What then are the foundations upon which the received notion, that the Alastores were always gods, is based? It might perhaps be urged that the word Alastor found a place among the many epithets and titles conferred by worshippers upon Zeus[1181] in order to indicate the particular exercise of his all-reaching power which their hearts desired. It might also be urged that Clement of Alexandria names the Alastores among those classes of gods whom the pagan Greeks had evolved from the naughtiness of their own imagination as types and personifications of the baser human passions[1182]. But neither of these facts can serve to substantiate the contention that the Alastores were primarily and necessarily gods. The occasional use of a word as an epithet of Zeus cannot be held to prove the general appropriation of that word to a class of lesser gods; while the statement of Clement is the statement of a man designedly vilifying the whole Greek religion, neither appreciating nor desirous to appreciate its refinements, but willing rather to overwhelm it utterly, its better and its worse elements alike, with the torrent of his invective and reprobation. To him the Alastores appeared as supernatural beings instinct with the pagan passion of revenge, false gods therefore or devils, fit objects whereon to pour out the vials of righteous wrath and Christian scorn. He was not concerned to be wholly just or wholly accurate. Indeed the very sources from which he drew the idea that the Alastores were gods are still open to us; it is the Greek Tragedians whom he holds guilty of this naughty invention; it is the Greek Tragedians who remain for us the fountain-head of information concerning these Avengers, and who will on examination make it clear that they were not primarily or necessarily gods.
The single passage in Greek Tragedy which has been often regarded as evidence in favour of Clement’s classification of Alastores among gods is on fuller enquiry rather a refutation of that view. In the Persae of Aeschylus the messenger, who reports to the queen the disaster which has befallen the Persian fleet, sets it down to supernatural agency:
ἦρξεν μὲν ὦ δέσποινα, τοῦ παντὸς κακοῦ
φανεὶς ἀλάστωρ ἢ κακὸς δαίμων ποθέν[1183].
This has generally been taken to mean that the beginning of the disaster was due to the sudden appearance of ‘some vengeful or malicious deity.’ But elsewhere in Tragedy ἀλάστωρ is treated not as adjective but as substantive; and, since there is no compulsion to suppose other than the ordinary use of the word here, it appears better to translate the phrase ‘some Avenger or some malicious god.’ In other words the real, if unemphatic, contrast implied in the phrase is not between ἀλάστωρ and κακός—no contrast is possible there[1184]—but between ἀλάστωρ and δαίμων. The inference therefore is rather that the Alastor in this passage was not conceived as a deity.
There are other passages of Greek Tragedy also in which the balance of probability seems to me to incline towards interpreting the name Alastor in the sense of a revenant and not of a god. Two such occur in the Medea of Euripides—the same play, be it noted, which contains that perfectly plain statement that the dead children of Medea are themselves the Miastores who will punish her. The first is in the scene in which Medea works herself up to the perpetration of her crime. Passionate love of her children, passionate jealousy and fury against their father, alternate in tragic turmoil, until the tense agony of spirit is let loose in that fierce oath,
‘No, by the Avengers that lurk deep in hell,
Ne’er shall it come to pass that I should leave
My children to mine enemies’ despite.
Most surely they must die; and since they must,