Chapter IV · THE RELATION OF SOUL AND BODY. (continued 2)

Here then are the same contradictory doctrines as in the nomocanon; the resuscitation of the dead man is the work of a devil who enters into the corpse and moves it and raises it from the grave; and yet it is the ‘imagination’ of the men who see it which is at fault. But it can be no casual coincidence that S. Anastasius in the sixth century and a nomocanon which was quoted as authoritative in the seventeenth attempted to combine two incompatible doctrines concerning the re-appearance of the dead. Rather is it proof that from a very early age the Church remained halting between two opinions; and the attitude adopted towards the superstition by the clergy, some of whom, according to Leo Allatius, had long tried to root it out of the popular mind, while others rendered aid in absolving suspected corpses, naturally varied according as they personally believed that revenants (including vrykolakes) were a figment of the people’s imagination or a real work of the Devil.

Now of these two ecclesiastical views, which are really alternative and incompatible although attempts were made to combine them, the former has clearly had little or no effect upon the people; in spite of the efforts of the ‘men of piety who received the confessions of Christians[1058]’ to extirpate the superstition, it remains vigorous, as we have seen, down to this day. But the explanation of the phenomenon as a work of the Devil was readily entertained; even educated men were convinced of it. ‘It is the height of folly,’ says Leo Allatius, speaking for himself, ‘to deny altogether that such bodies are sometimes found incorrupt in the graves, and that by use of them the Devil, if God permit him, devises horrible plans to the hurt of the human race’; and similarly Father Richard opens his account of vrykolakes with the statement that the Devil sometimes works by means of dead bodies which he preserves in their entirety and re-animates. As for the common-folk, the explanation accorded so well with the diabolical characteristics of the vrykolakas that they could hardly have failed to accept it.

The popularisation of this view is well illustrated by a local interpretation set upon a custom which I have already discussed, the so-called custom of ‘Charon’s obol.’ I have shown that the practice of placing a coin or other object in the mouth of the dead continues down to the present day; that the classical notion, that the coin was intended as payment for the ferryman of the Styx, was only a temporary and probably local misinterpretation of the custom; and that the coin or other object employed was really a charm designed to prevent any evil spirit from entering (or possibly the soul from re-entering) the dead body. Now in Chios and in Rhodes this original intention has not been forgotten, and is combined with the belief in vrykolakes. In the former island the woman who prepares the corpse for burial places on its lips a cross of wax or cotton-stuff, and the priest also during the funeral service prepares a fragment of pottery to be laid in the same place by marking on it the sign of the cross and the letters I. X. N. K. (Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς νικᾷ, ‘Jesus Christ conquers’), both of them with the avowed purpose of preventing any evil spirit from entering the dead body and making of it a vrykolakas[1059]. In Rhodes a piece of ancient pottery, inscribed with the same words but marked with the pentacle[1060] instead of the cross, is placed in the mouth of the dead for the same purpose[1061]. Clearly then in these two islands this ecclesiastical view has been fully accepted by the people; and what I can illustrate by customs in these cases I know to be equally true of Greece in general. Whenever an explanation is sought of the resuscitation of the dead, the answer, if any be forthcoming, lays the responsibility for it on the Devil.

This opinion, as I have said, is abundantly justified by the conduct of modern vrykolakes; but I am inclined to think that it was held also, by the Church at any rate, in the pre-Slavonic age when revenants were of a less diabolical character. The actual practice of excommunication was thought to have been instituted by St Paul[1062], who twice speaks of ‘delivering persons unto Satan[1063].’ The early ecclesiastical interpretation of this phrase is clearly given by Theodoretus[1064]; commenting upon the sentence, “To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus,” he draws special attention to the fact that the body, and not the soul, is to be subjected to diabolic affliction, and then adds, ‘We are taught by this, that those who are excommunicated, that is to say, severed from the body of the Church, will be assailed by the devil when he finds them void of grace.’ In other words, the bodily punishment inflicted by the act of excommunication was ‘possession’ by the devil.

Now Theodoretus, it is true, says nothing in this passage as to the continuance of the punishment after death. But clearly if demoniacal possession was the effect of excommunication, and if also, as we have seen, the sentence of excommunication remained valid after death, it must have followed that the dead body no less than the living body was possessed of the devil; and if the devil in possession of the corpse chose to agitate it and drive it out of the grave, the dead demoniac was at once a revenant.

There is therefore some probability that, though the Church never threatened the excommunicated with resuscitation but only with incorruptibility, she may at a very early date have offered this explanation of their alleged re-appearance; and the theory of diabolical agency may have gained popular approval from the first; for resuscitation was originally viewed by the Greek people as a calamity befalling the dead man, not as a source of danger to the living; and therefore an ecclesiastical doctrine, that it was by delivering an offender unto Satan that the curse of the Church rendered him a revenant, would have been felt to be a perfectly satisfactory, if novel, explanation of the process by which a known cause, imprecation, produced its known effect, resuscitation.

But, whatever the date at which the theory of diabolical possession was first developed and disseminated, the Church, and the Church only, was responsible for it. The Devil is a Christian conception, just as the vampire is Slavonic. Both must go, if the modern superstition is to be stripped of its accretions, and the genuinely Hellenic elements discovered. What then remains? Simply the belief that the bodies of certain classes of persons did not decay away in their graves but returned therefrom, and the feeling that such persons were sufferers deserving of pity. What then were the classes of persons so affected, according to the original Greek superstition?

The classes now regarded as liable to become vrykolakes were enumerated at the end of the last section. But both Slavonic and Christian influences have been felt here, as in the rest of the superstition. I must therefore take those classes one by one, and indicate the origin of each. None of them will require long discussion; their provenance is in many cases self-evident.

(1) Those who have not received the full and due rites of burial.

Here there can be no reason for supposing any alien influence; on the contrary, the high importance attached by the ancient Greeks to funeral-rites is everywhere apparent. It was these which Patroclus’ spirit returned to implore; these which Antigone risked her life to give. The sin of Clytemnestra culminated in that she ‘dared to bury her husband without mourning or lamentation[1065]’—an essential part of the Greek funeral; and again in historical times Lysander’s honour was tarnished not so much because he put to death some prisoners of war, but because ‘he did not throw earth even upon their dead bodies[1066].’ What effect such neglect was anciently believed to have upon the dead is a question to be considered later; but the general idea is plainly Hellenic.

(2) Those who meet with any sudden or violent death (including suicides), or, in Maina, where the vendetta is still in vogue, those who having been murdered remain unavenged.

The most important element in this class is formed by those who have been murdered, especially when, as in Maina, they are believed to return from the grave with the purpose of seeking revenge upon their murderers. Such an idea, as will be shown later, is thoroughly consonant with ancient views of bloodguilt. But it appears also from a passage of Lucian[1067] that any ‘violent’ or ‘sudden,’ as opposed to ‘natural,’ death was commonly held to debar the victim from rest no less effectually than actual murder. The whole class may therefore be accepted as Hellenic, and may probably be considered to have always comprised all persons whose lives were cut short suddenly before their proper hour had come.

(3) Children conceived or born on one of the great Church-festivals, and children still-born.

The first division of this class may be variously explained; either the child may be supposed to suffer for the sin committed by its parents on a day when the Church enjoins continence, or else the notion, that children born between Christmas and Epiphany are subject to lycanthropy[1068] and therefore also, according to Slavonic views, to vampirism, has become associated with other church-festivals also. Children still-born are probably to be numbered among victims of ‘sudden’ death. Thus the first division, being of ecclesiastical or Slavonic origin, is to be set aside; the second may probably be included in a larger Hellenic class already considered; neither therefore requires any further discussion.

(4) Those who die under a curse, especially the curse of a parent, or one self-invoked, as in the case of a man who in perjuring himself calls down on his own head all manner of damnation if what he says be false.

The dread which a curse, above all a parent’s curse, excited in the ancient Greeks is well known. No one can have read Aeschylus’ story of the house of Atreus, nor followed with Sophocles the fortunes of Oedipus and his children, without perceiving therein the working of a curse that claims fulfilment and cannot be averted. The idea therefore here involved is purely Hellenic.

(5) Those who die under the ban of the Church, that is to say, excommunicate.

This class is an ecclesiastical variety of the last.

(6) Those who die unbaptised or apostate.

The apostate is of course ipso facto excommunicate, even though no formal sentence have been pronounced against him. The unbaptised have probably been included by priestcraft for purposes of intimidation; baptism is commonly held to prevent children from becoming were-wolves, and therefore also vrykolakes at death.

(7) Men of evil and immoral life in general, more particularly if they have dealt in the blacker kinds of sorcery.

Clerical influence is clearly discernible here, but is not, I think, responsible for the whole idea. A story from Zacynthos[1069] records how the treacherous murderer of a good man was first smitten by a thunderbolt so that he lost both his sight and his reason, and after his death was turned by God into a vrykolakas as a punishment for his crime, and has so remained for a thousand years. Here, in spite of the word vrykolakas being used, the revenant is represented, like Constantine in the popular ballad, as a sufferer. This idea has been shown to be pre-Slavonic—and incidentally it is not a little curious that the story itself claims to date from a thousand years ago, when this idea was only beginning to be ousted by Slavonic superstition. But if the idea of ‘punishment’ is old, the idea that the punishment was merited by a crime must be equally old. For this reason, and for others which will be developed later, I hold that the perpetrators of certain deadly sins were from early times regarded as accursed and subject to the same punishment as befell those on whom a curse had actually been called down. The Church, I think, merely added to the number of those sins, and at the same time undertook the task of pronouncing in many cases the curse which they had earned.

