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,
‘Is yon an ape be-plastered with white lead,
Or an old hag uprisen from the dead?’[1080]
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.