x x x x x x ș***$s
ŅŅ（^^`````§§§§§ §§
· · · · * * * ſ- s s ≠ ± • • • • • • • • • •-， asºº • <<< < <<< ** =：= * * * * * *s* -- -**... , ）, …..….....… …………..…...….….……., ….…….………..………….…….
, ， ， , ， ， ， … ~ （~~~~ • • • •: ！ --~~~~）<; • • • • • •
· • ¶ • • • • • • • • • × × × × ×
s s, s.s. • • • • • • × 2 × × × × × × × × × × × × s. *•* • * * × × × × × × ×*， , , ,,，,，, ，, ， ， ， ， ，'s （~~~~）;
º, ， ' *: * ， ， ， ， ，·- · ،
&~~~~*~~~~***************~*~*~~~~| • •<!-- *******… ， ！~~ ~~~~`````` ſ.•• ... - , , ， ; .· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · * * * **：§ §|-·，≤ºº， *********®
» . . . № s ſº：•، ، ، ، ، ، ، ،* --~--~--~ -：• • w：- ·º. ·
§.º ºſ§§§§§§）.quaerſws， ， ，'$$º • ~ ~ 7.- -- ----∞ √≠√≠√≠√∞∞∞∞ f√∞'，--<--<--….….~--~ ·
§.·™*：§§-- - §§§§§§§§§§§***≤?*∞ √∞،
§§§&&· . . . . .§********<<s<<SSSSSS&§§
~**-***' '^^ '"§§§§
§¶r√°r'，§..………….………….….….………–.… - - - - - - - - .-
ſ-3 ** * * * * *••• • • • • • • • • ** * * * * * * · ****
* * * * * * *

- *--- +*T:TRW 4 x * * * * === -
ºis- ayatva-Aºzº -* ---
- * **---arºº--------_ E.
- --------. ------T’ ºr " - - --- - . . - ;
N ſ % º
º
...At º º -
D r- N
*SAIIM/º º:
w s º - -
º -:
* * º SA -
º H rº
Sºtº.
h' º º w
h
+
f
i
º--;:
-wºº--
!#k i
§:
º&à--S.ºil-
#m.
#




I)E.
3
, O43
v.44
cky 2.
glut Debt to Grette and 150mt
EDITORS
GeoRGE DEPUE HADZSITs, PH.D.
University of Pennsylvania
DAVID MooRE Robinson, PH.D., LL.D.
The johns Hopkins University

GREEK AND ROMAN
FOLKLORE
BY
WILLIAM REGINALD HALLIDAY, B.A., B.LITT.
RATHBONE PROFESSOR OF ANCIENT HISTORY
University of Liverpool
L O N G M A N S , G R E E N A N D C O.
5 5 FIFTH A V E N UE
N E W Y O R. K.

1927
coPYRIGHT - 1927
BY LONG MANS, GREEN & CO.
T EI E P L I M PTO N P R E S S • NO R W O O D → M A S S A C H U S E TTS
P R I N T E D IN T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S OF A M E R I. C. A
#4a: .
|47, W . (t+4. *...t.
10 - 220 - 3 e
2, 2, 7 & 5 T
To
E. H. H.
WHO KNOWS HOW FAIRY TALES SHOULD END
Nam, ut vere loquamur, superstitio fusa per gentis
oppressit omnium fere animos atque hominum
inbecillitatem occupavit. Cic., De Div., II. I48.
PREFACE
OME critic whose patience carries him
to the end of the third chapter, may pos-
sibly be reminded of the chapter of Dr.
Horrebow's Natural History of Iceland to
which Dr. Johnson has given fame. “Chapter
LXXII, Concerning Snakes,” was its title: its
contents were as follows: — “There are no
Snakes to be met with throughout the whole
island.” But it is the purpose of this series not
to exaggerate, but to assess a debt. And if the
European superstitions and folktales which can
be said with certainty to have been invented
by classical antiquity and thence to have been
transmitted direct to the modern world, are
few, the common property of modern and an-
cient folklore is shown to be considerable. Here
we may mention that the mutual debt of the
studies of Greek and Roman religion on the
one hand, and of European folklore on the
other, is incalculable.
My statements of fact must be taken on
trust. I early came to the conclusion that the
[vii J
P RE FA C E
piling up of references in a little essay of this
character was useless pedantry, and though the
actual illustrations used are mainly derived
from my own miscellaneous reading, the mat-
ters which they illustrate are fairly typical and
well known. With regard to references to classi-
cal authors, I soon found that in practice all
must be given or none; I have therefore con-
tented myself with generally indicating the
kind of authority for specific statements by
“Pliny says,” “we learn from Aristophanes,”
or some similar phrase. The few references
which are given in the notes are intended to
supplement the information in the text by indi-
cating where further detail, which considera-
tions of scale did not allow me to give, may be
found. In the chapter on Folktales I have ha-
bitually quoted the numbers of the variants in
Grimm. This will enable the reader to refer
also to the great dictionary of variants, Bolte
and Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder-
wnd Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, of
which the long delayed index volume is not yet
to hand. For Aesop's Fables I have used the
numeration of the standard Greek text of
Halm.
