Plato in fact recognises no less frankly than others the personal activity of the slain man. He differs indeed in limiting the duration of that activity, when he says that the dead man’s anger is hot against the slayer only while his death is still recent, and when by the provisions of his law he implies that the victim’s desire for vengeance is fully satisfied by the slayer’s withdrawal for the space of one year. But this difference is completely explained by the fact that Plato introduces the tradition in connexion with unintentional homicide, whereas previously we have had it treated in relation to wilful murder. Reasonably enough the man who has been accidentally slain is represented as angry only for a time, while the victim of deliberate murder nourishes a wrath implacable. The one drives the author of his misfortune into exile for a year and then repents him of the evil; the other dogs his enemy with vengeance not only for a year but throughout his life and even after death; and indeed Plato himself, when he passes from the subject of involuntary homicide to that of deliberate murder, proves his recognition of this difference by his enactments; for, at any rate in the most heinous case, namely the murder of a near kinsman, he expressly states[1126] that the old principle ‘as a man hath done, so must he suffer’ admits of no abatement; the guilty man must die, and his body be left unburied.
But I must not yet enter upon a discussion of the actual punishments inflicted. Here I am only concerned to point out how completely Plato’s ‘old doctrine’ harmonises with that which we have learnt from other sources concerning the personal activity of the dead man. First we read that the dead man terrifies and confounds the slayer to the utmost of his power, with the aid of the slayer’s own conscience; and then again that his next of kin is under an obligation to obtain satisfaction for him, and is punished by him if he neglects that duty. Clearly the slayer’s own conscience is no more than an instrument—a somewhat ineffective instrument, one might think, in a case of unintentional homicide—and the next of kin is no more than a minister, both of them employed and directed by the dead man himself. He it is who exacts his own vengeance.
The other literary method of mitigating the crude popular belief in a bodily revenant hunting down his enemy was to treat the murderer’s punishment as the result of a curse. Such a curse was denoted usually by the word μήνιμα, which may perhaps be more exactly rendered by the phrase ‘a manifestation of wrath (μῆνις)’ on the part of some supernatural being[1127], whether a god or the departed spirit of a man; when once provoked by deadly sin such as the murder of a kinsman or refusal of burial, this curse was held to cleave to the tainted family from generation to generation.
In the case of blood-guilt, which we are at present considering, the curse, as was said above, was held either to work spontaneously or to be executed by some powers of the nether world. The former view is more rarely adopted, but is clearly enough indicated in one or two passages of ancient literature. Plato in the Phaedrus speaks of most grievous sicknesses and sufferings being produced in certain families as the consequence of ancient curses (παλαιῶν ἐκ μηνιμάτων)[1128]; and from the reminiscences and verbal echoes of Euripides’ Orestes which appear in the passage[1129] it is abundantly clear that the particular family which Plato had in mind was the blood-guilty house of Atreus. Here then there is no mention of any gods, no suggestion that the curse was executed by them or in the first instance proceeded from them. And the negative evidence of Plato’s silence concerning the gods is turned to certainty by the positive statement of Aeschylus that, if a son neglect the task of vengeance, ‘betwixt him and the gods’ altars standeth the unseen barrier of his father’s wrath[1130]’; for if, in the case of the kinsman who by neglecting the duty of vengeance has made himself a partaker in the guilt and pollution of the murderer, the Wrath (μῆνις) by which he is punished both proceeds from the dead man and, far from needing the gods’ furtherance in order to take effect, stands as it were on guard to hold the polluted man aloof from their altars, then surely the Wrath which pursues the murderer himself must emanate from the same source and possess the same spontaneous efficacy. The dead man himself then both launches the curse and controls its course; and probably it was in deference to this doctrine that Plato formulated his own law, that, even in the case of a father being killed by his own son, the dying man might with his last breath remit the curse which such a deed incurred and exempt his son from all except the purifications and the temporary retirement imposed in cases of involuntary homicide[1131].
But more frequently the execution of the curse is conceived to be the work of certain powers of the nether world. These powers however do not act on their own initiative; they are instigated to the task of vengeance by the murdered man himself. Here, no less than in the other renderings of the old tradition, the sufferer himself is the supreme avenger of his own sufferings. The most famous example of this conception is furnished by the plot of the Eumenides. The Furies are represented as the servants of Clytemnestra, faithful witnesses to her wrongs, exactors of blood for blood on her behalf[1132]. When they slumber and allow Orestes to escape the while, her ghost approaches them in no suppliant manner for all their godhead, but chides them and urges them afresh, like hounds, upon the quarry’s trail[1133]. And, most significant of all, there is one passage in which they say of themselves that the name whereby they are known in their home beneath the earth is the name of Curses (Ἀραί)[1134]; they are in fact the personification of those curses which a murdered man himself directs against his murderer. Nor is this notion confined to drama. Xenophon is little prone to poetic imaginings; yet he can find an argument for the immortality of the soul in what he considers an established fact of human experience, namely, that the spirits of those who have been unjustly slain inspire terrors in their murderers’ hearts and ‘send against them’ certain ‘avengers of blood’ (παλαμναίους ἐπιπέμπουσι[1135]). And elsewhere again and again we hear of the same avengers under a variety of names—μιάστορες, ἀλάστορες, προστρόπαιοι—names which will receive consideration later and by their very meaning and usage will confirm once more my contention that, by whatever instrument or agency the murder is represented as being avenged, ancient literature only departed from the primitive belief in bodily revenants executing their own vengeance at the one point at which the grossness of popular superstition must have offended educated sensibilities, and followed the old tradition as faithfully as might be in conceding to the dead man, if not bodily, yet personal, activity.