(8) Those who have eaten the flesh of a sheep which was killed by a wolf.

This class is purely Slavonic in origin. To become a were-wolf in consequence of having eaten flesh which a wolf’s fangs have infected with madness is to a simple mind rational enough; and a were-wolf becomes after death a vampire. Further the belief, so far as I know, belongs only to Elis, one of the districts where Slavonic ascendancy was most complete and continued longest.

(9) Those over whose dead bodies a cat or other animal has passed.

This class also is Slavonic. The jumping of a cat over a dead body is still believed by some Slavonic peoples to be a cause of vampirism[1070], while in Greece the idea is rare and local only.

Thus out of the many conditions by which, in modern belief, a man is predisposed to turn vrykolakas, only three can be genuinely Hellenic: first, lack of burial; second, a sudden or violent death; and third, a parental or other curse, or such sin as renders a man accursed. The revenant therefore was regarded, as we inferred also from the story of Constantine and Areté, as a sufferer. His suffering might be the result of pure mischance, as in the case of sudden death, or of neglect on the part of those whose duty it was to lament and to bury him, or again of some sin of his own which had merited a curse. But whether he was the victim of sheer misfortune or of punishment, he was still a sufferer, an object to excite the pity of mankind in general, although in special cases, as when he had been murdered or had not received the last offices of love at the hands of his kinsfolk, he might reasonably be feared by those who had injured him as an avenger.

Since then in the pre-Slavonic period the general feeling towards revenants was a feeling of pity, the treatment of them in that period requires investigation.

Starting once more from the modern superstition, we find that the treatment of vrykolakes by the Greeks differs widely from that accorded by the Slavs to vampires. The Slavonic method is generally to pierce the suspected corpse with a stake of aspen or whitethorn, taking care to drive it right through the heart at one blow. The usual Greek method is to burn the body. The Greeks therefore, who learnt from the Slavs all that is most horrible in their conception of vrykolakes, none the less thought that they knew a better way of disposing of these new-found pests than that which was practised by their teachers. Convinced by foreign influence of the danger, they relied on a native method of obviating it. They would not impale the vrykolakas; they would burn him. Clearly there must have been some strong conviction and assurance in the heart of a people who, freshly persuaded of the peril threatening them at the hands of so loathly and savage a monster, yet chose to pursue their own method of combating it rather than to adopt the foreign and repugnant practice of impaling the dead. That conviction plainly was that cremation, by ensuring the immediate and complete dissolution of the body, put an end to all relations of the dead with the living; and their confidence in it can only have been based upon their own experience in the treatment of the Greek species of revenants. Cremation then was the means by which the Greek folk had always been wont to succour those of the dead who suffered from incorruptibility and resuscitation.

Such a custom would not, so far as I can judge, have encountered any serious ecclesiastical opposition. The Church, it is true, in her earlier days had condemned cremation as a pagan rite, and with the spread of Christianity inhumation became the ordinary rite. But in the case of those who, having been buried, yet returned from the grave, since the Christian rite had proved of no avail, some concession to pagan traditions would have been natural. Many of the clergy, as we have seen, condoned cremation in the case of vrykolakes as a measure of self-defence; surely they would equally have allowed it as an act of charity to more innocent men to whom the earth had denied dissolution and death had brought no repose.

Thus the actual custom of burning dates from the pre-Slavonic era; it is only the motive of the act which is changed. Formerly men felt pity for the revenant, and sought to promote his dissolution in order to release him from a state of suffering; now, as for some centuries past, men feel only horror of the vrykolakas, and seek to promote his dissolution in order to release themselves from a state of peril. Hence no doubt came the more horrible barbarities occasionally inflicted on the corpse; to tear out the heart, to boil it in vinegar, to tear the body to shreds—these are the acts of a panic-stricken and vindictive people eager to torment their foe before annihilating him. But in the old custom of cremation there was nothing inhumane; it was the merciful act of a people who had compassion upon the unquiet dead and gave to them, in solicitude for their welfare, that boon of bodily dissolution by which alone they were finally severed from the living and admitted to the world of the departed.

§ 3. Revenants in ancient Greece.

The Slavonic and the ecclesiastical elements have now been removed from the modern Greek superstition, and the Hellenic residue is briefly this: the human body sometimes remains incorruptible in the earth, and in this state is liable to resuscitation; persons so affected stand as it were halfway between the living and the dead, resembling the former when they walk the earth, and the latter when they are lying quiet in their graves or, if unburied, elsewhere; during their periods of resuscitation they act as reasonable human beings, but their whole condition is pitiable, and the most humane way of treating them is to burn their bodies; disintegration being thus secured, they return no more to this world, but are numbered among the departed. Further the causes of such a condition are threefold—lack of burial, sudden death, and execration or deadly sin deserving of it. The only question which we have left unsolved is that of the agency by which the body is resuscitated. The Devil is now held responsible; but the Devil is a Christian, not a pagan, conception.

My purpose in the present section is, first, to verify by the aid of classical literature the conclusions which have been reached, and, secondly, to solve the one problem which remains.

There is, so far as I know, only one story in ancient literature which contains anything like a full account of a revenant. This is related by Phlegon[1071], a freedman of Hadrian; and the narrator professes to have been an eye-witness of the occurrences which he describes. In his story are embodied most of those very ideas which on wholly other grounds have been argued to form the genuine Hellenic element in the modern superstition concerning vrykolakes, and I shall therefore reproduce it at length. Unfortunately however the beginning of the story is lost, and therewith possibly the cause assigned for the strange conduct of the resuscitated corpse which plays the heroine’s part.

What remains of the story opens abruptly with a weird scene in the guest-chamber of the house of Demostratus and his wife Charito.

Their daughter Philinnion had been dead and buried somewhat less than six months, when one evening she was observed by her old nurse in the guest-chamber, where a young man named Machates was lodged, to all appearances alive. The nurse at once ran to the girl’s parents and bade them come with her and see their child. Charito however was so overcome by the tidings that she first fainted and then wept hysterically for her lost daughter and finally began to abuse the old woman, calling her mad and ordering her out of the room; but the nurse expostulated with spirit, and Charito at last went with her. In the meanwhile however Philinnion and her lover had retired to rest, so that when the mother arrived she could not obtain a good view of her; but from the peep which she got of the girl’s clothes and the shape of her face she thought that she recognised her daughter. Then, feeling that she could not at that hour ascertain the truth of the matter, she decided to keep quiet until morning, and then to rise betimes and surprise the girl if still there, or, failing that, to extort from Machates the whole truth.

But when dawn came the girl had gone away unobserved, and Charito began to take Machates to task, telling him the whole story and imploring him to confess the truth and to keep nothing back. The young man (who seems to have been unaware that Charito had lost a daughter named Philinnion) was much distressed, and at first would only admit that such was indeed the name of the girl whom they had seen; but afterwards he told the whole story of the girl’s visits to him, mentioning that she had said that she came without her parents’ knowledge. To confirm his story, he produced the gold ring which she had given him and her breast-band which she had left behind on the previous night. These were at once recognised by Charito as having belonged to her daughter, and with a loud cry she rent her clothes and loosed her hair and threw herself upon the ground beside the tokens and began making lamentation anew. Her example was soon followed by others of the family as if in preparation for a funeral, and Machates, at his wits’ end how to quiet them, promised to let them see the girl if she should come to him again.

That night accordingly they kept watch, and at the usual hour the girl came, went into Machates’ room, and sat down upon the bed. The young man himself was now anxious to learn the truth; he could not wholly credit the supposition that it was a dead woman who had come so regularly, and who had eaten and drunk with him and lain at his side, and thought rather that the real Philinnion’s tomb had been robbed and the booty sold to the father of the girl, whoever she might be, who visited him. No sooner therefore was she come than he quietly summoned the watchers. The girl’s parents at once entered, and were for a while dumb with astonishment at the sight of her, and then threw their arms round her with loud cries. Then said Philinnion, ‘O my mother and father, it was wrong of you to grudge me three days with this man here in my own home and doing no harm. And so, because of your meddlesomeness, you shall mourn for me anew, and I shall go away again to my appointed place. For it is by divine consent that I have done thus.’ Scarcely had she spoken when she became a corpse and her body lay stretched upon the bed in the sight of all. Confusion and loud lamentation at once ensued, and before long the rumour had got about the town and was reported to the narrator of the story, Phlegon, who appears to have held some official position. To him at any rate it fell to keep order during the night among the excited townsfolk, and early next morning he was present at a crowded meeting in the theatre, at which it was decided to inspect first of all the family vault in which Philinnion had been laid.