Finally the purpose of the intrusive personal
I viii |
P RE FA C E
pronoun, where it occurs, is intended to help
the reader to discriminate between my per-
sonal views and those which have the more
considerable sanction of received opinion.
[ix]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE. . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
I. INTRODUCTORY . . . . . . . . . . 3
II. SUPERSTITIOUS BELIEFs AND PRAc-
- TICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
III. FolkTALES AND FABLEs. . . . . . 74
IV. THE CLASSICAL AND THE MEDIEval
TRADITIONS . . . . . . . . . . I 15
NOTEs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . I47
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . I51
CoNTRIBUTORs To THE FUND . . . 155
GREEK AND ROMAN
FOLKLORE
GREEK AND ROMAN
FOLKLORE
I. INTRODUCTORY

HE study of folklore is concerned with .
survivals. It embraces the supersti-
tions, festivals, customs, and amuse-
ments (games, songs, stories, riddles, and prov-
erbs) of the less sophisticated portion of the
community. The sanction for the continued
existence or practice of these is primarily that
of tradition. The old favorite stories or recipes
have been passed down from father to son or
from mother to daughter; beyond the memory
of the oldest inhabitant and, from what his
grandfather told him, for time out of mind the
village has observed such and such a custom
upon a stated anniversary. The appeal is to ,
what the Romans called mos maiorum, the cus-,
tom of the ancestors, the inherited experience .
of the race.
[3]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
The conservatism of simple folk is extra-
ordinarily tenacious. A number of the beliefs,
customs, or ideas which in this way have be-
come embalmed in popular tradition, have Sur-
vived from immemorial antiquity. They are
found not only among the peasantry of Europe
but also among the less highly developed races
in all parts of the world. For instance the idea
that the imitation of a natural process will
magically produce it, that thunder can be in-
duced by making a noise like thunder, that
rain can be summoned by sprinkling water, or
that the fertility of fields or flocks can be pro-
moted by the performance of the sexual act,
may be said to find universal expression. Uni-
versal again may be called the belief in an ex-
ternal soul, that is to say the existence of Some
external object with the safety of which the
life of an individual is bound up, or the con-
viction that a man’s health and well-being may
be affected by the treatment of Some part of
his person — his portrait or effigy, a lock of
his hair, or his nail-clippings. The existence of
these and similar ideas has been observed
among all peoples at a certain stage of culture,
and though from time to time the attempt is
made to derive all cultural elements from Some
[4]
I N T R O D U C T ORY
single source, from ancient Egypt or from a
lost Atlantis, the contention of Tylor and the
t
earlier anthropologists remains in my opinion
unshaken, viz., that at a certain stage of intel-
lectual and social development the human mind
reacts to similar circumstances in similar ways.
A number of simple general ideas of this kind,
which are, after all, psychologically intelligible,
must have been developed independently in
different places. They are rooted in human na-
ture. Neither the place nor date of their origin
can be determined. Whenever or wherever peo-
ple have attained a certain level of civilization,
they are observed to occur.
Obviously, however, the whole content of
popular tradition does not belong to so dim and
distant a past. There is no valley so sequestered
nor island set in so remote a sea as to provide
the opportunity for a community of human be-
ings to maintain its existence in complete isola-
tion from cultural contacts of any kind. Nor
in any civilized society has there ever been a
gulf so great between the classes, that the more
backward element in the community has re-
mained wholly uninfluenced by the ideas of the
more sophisticated element. For a community
is in fact a continuous unit. The rate of infiltra-
[5]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
tion from top to bottom under certain condi-
tions may be very slow and partial in effect,
but it must always be operative. Besides, there-
fore, the element to which no origin nor date
can be assigned, we shall necessarily expect to
discover matters which have been transmitted
from an alien source, or cases where the learned
tradition of an earlier generation has con-
tributed to popular beliefs, customs, and litera-
ture, if for convenience we may use this term
of matter which is primarily handed down not
by letters but by word of mouth.
