Restless Dead

by Sarah Iles Johnston

  Having reached the end of our survey of the Greek aore's traits, I would note that most of them have been shown to accord well with the model proposed earlier: society marginalizes that which is undesirable by associating it with the demonic world, and then further marginalizes the demonic by attaching to it other marginal traits, such as bimorphism. The aore, in other words, played a strong normative role, inasmuch as she sent the message that failure to bear and nurture children was to be associated with such monstrous abnormalities as hermaphrodism, theriomorphism, ugliness, filth, and a life in the wilderness that was imagined to lie outside the city-state. Greek girls who heard the stories of Gello, Lamia, and Morino were left in no uncertainty that their success in life would be defined by their reproductive accomplishments. Refusal or failure to perform would place them in the same relationship to society as Lamia, Gello, and Mormo and would lead to their suffering the same unhappy sort of afterlife.

  THE AORE AND REPRODUCTIVE FAILURE

  In the course of describing the normative force of the aore, I have temporarily left aside the fact that she helped to explain phenomena that we would call miscarriage, toxemia, stillbirths, puerperal fever, and sudden infant death syndrome. At first glance, this point may not seem to require much investigation. Ghostly explanations for illness are often dismissed on the assumption that they arise "naturally" in societies where medical and scientific knowledge is rudimentary; indeed, I used much this same reasoning myself in chapter 4 when discussing the association between madness and the angry dead. Yet in fact, other, nondemonic explanations of illness and other misfortunes are usually available even in traditional cultures. Illnesses can be blamed on the magical attacks of other mortals, for example, or on a god's anger. In some cultures, illnesses are blamed on the moral misconduct of someone close to the victim, each illness being linked to a specific form of misconduct. For the African Lele, the deaths of parturient women and infants are assumed to be due to adulterous behavior within the tribe; following such a death, the adulterers are sought out and punished.14

  Given this variety of possible explanations, the question of why a given culture chooses to explain illnesses (or certain types of illnesses) by blaming the angry dead must always be asked. Do the angry dead express certain fears or values that other explanations cannot? Conversely, do they allow the culture to avoid confronting certain fears or suspicions? In this section, I shall be asking such questions with regard to the Greek aore-as well as with regard to other Greek explanations of reproductive failure.

  I exclude from this discussion explanations for reproductive failure that are not likely to have been adduced in normal, everyday life. For example, in the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Theban community suffers an epidemic of childbed deaths and stillbirths (among other things) because of Oedipus's presence, reflecting a belief that polluted individuals could bring reproductive misfortune upon the people with whom they lived, much as the Lele believe that adultery can cause innocent women and infants to die. Yet few ancient Greeks would have reacted to their own obstetrical problems by searching their neighborhood for patricides. On the one hand, reproductive failure was too common to allow this; if each person who suffered it began seeking such a cause, the community would be in a constant state of disruption. On the other hand, however, reproductive failure was seldom common enough at any given time to give rise to this explanation; so long as some women in a community were successfully bearing infants and some of those infants survived, it would be difficult for explanations such as that in the Oedipus Tyrannus to be taken seriously.65

  The first type of what might be called everyday explanations for reproductive failure is concerned more with the problems encountered by the mother during pregnancy or parturition than with those encountered by the infant after birth. It attributes difficulties to misalignments or imbalances within the woman's body. A misalignment might be structural: perhaps her womb had wandered to an inappropriate place within her body, for example, as Plato so vividly describes at the end of the Timaeus, or perhaps her cervix was either locked shut, preventing conception, or stuck open, preventing retention of the fetus once conception had occurred. An imbalance might occur in her body's various "humors" that prevented conception, gestation, or parturition. Sometimes, imbalances could lead to misalignments: a thirsty womb might be driven to wander throughout the body, for example, seeking liquid replenishment from other organs.66 We find such ideas expressed most clearly by Hippocrates and other medical writers, but these practitioners were drawing on established folk traditions.67