The vault having been opened, on all the shelves, save that appropriated to Philinnion, were found bodies or bones; but on hers there was nothing except an iron ring belonging to Machates and a gilt cup—presents which she had received from him at her first visit. Horror-stricken the party left the vault and went straight to Demostratus’ house, and in the guest-chamber saw the girl stretched upon the floor. Thence they returned to another public assembly as crowded as the first, at which one Hyllus, who was reputed not only the best seer of the place but also a clever diviner[1072] and possessed of a comprehensive knowledge of other branches of the profession, advised that the girl’s body should be taken outside the boundaries of the town and should be burnt to ashes—it was inexpedient, he said, for her to be buried in the town—and that certain propitiatory rites, accompanied by a general purification, should be paid to Hermes Chthonios and the Eumenides.

The strange episode ended with the acceptance of this advice by the townspeople and the suicide of Machates.

This story was known to Father Richard of Santorini[1073], who recognised in it an ancient case parallel to some which he himself had witnessed or learnt from other eye-witnesses in his own times. Even the harmless character of Philinnion did not appear to him incompatible with the popular conception of vrykolakes. Indeed, as we saw above, he himself mentions, among the many instances known to him, one in which a shoemaker of Santorini, having turned vrykolakas, manifested no vicious tendencies, but rather the greatest affection and solicitude for his wife and children.

Nor again is the incident of Philinnion’s intercourse with Machates unparalleled in modern times. Many travellers and writers[1074] have concurred in recording the belief that the vrykolakas sometimes revisits his widow, or does violence to other women in their husbands’ absence, or even marries again in some place where he is unknown, and that of such unions children have been born. Indeed in the Middle Ages this belief seems to have spread even beyond the confines of Greece; for a Roman priest, early in the seventeenth century, sums up the views of his Church on the subject as follows[1075]: ‘Devils, though incorporeal and spiritual, can take to themselves the bodies of dead men ... and in such bodies can have intercourse with women, as commonly with striges[1076] and witches, and by such union can even beget children.’ This statement would be a fair ecclesiastical summary of modern Greek belief. In Thessaly I myself was told of a family in the neighbourhood of Domoko, who reckoned a vrykolakas among their ancestors of the second or third generation back, and by virtue of such lineage inherited a special skill (such as is more commonly ascribed to σαββατογεννημένοι, ‘men born on a Saturday,’ when vrykolakes usually rest in their graves, or to ἀλαφροστοίχει̯ωτοι[1077], those who are in close touch with a ‘familiar spirit,’) in dealing with those vrykolakes which from time to time troubled the country-side; indeed they had been summoned, I was assured, even to remote districts for consultation as specialists.

The story of Philinnion was not overlooked by Bernhard Schmidt, but he does not appear to have recognised in it anything more relevant than in the ancient ghost-stories (gespenstergeschichten) among which he reckons it[1078]. Most emphatically this is no ghost-story. The distinction between ghosts and Greek revenants is of a primary and universal nature, patent to all who can discriminate between soul and body. In this story Philinnion acts as a revenant and is treated as a revenant; the inspection of the vault in which her body had been laid and the purpose of her nocturnal visits to Machates furnish conclusive evidence of her corporeal resuscitation; and the method of disposing of her corpse is the method generally approved and employed in the case of revenants—cremation. In effect all that remains of the story is in complete accord with what I have claimed on other grounds as the Hellenic element in the modern superstition; only one detail is wanting—the cause of Philinnion’s resuscitation—and if we had the first part of the story, it is not unlikely that in it we should find that her early death had been also sudden or violent. Clearly then the belief in revenants was known in Greece in the age of Hadrian.

A casual allusion to the same superstition occurs also in Lucian[1079]. ‘I know of a man,’ says a doctor named Antigonus, ‘who rose again twenty days after he was buried; I attended him after his resurrection as well as before his death.’ ‘But how was it,’ rejoins another, ‘that in twenty days the body did not decompose or in any case the man perish of hunger?’ Unfortunately no answer is given and the subject drops, but the man in question was clearly a corporeal revenant and not a mere ghost.

A reference to the same vulgar belief is also seemingly intended by Aristophanes in the Ecclesiazusae, where the personal appearance of one of the reprobate old women calls forth the exclamation,

The passage is of course too brief to make any such allusion certain; but it becomes highly probable if it can be shown from other sources that the superstition was popularly current in Aristophanes’ time. This I can do.

The fixity of popular phrases of imprecation has been amply demonstrated in the last section[1081]. A large selection of curses, all conceived in the same spirit, furnished, by their contrast with some features of the now contaminated superstition, a clue for the detection of the Slavonic elements therein. These imprecations, we learnt, were based upon the purely Hellenic belief, and had remained unaffected by the foreign influence which had modified and in some respects almost transformed it. Spoken often in a moment of passion, springing spontaneously and familiarly to the lips, too hasty to be informed by conscious thought, such curses have been handed down from generation to generation as fixed expressions subject to none of the changes which come of deliberate reflection. Though the old beliefs have been altered by the infusion of alien doctrines, the old curses stand fast in bold antagonism to all foreign lore, true records of a superstition now garbled, coins stamped with the effigy and superscription of by-gone thought, but current still.

As the simplest types of these old-established curses may be taken the two phrases, νὰ μὴν τὸν δεχτῇ ἡ γῆς, ‘May the earth not receive him,’ and νὰ τὸν βγάλῃ ἡ γῆς, ‘May the earth cast him out.’ The one is negative in form, the other positive, but both equally suggest, in the peasant’s mind, both the incorruptibility of the body and its resuscitation. Can a prototype of these curses be found in ancient literature? If so, in view of the general continuity of Greek belief and custom, we shall be justified in concluding that, as those ancient curses are identical with the modern, so the superstition which suggested them in old time is identical with that part of the modern superstition on which they are now based.

Two examples of these curses are furnished by Euripides. In a scene where Orestes conjures his comrade Pylades to leave him and not to involve himself in the meditated act of vengeance, the latter replies[1082], ‘Never may the fruitful earth receive my blood, nor yet the gleaming air, if ever I turn traitor to thee and save myself and forsake thee!’ In like tone rings out Hippolytus’ assertion of his innocence toward his father[1083]: ‘Now by Zeus the judge of oaths and by the earth beneath our feet, I swear that never have I touched thy marriage-bed, nor would have willed it nor conceived the thought. May I verily perish without glory and without name, cityless and homeless, an outcast and wanderer upon the earth, yea and in death may neither sea nor earth receive my flesh, if I have proved false!’

‘May the earth not receive my flesh!’ Such is the common burden of the two oaths; such the final chord struck by Hippolytus in that symphony of imprecations with which he vindicates his innocence; such too would be the strongest oath by which any peasant of to-day might bind himself. The very words have scarcely varied in a score of centuries; who then will venture to claim that their purport is changed? Is it not clear that just as in later times the Church, by incorporating the popular curse in her formula of excommunication, seized the weapons of paganism and turned them against those rebels and infidels whom her own direst fulminations had no power to dismay, so Euripides, conscious that no imaginings of his own art could suffice to excite in his hearers that horror which the climax of self-execration demanded, did not disdain ‘the touchings of things common,’ but turned to tragic use a popular curse which then, as now, pierced home to every heart? It would be strange indeed if words, which since early in the Christian era have continuously implied a belief in the indissolubility and resuscitation of those who die accursed, should be held to have borne some other meaning a few centuries earlier.

Thus then Euripides, by the identity of his language with that of to-day, discovers most conspicuously his knowledge of that which on other grounds I have shown to be the Hellenic element in the superstition concerning vrykolakes. But he was not alone in employing it for dramatic purposes. In the pages of Sophocles too and of Aeschylus there are passages which only a knowledge of this superstition can adequately explain. First among these is the climax of that speech in which Oedipus, blind and outcast, denounces his undutiful son:

‘Begone, abhorred and renounced of me thy father, thou basest villain, and take with thee these curses that I call down upon thee, that thou win not with thy spear that land of thine own kin, nor yet return ever again to the vale of Argos, but that thou and he that drave thee forth, smiting and smitten, fall each by a brother’s hand. Such is my curse; yea, and I call on Tartarus, in whose hated gloom my father lies, to drive thee from his home[1084].’

The last phrase of this denunciation,

is that with which I am concerned. It is an old-established difficulty. Commentators have translated variously ‘to remove thee from thy home,’ ‘to take thee away to his home,’ ‘to give thee another home’; but in effect they are all agreed in trying to make the words refer to removal from this to the nether world, or, in one word, to death. Now even if the word ἀποικίζω could in this context bear any of the meanings ascribed to it, such an euphemism following upon the explicit threat that Polynices should be slain by his own brother’s hand would be an imbecile anticlimax; but I question the very possibility of the supposed usage. It is true that an emigrant from one place becomes an immigrant into another; but that cannot justify the interchange of the two terms. Tartarus is here besought, as plainly as language can express it, to drive Polynices out, not to take him in. There can be only one explanation of that prayer. Polynices’ death has already been foretold; but his father’s curse pursues him beyond death. Tartarus, in whose keeping the dead should lie, is conjured to drive him forth from the home of the dead, even as the peasants now pray that the earth may cast out those whom they hate.

