Such is the wild, weird refrain of the Furies' incantation; and in its closing phrase are re-echoed the closing words of Clytemnestra's charge.
Will anyone then venture to say that Aeschylus had no special reason for thus repeating thrice within the compass of some two hundred lines the same threat? For the punishment threatened is substantially the same, though the means of inflicting it vary. Now it is the breath of the Furies which shall scorch up the victim's very blood; now it is their lips that shall suck him dry; now a magic spell to parch and shrivel him; but ever the effect is the same; the bloodguilty man shall lie in death a sere and sapless carcase, already 'damned to incorruption[1] even in that doom which wastes all else.' And the only reason which I can conceive for the poet's insistence upon this thought is that here again, as in all the former punishments, he was reproducing a popular belief substantially the same then as it is in Maina now, namely, that the murdered man, having become a revenant, sucked his murderer's blood and made him also in his turn a revenant.
Nor is Aeschylus the only ancient authority for the idea of some such retribution after death. Plato, in a passage of the Phaedrus already cited, contemplates the activity of a murdered man's wrath ([Greek: mênima]) not only in the present time but also hereafter[2]; and in his Laws there is a provision, not assuredly of his own devising but dating from the very beginning of Greek legislation, which can only have been designed to insure the complete vengeance of the murdered man on his murderer even beyond death. A man convicted of the wilful murder of a near kinsman[3] was punishable not only with death but with a further penalty: 'the attendants of the jury and the magistrates having killed him shall cast out his corpse naked at an appointed cross-roads without the city, and all the magistrates, representing the whole city, shall take each a stone and cast it upon the head of the corpse and thereby free the whole city from guilt, and thereafter they shall carry the corpse to the borders of their land and cast it out, in accordance with the law, unburied[4].' Now the law, we know, in ordaining the penaltyin the phrase from which I started (Choeph. 296) is hereby explained.].]
