Nought reck I of ill fortune at thy side
Where once ’twas good; that hour must draw my heart
When thou didst bring me safe from death to light;
Nay, I hate friends whose gratitude grows old,
I hate the man that will enjoy good hap
But will not face foul weather with his friend[1189].’
Is this the man whose words, spoken but a moment later, shall be interpreted to mean, ‘I will not run away, because the danger that threatens my friend cannot hurt me’? The thought is deeper, more generous, than that. Theseus is thinking not of himself, but of his friend. It is the word ‘pollution,’ used first by himself and caught up by Heracles, which arrests his attention. Was his friend ‘polluted’ by a deed of blood, wrought in madness, expiated in tears? Polluted? Yes, in the sense that religious purification was required[1190]. He cannot deny the pollution. But could the deed also be punished as the murder of close kinsfolk was wont to be punished? Could the children, albeit slain by their own father’s hand, desire revenge upon him who loved them and was loved of them? ‘No,’ he answers boldly, ‘pollution (μίασμα) there is, but no Alastor, no Avenger of blood, can come from them that love against them that love.’ How then does Theseus picture the Alastor who, but for the bond of love between the father and his dead children, would seek vengeance for their death? The phrase which he uses is ambiguous—perhaps deliberately ambiguous—οὐδεὶς ... ἐκ τῶν φίλων. It may mean equally well ‘no one of those who love’ or ‘no one coming from those who love.’ But when the close correspondence of μίασμα, ‘pollution,’ and ἀλάστωρ ‘avenger,’ is noted in this passage, and when it is also remembered that the dead children of Medea are elsewhere plainly named Miastores, it is hard to suppose that an audience familiar with the belief that the dead themselves avenged their own wrongs would not have interpreted the ambiguous phrase to mean ‘none of these children shall rise up from the grave as an Alastor, for love is stronger than vengeance.’
But such doubt as still remains is set at rest when we turn from the usage of the word Alastor to its origin and enquire how it obtained the sense of ‘Avenger.’ What is its derivation?
Two conjectures seem to have been made by the ancients and are recorded by early commentators and lexicographers[1191]. The one connects the word with the root of λανθάνω, ‘I escape notice,’ and extracts a meaning in a variety of ways, leaving it open to choice, for example, whether it shall mean a god whose notice nothing escapes or a man who commits acts which cannot escape some god’s notice. The other conjecture refers the word to the root of ἀλάομαι, ‘I wander.’ It is between these two proposed derivations that our choice lies; nor can we obtain much help from the greatest modern authorities. Curtius[1192] unhesitatingly adopts the latter, Brugmann[1193] the former, nor does either of them so much as mention the possibility of the alternative. I must therefore discuss the question without reference to these authorities, knowing that, if I run counter to the one, I have the countenance of the other.
Is then ἀλάστωρ, in the sense of a ‘non-forgetter,’ a possible formation from the root of λανθάνω? My own answer to that question is a decided negative, and my reasons are as follows. Substantives denoting the agent and formed with the suffix -τωρ (-τορ-) can only be so formed direct from a verb-stem, as ῥήτωρ from ϝρε or ϝερ appearing in ἐρῶ etc., μήστωρ from the stem of μήδομαι, ἀφήτωρ answering to the verb ἀφίημι, ἐπιβήτωρ to ἐπιβαίνω. It is among these and other such examples that Brugmann places the anomalous ἀλάστωρ, to be connected with ἄλαστος, λήθω. But evidently, in order that ἀλάστωρ may be parallel, let us say, to ἀφήτωρ, we must postulate the existence of an impossible verb ἀ-λήθω or ἀ-λανθάνομαι, ‘I non-forget.’ Nor would it mend matters to suppose, first, the formation, direct from λήθω, of a nomen agentis of the form λάστωρ, a ‘forgetter’; for the privative ἀ- appears only in adjectives and adverbs and in such verbs and substantives as are formed directly from them, as ἀμνημονεῖν from ἀμνήμων etc., and cannot be prefixed at pleasure to a substantive or verb not so formed; ἀλάστωρ could no more be formed from an hypothetical substantive λάστωρ[1194], than could an hypothetical verb ἀ-λανθάνεσθαι be formed from λανθάνεσθαι. Etymologically then the derivation of ἀλάστωρ from ἀ- privative and the root of λήθω is impossible, and its sense of ‘Avenger’ was not developed from the meaning ‘one who does not forget.’