And the context shows clearly that the curse was so understood by Polynices. Turning to Antigone and Ismene with impassioned entreaty he implores them—them at least, though all others forsake him and turn against him—if so be his father’s cruel imprecations come to fulfilment and they, his sisters, ever return to their home, not to leave him dishonoured, but to lay him in the grave and to grant him the guerdons of the dead[1085]. Why then this insistence, unless the father’s curse had extended beyond death? Merely to introduce a reference to the plot of the Antigone? Clearly more than that. Polynices was to die bound by his father’s curse, slain by his brother’s hand, doubly debarred, if modern beliefs be a key to ancient, from dissolution and from reception into the nether world. The words of his father’s invocation of Tartarus had conveyed to his mind the certainty of a doom outlasting death, that Tartarus should not receive him, but reject him from the home of the dead. Only one faint gleam of hope was left, that by the fulfilment of those last offices of love toward the departed, which were for all men a passport to the lower world, he, burdened and bound with a father’s curse, both slayer and slain of his own brother, might yet be not debarred from his last home, but free to enter into rest.

Thus Sophocles in language less popular, but hardly less clear, than that of Euripides proclaims that the belief in the non-dissolution or rejection of the body by the earth and the powers under the earth was a terror as potent then as it is now, and an ever effective weapon of malediction. Aeschylus had gone even further, and, by enlisting this terror among the threats uttered on behalf of a dead man by a god in his most holy sanctuary, had claimed as it were for the popular superstition the highest religious sanction.

In the Choephori[1086] Orestes is made to review in a speech as difficult as it is powerful the motives which are urging him on to the requital of blood with blood. Most cogent among these motives is the explicit command issued from Apollo’s Delphic shrine, bidding him not spare his father’s murderess, mother though she be, and foretelling the direst penalties for disobedience. And what are these penalties? First, the physical torment of ‘blains that leap upon the flesh and with savage jaws eat out its erstwhile vigour’; second, the mental horror of coming madness, ‘the arrow that flieth in darkness winged by the powers of hell with the curse of fallen kindred, even raving and vain terror born of the night’; third, banishment from home and city, with no place at friendly board, no part in drink-offering and sacrifice; and yet one penalty more wherein should culminate the threatened agonies, ‘to die at last with none to honour, none to love him, damned, even in the doom that wastes all, to know no corruption.’

Of the earlier penalties and of their intimate connexion with one branch of this popular superstition I shall have occasion to speak later. Here I have only to justify the new rendering which I have given to the last lines of the passage,

It has generally been held that ταριχευθέντα is here metaphorically used of the wasting or withering of the body through physical suffering, the first penalty, or, it may be, through mental distress, the second. In other words, the last line of the passage merely sums up in a concise expression a penalty, or penalties, previously detailed. On the same view it is but consistent to regard πάντων ἄτιμον κἄφιλον as a similar summary of the third penalty. Stripped of these recapitulations and vain repetitions Apollo’s final threat amounts to—what? θνήσκειν χρόνῳ, ‘to die in course of time.’ A blood-curdling and unique climax of human suffering in very truth! And this a last threat after leprosy and madness and outcast loneliness? Surely rather a promise of release and rest.

But let the anti-climax pass. Whence comes the alleged metaphorical meaning of ταριχεύεσθαι, so foreign to its normal use? How comes it to denote the wasting of disease, and what authority has this supposed use? Its mainstay apparently is a single passage in a pseudo-Demosthenic speech, which, in describing the cowardly assault of a young man upon an old, depicts the aggressor as νεαλὴς καὶ πρόσφατος and his victim as τεταριχευμένου καὶ πολὺν χρόνον συμπεπτωκότος[1088]. But here the metaphor, whatever may be thought of its elegance or of its likelihood to excite mirth rather than indignation, is at least clearly explained both by its antithesis and by its context; νεαλὴς and πρόσφατος are terms properly applied to ‘fresh’ fish or meat, τεταριχευμένος to the same commodities ‘preserved’ by drying or pickling, and we understand at once that the old man is represented to be dried and shrivelled in appearance. Such is the support for the alleged Aeschylean usage of ταριχευθέντα without the same antithesis to illuminate its meaning. Are we then to understand that all the fulminations and thunderings of Apollo’s oracle dwindle away into an appeal to Orestes’ pride in his personal appearance and a warning that leprosy will render him as unattractive as a bloater? Or, if it be claimed that the slow painful process of wasting is suggested rather than its ultimate effect, is it reasonable that a word which properly denotes artificial preservation should be used metaphorically of natural decay? This is not metaphor, but metamorphosis.

Let us then abandon far-fetched explanations; let us conceive it possible that Aeschylus used the word in the sense which it normally bore in relation to the human body—‘preserved from corruption,’ like the mummies of Egypt—and further that he placed the word παμφθάρτῳ in immediate juxtaposition with it in order to emphasise the more strikingly the contrast between the threatened ‘non-corruption’ and the ordinary ‘wasting’ powers of death. So understood, the final penalty presents a true climax. As the victim is to be excluded in his lifetime from all intercourse with the living, so in his death, by the withholding of that dissolution without which there is no entrance to the lower world, he is to be cut off from communion with the dead. He is to die with none to honour him with the rites due to the dead, none to love him and shed the tears that are their just meed, but even in that last doom which consumes all others is damned to be withheld from corruption. As ‘Euripides the human’ uses the common phrase of to-day ‘May the earth not receive,’ so Aeschylus the divine anticipates the ecclesiastical formula, ‘and after death thou shalt be indissoluble.’

The same contrast between the all-wasting functions of death and the ‘bound’ condition of the damned now becomes intelligible in two other passages of Aeschylus.

In the Supplices the king of the Pelasgians, who is beset by the daughters of Danaus with the twofold claim of kinsfolk and suppliants, and besought to deliver them from the lust and violence of their pursuers, acknowledges himself in a sore strait. If he rescue his suppliants, he may involve his people in war; if he refuse to hearken, he fears that, as a tacit accomplice in the violence and pollution[1089] threatened, he may make to himself ‘the God of all destruction a stern Avenger ever present, an Avenger that sets not free the dead even in Hades’ home[1090].’

Again in the Eumenides, when Orestes having slain his mother is no longer seeking for vengeance but flying therefrom with no hope of safety save in the promises of Apollo whose will he has done, the band of pursuing Furies, like to be presently thwarted by that god, yet comfort their black hearts with the assurance of future retribution. ‘Yea,’ cries one, ‘me doth Apollo vex, but Orestes shall he not redeem; though he flee from me beneath the earth, there is no freeing for him, but because of his blood-guiltiness he shall find another in my stead to visit his pollution on his head[1091].’

The conception of future punishment in these two passages is clearly the same. What then is meant by the fear that even the dead may not be set free? and who is ‘the God of all destruction’ who is named in the first passage as the author of that punishment? The answer has already been found. ‘The all-destroying, God’ (ὁ πανώλεθρος θεὸς) is none other than the ‘all-wasting doom’ (πάμφθαρτος μόρος) of Apollo’s oracle—Death personified instead of death abstract; and Death’s refusal ‘to set free’ the dead is to be interpreted in the light of Apollo’s warning to Orestes that, if he fail in his duty to his murdered sire, he will himself in death be ‘damned to incorruption.’ The language employed is indeed vaguer and more allusive; the word ἐλευθεροῦν, ‘to set free,’ might suggest many ideas besides bodily ‘freeing’ or dissolution; yet it may be noticed that this is the very word which the above-quoted[1092] nomocanon de excommunicatis uses interchangeably with the more common λύειν in this very sense. Only for us, who have not in our hearts the same faiths and fears quick to vibrate in response to each touch of religious awe, is a commentary needed; for a Greek audience the suggestion contained in ἐλευθεροῦν, above all in its implied contrast with πανώλεθρος, fully sufficed.

Thus then we have found two passages of Euripides containing imprecations almost identical in form with the curses that may be heard from the lips of modern Greek peasants; we have found a similar passage in Sophocles which has hitherto proved a difficulty to commentators simply because they have tried to pervert the meaning of the word ἀποικίζω, when its normal sense will make the phrase a parallel to those of Euripides and of modern Greece; and finally in the Choephori of Aeschylus—here again by reading a word in its proper sense—we have found religious sanction claimed for the belief which underlies these imprecations—the belief that the fate to be most dreaded by mankind after death is incorruptibility and resuscitation.

It remains to examine the supposed causes of this dreaded fate, and to see whether the three causes which, when we discussed the modern classes of men liable to become vrykolakes, appeared to be Hellenic—namely, lack of burial, violent death, and parental or other execration or any sin deserving it—actually figure as causes in ancient Greek literature.

It will be convenient to consider the last-mentioned first.

An instance of formal execration has already been provided. No better example than the curse called down by Oedipus upon his son could be desired. But it was suggested above that in certain other cases, even where no actual imprecation had been uttered, men were accounted accursed; and indeed it would be an absurdity that a son who acted undutifully towards his father should fall a victim to his curse, but that one, let us say, who slew his father and gave him no time to pronounce the damning words, should go scatheless. From the earliest times, I believe, there were held to be certain deadly sins, sins against the few primitive god-given principles of right and wrong, which brought their own curse. Among these was numbered from the first the murder of a kinsman. To this Hesiod[1093] adds others which were so regarded in his day. ‘Equal is the guilt when one ill treateth the suppliant and the stranger, or goeth up unto his brother’s bed, ... or sinneth against orphan children and heedeth not, or chideth his old father, who hath passed the gloomy gates of age, and raileth upon him with hard words; against such an one verily Zeus himself is wroth, and at the end layeth upon him stern retribution for his unrighteous deeds.’ A more civilised age included all murder in the list; and later again the Church seems to have extended it until ‘transgressors of the divine law’ might become ipso facto excommunicate and accursed.

