light;
Nay, I hate friends whose gratitude grows old,
I hate the man that will enjoy good hap
But will not face foul weather with his friend[1189].’

Is this the man whose words, spoken but a moment later, shall be interpreted to mean, ‘I will not run away, because the danger that threatens my friend cannot hurt me’? The thought is deeper, more generous, than that. Theseus is thinking not of himself, but of his friend. It is the word ‘pollution,’ used first by himself and caught up by Heracles, which arrests his attention. Was his friend ‘polluted’ by a deed of blood, wrought in madness, expiated in tears? Polluted? Yes, in the sense that religious purification was required[1190]. He cannot deny the pollution. But could the deed also be punished as the murder of close kinsfolk was wont to be punished? Could the children, albeit slain by their own father’s hand, desire revenge upon him who loved them and was loved of them? ‘No,’ he answers boldly, ‘pollution (μίασμα) there is, but no _Alastor_, no Avenger of blood, can come from them that love against them that love.’ How then does Theseus picture the _Alastor_ who, but for the bond of love between the father and his dead children, would seek vengeance for their death? The phrase which he uses is ambiguous--perhaps deliberately ambiguous--οὐδεὶς ... ἐκ τῶν φίλων. It may mean equally well ‘no one of those who love’ or ‘no one coming from those who love.’ But when the close correspondence of μίασμα, ‘pollution,’ and ἀλάστωρ ‘avenger,’ is noted in this passage, and when it is also remembered that the dead children of Medea are elsewhere plainly named _Miastores_, it is hard to suppose that an audience familiar with the belief that the dead themselves avenged their own wrongs would not have interpreted the ambiguous phrase to mean ‘none of these children shall rise up from the grave as an _Alastor_, for love is stronger than vengeance.’

But such doubt as still remains is set at rest when we turn from the usage of the word _Alastor_ to its origin and enquire how it obtained the sense of ‘Avenger.’ What is its derivation?

Two conjectures seem to have been made by the ancients and are recorded by early commentators and lexicographers[1191]. The one connects the word with the root of λανθάνω, ‘I escape notice,’ and extracts a meaning in a variety of ways, leaving it open to choice, for example, whether it shall mean a god whose notice nothing escapes or a man who commits acts which cannot escape some god’s notice. The other conjecture refers the word to the root of ἀλάομαι, ‘I wander.’ It is between these two proposed derivations that our choice lies; nor can we obtain much help from the greatest modern authorities. Curtius[1192] unhesitatingly adopts the latter, Brugmann[1193] the former, nor does either of them so much as mention the possibility of the alternative. I must therefore discuss the question without reference to these authorities, knowing that, if I run counter to the one, I have the countenance of the other.

Is then ἀλάστωρ, in the sense of a ‘non-forgetter,’ a possible formation from the root of λανθάνω? My own answer to that question is a decided negative, and my reasons are as follows. Substantives denoting the agent and formed with the suffix -τωρ (-τορ-) can only be so formed direct from a verb-stem, as ῥήτωρ from ϝρε or ϝερ appearing in ἐρῶ etc., μήστωρ from the stem of μήδομαι, ἀφήτωρ answering to the verb ἀφίημι, ἐπιβήτωρ to ἐπιβαίνω. It is among these and other such examples that Brugmann places the anomalous ἀλάστωρ, to be connected with ἄλαστος, λήθω. But evidently, in order that ἀλάστωρ may be parallel, let us say, to ἀφήτωρ, we must postulate the existence of an impossible verb ἀ-λήθω or ἀ-λανθάνομαι, ‘I non-forget.’ Nor would it mend matters to suppose, first, the formation, direct from λήθω, of a _nomen agentis_ of the form λάστωρ, a ‘forgetter’; for the privative ἀ- appears only in adjectives and adverbs and in such verbs and substantives as are formed directly from them, as ἀμνημονεῖν from ἀμνήμων etc., and cannot be prefixed at pleasure to a substantive or verb not so formed; ἀλάστωρ could no more be formed from an hypothetical substantive λάστωρ[1194], than could an hypothetical verb ἀ-λανθάνεσθαι be formed from λανθάνεσθαι. Etymologically then the derivation of ἀλάστωρ from ἀ- privative and the root of λήθω is impossible, and its sense of ‘Avenger’ was not developed from the meaning ‘one who does not forget.’

On the other hand, to the connexion of ἀλάστωρ with the verb ἀλᾶσθαι, ‘to wander,’ no exception can be taken. Not only is the formation simple, but an exact parallel is forthcoming. As the substantive μιάστωρ stands to the verb μιαίνω, so does the substantive ἀλάστωρ stand to a by-form of ἀλάομαι, which is fairly frequent in Tragedy, ἀλαίνω[1195]. It follows then that ἀλάστωρ meant originally a ‘wanderer.’

But, when once that primary meaning is discovered, there can be no further doubt as to the primary application of the term. Of the three possible exactors of vengeance--the _revenant_ himself, some demonic agent, and the nearest kinsman--the first alone 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[1196]. 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 ἀλήτης remained the ordinary and general term, while ἀλάστωρ 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 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, ἀλᾶσθαι and ἀλαίνειν, it continued to be applied to any of the restless dead, when the substantive ἀλάστωρ, 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 ἀλάστωρ 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[1197]; though a ghost, she is made to exhort the Erinyes to vengeance ‘on behalf of her very soul’ (τῆς ἐμῆς πέρι ψυχῆς)[1198]. 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 αἰσχρῶς ἀλῶμαι, ‘I wander in dishonour[1199]’? 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[1200] that Clytemnestra avows herself condemned to shameful wanderings. ‘To wander,’ ἀλᾶσθαι, sums up the suffering which the murderer, like his victim, must incur after death. It is likely then that the name ἀλάστωρ 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 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’--σὺ μὲν φθίμενος ἀλαίνεις, ἄθαπτος, ἄνυδρος[1201]. ‘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’ (ἀλᾶσθαι, ἀλαίνειν), but apparently forbade them to be collectively named ‘wanderers’ (ἀλάστορες)? 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 ἄλαστος, ‘unforgotten,’ which, as I have noted above, was commonly and naturally, in an age when etymology was not science but guess-work, connected with ἀλάστωρ. 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 in early times referred to a common origin[1202] warrants the suggestion that such influence had been exercised. Now ἄλαστος always remained in meaning true to its derivation. Itself employed in the passive sense, ‘unforgotten,’ it seems to have made over the active meaning, ‘unforgetting,’ ‘vindictive’ (which, on the analogy of ἄπρακτος and a score of similar forms, it should naturally have possessed), to the apparently kindred word ἀλάστωρ. This adventitious meaning accorded well with the popular conception of the most conspicuous class of ‘wanderers’ from the grave--those whose wanderings had a vindictive aim; and thus, by the help of the accidental resemblance of two words, it seems to have come to pass that the term _Alastores_ ceased to be applicable to all kinds of _revenants_ and denoted only the ‘Avengers.’ At this point it became in fact synonymous with _Miastores_, and, like that word, enlarged its scope so as to denote not only the prime Avenger, the _revenant_ himself, but also any divine or human agents employed by him as subsidiary Avengers.

So much then for the first meaning which the lexicons attach to the words _Alastor_ and _Miastor_; the second interpretation of them, in relation to a blood-guilty man, may be more briefly treated. _Alastor_ in this passive sense is alleged to mean a man who suffers from the vengeance of one who is an _Alastor_ in the active sense; and _Miastor_ to mean a man who is himself polluted and therefore pollutes those with whom he associates.