  Professionals had ways of dealing with these misalignments and imbalances, such as burning sweet-smelling essences beneath the vaginal opening to lure the womb back into the proper position while simultaneously driving it away from improper positions by placing fetid substances near other orifices.68 There also were popular magical techniques available, such as amulets and mixtures that could be tied or rubbed onto the body during pregnancy or labor. Many of these worked on the principle of sympathy or persuasive analogy.69 Amulets also attest to popular attempts to cure problems caused by structural difficul ties. Those of the "uterine-key" type, which show the uterus as an upturned jug with a key poised at its mouth, were intended to correct a variety of obstetrical problems, by either "locking" the cervix to retain a fetus or "unlocking" it to allow passage of the semen in or the child out.70 Magical spells also commanded the uterus to open or close."

  We know that this first method of explaining reproductive failure sometimes brought blame upon the victim herself. Women who acted in what was considered to be an unfeminine manner-by exercising too strenuously, for example-were held responsible for inducing the imbalances and misalignments that afflicted them.72 At other times, however, it must have been the case that no activity or lack thereof on the woman's part could be adduced as an obvious explanation; her body simply seemed to have rebelled, refusing to perform its proper func- tions.73 It is possible that some misalignments or imbalances might have been thought to have been induced magically by other mortals-after all, what amulets and incantations could cure, they logically could cause as well-but it is not necessary to assume such a mortal agent working behind the scenes, and Greek sources that describe misalignments never do so in fact, as far as I have been able to establish. Roman authors do occasionally mention this possibility: Apuleius tells us about a witch who caused her enemy's cervix to clamp shut, thus forcing the poor woman to endure eight years of pregnancy. Pliny says that to sit with one's fingers laced together in the presence of a parturient woman is "to commit veneficium" (sorcery).74 But in most cases, Roman descriptions of gynecological misalignments or imbalances, like Greek descriptions, do not assume that they were caused by the actions of other mortals.

  Even if we extend our search to include any sort of mortal attack on another's reproductive abilities (not just those that cause misalign ments), we still find little evidence in Greek sources. From the preRoman period, we have Euripides' Andromache, where Hermione, the legal wife of Neoptolemus, assumes that her sterility is due to the fact that Andromache, his concubine, has been poisoning her womb with pharmaka so that Neoptolemus will grow to hate her.75 There may also be an allusion to people using herbs to harm others' children in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, where, as discussed above, Demeter promises to protect her nursling against the the "Undercutter" and the "Plant-cutter." We can find one more example in Plutarch, who reports that the injuries of young children and tender crops were believed to be caused by another person's Evil Eye. Pliny and Aulus Gellius give similar information.76 Notably, however, the only examples that these authors give of the intentional use of the Evil Eye connect it with distant, mysterious tribes, such as the Ethiopians, the Scythians, and the legendary Thibii, who dwelt near the Pontus-in other words, its intentional, maleficent use is associated only with peoples who dwelt outside of the civilized world.77 We have no earlier sources than these that discuss the obstetrical effects of the Evil Eye, but the intentional nonobstetrical uses
that are mentioned in earlier sources also are associated only with distant, semi-fictional foreigners.78 In sum, although Hermione's accusations in the Andromache and Demeter's remarks in the Hymn suggest that the Greeks believed that it was possible for mortals to inflict reproductive harm on one another intentionally, we have little evidence to suggest that they naturally turned to that belief as an explanation when they confronted reproductive failure in real life. As we shall see, moreover, the cases involving Hermione and Demeter exactly fit certain exceptional circumstances in which such unusual accusations might occasionally arise: they do not reflect the normal, day-to-day life of the Greek wife.

  Considering that, in many traditional cultures throughout the world, it is common to blame reproductive failure on the deliberate attack of another person,79 it is surprising that we have virtually no evidence for this among the Greeks. The absence becomes all the more striking when we remember that the Greeks did assume that their neighbors were using curse tablets and other magical devices to keep them from winning court cases, chariot races, lovers, and other desiderata. Why was a similar assumption not made when a woman failed to reproduce?