To Aeschylus the chief of such sins was unquestionably the murder of a close kinsman; but other sins also, especially those involving pollution (μίασμα), rendered the perpetrator liable to the same punishment as followed upon a formal imprecation. And this view was not of Aeschylus’ own invention; it must have belonged to the popular religion. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain how the Greek Church in the Middle Ages had come to adopt almost the same views as Aeschylus. For what said the Church? The nomocanon quoted in the last section[1094] teaches that persons who ‘have been justly, reasonably, and lawfully excommunicated by their bishops, as transgressors of the divine law, and have died in the state of excommunication, without amending their ways and receiving forgiveness,’ may be expected to remain whole and incorrupt after death. But another ecclesiastical document[1095] shows clearly that a formal sentence of excommunication was not essential to this result; a distinction is drawn between him whose corpse appears white, showing that he was ‘excommunicated by the divine laws,’ and him whose corpse is black, showing that he was ‘excommunicated by a bishop.’ Clearly then the Church taught that certain ‘transgressors of the divine law’ might become automatically excommunicate. Certain deadly sins deserved the ecclesiastical curse and, whether it were pronounced or not, incurred the same punishment after death. The list of such sins was certainly extended by the Church so as to include, for example, apostasy, omission of baptism, the more reprehensible acts of sorcery, and suicide, which was, and still is sometimes, a bar to Christian burial. But at the same time the number of those sins which were actually left to work out their own curse was probably diminished; the Church constituted herself judge, and in most cases formally sentenced the sinner to that punishment which the sin alone, without her condemnation, was popularly believed to entail. If then we strip this doctrine of its ecclesiastical dress and put out of sight the intervention of an hierarchy arrogating to itself the office of binding and loosing, there remains the simple belief that certain transgressors of the divine law, certain sinners of deadly sins, were ipso facto accursed and condemned to incorruption.

Is not this precisely the Aeschylean doctrine? Pelasgus, if he should consent unto the violence of those suitors who sought the daughters of Danaus in unhallowed wedlock, if he should defy Zeus the God of suppliants and set at naught those other deities at whose altar his kinswomen sat—would not he indeed be a transgressor of the divine law? He acknowledges it himself, and, conformably to the doctrine enunciated, anticipates that Death himself will turn Avenger and free him not when dead. Orestes, owing to his murdered father the sacred duty of vengeance and expressly urged by Apollo to perform it—would not he too be a transgressor of the divine law, if he should fail or flag in his enterprise of blood? Fitly then did Apollo threaten him that after manifold troubles in life he should die damned to incorruption. The same Orestes, viewed now not from Apollo’s standpoint but from that of the Erinyes, bloodguilty with his mother’s murder—had he not perpetrated a deadly sin, was he not a transgressor of the divine law? Rightly then may his foes exult that he shall not escape, but, though he be fled from them beneath the earth, still ‘hath he no freeing.’ In fine, Aeschylus agrees, save for the mediaeval multiplication of deadly sins, with the doctrine of the Church; and this agreement is proof that in the popular creed of Greece, from which both Aeschylus and the Church must have borrowed, the commission of certain sins has always involved the penalty of incorruptibility, whether the curse which those sins merited had been formally pronounced or no. The actual source and operation of such unspoken curses will be considered in the next section.

The other two causes, lack of burial and violent death, may be considered together; for the whole trend of ancient literature in regard to both these calamities is the same, namely, that they caused the return of the dead man’s spirit—of his spirit only, be it noted, and not of his body. It is the ghost of Patroclus which in the Iliad[1096] appears to Achilles and demands the funeral-rites due to his body; it is the ghost of Elpenor which in the Odyssey[1097] makes the same claim upon Odysseus; it is the ghost of Polydorus which in the Hecuba[1098] of Euripides bemoans his body cast away in the sea. Again it is the ghost of Clytemnestra which in the Eumenides[1099] of Aeschylus comes seeking vengeance for her violent death; and Lucian in the Philopseudes[1100] gives special prominence to this cause of the soul’s unrest. ‘Perhaps, Eucrates,’ says one of the speakers in the dialogue, ‘what Tychiades means is this, that the only souls which wander about are those of men who met with a violent death—anyone, for example, who hanged himself, or was beheaded or impaled, or departed this life in any other such way—but that the souls of those who died a natural death do not wander; if that is his theory, it cannot be lightly dismissed.’ It is needless to multiply examples[1101]; literary tradition, from Homer down to Lucian, is all in favour of the re-appearance of the soul, and not of the body, as the result of either lack of burial or violent death.

It is perfectly clear then that there is a considerable discrepancy between the ancient literary view and the modern popular creed. Ancient literature is extremely reticent on the subject of bodily resuscitation occasioned solely by a violent death[1102] or by lack of burial. In Phlegon’s story it is indeed probable that the cause of Philinnion’s re-appearance was a violent death; but the first part of the narrative is missing, and no such statement is actually made.

In modern beliefs, on the contrary, there is little or no trace of the idea that the dead return for these causes in purely spiritual form. The very conception of ghosts is weak and indefinite among the peasantry. I have certainly been told by peasants of cases in which a person at the point of death has appeared, presumably in spiritual form, to friends at a distance; and there is a fairly common belief, seemingly derived from the Bible, that at Easter many of the graves are opened and release for a time the spirits of the dead. But it is a significant fact that there is not even a name for ghosts which cannot be equally well applied to any supernatural apparitions. The thought of them in general seems to be nothing more definite than a vague uneasiness in the minds of timid women and children at that hour when

There is no fixed creed or tradition here. In an account of the definite superstitions of modern Greece ghosts are a quantité négligeable.

But, while ancient literature and modern superstition are thus in direct conflict on one point, they are agreed in making lack of burial and violent death the causes of a certain unrest on the part of the dead; and though the one usually attributes that unrest to the ghost, and the other to the corpse, their agreement in all else could not surely be a mere casual coincidence; there must be a connexion to be discovered between them.

The consistency of the popular view which has obtained practically throughout the Christian era has already been established. The Church found the Greek people already firmly convinced that the two causes which we are considering, no less than formal execration or execrable sin, led to bodily incorruption and resuscitation. The only moot point is what agency was held to produce the resuscitation before the Church taught that it was the work of the Devil. But can equal consistency be claimed for ancient literature? It has just now been shown that the tragedians recognised that a curse or a deadly sin led to the resuscitation of the body; and yet they make lack of burial and violent death lead rather to the re-appearance of a ghost. Why then this discrimination between the effects produced by causes all of which in more recent popular belief produce the same effect? My answer is that popular belief in antiquity was the same as popular belief now in respect of all the causes, but that literary propriety forbade more than a mere verbal reference to so gross a superstition as bodily resuscitation. When a dead man was required in literature to re-appear, he was conventionally pourtrayed as a ghost, not as a walking corpse; and the convention was, I think, right and necessary.

For let it be granted for a moment that the popular belief of to-day dates from the earliest times, and that then as now the revenant was popularly pictured as a monster ‘swollen and distended all over so that the joints can scarcely be bent; the skin being stretched like the parchment of a drum, and when struck giving out the same sound.’ Could even Homer have re-animated the dead Patroclus, with this unearthly ghastliness added to his wounds and to his mangling by the chariot, and have brought him to Achilles in the darkness of the night, without exciting in his breast horror instead of pity and loathing for love? Euripides again was greatly daring when he assigned the prologue of a tragedy to Polydorus’ ghost; but even he could not have restrained the unquenchable mirth of his audience, if his play had opened with a soliloquy by an agitated corpse. Epic and dramatic propriety must have demanded some refinement of so grossly material a conception. The canons of drama, we know, would not allow the enactment of a murder on the stage before the eyes of the spectators; would it then have been compatible with the restraint of Greek art to represent the murdered body as a revenant? Aeschylus himself, the lover of weird misbegotten shapes, would have recoiled from such an enterprise. But those same canons did permit a verbal description of the murder; and similarly the tragedians permitted themselves to refer, in imprecations and suchlike, to the horror of bodily resuscitation.

The case then stands thus. References are, as we have seen, made by the tragedians to the possibility of men becoming revenants, whereas they shrank from presenting the actuality. But the references to the possibility occur, chiefly at any rate, in imprecations, with the result that at first sight a curse would seem to have been the only recognised cause of bodily resuscitation in ancient times; whereas the most famous literary examples of the actual re-appearance of the dead—Clytemnestra and Polydorus in tragedy, or, if we go back to Homer, Patroclus and Elpenor—happen to be cases in which the cause was lack of burial or a violent death, with the result that literary tradition inclined to substitute ghosts for the corporeal revenants of the popular creed in these two cases.

Such is my explanation of the discrepancy; and the probability of it is warranted by three considerations—first, that Greek Tragedy does contain one or two references to the possible resuscitation of other than the accursed—second, that Plato modifies the popular notions concerning the accursed in almost the same way that the tragedians modified the fate of the unburied and of those slain by violence—third, that the literary tradition concerning ghosts is in itself inconsistent and bears the marks of arbitrary modification.

