Thus, we might understand the lesser mysteries as yet another stage in a month-long process of ensuring good relationships between the living and dead, but one that was particularly important for those intending to embark on a process (initiation at Eleusis) that made good relationships with the dead particularly important. The "purification" that was carried out for some or all of the initiates at Agrai could be understood as the first and most important step in the aversion of the potentially dangerous ghosts that other sources suggest would try to threaten the initiate at a later stage of the process or would threaten the uninitiated after death, in Hades itself.
Additional sources mention ghostly manifestations in connection with other mystery cults as well; they may have been a standard feature of these cults, which were, after all, directly concerned with the Underworld and its inhabitants and with ensuring that the initiate was made immune to all of Hades' dangers. (This was one reason that the goes, discussed in chapter 3 as an expert in the control and aversion of disembodied souls, would also make a good initiator.) For example, Origen says that "terrible things and ghosts" appeared during the Bacchic mysteries.34 Is this, perhaps, what the dark and threatening female of the Pompeian fresco is meant to represent? Angry ghosts appeared during the initiations into Hecate's mysteries on Aegina, too, as we shall see shortly below. Although the primary purpose of this cult, so far as we can tell, was not to guarantee a better afterlife but rather to cure madness, the underlying idea was the same: to be freed of madness (which the dead were believed to inflict) and to be protected against postmortem problems (caused by the angry dead or the infernal agents who avenged them) required confronting the dead or their agents during a special initiatory process. The assumption that unhappy souls would impede initiation carried on into mysteries that developed in later antiquity as well. The theurgists believed that demonic entities would try to obstruct them during an early stage of the initiation that prepared their souls for the encounter with the gods that would win them bliss. In accord with theurgy's platonizing tendencies, these demons were interpreted by the theurgists as the inflictors of corporeal passions that would lure the soul away from its proper pursuits, rather than as angry souls, but the general pattern mimics that of long-established mysteries, as do many other elements of the theurgic initiation.35
Column VI of the Derveni Papyrus and its daimones empodon are important in this respect as well. Exactly what cult is being discussed in this papyrus, and for what reason, are famously difficult questions to answer, but most scholars would agree that it is probably a cult concerned with private mystery initiations of some sort, similar to those referred to by Plato in the Republic, which took the poems of Orpheus as their doctrinal basis. The point of the cult seems to have been to prepare the individual's soul for a better afterlife by protecting it against the "terrors of Hades" (col. V); in this sense, it is quite similar to the Eleusinian and most other mystery cults. The magoi, that is, the special priests36 who conducted the rites, had to prevent the daimones empodon from obstructing the initiate as he completed the process that would guarantee this. The magoi did so by offering prayers and sacrifices to the daimones "as if they were paying a penalty" ((ilairEpEi TTOLV1jv aTro8L8ovTE9) and by chanting an incantation (epoide) to keep the daimones away. The phrase "as if they were paying a penalty" is interesting; it echoes phrases found in connection with Orphic and Bacchic cults that refer to the "penalty" that each mortal had to pay to Persephone to atone for the death of her son Zagreus at the hands of the Titans-a penalty that expiates blood-guilt in other words.37 Here, in column VI, however, the penalty is to be paid to the daimones empodon (i.e., souls of the dead), not to Persephone, and it is hard not to infer that it is intended to atone for the deaths of these daimones empodon themselves. Thus, we glimpse a situation much like the one that I have just proposed in connection with Eleusis: before initiation can be completed successfully, the souls of the angry dead, who would otherwise impede (einai empodon) 38 the initiates, must be appeased and averted. The actions taken by Dionysus and Xanthias against Empousa in the Frogs seem to be a farcical version of some such aversion ritual: first they beg the priest of Dionysus (who would have been sitting in the front row of the theater) to protect them, as a mystagogue or other official might help to protect an initiate. Then Xanthias adjures the monster to depart (te' T)TTEp EpXEL). After she has gone, he proclaims "Be bold, all good things now are accomplished" (AdppEv• TravT' aya6d TrETrpayaiEV), a phrase that echoes a declaration supposedly made by the Eleusinian hierophant as well as various other cultic declarations of salvation, and then swears thrice that she is really gone-the triplicity lends the oath an incantatory tone.39
There are other bits of information that suggest control of the angry dead may have been of concern in mystery cults, and that the purifications used in those cults were specifically oriented toward this task '40 but enough has been said already on this topic for my purposes. For, in making this detour into the Eleusinian mysteries, the Derveni Papyrus and the association between purification and averting dangerous souls, I have sought to demonstrate two things that I believe are well supported by now. The first, which takes us back to a topic raised in chapter 3, is the likelihood that those who performed initiations were required to have expertise in the aversion or control of souls as well: initiation and goeteia are two sides of the same coin and help us to understand the goes as essentially a "psychologist" of a sort-that is, an expert in souls. The second, which is more directly relevant to the topic of this chapter, is the likelihood that more rites referred to in antiquity as "purifications" were concerned with appeasing and averting the angry dead than has been recognized by those who prefer to keep miasma and the biaiotbanatoi- as well as their remedies-separated.
