Greece, from which both Aeschylus and the Church must have borrowed, the commission of certain sins has always involved the penalty of incorruptibility, whether the curse which those sins merited had been formally pronounced or no. The actual source and operation of such unspoken curses will be considered in the next section.
The other two causes, lack of burial and violent death, may be considered together; for the whole trend of ancient literature in regard to both these calamities is the same, namely, that they caused the return of the dead man's spirit—of his spirit only, be it noted, and not of his body. It is the ghost of Patroclus which in the Iliad[1] appears to Achilles and demands the funeral-rites due to his body; it is the ghost of Elpenor which in the Odyssey[2] makes the same claim upon Odysseus; it is the ghost of Polydorus which in the Hecuba[3] of Euripides bemoans his body cast away in the sea. Again it is the ghost of Clytemnestra which in the Eumenides[4] of Aeschylus comes seeking vengeance for her violent death; and Lucian in the Philopseudes[5] gives special prominence to this cause of the soul's unrest. 'Perhaps, Eucrates,' says one of the speakers in the dialogue, 'what Tychiades means is this, that the only souls which wander about are those of men who met with a violent death—anyone, for example, who hanged himself, or was beheaded or impaled, or departed this life in any other such way—but that the souls of those who died a natural death do not wander; if that is his theory, it cannot be lightly dismissed.' It is needless to multiply examples[6]; literary tradition, from Homer down to Lucian, is all in favour of the re-appearance of the soul, and not of the body, as the result of either lack of burial or violent death.
It is perfectly clear then that there is a considerable discrepancy between the ancient literary view and the modern popular creed. Ancient literature is extremely reticent on the subject of bodily resuscitation occasioned solely by a violent
- ↑ Hom. Il. XXIII. 69 ff.
- ↑ Hom. Od. XI. 51 ff.
- ↑ Eur. Hec. 1-58.
- ↑ Aesch. Eum. 94 ff. It must be observed, however, that Clytemnestra's restlessness is represented as being due to her being a murderess quite as much as to her having been violently slain. There was a double cause. See below, p. 474.
- ↑ cap. 29.
- ↑ Other references are given by Schmidt, das Volksleben, p. 169, among them Servius on Virg. Aen., IV. 386 and Heliod. Aethiop., II. 5.