The most important reference in Tragedy occurs in the Choephori, where Orestes and Electra pray their murdered father to rise from the grave in bodily form[1103]. This passage, together with a close parallel from Sophocles, will be fully discussed later[1104]. Here I need only point out the justification by Aeschylus of my theory that the substitution of ghost for revenant is a necessary literary convention. He suggests verbally the possible uprising of the murdered Agamemnon as a revenant; but, when it comes to an actual presentation of the murdered Clytemnestra on the stage, his dramatis persona is a ghost.

Next, Plato, in a well-known passage of the Phaedo[1105], speaks of the souls of dead men having actually been seen in the form of shadowy apparitions haunting the neighbourhood of tombs—souls, he explains, which have not been fully cleansed and freed from the visible material world, but still have some part therein and hence are themselves visible; and, he adds, these are the souls of the wicked, which are compelled to wander thus in punishment for their former evil life. Naturally Plato of all men—and of all his works in the Phaedo—could not accept the notion that the body under any conditions remained incorruptible; his whole doctrine is imbued with his belief that the gross and material perishes, and only the pure and spiritual endures. When therefore he came to utilise the popular doctrine, which the tragedians had endorsed, that certain sinners were condemned to incorruption, some modification of the idea was necessary; and accordingly he makes the wicked to wander as ghosts, not as corporeal revenants, just as Homer and the tragedians seem to have done in the case of the unburied and those who had met their death by violence. Plato’s extension of the literary tradition suggests that its earlier development had been such as I have indicated.

Lastly, the literary tradition, as represented by earlier writers than Plato, is by no means uniform. If it had been a definite religious doctrine, and not merely a literary convention, that the unburied returned as ghosts, the presentment of Patroclus and of Polydorus should have been in all respects similar. But what do we find? Each certainly appears as a ghost and asks for burial; but there the resemblance ends. According to Homer[1106] the spirit of Patroclus, in craving burial of his body, declares that, ere that rite be performed, the spirit itself cannot pass the gates of Hades but is held aloof by the spirits of the other dead, and moreover that having once passed it can no more return to this world. According to Euripides[1107], familiar though he must have been with Homer’s teaching, the spirit of Polydorus had passed within the gates of Hades and by permission of the nether gods had returned to demand the burial of his body. Homer’s reason for the soul’s anxiety about the body’s burial is none too convincing in itself; for it only raises a further question: if death means the final separation of soul from body, and the lower world is tenanted by souls only—for so Homer at any rate teaches—why should the denizens of that world make the admission of a newly-sped soul conditional upon the burial of the body which it had finally quitted? But, what is more important, Homer’s reason, such as it is, is flatly disavowed by Euripides, who yet advances no reason of his own why the spirit of Polydorus, having once passed into Hades’ halls, should have any further interest in its old carnal tenement. This disagreement can only mean that Homer and Euripides were not following an acknowledged doctrine of popular religion in representing Patroclus and Polydorus in the form of ghosts; for in that case they would surely have agreed with the popular doctrine, and therefore also with each other, in assigning a reason for the ghost’s interest in the burial of its discarded body. Either then there was no popular belief on the whole subject—which is incredible—or else it was such as literary propriety forbade them to follow. Now if the popular belief was that the unburied appeared as corporeal revenants, their eagerness for burial is intelligible; but if a ghost be substituted by literary convention for the revenant, a good reason for such eagerness becomes hard to find. Hence the inconsequence of Homer’s reason; hence the silence of Euripides.

But if, as now seems likely, the substitution of mere ghost for bodily revenant was a literary convention, it by no means follows that that convention is valueless as a guide to the popular beliefs of the time. It may represent a part of those beliefs, though not the whole. The established doctrines on this whole subject were not remodelled by the tragedians save in obedience to the laws of their art. This we definitely know; for the causes which they assign for the unrest of the dead are numbered among the popularly received causes which remain to this day; and even the idea of physical resuscitation was retained and effectively utilised by them within certain limitations. Clearly then they kept what they could, and only changed what they must. Judicious selection rather than arbitrary invention was the method by which the literary tradition was established. Since then that tradition uniformly speaks of the soul’s return, while discrepancies only arise in accounting for the soul’s interest in the corpse, was it perhaps only in the latter respect that literary tradition parted company with popular belief? Did the spirit as well as the body of the dead play some part in the popular superstition? Did the common-folk too hold that, after the separation of soul from body at death, the soul itself under certain conditions returned from its flight towards the house of Hades—returned however not to appear alone in ghostly guise, but to re-animate the dead body and raise it up as a revenant? Was this the popular doctrine from which literature selected, recording the soul’s return, but suppressing the re-animation of the body, and thereby creating for itself the difficulty of explaining the soul’s interest in the body?

The hypothesis commends itself as providing at the same time an answer to the one question which remained unanswered in the last section. We saw that, through ecclesiastical influence, Christian Greece has long assigned the work of resuscitating the dead to the Devil. But to whom or to what did pagan Greece previously assign it? Surely in the whole range of Greek mythology it were hard to find any supernatural being either specially suited or probably condemned to such a task. The soul is, prima facie, the most appropriate and likely agent.

But there is even stronger evidence than this. The probable becomes proven when we turn back to the only full pagan account of a bodily revenant, the story of Philinnion. What are her words, when she is discovered by her parents? ‘Mother and father, it was wrong of you to grudge me three days with this man here in my own home and doing no harm. And so, because of your meddlesomeness, you shall mourn for me anew, and I shall go away to my appointed place. For it is by divine consent that I have done thus.’ And how is her threat of going away fulfilled? ‘Scarce had she spoken when she became a corpse, and her body lay stretched upon the bed in the sight of all.’ The words ‘I shall go away’ were therefore intended by the writer to mean ‘My soul will go away’; for the body remained. Clearly then, in the belief of that age, resuscitation of the dead meant the re-animation of the body by the soul which had been temporarily separated from it.

In the light of this fact Plato’s reference to the wandering of the souls of the wicked is found to approximate more nearly to the popular superstition. Such souls, he says, have been seen in the neighbourhood of tombs; and they are visible because they are not cleansed and freed from the visible and material world[1108], but participate therein. What then is the particular material thing in which they participate and which keeps them near the tombs? Evidently the body whose impurities they contracted in life, the body from which they are not cleansed and freed. Plato admits only participation, not re-animation; but in all else he adheres to the genuine popular belief.

The same idea furnishes also what I believe to be the true explanation of the custom of the so-called ‘Charon’s obol.’ The coin or other object placed in the mouth of the dead was originally, I have argued[1109], a charm to prevent the entry of some evil spirit or the re-entry of the soul into the corpse. In Chios and in Rhodes, as we have seen, this is the popular explanation still given—the particular spirit against whom the precaution is taken being, owing to Christian influence, a devil. But if, as is likely, a devil has merely been substituted for the soul, while the rest of the superstition has remained unchanged, it follows that the precaution was originally directed against the return of the soul, and so was a means of ensuring bodily dissolution; for, though I cannot actually prove it, it is natural to suppose that re-animation was not the result, but the cause, of incorruption.

To sum up, the conclusions which have been reached stand thus:—Death, according to the popular religion of ancient Greece, was not a final separation of body and soul; in certain cases the body remained incorrupt and the soul re-animated it. This condition, in which the dead belonged neither to this nor to the nether world, was one of misery; and bodily dissolution was to be desired. Dissolution could in no case be properly effected without the rite of interment or cremation. The unburied therefore formed one class of revenants. But even due interment did not necessarily produce dissolution; a sudden or violent death rendered the body incorruptible, presumably because the proper hour had not yet come for the soul to leave it; an imprecation withheld the body from decay by its own ‘binding’ power; and finally, the commission of a deadly sin, above all of murder, rendered the sinner subject to the same dire fate as if the curse which his sin merited had actually been pronounced. The only unfailing method of dissolution was cremation.

§ 4. Revenants as Avengers of Blood.

The conclusions which have now been reached show, among others, the somewhat surprising result, that the popular religion of Greece both ancient and modern has always comprised the belief that both the murdered and the murderer were doomed to the same unhappy lot after death. The murderer, in the class of men polluted and accursed by heinous sin, and his victim, in the class of those who have met with violent deaths, have alike been regarded as pre-disposed to become revenants. The two facts thus simply stated constitute a problem which deserves investigation. It can be no accident that two classes of men, so glaringly contrasted here, should be believed to share the same fate hereafter. Some relation between the two beliefs must surely subsist.

The solution to which the mind naturally leaps is the idea that in some way retributive justice causes the murderer to be punished with the selfsame suffering as he has brought upon his victim; that, as blood calls for blood, so the resuscitation of the murdered calls for the resuscitation of the murderer; that the old law, δράσαντι παθεῖν, ‘as a man hath wrought, so must he suffer,’ is not limited to this world nor fully vindicated by the mere shedding of the murderer’s blood, but dooms him to become, like his victim, a revenant from the grave.

