In the active sense προστρόπαιος was primarily applied, I hold, like Miastor and Alastor, to the murdered man himself, who ‘turned’ his wrath ‘against’ the murderer, or, if it so happened, against the next of kin who had failed in his duty of bringing the murderer to justice. It is precisely thus that Plato uses the verb προστρέπεσθαι in recording the old tradition in which he apparently reposed so much faith as to base his own laws upon it. ‘If the nearest of kin,’ so runs the passage, ‘do not seek vengeance for the deed, it is held that the pollution devolves upon him, and that the sufferer (i.e. the dead man) turns upon him the suffering (i.e. that which the homicide himself should have incurred), and anyone who will may bring a suit against him, etc.[1215]’ The words which I have italicised are in the Greek τοῦ παθόντος προστρεπομένου τὴν πάθην, where the middle presumably was preferred to the active because the sufferings which the dead man inflicts are, as we already know and as the language of the particular phrase itself suggests, exactly those which he himself suffers. This usage of the verb, though it is distinctly rare and probably a technicality of religion or law, is so perfectly clear in this one example[1216], that there should be no hesitation about understanding the cognate word προστρόπαιος in the same sense. And indeed one lexicographer, Photius, shows that he did so understand it; for he tells us that Zeus was sometimes invoked under this title, as turning against murderers the pollution (including perhaps the punishments) of their crime: Ζεὺς ... προστρόπαιος, ὁ προστρέπων τὸ ἄγος αὐτοῖς (sc. τοῖς παλαμναίοις)[1217]—such are his actual words, and this time of course the verb is rightly in the active, for Zeus is in no way personally concerned but acts only in the interests of the dead man. Clearly then it was in virtue of this active meaning that προστρόπαιος came to be practically a synonym of Miastor and Alastor in the sense of an Avenger of blood.
Once more then we return to the same question which has been propounded and answered with regard to those two other names—to whom was the term προστρόπαιος primarily applied?
I find the application of it more restricted than that of the other two words. It was used of the dead man himself, and it was used of demons avenging his cause; but it was never used[1218] of the next of kin in the character of avenger—and that for the very good reason that when the word was applied to a living man it bore an entirely different meaning, which has yet to be discussed, the meaning of ‘blood-guilty.’
A few examples of each usage must be given. Both Antiphon and Aeschylus apply the word to murdered men; Antiphon, in a speech in which the kinsman, who has, as in duty bound, undertaken the prosecution of the murderer, claims that, if the jury wrongfully acquit, the dead man will not become προστρόπαιος, an Avenger, against his kinsmen who have done their best in his service, but will visit his anger on the jury for condoning and thereby sharing the blood-guilt[1219]; Aeschylus, in that list of penalties which has been discussed, when he depicts the ‘madness and vain terror,’ which will befall Orestes if he fail in his task, as an arrow that flieth in darkness sped by powers of hell ‘at the behest of fallen kindred that turn their vengeance upon him’ (ἐκ προστροπαίων ἐν γένει πεπτωκότων[1220]). But equally clearly in other passages the Avenger indicated is not the murdered man, but some divine being. Antiphon again is an authority for this usage. Twice, in a context similar to that which has just been noticed, he speaks not of the murdered man himself becoming an Avenger, but of certain divine powers—whom he also calls ἀλιτήριοι, the powers that deal with sin—acting as Avengers (προστρόπαιοι) of the dead[1221]. And similarly in later time Pausanias also speaks of ‘the pollution (μίασμα) incurred by Pelops and of the Avenger (προστρόπαιος) of Myrtilus[1222].’
Since then there is no question but that the word προστρόπαιος was actually applied both to dead men and to gods, to which of the two did it refer primarily? We already know the answer. The dead man himself, as a revenant, was the prime and proper Avenger of his own wrongs; demons of vengeance acted only in his name, as his subordinates and agents. To him therefore the name primarily belonged. And even if we had not already learnt this from other sources, the passage of Aeschylus, to which I have just referred, might well guide us to the same conclusion. The arrow that flieth in darkness is sped indeed, he says, ‘by powers of hell’ (τῶν ἐνερτέρων)—the demonic agents of the dead—but ‘at the behest of fallen kindred.’ The activity both of the principal and of the agent is recognised in the same passage, and either might have been called προστρόπαιος: but, because the activity of both was plainly asserted, Aeschylus reserved the name for the one to whom it primarily belonged, the murdered man, who turns his wrath, who turns indeed those powers of hell who execute his wrath, against his enemies.