  Scholars who study other cultures that reject this explanation have tried to account for its lack of appeal in various ways. Alan MacFarlane has drawn upon the anthropological theory that links accusations of magical attacks to problematic social relationships to explain why in fant deaths were seldom attributed to witchcraft in Stuart and Tudor England. Because infants do not quarrel with other members of their society, he reasons, their deaths could not be blamed on the magical retaliation of someone whom they had offended or aggrieved. But there is a problem here: did not the parents of some stricken infants fight with their neighbors? Why were infants' deaths not understood as a result of such parental quarrels? Elsewhere, MacFarlane suggests that "to ascribe the very frequent deaths of children in a primitive society to witchcraft would be to overload the concept [of witchcraft as an explanation for misfortune]." 80 Considering that witches in traditional societies-including those that MacFarlane studied-were blamed for a huge variety of other common illnesses and misfortunes, however, it does not seem that infant deaths would have overloaded the concept any more than it already was.

  I shall return to the social significance of the absence of such accusations. First, however, it is important to realize that the most important reason such accusations were not being made in ancient Greece was that people were not, in fact, using magic to hurt one another reproductively. I find no Greek spell earlier than the late Roman period that is intended to harm a pregnant woman or infant or inflict sterility, nor any reference to such a spell, with the possible exception, again, of the passages from Euripides' Andromache and the Homeric Hymn. Even in the Roman period, evidence for such practices is meager; I find only two real cases and a few references to the general possibility.81 In effect, we are back to the question I posed a few paragraphs ago, although it must be extended: not only must we ask why the Greeks did not assume that others were responsible for their reproductive failures, we also must ask why they did not use magic to cause other people to fail reproductively.

  To begin with, the context in which reproductive problems occurred differed from those in which injurious magic usually was used in ancient Greece: to win a race, a lawsuit, or a lover, for example. The latter are all contexts in which a zero-sum, agonistic situation openly exists.82 There could be only a single winner in these situations, who gained at the expense of the loser or losers. When a child died in infancy or a woman died in labor, in contrast, in most cases no specific person benefited from the death. It is possible to imagine scenarios that were exceptions to this rule. A young man might have desired his rich uncle to remain childless so that he himself would be adopted as the uncle's heir. The members of a Athenian man's anchisteia (extended family) might hope that his infant son would die so that his property would revert to them after his death (the two Roman cases cited in note 81 work on this same principle). A well-born concubine might hope that a legal wife would remain sterile so that her own child would stand a chance of being adopted as the legal heir (as in the case of Andromache and Hermione) or, in a monarchic situation such as existed in Eleusis of the Homeric Hymn, powerful families might hope that the king would remain without a son to whom he could pass on the reign. But these are extreme and unusual situations. The general rule still stands: childbirth did not take place in a zero-sum environment in ancient Greece. Far the contrary: a mother and child usually were surrounded by people who desired their continued health.

  There is, however, another powerful motivation that drives people to attack one another even when no logical reason to do so exists: envy. Envy thrives outside of such overtly agonistic arenas as the racetrack and courtroom just as well as it does within them, because the envier desires not so much to obtain what someone else has, as to deprive the possessor of it. Indeed, quite frequently, there is no real way in which the envier can obtain the object of his envy: one woman cannot steal the beauty of another, one man cannot take over as his own the kleos (glory) of another. Satisfaction of many types of envy, therefore, comes only from ensuring that no one else possesses what you cannot possess. Legend tells of how the envious women of Thessaly stoned Lafs to death because they could not bear to look upon her beauty any longer, for example.83

