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,
αἰτοῦ δὲ προσπίτνουσα, γῆθεν εὐμενῆ
ἡμῖν ἀρωγὸν αὐτὸν εἰς ἐχθροὺς μολεῖν[1111],
‘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,’
ὦ Περσέφασσα, δὸς δ’ ἔτ’ εὔμορφον κράτος.
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.