The main problem then of this section is now fully solved; but incidentally much light has been thrown upon the character ascribed by the Greek people in antiquity to those revenants who were not merely pitiable sufferers but were active in bringing a like doom upon those who had wronged them. And the character of these Avengers approximates very closely to that of the modern vrykolakes. True, there is one fundamental difference; the ancient Avenger directed his wrath solely against the author of his sufferings, or at the most extended it only to those who, owing to him the duty of furthering his vengeance, had proved lax and cowardly therein; the modern vrykolakas is unreasoning in his wrath and plagues indiscriminately all who fall in his way. But the actual sufferings which the vrykolakas inflicts are identical with those which furnished Aeschylus with his tale of threatened horrors. Modern stories there are in plenty, which tell how the vrykolakas springs upon his victim and rends him and drinks his blood; how sheer terror of his aspect has driven men mad; how, in order to escape him, whole families have been driven forth from their native island to wander in exile[1160]; how death has often been the issue of his assaults; and how those whom a vrykolakas has slain become themselves vrykolakes. Only his unreasoning and indiscriminate fury is necessarily of Slavonic origin; his acts are the acts of those ancient revenants whose own wrongs rightfully made them the Avengers of blood. Apart from the one Slavonic trait, the characters of the vrykolakas and the ancient Avenger are identical.
And perhaps this identity is most clearly seen in the one case in which the old Avenger punished not only the immediate author of his own wrongs, but a whole community which had subsequently given the guilty man an asylum. We have noticed how Antiphon ventured to threaten an Athenian jury with such punishment at the hands of the dead man if they wrongfully acquitted his murderer. In the same spirit Aeschylus makes the Furies, as the agents of the dead Clytemnestra, menace the whole land of Attica with a venomous curse that shall blast man and beast and herb in revenge for the wresting of Orestes from their grasp[1161]. And such too is the dread which in the Phoenissae of Euripides stirs Creon to make to the blood-guilty Oedipus this appeal: ‘Nay, remove thee hence: verily ’tis not in scorn that I say this, nor in enmity to thee, but because of thine Avengers, in fear lest the land suffer some hurt[1162].’ In such cases the punishments with which a whole community is threatened, although still a reasonable measure, approach most nearly to the indiscriminate violence of the modern vrykolakas.
For the fulfilment of such threats as these we must turn to the Supplices of Aeschylus, and there we shall find a description of just such a devastation as is said to have been suffered by the inhabitants of Santorini and many other places in the seventeenth century. The story of Aeschylus tells how ‘there came unto the Argive land, from the shore of Naupactus, Apis, son of Apollo, both healer and seer, and cleansed the land of monsters that destroyed mankind, even of those that Earth, tainted with the pollutions of blood shed of old, sent up in wrath to work havoc, fearsome as a dragon-brood to dwell among[1163].’ What then were these monsters? I will venture to say that any Greek peasant of to-day, could he but read and understand the Aeschylean description, would furnish a better commentary upon those lines than the most learned discourse thereon that any scholar has written; and his commentary would be summed up in the one word vrykolakes. For, vigorous as the description is, its vigour comes less of dramatic word-building than of fidelity to the horrors of popular superstition, and no other single passage could so fully establish the unity of ancient and modern belief. For while the actual language contains all the words[1164] which in antiquity were bound up with the superstition—the ‘pollution’ which comes of bloodshed, the ‘wrath’ which follows thereon and in which Earth herself is here made to share, and the ‘sending up’ by Earth of the Avengers—the thought of the passage is a faithful reflection of what the Greek peasants still believe, that a violent death is among the chief causes of resuscitation, that the earth sends up the dead man raging to deal destruction, and that with others of his kind he consorts and conspires in veritable dragon-bands; and men still tell of gifted seers and healers, such as Apis, summoned in hot haste to panic-stricken hamlets to allay the pest. The κνώδαλα βροτοφθόρα of Aeschylus, ‘the monsters that destroy mankind,’ are indeed but little removed from the modern vrykolakes.
