in the background of the historical
prospect, Greek institutions retained a thousand birth-marks of
savagery. It is manifest and undeniable that the Greek criminal law,
as far as it effected murder, sprang directly from the old savage
blood-feud.(1) The Athenian law was a civilised modification of the
savage rule that the kindred of a slain man take up his blood-feud.
Where homicide was committed WITHIN the circle of blood relationship,
as by Orestes, Greek religion provided the Erinnyes to punish an offence
which had, as it were, no human avenger. The precautions taken by
murderers to lay the ghost of the slain man were much like those in
favour among the Australians. The Greek cut off the extremities of his
victim, the tips of the hands and feet, and disposed them neatly beneath
the arm-pits of the slain man.(2) In the same spirit, and for the same
purpose, the Australian black cuts off the thumbs of his dead enemy,
that the ghost too may be mutilated and prevented from throwing at him
with a ghostly spear. We learn also from Apollonius Rhodius and his
scholiast that Greek murderers used thrice to suck in and spit out the
gore of their victims, perhaps with some idea of thereby partaking of
their blood, and so, by becoming members of their kin, putting it beyond
the power of the ghosts to avenge themselves. Similar ideas inspire the
worldwide savage custom of making an artificial "blood brotherhood" by
mingling the blood of the contracting parties. As to the ceremonies of
cleansing from blood-guiltiness among the Greeks, we may conjecture
that these too had their primitive side; for Orestes, in the Eumenides,
maintains that he has been purified of his mother's slaughter by
sufficient blood of swine. But this point will be illustrated presently,
when we touch on the mysteries.

(1) Duncker, History of Greece, Engl. transl., vol. ii. p. 129.

(2) See "Arm-pitting in Ancient Greece," in the American Journal of
Philology, October, 1885, where a discussion of the familiar texts in
Aeschylus and Apollonius Rhodius will be found.

Ritual and myth, as might be expected, retained vast masses of savage
rites and superstitious habits and customs. To be "in all things too
superstitious," too full of deisidaimonia, was even in St. Paul's time
the characteristic of the Athenians. Now superstition, or deisidaimonia,
is defined by Theophrastus,(1) as "cowardice in regard to the
supernatural" ((Greek text omitted)). This "cowar