In particular cases it is often very difficult
to be sure as to whether a specific phenomenon
is due to transmission or to independent origi-
nal invention. Let me give an example of a
problem to which I should be very unwilling
to give a dogmatic answer. The Romans em-
ployed the practice of examining the liver of
the victim of sacrifice for omens. That they
learned this from the Etruscans we know for
certain. It is generally held that the Etruscans
in turn had learned it before they came to
Italy probably from Asia Minor (somewhere
about the beginning of the eighth century B.C.),
and that they had borrowed it from the civiliza-
tion of Mesopotamia, where it was also elabo-
[6]
I N T R O D U C T OR Y
rated. I am myself more inclined cowards the
probability of this view than I once was,
though there remains, I notice, a considerable
geographical gap between the Mesopotamian
kingdoms and any probable Eastern home of
the Etruscans. But it is not inconceivable that
the art was an independent invention of the
Etruscans, for the practice of examining the
liver of an animal which is killed for sacrifice
or for some important domestic festival, is
fairly common, and it has been observed among
peasantry who have no obvious links with
Etruria or Mesopotamia. A natural anxiety is
aroused by solemn moments like those of sacri-
fice, which tends to attribute significance to
any abnormality which attends the perform-
ance. The liver is a remarkable organ and no-
ticeably variable in its outward appearance,
while it is also very generally considered to be
the seat of the intelligence or of the emotions.
No doubt for these reasons it is not infre-
quently the object of special attention upon
such occasions. Either solution therefore is
quite possible. It is not inconceivable that the
Etruscans learned to interpret the signs upon
the livers of sacrificial victims, from the Baby-
lonians, but it is equally possible that the elabo-
[7]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
rate art developed independently, from a simi-
lar simple omen-taking, in each of the two
area.S.
Another case happens to be easier to decide.
It is a very remarkable fact that the natives
of Borneo practice a system of divination by
birds which presents a strikingly close analogy
to ancient Italic augury. But here the difficulty
of constructing any intermediate links by
which the ancient Italians could have trans-
mitted this practice to remote Borneo must
surely be decisive for the probability that the
similarity of custom is due to a coincidence of
independent invention.
The student of folklore, therefore, will al-
ways be on the alert to discriminate between
elements which are rooted in human nature
and are probably of very ancient and native
origin within the area which he is considering,
and elements which have either been borrowed
from alien sources or are the relatively recent
product of the learned tradition of an earlier
generation. The problem, it will be seen, is not
always an easy one, but to remember its exist-
ence is salutary. There is perhaps no branch of
learned enquiry in which wild speculations are
so rashly offered and accepted as in the study of
[8]
I N T R O D U C T OR Y
folklore. Whenever we are told that some partic-
ular phenomenon carries us back to the mental
or physical habits of palaeolithic man or that it
proves the transmission of culture from the
VIth Dynasty in Egypt, we need to examine
the probabilities very carefully in the light (a)
of what we know of its distribution among the
later human societies and (b) of what little we
know of the palaeolithic age or of ancient
Egyptian culture as the case may be, distin-
guishing here very carefully between ascer-
tained facts and arbitrary subjective interpre-
tations, which have been put upon them.
An essay of this kind cannot, of course, at-
tempt an exhaustive examination of the folk-
lore of ancient Greece and Italy. The most it
can profitably aim at doing is first of all to
illustrate by some examples the character of
the folklore elements in classical culture, phe-
nomena that is to say which were already sur-
vivals in the Greek and Roman civilizations.
Secondly we must attempt some discussion of
the relation of the legends, mythology, and
fables of the Greeks and Romans to the folk-
tales of the Indo-European area. Thirdly we
must consider the effect which was produced
upon the imagination and hence upon the pop-
[9]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
ular ideas of Europe by the grandeur of the
Graeco-Roman civilization, and the degree to
which the learning of the later classical epoch
contributed to the subsequent vulgar supersti-
tions of Europe.
Our debt specifically to Greece and Rome in
these matters is not perhaps so large, as it is
certainly not so important, as in things of
greater value. The superstitions and customs,
which we must consider in our first section,
have their parallels in European folklore, but
their presence there may not be due to direct
inheritance from their classical analogues. In
the main they are part of the common stock of
ideas belonging to the relatively low stages of
human development. As regards folktales the
result of our investigations are likely to be
mainly negative; here we cannot neglect the
important problems of the relation of classical
to oriental stories. The intellectual and Scien-
tific tradition of medieval Europe, which will
engage us in the third section, may at least
bring home to us the continuity of European
culture and show how multiple, close, and inti-
mate are the ties which even in trivial things
bind us to the Greeks and Romans.
Before going further, it may perhaps be
[ Iol
I N T R O D U C T OR Y
worth while to remind ourselves of the general
course of that tradition. Between the years
Iooo and 500 B.C. the Greeks created a new
civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Characteristic of this people was an intense
love of independence, a restless and insatiable
curiosity, a very high degree of aesthetic and
intellectual sensibility, and a remarkable power
of analysis and generalization, which led them
to look behind particular phenomena for the
general principles which govern their mani-
festation. It was this last capacity which en-
abled the Greeks to take over the patiently ac-
cumulated experience of the older civilizations
and to create therefrom the sciences. Thus the
necessity imposed by the annual inundations of
the Nile had taught the Egyptians the empiri-
cal art of land measurement, but it was the
Greeks who discovered geometry; the Baby-
lonians had for centuries recorded the move-
ments of the heavenly bodies, but the Greeks
invented the principles of astronomy. Scientific
investigation in a true sense was born with the
Greeks.