Is it not then clear also on what sources Aeschylus drew for his picture of the Furies themselves? We have seen how, for dramatic purposes, they were substituted for a revenant wreaking his own vengeance. Clytemnestra herself in bodily form should have been the Avenger, if popular superstition had not been in this respect too gross; but the Erinyes take her place in the actual execution of vengeance, and she herself appears only as a ghost to instigate them to their work. But, when that substitution was effected, did not Aeschylus clearly transfer to the Erinyes the whole character and even the appearance popularly attributed to the human Avenger? They are black and loathly to look upon[1165]; their breath is deadly to approach[1166]; the smell of blood is a joy to them[1167]; they follow like hounds upon their victim’s trail[1168]; they torment him both body and soul[1169]; they fasten upon his living limbs and gorge themselves with his blood[1170]; and if any would harbour him from their pursuit, the venom of their wrath falls like a plague upon the land, and devastates it[1171]; they are monsters, κνώδαλα[1172]—and the recurrence of this word is significant—abhorrent alike to gods and to men[1173]. The description is surely not that which Aeschylus would himself have invented for beings who should come afterwards to be worshipped as ‘revered goddesses,’ σεμναὶ θεαί. The difficulty of that transition in the play itself cannot but arrest the attention of every reader; it is a difficulty which even the genius of Aeschylus could not remove. Why then did he draw so loathsome a portrait of the Erinyes in the earlier part of the play? Why did he create that difficulty? The reason, I suggest, was that he followed once more, and this time almost too faithfully, the popular traditions, and, while he would not represent a real revenant on the stage, transferred to those demonic agents, by whom the work of vengeance was vicariously performed, all the attributes popularly associated with the prototypes of the modern vrykolakas.
Thus then the history of the modern belief in vrykolakes has been fully traced. The ancients also believed that for certain causes—the same causes in the main as are still assigned—men were doomed to remain incorruptible after death and to rise again in bodily form from their graves, and that one class of these revenants, those namely who had wrongs of their own to avenge, inflicted upon their enemies (and upon any who shielded or harboured them) the same sufferings as are now generally believed to be inflicted in an unreasoning manner by all classes of vrykolakes alike upon mankind at large, with no justification, such as a natural desire for vengeance might afford, in the case of those whose resuscitation is not the outcome of any injury or neglect at the hands of other men, and with no discrimination between friend and foe on the part of those who have real wrongs to avenge. Remove the unreasoning element in the character of the vrykolakas, and the revenant in which the folk of ancient Greece believed remains.
But, if they believed in him, they must have called him by some name. Aeschylus’ phrase κνώδαλα βροτοφθόρα, ‘monsters that destroy mankind,’ is a description rather than a name. What were the reasonable vrykolakes of ancient Greece called? That is now the one question which must be answered in order to make our enquiry complete.
Briefly my answer is this, that the particular class of revenants with which the present section has mainly dealt, the Avengers of blood, were known by three several names, μιάστωρ, ἀλάστωρ, and προστρόπαιος, but that literature contains no word which could serve as a collective designation for all classes alike. I hope however to show that the Greek language was not originally defective in this respect, but that the term ἀλάστωρ, although regularly used from the fifth century onwards in the narrow sense of an Avenger, had originally a wider application and denoted simply a revenant.
Now the interpretation which I give to these three words is not that which is commonly accepted. Anyone who will turn to a lexicon will find that to each of the three is assigned a double signification in connexion with blood-guilt. All three are said to denote either a god who punishes the blood-guilty or the blood-guilty man who is punished. Thus a god, it is alleged, may be called μιάστωρ (literally a ‘polluter’) because he punishes the polluted—a somewhat obvious misnomer; or again ἀλάστωρ, because he ‘does not forget’ but punishes the sinner—a derivation which, as I shall show later, cannot be accepted; or thirdly προστρόπαιος, as the being who was ‘turned to’ by the murdered man and was besought to avenge his cause—a somewhat circuitous way for the word to arrive at its active sense of ‘Avenger.’ And, secondly, a man, it is said, was called μιάστωρ when, being himself polluted, he was liable to be ‘a polluter’ of other men with whom he came in contact—a view which is certainly defensible; ἀλάστωρ as one whose sin ‘could not be forgotten’—an interpretation almost beyond the pale of serious discussion; and προστρόπαιος because, being blood-guilty, he ‘turned towards’ some god for purification—an explanation which may be right—whence the word came to denote in general a polluted person who still needed purification.
Thus in my view, as I have indicated, the greater part of the information in the lexicons with regard to these three words is inaccurate; and my reasons for disputing the received interpretations will be set forth point by point as I offer my own interpretations in their stead.
In dealing with the first group of meanings assigned to the three words, by which they came, somehow or other, to be used with the common active signification of ‘Avenger,’ my main contention will be that, as regards their primary and strictest usage, all three words were applied not to gods but to men—men who, having been murdered, sought to requite their murderers—and were only secondarily extended to the agents, whether divine or human, to whom those dead men committed the task of vengeance; but I shall also endeavour to show, as regards the literal meaning of the three words severally, that the interpretation by means of which their final sense of ‘Avenger’ has generally been elicited from them is in each case wrong, and that, in the case of the word ἀλάστωρ in particular, a right understanding of its original meaning gives very important results.