In festal cup awaits, or hallowed drop
Of pure libation.”
Here we have a notable example of the terms of that sort of excommunication which the religious and social feeling of the ancients passed against the perpetrators of atrocious crimes. See [Introductory Remarks] to the Eumenides.
“Age to age with hoary wisdom
Speaketh thus to men.”
The old Jewish maxim of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, will here recur to every one; and, indeed, it is, to the present day, an instinctive dictate of social justice, however insufficient it may be as a general motive for individual conduct. In this spirit, wise old Nestor, in the Iliad (II. 354), considers that it would be disgraceful for the Greeks to think of returning home “before some Greek had slept with the wife of some Trojan,” as a retaliation for the woes that Paris had inflicted on Greek social life, in the matter of Helen. In Dante’s Inferno there are many instances, sometimes ingenious, sometimes only ridiculous, of the application of this principle to retributive punishment in a future life.
“There where in dark, the dead-man’s day, thou liest.”
Kl. appears to me to have supplied the true key to σκότω φάος ἰσόμοιρον, by comparing the exclamation of Ajax in Sophocles, v. 394—