HOMERIC BIAIOTHANATOI
Turning away now from the angry dead and their possible connections to miasma, let us focus on the biaiotbanatoi themselves. We shall start, as it seems we always must, with a glance at Homer, in order to establish some baseline for later developments. In Homer, murder typically results in the exile of the murderer from his native land. Why this is the case is never explained in the poems: it is certainly reasonable to guess, as many scholars do, that the murderer's flight is due to the anger of surviving kin,41 although this alone does not exclude other motivations as well, such as fear of the ghost or its agents. The story of Meleager, as told by Phoenix in the Iliad, is interesting in this respect because it collapses the two ideas. Althaea invokes the Erinyes to avenge the death of her brother by killing his murderer. In other words, a kinswoman urges on the sort of supernatural agents that are sent forth by the dead themselves in other passages, rather than punishing the murderer herself, as she did in the traditional version of the story.42 There were good narrative reasons for collapsing the two concepts in this case. On the one hand, for the persuasive purposes of Phoenix, Meleager could not be described as dying immediately after Althaea's angry response to her brother's death, as he had in the familiar version; he had to live long enough to go back out onto the battlefield. On the other hand, omitting Althaea's involvement with Meleager's death altogether would have changed one of the most striking features of the traditional myth far too much. Having Althaea invoke the agents of Meleager's death preserves the essence of the myth and yet admits the changes necessary for Phoenix's purposes. What is notable for us, however, is that Phoenix's revision of the story was tolerable to Homer's audience; punishment of a murderer by surviving kin and pursuit of a murderer by supernatural agents coexist comfortably-indeed, seem to be two variations or stages of the same process.
Let us pause for a moment on the fact that it was the Erinyes whom Althaea urged to punish Meleager, not the ghost of her brother itself. This agrees with what we find elsewhere in Homer. We hear about Oedipus suffering from the attacks of his mother's Erinyes after her suicidenot from the attacks of his mother's ghost itself. Similarly, Elpenor and Hector, to ensure the burial of their bodies, threaten that their lack of burial w
ill become a cause for "gods' wrath" (menimata theon) upon Odysseus and Achilles, which suggests that it will be some or all of the gods who punish Odysseus and Achilles, rather than the ghosts of the dead men. Perhaps the gods whom Hector and Elpenor have in mind are Hades and Persephone, who in Homer are twice connected with the Erinyes in their roles as avengers. "Gods" may also refer to the Erinyes themselves, who as early as Homer can be called theai.43 But whoever these gods are, Elpenor and Patroclus's threats confirm that the dead individual, however restless and unhappy, was unable to inflict harm upon the living directly and had to rely instead upon the agency of more powerful entities to do so. This aligns nicely with the general Homeric pic ture of the dead as described in chapter I: inside or outside of Hades, most of them are very feeble.