  There is no doubt that the Greeks recognized the power of envy, and feared the effects that it could have on both the envied and envier, on both individuals and communities. 84 Epinician poets sang of its destructive effects.85 The burning, gnawing pain of the envier was vividly portrayed in ancient art,86 and was described in literature by verbs such as "bite," "devour," and "wear away." 87 Numerous myths tell of how envy infected even the gods, leading them to smite men and women of accomplishment. That reproductive success was among the things envied is illustrated clearly by myths. For example, it is Leto's envy, as well as Niobe's hubris, that leads Apollo and Artemis to kill Niobe's fourteen children. Niobe is on the receiving end of reproductive envy in another myth, too, although she fared better there. According to Antoninus Liberalis, Aedon was Niobe's sister, and killed her own son accidentally while attempting to kill one of Niobe's: it was envy of her sister's greater reproductive success that drove Aedon to her desperate act. In another myth, Hera, jealous of Aphrodite's pregnancy, touched her belly with a curse, and caused Aphrodite's child, Priapus, to be born deformed.ss

  Envy will tear apart the family or any other group that it infects. The envious may attack the envied by any of various methods, both physical and social, which will lead, in the long run, to divisiveness within the group as a whole. The suspicion of envy, moreover, may lead a victim of misfortune to accuse another in the group of having enviously attacked him, perhaps by magical means. This, too, often works to divide the group, particularly when the injury is of a serious nature, for supporters rally to either side. In some cases, envy within a group can be stopped from developing in the first place by equalizing desirable commodities or qualities so far as is possible-in some societies, no man owns many more pigs than another of his rank, no woman allows herself to weave much faster than the average weaver, and those who are better endowed than others with beauty or health learn not to display those gifts con- spicuously.89 Peter Walcot has argued, in fact, that some of the most sophisticated cultural achievements of the Greeks worked similarly. He notes that democracy-wherein each citizen had an equal voteand the development of inheritance laws-whereby all sons inherited equally-substantially evened out the power, possessions, and kleos that adult males had. Although control of envy per se probably was not a conscious motivation behind such political and juridical reforms, they do point to an underlying desire among the Greeks to avoid situations of gross inequality. Walcot suggests that there were less formal attempts to avoid envy as well. For example, in working-class families, brothers were encouraged to learn different trades, which would have prevented direct competition and envy within the family.90

>   Eliminating the reasons that envy might arise is one way of controlling its potentially divisive effects. But, in some situations, it is impossible to get rid of the cause of envy without losing highly desirable rewards in the process. This brings us back to reproductive matters: a couple who had been blessed with children would surely be envied by those who had not, but the importance of a man producing an heir, in conjunction with the high mortality rate among infants and children, made it unlikely that a couple would limit their reproductive achievements simply to ensure that they would not become the object of others' envy. The stakes were too high.

  If the cause of envy cannot be eliminated-that is, if the distribution of a desired commodity cannot be equalized among those who desire it-then efforts must focus on controlling the two products of envy mentioned above. Those who possess lesser skills or fewer desiderata must be discouraged from becoming envious, and society must prevent victims of misfortune from accusing others of envious attacks by giving the victim an object or person outside of the society to blame. With these ideas in mind, let us return to the aore. As I shall show, using the dead to explain reproductive failure not only clearly reflected the Greeks' fear that reproductive envy was rampant but also helped to control it in each of the two ways just described.

  The aetiological myths connected with Greek aorai, reviewed in the previous section of this chapter, tell that they once were mortal women who died without reproducing successfully. The implicit reason that the ghosts attacked mothers and children, then, was that they had failed to reproduce, died without earning the honor that reproduction conferred upon women, and were envious of those who had succeeded. Sometimes this point is made explicit. The aore is named "Megaira"-"She who is envious"-in one magical spell (Orphic lithica zz4-z5). Lamia's story, as told by Diodorus and other sources, says that she "envied the happiness of other women in their children" following the death of her own. Amulets sometimes label the aore that they portray as Phthonos, "Envy," or show her in combination with the Evil Eye, a well-known symbol of envy. Our earliest examples of this are from the third century C.E., but the motifs are probably older.91 Grave inscriptions for children sometimes blamed their deaths on phthoneroi daimones, "envious daimones." 92 The Greek aore, then, was more than just an explanation for misfortune born out of medical ignorance; she was endowed with a human emotion that was felt to be omnipresent.