Since then there is no question but that the wordπροστρόπαιοςwas 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 arevenant, 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 samepassage, and either might have been calledπροστρόπαιος: 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 ofπροστρόπαιος; 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 ofπροστρόπαιος, ‘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, themurderer who sought to turn his own pollution upon the victim might have been calledπροστρόπαιος.
Thus then the problem of the ancient nomenclature ofrevenantsis solved, and the results are briefly these: allrevenantswere originally calledἀλάστορες, ‘Wanderers’; but subsequently that name was restricted only to the vengeful class ofrevenants, to which the namesμιάστορεςandπροστρόπαιοιhad always belonged; and for the more harmless and purely pitiablerevenantsno name remained, but men said of such an one simply, ‘He wanders.’