‘So by that portal old kneeling he fell, And while the last of life yet sobbed and passed, Craving, clasped both hands to the wound, to hold The dark blood back. But the blood reached, and sprang, And, where the veilèd woman shuddered from him, Lay red on the white robe and the white veil. Then swift a sidelong eye, a pitiless eye, The Erinys all subduing, that knoweth Sin, Awoke, and saw what manner of deed was there. And Aeson’s son smote from that sacrifice Red ravine, and three times ravined with his mouth Amid the blood, and three times from him spewed That horror of sin; as men that slay by guile Use, to make still the raging of the dead.’ Apollonius tries to make a ritual of the awful instinct of physical fear. The body is mangled that the angry ghost may be maimed, the blood actually licked up that the murderer may spit it forth and rid himself of the fell pollution. Only then can the corpse be safely buried[173]. But it is too late, for Absyrtos has put the blood upon Medea. Clytaemnestra, when she murdered Agamemnon, followed the same horrid practice of ‘aversion.’ Sophocles[174] makes Electra say: ‘She lopped his limbs as though he were a foe And for libations wiped upon his head The blood stains.’ By the time of Apollonius the Erinys is no longer the actual ghost but a separate spirit of vengeance, and even the primitive ritual of _aversion_ is explained as a sort of tendance; the lopped limbs are ἐξάργματα, first beginnings, a sort of hideous sacrifice to the murdered man rather than mainly the means of maiming him[175]. But the scholiast[176] on the _Electra_ clearly explains the gist of the ceremonial. He says these things were done ‘as taking away the force of the dead so that later they may suffer nothing fearful from them.’ It may perhaps be felt that such instances are purely mythological, and that fear of the ghost had wholly waned in historical times. The horrid practice of mutilation no doubt fell into abeyance, but the fear of the ghost and the sense that purification from guilt could only be obtained by direct appeal to the ghost itself lived on. The case of Pausanias gives curious evidence as to the procedure of an educated murderer of the fifth century B.C. Pausanias[177] the traveller tells how his namesake sought protection from the Goddess of the Brazen House, but failed because he was defiled by blood. This pollution he tried by every possible means to expiate: he had recourse to purifications of all kinds, he made supplication to Zeus Phyxios, a being obviously akin to Meilichios—and he resorted to the Psychagogi, the Ghost-Compellers of Phigalia. They seem to have failed, for Plutarch[178] tells us he sent to Italy for experts, and they, after they had done sacrifice, _wrenched the ghost out of the sanctuary_.