duration of that activity, when he says that the dead man's anger is hot against the slayer only while his death is still recent, and when by the provisions of his law he implies that the victim's desire for vengeance is fully satisfied by the slayer's withdrawal for the space of one year. But this difference is completely explained by the fact that Plato introduces the tradition in connexion with unintentional homicide, whereas previously we have had it treated in relation to wilful murder. Reasonably enough the man who has been accidentally slain is represented as angry only for a time, while the victim of deliberate murder nourishes a wrath implacable. The one drives the author of his misfortune into exile for a year and then repents him of the evil; the other dogs his enemy with vengeance not only for a year but throughout his life and even after death; and indeed Plato himself, when he passes from the subject of involuntary homicide to that of deliberate murder, proves his recognition of this difference by his enactments; for, at any rate in the most heinous case, namely the murder of a near kinsman, he expressly states[1] that the old principle 'as a man hath done, so must he suffer' admits of no abatement; the guilty man must die, and his body be left unburied.
But I must not yet enter upon a discussion of the actual punishments inflicted. Here I am only concerned to point out how completely Plato's 'old doctrine' harmonises with that which we have learnt from other sources concerning the personal activity of the dead man. First we read that the dead man terrifies and confounds the slayer to the utmost of his power, with the aid of the slayer's own conscience; and then again that his next of kin is under an obligation to obtain satisfaction for him, and is punished by him if he neglects that duty. Clearly the slayer's own conscience is no more than an instrument—a somewhat ineffective instrument, one might think, in a case of unintentional homicide—and the next of kin is no more than a minister, both of them employed and directed by the dead man himself. He it is who exacts his own vengeance.
The other literary method of mitigating the crude popular belief in a bodily revenant hunting down his enemy was to treat
- ↑ Plato, Leges, 872 D ff.
