On the other hand, to the connexion of ἀλάστωρ with the verb ἀλᾶσθαι, ‘to wander,’ no exception can be taken. Not only is the formation simple, but an exact parallel is forthcoming. As the substantive μιάστωρ stands to the verb μιαίνω, so does the substantive ἀλάστωρ stand to a by-form of ἀλάομαι, which is fairly frequent in Tragedy, ἀλαίνω[1195]. It follows then that ἀλάστωρ meant originally a ‘wanderer.’
But, when once that primary meaning is discovered, there can be no further doubt as to the primary application of the term. Of the three possible exactors of vengeance—the revenant himself, some demonic agent, and the nearest kinsman—the first alone could be aptly described as a ‘wanderer’; moreover we know that the murdered man was actually so conceived, and that, among the punishments by which he sought to make his murderer suffer the same lot as he himself endured, one of the most conspicuous was the punishment of wandering and exile. The name Alastor therefore, like Miastor, denoted first of all the dead man himself, and was only secondarily extended to human or divine agents seeking vengeance on his behalf.
It remains only to enquire how the meaning ‘Avenger’ was evolved from the meaning ‘Wanderer,’ and so completely superseded it that the name Alastores was extended to those agents who were in no obvious sense ‘Wanderers’ but simply ‘Avengers.’
The first occurrence of the word is in the Iliad, as the proper name of a Greek warrior[1196]. This fact tends to show that the word had as yet acquired none of that ill-omened sense which it undoubtedly bears in Greek Tragedy. It was used rather, we may believe, in its original and literal sense of ‘wanderer,’ and the adoption of such a word as a proper name is entirely consistent with the principles of Homeric nomenclature. Hector, Nestor, Mēstor, are famous names of the same class.
Otherwise than as a proper name the word is not used in Homer, nor does it occur at all again, so far as I am aware, before the time of Aeschylus. It is during this interval then that the evolution of meaning must have taken place; for by the age of Aeschylus the idea of vengeance—and vengeance of a horrible kind—had become the ordinary signification of the word. My view then is that the intervening centuries had witnessed a gradual differentiation of the several words which alike originally meant a ‘wanderer,’ a differentiation such that ἀλήτης remained the ordinary and general term, while ἀλάστωρ was little by little restricted to the wanderer from the dead, the revenant; and that subsequently from meaning a revenant of any and every kind it became limited to that single class of revenants whose wanderings were guided by the desire for revenge—the class to whom the name Miastores had always belonged.
Some evidence for the first stage in this development of meaning is furnished by the Tragic usage of the verb from which the substantive is derived; for in both its forms, ἀλᾶσθαι and ἀλαίνειν, it continued to be applied to any of the restless dead, when the substantive ἀλάστωρ, as I conceive, had come to be appropriated to the Avenger only. Indeed it might almost be thought that both Aeschylus and Euripides had an inkling of the derivation and earlier meaning of the substantive; for while idiom debarred them from using ἀλάστωρ in the large sense of any revenant, they certainly used the corresponding verb in contexts which suggest that those who thus ‘wander’ were not imagined by them as vague impalpable ghosts, but possessed for them rather the real substance and physical traits of a revenant. Thus in the Eumenides, though Clytemnestra could not be permitted to play the part of a revenant and appears only as a ghost, yet the more gross and popular conception of her is clearly present to the poet’s mind. Though a ghost, she points to the wounds which her son’s hands inflicted[1197]; though a ghost, she is made to exhort the Erinyes to vengeance ‘on behalf of her very soul’ (τῆς ἐμῆς πέρι ψυχῆς)[1198]. Strange gestures and strange language indeed, if the so-called ghost had been conceived as a mere disembodied soul! But the popular conception of the revenant penetrated even here. And was it not the same conception which suggested the phrase αἰσχρῶς ἀλῶμαι, ‘I wander in dishonour[1199]’? In the popular belief, as we know, the murderer was bound to wander after death, suffering as he had wrought; and it is as a murderess[1200] that Clytemnestra avows herself condemned to shameful wanderings. ‘To wander,’ ἀλᾶσθαι, sums up the suffering which the murderer, like his victim, must incur after death. It is likely then that the name ἀλάστωρ too was originally applied to any ‘wanderer’—whether murderer or murdered—before it acquired the connotation of vindictiveness and so became appropriated to the latter only.
Again Euripides uses the same verb of one whose body has not received burial. This time there is no connexion with blood-guilt at all, but the lines are simply the plaint of captive wife for husband slain in battle: ‘oh beloved, oh husband mine, dead art thou and wanderest unburied, unwatered with tears’—σὺ μὲν φθίμενος ἀλαίνεις, ἄθαπτος, ἄνυδρος[1201]. ‘To wander unburied’—could there be a simpler description of a revenant? Does not the whole misery of the unburied dead consist in this—that they must wander? It is almost inconceivable then that the name Alastor, ‘wanderer,’ should have been originally applied only to a single class of the wandering dead—to those whose wanderings were directed towards vengeance, and not also to those whose wanderings were more aimless, more pitiable, whose whole existence might have been summed up in that one word ‘wandering.’ At some time then between the age of Homer and that of Aeschylus Alastor, I hold, meant simply revenant.
How then shall we explain that caprice of language which, according to this Tragic usage, permitted all the unhappy dead to be said ‘to wander’ (ἀλᾶσθαι, ἀλαίνειν), but apparently forbade them to be collectively named ‘wanderers’ (ἀλάστορες)? How did Alastor acquire its sense of ‘Avenger’ and become restricted to one class of revenant only?
It might be sufficient answer to point out that those revenants who were bent on avenging their own wrongs are likely always to have occupied a prominent place in popular superstition simply because they inspired most terror in the popular mind; other revenants were harmless, and, as harmless, liable to be little regarded and seldom named; and the most conspicuous class might thus have appropriated to itself the name which properly belonged to all. But there is another influence which, if it did not cause, may at least have facilitated and quickened the change—the influence of the word ἄλαστος, ‘unforgotten,’ which, as I have noted above, was commonly and naturally, in an age when etymology was not science but guess-work, connected with ἀλάστωρ. Etymologically the two words have nothing in common; but that is no obstacle to the supposition that, in their usage, their casual but close similarity of form rendered the meaning of the one susceptible to the influence of the other. Nay more, the fact that the two words, it matters not how erroneously, were actually in early times referred to a common origin[1202] warrants the suggestion that such influence had been exercised. Now ἄλαστος always remained in meaning true to its derivation. Itself employed in the passive sense, ‘unforgotten,’ it seems to have made over the active meaning, ‘unforgetting,’ ‘vindictive’ (which, on the analogy of ἄπρακτος and a score of similar forms, it should naturally have possessed), to the apparently kindred word ἀλάστωρ. This adventitious meaning accorded well with the popular conception of the most conspicuous class of ‘wanderers’ from the grave—those whose wanderings had a vindictive aim; and thus, by the help of the accidental resemblance of two words, it seems to have come to pass that the term Alastores ceased to be applicable to all kinds of revenants and denoted only the ‘Avengers.’ At this point it became in fact synonymous with Miastores, and, like that word, enlarged its scope so as to denote not only the prime Avenger, the revenant himself, but also any divine or human agents employed by him as subsidiary Avengers.
So much then for the first meaning which the lexicons attach to the words Alastor and Miastor; the second interpretation of them, in relation to a blood-guilty man, may be more briefly treated. Alastor in this passive sense is alleged to mean a man who suffers from the vengeance of one who is an Alastor in the active sense; and Miastor to mean a man who is himself polluted and therefore pollutes those with whom he associates.