The same popular beliefs, mutatis mutandis, probably attached also to another class of revenants, dead men whose bodies had not received due burial. The necessary modifications of the superstition would be two in number. First, the anger of the dead man would not endure for ever, unless his body had been so treated that burial was no longer possible, but would cease with the performance of that which he returned to demand; and secondly, he would not be represented as using for his agent his next of kin, who in most cases of the kind would be the very person responsible to him for the neglect of burial. Literature therefore had here no choice of versions; the bodily re-appearance of the dead man was reckoned too gross an idea; the employment of his nearest kinsman to act on his behalf became in this case impossible; a curse was the only expedient. And this is the expedient which we actually find adopted. In the Iliad Hector adjures Achilles not to fulfil his threat of throwing his dead body to the dogs and to the fowls of the air, but to give him burial, ‘lest,’ he says, ‘I become a cause of the gods’ wrath against thee’—μή τοί τι θεῶν μήνιμα γένωμαι[1136]—and the self-same phrase is put into the mouth of Elpenor’s spirit in the Odyssey when he craves due burial of Odysseus[1137]. The same idea occurs once more in Pindar’s reference to Phrixus, who bade go unto the halls of Aeetes (for there in a strange land he had died, and had not received the burial-rites of his own country) and bring his spirit to rest, and whose bidding Jason is besought by Pelias to fulfil, for that ‘already doth old age wait upon me; but with thee the blossom of youth is but burgeoning, and thou canst put away the wrath of powers beneath[1138].’ In each of these passages then the actual enforcement of the dead man’s will is by means of a curse or ‘manifestation of wrath’—for the same word μήνιμα (or μῆνις) is used; in each case also, as it happens, the curse does not operate automatically but is executed by gods—the method preferred also, as we saw, in cases of blood-guilt; but here also, as there, the personal activity of the dead man is frankly acknowledged; the phrase of Homer ‘lest I become ...’ and that of Pindar ‘Phrixus doth bid ...’ clearly suggest that the gods were instigated to intervene by the sufferer himself.
The case then stands thus. We learnt in the last chapter that the unburied dead no less than the murdered were popularly believed to become revenants. We have since learnt that the murdered, in the capacity of revenants, were popularly believed to avenge their own wrongs with their own hands, but that ancient literature commonly presents a modified version of that belief according to which the personal activity indeed of the dead man is recognised, but the instrument of his vengeance is a curse executed by demonic agents. We find now that literature assigns also to the unburied dead the same personal activity in punishing those whose neglect has caused their suffering, and by the same means. The reasonable inference is that here too we have a modified version of a popular belief that the unburied, like the murdered, not only became revenants, which we know, but, in the capacity of revenants, themselves punished those who refused or neglected to render them their due funeral rites.
Thus the same principle governed the whole system of the punishment incurred by men who were guilty either of murder or of leaving the dead unburied—the principle that the dead man whom they had injured in either of these ways himself requited those injuries. Hence, when we proceed to examine the actual punishments inflicted, we need no longer concern ourselves with the fact that literature attributes the infliction now to the nearest kinsman of the dead man and anon to some divine avenger; but, whatsoever instrument or agency is employed, we know that the dead man himself was believed to control and direct it, and therefore that the punishment thus effected was conceived to be such as the dead man himself willed and, in popular belief, could with his own hands enforce. Thus in the Oresteia the punishment of Clytemnestra is actually effected by Orestes, and again the punishment of Orestes is entrusted to the Furies; but Orestes is only the minister of his dead father, carrying out the work of retribution under pain of incurring the same punishment himself if by inaction he should consent unto his mother’s crime; and the Furies in like manner are only the servants of the dead Clytemnestra, instigated by her to their pursuit. The slaying of Clytemnestra and the sufferings of Orestes are the punishments which the dead Agamemnon and the dead Clytemnestra, even in the literary version of the story, impose, and, in a more primitive and gross form of it, might themselves have inflicted.
But before examining the nature of those punishments in detail, it will be well to recall the fact that to the eyes of the ancient Greeks murder or homicide always presented itself in two distinct aspects[1139]. Regarded from one point of view, it was the gravest possible injury to the man who was slain. Viewed from the other, it was a source of ‘pollution’ (μίασμα, μύσος, ἅγος), an abomination to the gods and a peril to living men; for the taint of bloodshed was conceived as a contagious physical malady, which the polluted person by touch or even by speech[1140] might communicate to his fellow-men, and not to them only, but to places which he visited, the market, the harbours, the temples[1141]; nay, even the sanctity of the gods’ images was not proof against the contamination of his bloodstained hands[1142]. In brief, the two aspects of homicide were the moral and the religious aspects; and both moral and religious atonements were required. The wrong done to the dead man was requited by the sufferings which he in turn imposed; the pollution, being primarily a state of religious disability (for it involved, as Plato says[1143], the enmity of the gods), was removed by a religious ceremony of purification.
How clearly marked was this distinction in antiquity is evident from Plato’s laws on homicide, as a brief consideration of two or three special cases will show.