Such an explanation of the two facts before us is, it may almost be said, obviously and self-evidently right, so far as it goes; but the proof of its correctness is best to be obtained by going further, so as not merely to indicate the appropriateness of the murderer’s punishment, but to discover also the agency whereby it is inflicted; for, if it can be established that according to the popular belief it is the murdered man himself who, in the form of a revenant, plagues his murderer, then the retributive character of all the murderer’s sufferings both here and hereafter will be manifest.

The most striking testimony to the existence of such a belief is to be found in a gruesome practice to which, we are told, murderers in old time were addicted—the practice of mutilating (μασχαλίζειν) the murdered man by cutting off his hands and feet, and either placing them under his armpits or tying them with a band (μασχαλιστήρ) round his breast. What object was had in view in so disposing of the severed extremities, if indeed our information as to the act itself be correct, remains uncertain; perhaps indeed that information amounts to nothing more than a faulty conjectural interpretation of the word μασχαλίζειν itself, which might equally well mean to sever the arms from the body at the armpit and to treat the lower limbs in similar fashion. But at any rate the intention of the whole act of mutilation is known and clear; the murderer sought to deprive his victim of the power to exact vengeance for his wrongs. Clearly then the vengeance apprehended was not that of a disembodied spirit entreating the gods to act on its behalf or appearing in visions to its surviving kinsfolk and urging them to requite the murderer, but the vengeance of a bodily revenant with feet swift to pursue and hands strong to strike. On no other grounds is the mutilation of the dead body intelligible.

But if any doubt could still rest upon this interpretation of the old custom, it must be finally dispersed by a consideration of the one instance of the same custom known to me in modern times. This occurs in a story which I have already related[1110]—the story of a human sacrifice in Santorini at the time of the Greek War of Independence, as narrated to me by an old man of the island who claimed to have himself taken part in the affair. According to his narrative not only the head of the victim was cut off but also his hands, and in that order. Why then this mutilation of the dead body? That question I put in vain to the old man; he had obliged me by giving me his reminiscences, but he had no intention of letting himself be cross-questioned upon them. Yet the real answer is not hard to conjecture. Santorini is the most famous haunt of vrykolakes in the whole of Greece, and familiarity with them has bred in the minds of the islanders no contempt for them, but rather a more lively terror. Nowhere therefore is any expedient for combating the powers of the vrykolakas more likely to be remembered and adopted. Since then the human victim in the story is not represented as a willing victim, but was evidently seized and slain by violence, his slayers, in performing their task, must have recognised that he would in all probability turn vrykolakas, and in their mutilation of his corpse (a deed inexpressibly repugnant to Greek feeling now as in old time) can only have been actuated by the hope of thus incapacitating the revenant for his otherwise sure and terrible vengeance.

The reason then why the murderer as well as the murdered becomes a revenant is plain. The victim, rising from his grave in bodily substance, pursues his enemy with untiring rancour until he brings him to the same sorry state as that to which he himself has come.

Such, I venture to say, has been the conviction deep down in the hearts of the Greek people from the earliest times down to this day. A custom, which consists in a deliberate and sacrilegious act of mutilation, more ghastly than murder itself, perpetrated upon the helpless dead, and which yet has continued unchanged throughout the changes and chances which the Greek people have undergone for more than a score of centuries, can only be based upon the most immutable of superstitious beliefs and dreads, and reveals more unerringly than even the whole literature of Greece the fundamental ideas of the Greek people concerning the avenging of blood. The murdered man in bodily shape avenges his own wrongs.

But while the existence of this belief is thus established by the best evidence of all, namely the fact that men have continued to act upon it, the views of ancient writers on the subject of blood-guilt are not on that account to be neglected; on the contrary, the whole literature bearing thereupon, and above all the story of the house of Atreus as told by Aeschylus, much as they have been studied, deserve fresh consideration just for the very reason that our judgement of them must be modified by this new fact. Starting with the knowledge of the part which the murdered man himself played according to popular belief in securing the punishment of his murderer, we are enabled more fully to appreciate the genius of Aeschylus in so handling a superstition which, like other things primitive in Greek religion, was still venerated by an age which could discern its grossness, that, without either losing the religious sympathies of his audience by too wide a departure from venerable traditions, or offending their artistic taste by too close an adherence to primitive crudities, he wrought out of that material the fabric of the greatest of tragedies.

What we shall find in thus studying anew some of the literature of the subject is a modification of the grosser elements in the popular superstition such as the last section has already prepared us to expect. We saw there how restricted was the use which the tragedians and others dared to make of the popular belief in corporeal revenants of any kind; we saw that dramatic propriety absolutely forbade the introduction of a dead man to play a part otherwise than in the form of a ghost; and yet more than once we found, especially as the climax of some imprecation, a verbal allusion to the belief in incorruptibility and bodily resuscitation. And now similarly we shall see that the tragedians allowed themselves no greater license in dealing with revenants in quest of vengeance than in dealing with the more innocuous sort; we shall see that dramatic propriety forced them to find some other agency than that of the bodily revenant whereby the vengeance of Agamemnon upon Clytemnestra, and of Clytemnestra upon Orestes, might be executed; but we shall find withal that here again there are a few verbal references to the uprising of the dead themselves as avengers of their own wrongs, and moreover that, though in the actual development of the plot they can have no part save only that of a ghost, and some other avenger is made to act on their behalf, yet it is they themselves who instigate and urge him to his task. The bodily activity of the murdered man is suppressed, save for some few hints, as a thing too gross for representation by tragic art; but at the same time fidelity to old religious tradition is in a way maintained by proclaiming his personal, though ghostly, activity in inciting and even compelling others to avenge him.

The clearest references to the bodily activity of the murdered man occur in precisely the same connexion in both Aeschylus and Sophocles—in a prayer offered by Agamemnon’s children at their dead father’s tomb. In Sophocles the occasion is that scene in which Electra rebukes her sister for bearing Clytemnestra’s peace-offerings to Agamemnon’s tomb—peace-offerings, be it noted, which in themselves imply that the dead man is still a powerful foe to his murderess—and bids her instead thereof join with Electra herself in laying a lock of hair upon the tomb; and then come the notable lines,

‘and falling at his tomb beseech thou him to come from out the earth in his own strength a kindly helper unto us against his foes.’ No one, I suppose, can misdoubt the emphasis which falls on αὐτὸν, ‘his very self’; and to the Greek mind the ‘very self’ was not a disembodied spirit, but a thing of flesh and bones and solid substance. Unless Sophocles was hinting verbally at that which he durst not represent dramatically—the resurrection of the dead man in bodily substance as an avenger of his own wrongs—the word could have had no meaning for his hearers.

The parallel passage in Aeschylus comes from the prayer of Orestes and Electra beside their father’s grave[1112]. ‘O Earth,’ cries Orestes, ‘send up, I pray thee, my father to watch o’er my fight’; and Electra makes response, ‘O Persephone, grant thou him still his body’s strength unmarred,’

It has been customary among translators and commentators to render εὔμορφον as if the second half of the compound were negligible; yet I can find no instance in which the word denotes anything but beauty of bodily shape. Let Aeschylus’ own usage of it elsewhere be the index of his meaning here. The Chorus of the Agamemnon, musing on the fate of those who have fallen at Ilium, tell how in place of some there have been sent home to their kin mere parcels of ashes, ‘while others, about the walls where they fell, possess sepulchres of Trojan soil, in comeliness of shape unmarred’—οἱ δ’ αὐτοῦ περὶ τεῖχος θηκὰς Ἰλιάδος γᾶς εὔμορφοι κατέχουσιν[1113]. My rendering then of εὔμορφον κράτος is right and cannot be evaded. Aeschylus, like Sophocles in the preceding passage, lightly yet surely, by the use of a single word, hints at the popular belief that the murdered man may rise again in bodily form to wreak his own vengeance.

Once again then the tragedians have come to our aid in the unravelling of this superstition. From them we learnt that incorruptibility and resuscitation were as great a terror to their contemporaries as they are to the modern peasants of Greece, and that actually the same imprecations of that calamity were in vogue then as at this day; and now again we receive from them corroboration of that which the horrible practice of mutilating a murdered man’s corpse had already revealed, namely, that some of the dead who returned from their graves were believed to go to and fro, not in mere vain and pitiable wanderings, but with the fell purpose of revenging themselves upon their murderers.

The general tendency however of Greek literature, as we saw in the last section, was to replace the bodily revenant by a mere ghost. In many cases the consequences of this literary modification were comparatively small; the ghost of Polydorus for example can sustain the part of pleading plaintively for burial no less effectively, perhaps indeed even more so, than a lusty revenant. But the case of revenants bent upon vengeance was different; the consequences of substituting a mere spirit were far-reaching; the part to be played consisted not in piteous words but in stern work; and for this part so frail and flimsy a creature as the Greeks pictured the ghost to be was absolutely unfitted. The only means of escaping from this difficulty was to represent the dead man as employing some instrument or agent of retribution; and accordingly, where the gross popular superstition would have had the murdered man emerge from his grave in bodily form to chase and to slay his murderer, literature in general confined the dead man to the unseen world and allowed him only to work by less directly personal means—sometimes by the hands of his next of kin, in other cases by a curse either automatically operative or executed by demonic agents. But it is important to observe that, whatever the means employed, literature cleaves to the old traditions, so far as artistic taste permits, by conceding to the murdered man the power of instigating the agents and controlling the instruments of his vengeance. His power is made spiritual instead of physical; but his personal activity is still recognised; he remains the prime avenger of his own wrongs.