There now remains for consideration only the second meaning of προστρόπαιος; how could a word, which in reference to dead men or to deities meant ‘an Avenger of blood,’ bear, in relation to living men, the sense of ‘blood-guilty’? Very likely the dictionaries are right in accepting the explanation of this use which Hesychius[1223] and others give. We have seen one case[1224] in which the word clearly has a middle sense ‘turning oneself towards’ a place or a person in supplication; and there is no difficulty in supposing that the word was used technically in the same sense of a blood-guilty man who turned to some god or to some sanctuary in quest of purification. This, I say, is very probably the right explanation. But I may perhaps offer an alternative explanation which I do not count preferable but merely possible. The active meaning of προστρόπαιος, ‘turning something upon someone,’ might conceivably have produced this sense of ‘blood-guilty’ as well as the other sense ‘an Avenger of blood.’ As the dead man was held to turn something, namely his wrath, against his enemy, so might the murderer have been pictured as trying to turn something, namely the pollution which he had incurred, upon some object and so to cleanse himself therefrom. Now the chief feature in the Delphic ceremony of purification was the slaying of a sucking-pig[1225]. This may of course have been merely a propitiatory sacrifice; but it is possible also that the animal was really a surrogate victim for the murderer himself, that by laying his polluted hand on its head he transferred the religious uncleanness from himself to it, and that, by the subsequent slaughter of the now blood-guilty animal, he vicariously satisfied the old law that blood could only be washed out by blood. This is only a conjecture, and I leave others to judge of its probability; but, if the ceremony had followed the lines which I have suggested, it is easily intelligible that, in the technical language of religion, the murderer who sought to turn his own pollution upon the victim might have been called προστρόπαιος.
Thus then the problem of the ancient nomenclature of revenants is solved, and the results are briefly these: all revenants were originally called ἀλάστορες, ‘Wanderers’; but subsequently that name was restricted only to the vengeful class of revenants, to which the names μιάστορες and προστρόπαιοι had always belonged; and for the more harmless and purely pitiable revenants no name remained, but men said of such an one simply, ‘He wanders.’
CHAPTER V.
CREMATION AND INHUMATION.
The discussion of those abnormal cases of after-death existence, to which the last chapter has been devoted, has disclosed to us the fact that in all ages of Greece the condition most to be dreaded by the dead has been incorruptibility and the boon most to be desired a sure and quick dissolution; and that of the two methods by which the living might promote the disintegration of the dead, cremation and inhumation, the former alone has been accounted infallible. What benefit in the future existence was in old time thought to accrue to those whose bodies had been duly dissolved, and to be withheld from revenants, is a question which may conveniently be adjourned for a while. First we must verify the results obtained from the study of the abnormal by consideration of the normal; we must see whether ordinary funeral usage has had for its sole object the dissolution of the dead in the interests of the dead; and what, if any, distinction has been made between inhumation and cremation as a means of securing that object.
Now diverse methods of disposing of the dead, especially among a primitive folk, would naturally suggest diverse religious purposes to be served thereby, diverse conceptions of the future estate of the dead, or of their future abode, or of their future relations with the living; and for my part I do not doubt that, if our eyes could pierce the darkness of a long distant past which neither history nor even archaeology has illumined, we should see that the peoples who first used cremation and inhumation side by side in Greece were in so doing animated by diverse religious sentiments. But I hold also that in no period of which we have any cognisance have the Greeks regarded inhumation and cremation as means to different religious ends; but that, whichever funeral-method has been employed, one and the same immediate object has always been kept in view, the dissolution of the dead body, and one and the same motive (save in the quite exceptional circumstances where a scare of vrykolakes has temporarily arisen) has always prompted the mourners thereto, the motive of benefiting the dead.