What, exactly, did the Erinyes (or any other gods) do to those against whom they were invoked? In the majority of cases, Homer tells us almost nothing at a11.44 Once, they are associated with sterility, a hidden injury that works from inside the body.45 In two other instances they are associated with inflicting madness or delusion, which, of course, eventually leads to bizarre behavior that is externally perceptible but that, like sterility, begins inside of the victim, hidden away.46 They are also associated once with death, as we have just seen, although exactly how Meleager's death occurred is not described, either because Homer, having altered the well-known version of the story, realized that he had to avoid giving too many details, or because it was better for Phoenix's persuasive purposes if Meleager's actual death were not narrated at all: the point was to persuade Achilles to return to the battlefield, after all, and Meleager's death there would scarcely provide an enticing precedent.47
In Homer, then, the revenge of the biaiothanatoi usually works itself out in ways that are not only indirect, insofar as the dead use an agent rather than acting themselves, but also are not, as far as we can tell, immediately obvious to the rest of the world. An adjective several times associated with the Homeric Erinyes, eerophoitos, "wandering through the aer," or "mist," perhaps expresses the surreptitious nature of their attacks by emphasizing the invisibility in which they operate.48 It was not impossible for Homeric characters to see ghosts-Achilles certainly sees the ghost of Patroclus, and Theoclymenus "sees" the ghosts of the suitors even before they are dead; in the epic Nostoi, the Achaeans see Achilles' ghost49-but there is no indication that we are to imagine even these ghosts who return to the upper world as being capable of physical interaction with the living, or to imagine their agents as working in overt ways.
From these sketchy pieces of Homeric information, we move, temporarily, into a complete void of information. Hesiod says nothing about the return of the violently dead to punish their murderers, and only obscurely hints at the role of the Erinyes as agents of vengeance by linking their birth to Cronus's castration of Uranus-the closest one can get to murdering an immortal god.50 But then, postmortem vengeance is not a topic on which either of Hesiod's poems naturally would focus. The Theogony concentrates on the construction and organization of the divine world; any implications that this has for humanity are painted only in broad strokes. The lives, and the afterlives, of ordinary mortals are unimportant in Hesiod's grand scheme of things. The Works and Days is deeply concerned with human justice and retribution, but wishes to attach them firmly to Zeus and his Olympian order, so as to give them the highest possible sanction. Crimes are noticed and punished by the 30,000 "watchers" whom Zeus himself directs (the special dead of the pure and ideal Golden Race), rather than by the pitiable ghosts of defective mortals of our own, imperfect Iron Race, or by any agents whom they are allowed to direct. The lyric poets by nature have little to say on the topic of the restless dead, either. It is not until the early classical age that we get further information about beliefs in the biaiothanatoi.
BIAIOTHANATOI AND THEIR AGENTS IN THE CLASSICAL PERIOD
As in Homer, supernatural agents sometimes carry out the curse of the dead in the classical period. There are a number of terms for these, including alastor, prostropaios, and palamnaios. These seem problematic in certain ways, because although their predominant referent is an agent of the dead, they are also used at times to refer to the ghost of the dead person in its own right or to the blood of that person upon the murderer's hands. In some instances they can even refer to the murderer. In any given case, then, care must be taken to identify the referent of the word correctly. Parker rightly suggests, however, that this multiplication of possible referents reflects the fact that murder set in motion a chain of violent actions performed by angry individuals-murderer, ghost, and supernatural agent-each in its own turn .51 In recognizing this, we also must recognize that behind even the cases where these words are applied to the murderer, there lingers an allusion to the belief that the dead could avenge themselves, either on their own or through agents. In our sources, there seems to be no qualitative distinction between the occasions on which the dead act for themselves and those on which the agents act, although the fact that the dead sometimes are said to "send" alastores, for example, does imply that as in Homer, the agents are imagined to have greater powers than the dead themselves. That Zeus himself could be called Alastor or Palamnaios suggests, moreover, that concern with avenging the dead extended all the way up the divine ladder and was not always carried out only by nondescript, rather anonymous agents.