These indirect methods of retribution must now be examined severally.

As regards the part taken by the next of kin to the murdered man in furthering the work of vengeance, I find no reason to suppose that literature deviated in any way from popular tradition. The idea of the vendetta is essentially primitive and at the same time perfectly harmonious with the belief that the murdered man is capable of executing his own revenge. The acknowledged power of the dead man has never in the minds of the Greek people served as an excuse for his kinsmen to sit idle; rather it has been an incentive to them to assist more strenuously in the task of vengeance, lest they themselves also should fall under the dead man’s displeasure. On this point ancient lore and modern lore are completely agreed.

The best exponents of this view at the present day are a people who can claim to be the most distinctively Hellenic inhabitants of the Greek mainland. The peninsula which terminates in the headland of Taenarum is the home of a race which is historically known to be of more purely Greek descent than the inhabitants of any other district, and which both in physical type and in social and religious customs stands apart—the Maniotes. Among their customs is the vendetta, and the beliefs on which it rests are in brief as follows. A man who has been murdered cannot rest in his grave until he has been avenged, but issues forth as a vrykolakas athirst for his enemy’s blood; for, in Maina, one who has turned vrykolakas for this cause is still credited with some measure of reasonableness. To secure his bodily dissolution and repose, it is incumbent upon the next of kin to slay the murderer or, at the least, some near kinsman of the murderer. Until that be done, the son (to take the most common instance) lies under his dead father’s curse; and, if he be so craven or so unfortunate as to find no opportunity for vengeance, the curse under which he has lived clings to him still in death, and he too becomes a vrykolakas.

The Maniote doctrine then amounts to this, that the murdered man rises from his grave to execute his own vengeance, which consists in bringing upon his murderer the same fate as he himself has suffered through his enemy’s deed—a violent death and consequently resuscitation; but at the same time he demands the assistance of his nearest kinsman, under pain of suffering a like fate hereafter if his efforts in the cause of vengeance are feeble or fruitless. Thus the belief in powerful and vindictive revenants forms the very mainspring of the vendetta.

To this view both Euripides and Aeschylus subscribe in telling the story of Orestes. In the former we have the answer made by Orestes himself to the tirade of Tyndareus[1114] against the vendetta: ‘Nay, if by silence,’ he says, ‘I had consented unto my mother’s deeds, what would my dead sire have done to me? Would he not have hated me and made me the sport of Furies? Hath my mother these goddesses at her side to help her cause, and hath not he that was more despitefully used?’[1115] Surely no clearer statement could be made of Orestes’ apprehension that, if he should fail in the duty which his dead father imposed upon him, the dead man would turn other ministers of his vengeance upon his cowardly son, to plague him, as if he were an accomplice, with the same punishment as had been designed for the actual author of the murder. And similarly in Aeschylus we have the retort of Orestes to his mother’s last warning before he slays her. ‘Beware,’ she says, ‘the fiends thy mother’s wrath shall rouse’; and he answers, ‘But, an I flag, how should I ’scape my sire’s?’[1116] Thus according to the ancient tragedians the vendetta of Orestes was prompted by the same beliefs and fears as still stir the Maniotes thereto.

So far then as concerns the vengeance for Agamemnon’s death, ancient drama added no new element to the popular beliefs, but was able to satisfy the requirements of art by judicious selection from them. The idea, to which the Maniotes still cling, that the murdered man in the form of a revenant avenges his own wrongs, is, save for the rare verbal allusions which we have noticed, rejected, and forms no part of the plot; but the belief, that fear of the dead man’s wrath is a cogent motive to action on the part of his kinsman, is retained. And here it is interesting to observe that Aeschylus even justifies his rejection of the first half of the popular doctrine, and that too by a plea perfectly satisfactory to the popular mind. Agamemnon’s case was peculiar. Not only had he been murdered, but his dead body according to Aeschylus, who is followed in this by Sophocles[1117], had been mutilated (ἐμασχαλίσθη) by his murderers. The effect of such mutilation, as we have seen, was to render the revenant powerless to wreak vengeance with his own hands. Hence the work devolving upon Orestes would have been, in popular esteem, doubled; if murder alone had been committed, he would have worked in conjunction, as it were, with the dead man; but the super-added mutilation incapacitated the dead man for bodily work, and placed the whole burden of retribution on the shoulders of his son. This, plainly put, is the meaning of the words spoken by the Chorus in the Choephori to Orestes: ‘Yea, and he was mutilated, for thou must know the worst. Cruel was she in the slaying of him, cruel still in the burial, in that she thought to make his doom a burden past bearing upon thy life[1118].’ Thus it may be claimed that Aeschylus, in the peculiar conditions of the case which he here presents, follows unswervingly the popular doctrine. It is only Euripides who can fairly be said to have really suppressed anything in this part of the story without troubling to justify himself by the circumstances of Agamemnon’s fate. But even Euripides, though he simply ignores in his plot the possibility of Agamemnon’s bodily resuscitation, is faithful to the doctrine that the next of kin was actuated in seeking vengeance not by simple piety but by a lively fear of the dead man’s wrath.

Moreover, this conception of the relations subsisting between the murdered man and his nearest kinsman did not merely furnish the motif of some fine passages of Tragedy; it served also a more prosaic purpose, and actually formed the basis first of Attic law concerning blood-guilt, and then of Plato’s Laws in the same connexion.

At Athens, as is well known, the duty of prosecuting a murderer (or homicide) was imposed by law upon the nearest relative of the murdered man. But the obligation was not only legal; it was also, and indeed primarily, religious. The law did no more than affirm and regulate a custom which religious tradition had long established. To this fact Antiphon especially bears witness in certain passages[1119] with which I must deal more fully later; but the whole tenor of his appeals to the religious feelings and fears of the jury is strictly in accord with the Maniote doctrine of the present day, save that in one small point he takes a more merciful view. In Maina it is held that, if the next of kin fail to avenge the dead man, no matter to what cause the failure be due, he falls a prey to the dead man’s wrath. Antiphon on the contrary asserts that, if the next of kin have honestly done his best to bring the murderer to justice, he will not be punished for failure therein; and yet he does not represent the dead man as inactive in such a case, but dares to threaten the jury that the murdered man’s anger will now descend, not upon his kinsman who has loyally striven to avenge him, but upon the jury who, by unjustly acquitting and harbouring[1120] the murderer, make themselves accomplices in his crime and sharers in his pollution. This difference of opinion however is of minor importance, and seems to be almost a necessary result of different social conditions. In ancient Athens the next of kin was required to proceed against the murderer by legal means, and not to commit a breach of law and order by personal violence. In modern Maina the kinsman who should have recourse to law and call in the police would be accounted a recreant; public opinion requires him to find an opportunity, openly or by ambush, of slaying the murderer with his own hand; this is to be his life’s work, if need be, and the possibility of failure, save through want of enterprise and energy, is hardly contemplated. But as regards the main issue, namely the belief that the dead man himself is the prime avenger of his own wrongs and that his kinsman acts only under his instigation as an assistant in the work, modern superstition has the entire support both of the drama and of the law of ancient Athens.

Further corroboration is perhaps unnecessary; yet Plato’s legislation in the matter of homicide must not be passed over; for it possesses this peculiar interest and importance of its own, that it was confessedly based upon a religious doctrine which Plato esteemed ‘old even among the traditions of antiquity[1121].’ From what source he obtained the doctrine he does not definitely say; but, from a mention of Delphi in the passage immediately preceding as the supreme authority in all matters of purification from blood-guilt, it may fairly be surmised that this too is a piece of Delphic lore. At any rate Plato accepted it as an authoritative pronouncement to which the homicide must pay due heed.

‘The doctrine,’ says Plato, ‘is that one who has lived his life in the spirit of a free man and meets with a violent death is wroth, while his death is yet recent, against the man who caused it, and when he sees him going his way in the places where he himself was wont to move, he strikes[1122] him with the same quaking and terror with which he himself has been filled by the violence done to him, and in his own confusion confounds his enemy and all his doings to the utmost of his power, aided therein by the slayer’s own conscience. And that is why it is right that the doer of the deed should in deference to the sufferer withdraw for the full space of the year, and should keep clear of the whole country which the dead man had frequented as his native land; and if the dead man be a foreigner the slayer must hold aloof from the foreigner’s country for the same period. Such then is the law; and, if a man voluntarily observe it, the dead man’s nearest kinsman, whose duty it is to look to all this, must respect the slayer, and will do right to be at peace with him; but, if the slayer disregard this law and either presume to enter holy places and to sacrifice before he be purified, or, again, refuse to fulfil the allotted period in retirement, the nearest of kin must proceed against him on a charge of homicide, and, if a conviction be obtained, the penalties are to be doubled. But if the nearest of kin do not seek vengeance for the deed, it is held that the pollution devolves upon him, and that the sufferer (i.e. the dead man) turns upon him the suffering (i.e. that which the homicide himself should have incurred), and anyone who will may bring a suit against him and obtain a sentence of banishment for five years[1123].’