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.