But it was Erinys and the Erinyes whom tragedy adopted as the avenging agents of the dead par excellence. In part this was probably because they had a well-established mythological genealogy and thus were more vivid than the vaguer alastores or palamnaioi, and in part it must have been owing to their appearances in the Iliad and Odyssey: they lent a Homeric flavor.52 Another reason for their popularity in tragedy has to do with their special link to familial crime, which we shall examine in detail in chapter 7.
In Homer, the Erinyes are already firmly associated with the Underworld, from which they rise up and in which, therefore, they apparently dwell. Tragedy takes this further, portraying them as chasing or dragging their prey into the Underworld53 and dwelling in its unlit gloom,54 and by calling them "black-robed," 55 "children of the Night," 56 and "bacchantes of Hades." 57 The Erinyes are never equated with the dead, however, and from earliest times until latest, Erinys can be called a goddess, thea. This, and the appearance of an early version of Erinys's name in Linear B lists of divinities, proves that the Erinyes could not have begun from a belief in divinized spirits of the dead, contrary to a once popular theory.58 Violent death sets in motion an erinys-"cries forth an erinys" 59-but it does not create an erinys in the sense of the dead spirit taking on this new identity. The Erinyes are simply, like some other gods, including Persephone, Hades, and Zeus, concerned with defending the rights of the dead and avenging their murders.
But we also find the angry, violently dead beginning to work for themselves in the classical period. In the Prometheus Bound, lo claims that the ghost (eidolon) of the dead Argus pursues and persecutes her. In the Choephoroi, Orestes tells us about Apollo's warning that the dead will afflict those who fail to avenge them. In Euripides' Electra, Agamemnon is asked to rise up and to bring with him a whole army of the dead. Orestes makes a similar request in the Orestes. In the Heracles, Amphitryon assumes that Heracles' madness has been inflicted by some dead person whom Heracles has murdered.60 Several comedies were written about ghosts, at least one of which, judging from Plautus's reworking of its plot in his Mostellaria, must have involved belief that a biaiothanatos was scaring people away.61 A tragic fragment describes the ghosts who work under Hecate's command as frightening the living in their sleep. The author of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease similarly tells us that common opinion traced terrors, unreasonable fears, and madnesses (deimata, phoboi, paranoiai) to attacks by the heroes (a special form of biaiothanatoi, discussed below) or to Hecate, the mistress of the dead, who could send them forth at will.62 As mentioned above, the Aeginetan mysteries of Hecate, which were famous for curing madness fro
m at least the fifth century on, probably worked by averting attacks by the dead who caused the madness and appeasing the goddess who commanded them. Dio Chrysostom tells us that "those involved with initiations [teletai ] and purifications [katharsia] say that by appeasing [hilaskomenoi] the wrath of Hecate they can make a person sane; and before they [begin] the purification process they invoke and point to many and various sorts of phasmata, which they say the angry goddess has sent." These mysteries were reputed to have been founded by Orpheus, famous not only as a mystagogue but also as an expert in the care and control of the disembodied soul, as we saw in chapter 3.63
None of these classical ghosts seem to have been any more physically involved with their victims than were the Homeric Erinyes. Neither Aeschylus, Sophocles, nor Euripides represents Agamemnon's ghost as actually doing anything, or even as appearing: Agamemnon's only clear contribution to the plot against Clytemnestra and Aegisthus is to send terrifying nightmares that upset and distract his guilty wife. Similarly, in the Hecuba, the ghost of Achilles terrifies his former comrades until they appease him through Polyxena's sacrifice on his tomb, but the ghost does not physically harm them. The ghost of Clytemnestra herself merely stood by and urged on the Erinyes who would avenge her. And in fact, even the Erinyes themselves seem to specialize in frightening and maddening their victims, despite their threat to "suck the blood" from Orestes while he is still alive. Indeed, the infliction of madness remains the Erinyes' favorite weapon throughout their long career.64 Remarks made by Plato and Xenophon also suggest that ghosts and their agents usually worked through mental and psychological disturbances.65
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