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,
καὶ καλῶ τοῦ Ταρτάρου
στυγνὸν πατρῷον Ἔρεβος, ὥς σ’ ἀποικίσῃ,
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.