δέσμιος φρενῶν, ἀφόρμικτος, αὐονὰ βροτοῖς[1154].
‘Over our victim thus chant we our spell,
Rocking and wrecking the torturèd soul,
The jubilant song of Avengers,
Fettering the soul with no ’witchments of lute,
A spell as of drought[1155] upon mortals.’
Such is the wild, weird refrain of the Furies’ incantation; and in its closing phrase are re-echoed the closing words of Clytemnestra’s charge.
Will anyone then venture to say that Aeschylus had no special reason for thus repeating thrice within the compass of some two hundred lines the same threat? For the punishment threatened is substantially the same, though the means of inflicting it vary. Now it is the breath of the Furies which shall scorch up the victim’s very blood; now it is their lips that shall suck him dry; now a magic spell to parch and shrivel him; but ever the effect is the same; the bloodguilty man shall lie in death a sere and sapless carcase, already ‘damned to incorruption[1156] even in that doom which wastes all else.’ And the only reason which I can conceive for the poet’s insistence upon this thought is that here again, as in all the former punishments, he was reproducing a popular belief substantially the same then as it is in Maina now, namely, that the murdered man, having become a revenant, sucked his murderer’s blood and made him also in his turn a revenant.
Nor is Aeschylus the only ancient authority for the idea of some such retribution after death. Plato, in a passage of the Phaedrus already cited, contemplates the activity of a murdered man’s wrath (μήνιμα) not only in the present time but also hereafter[1157]; and in his Laws there is a provision, not assuredly of his own devising but dating from the very beginning of Greek legislation, which can only have been designed to insure the complete vengeance of the murdered man on his murderer even beyond death. A man convicted of the wilful murder of a near kinsman[1158] was punishable not only with death but with a further penalty: ‘the attendants of the jury and the magistrates having killed him shall cast out his corpse naked at an appointed cross-roads without the city, and all the magistrates, representing the whole city, shall take each a stone and cast it upon the head of the corpse and thereby free the whole city from guilt, and thereafter they shall carry the corpse to the borders of their land and cast it out, in accordance with the law, unburied[1159].’ Now the law, we know, in ordaining the penalty of death, ordained it as a satisfaction of the murdered man’s claims to vengeance. The State, so to speak, sided with the dead man and assisted him to exact blood for blood. Again the stoning of the dead body by representatives of the city was intended, we are expressly told, to free the whole city from guilt—from guilt, that is, in the eyes of the murdered man, who might otherwise visit his wrath upon the city as though it had consented to the crime or had too lightly punished it. Can it then be supposed that the State was actuated by any other motive in carrying out the rest of the penalty? It was surely still in deference to the murdered man’s desires that the murderer’s corpse was left unburied. To refuse burial was the surest means of condemning the man to resuscitation and thereby of satisfying his former victim’s uttermost demands.
Thus our detailed examination of the Aeschylean catalogue of penalties establishes beyond doubt that of which we had already had some evidence, namely, that all the punishments which were inflicted on the murderer—and, in popular belief, inflicted by the murdered man on his own behalf—were an exact reproduction of the sufferings which the murdered man himself had undeservingly endured, and culminated therefore, as they should, in the blood-guilty man becoming, like his victim, a revenant.