The natural qualities of the Greek race were,
no doubt, intensified by the peculiarity of their
political organization in a number of inde-
[ II ||
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
pendent city-states, the very small Scale of
which promoted an extraordinary degree of
energy and activity in political and intellectual
life. The city-state was the forcing frame of
Greek talent. At the turn of the sixth and
fifth centuries B.C. Hellenism came into col-
lision with a great organized oriental state,
Persia. The Greek cities of the Asia Minor
coast, which had hitherto led the van in intel-
lectual and artistic achievement, were con-
quered, and Greece itself was invaded. A tem-
porary combination of patriotic cities succeeded
in repelling the invader, but two results of the
conflict followed. The center of Hellenic cul-
ture passed from the eastern Greeks to Athens,
and the inexorable logic of events had shown
that if Hellenism in its existing form was to
preserve its independent existence, the forma-
tion of some larger and more powerful political
unit than the city-state was necessary. But for
this to be successfully accomplished, a subordi-
nation of individual liberties was required
which the fierce love of independence of the
city-state was unable to endure. The attempt
to establish an Athenian maritime empire led,
in the latter half of the fifth century, to a long
war in which the whole Greek-speaking world
[I2]
I N T R O D U C T ORY
became involved; the result was the disruption
of the Athenian empire and the exhaustion of
the Greek world. War did not end war, but left
a legacy of quarrelsomeness, increasingly futile
but increasingly ineradicable as the resources
of the individual Greek states became weaker
and weaker. The disintegration of the Greek
world was then arrested in the latter half of
the fourth century by the Macedonians, Philip
and Alexander, who constituted themselves the
champions of Hellenism, in effect destroyed the
independence of the Greek city-state, and dealt
finally with the menace of Persia. Having con-
quered the East as far as the Punjab, Alex-
ander died, a young man, leaving no adult heir
to complete his work. His empire split up
into three great rival monarchies, which
between them controlled the Eastern Mediter-
Iſa Ilea Il.
Alexander’s conquests profoundly affected
the current of civilization. He had been the
champion of Hellenism, and Greek was the
official language spoken throughout the king-
doms of his Successors. Greek culture re-
mained the dominant element which gave its
form to the civilization which is called Hellen-
istic. For though in many respects profoundly
[I3]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
Greek, it was no longer purely Greek. Alex-
ander had carried Hellenism into the East, but
the East had inevitably reacted upon Hellen-
ism. The true center of the Eastern Mediter-
ranean culture now passed from Athens to
Alexandria in Egypt, the greatest of Alex-
ander's foundations.
In the meantime in Italy a single people, the
Romans, had patiently fought their way to
power. Rather unimaginative, but richly en-
dowed with the military qualities of discipline,
patriotism, courage, and tenacity, and gifted
with a genius for practical affairs, they gradu-
ally mastered the Italian peninsula. In very
early times they had been influenced by the
Greek colonies in Southern Italy, which were
then independent neighbours. Their alphabet,
for example, was derived from Greek Cumae,
and already before the fall of the monarchy,
Greek religion had begun to affect that of the
Romans. In religion Greek influences became
increasingly prominent, and eventually the
Greek pantheon and Greek mythology were
bodily taken over by Rome. Roman literature,
again, begins with the translation of Homer
into Latin by a Greek slave, who was captured
in 272 B.C., when the fall of Tarentum made
[I4]
I N T R O D U C T OR Y
the Greek cities of Italy subjects of Rome.
Roman civilization and literature were there-
fore almost from the first derivative, and their
Greek character was naturally intensified by
direct contact with and the subsequent con-
quest of Greece itself. In consequence it is very
difficult to distinguish genuinely Italic beliefs,
stories, or superstitions from the Superimposed
Greek borrowings, and for the purposes of this
essay we shall for the most part treat the
Graeco-Roman civilization as a single unit.
Eventually Rome conquered the whole sea-
board of the Mediterranean and a large part
of Western Europe. To the ruder peoples of
the west she gave their civilization, but this
was essentially Graeco-Roman, a continuous
development from the Hellenistic culture. For
two centuries after the birth of Christ the
Roman Empire gave the blessings of ordered
government and peace to an area bounded
upon the west by the Atlantic, on the north by
the Rhine and Danube, on the east by the
upper Euphrates and the Palestinian desert,
and on the south by the sands of Libya and the
Sahara. Throughout this area travel and com-
merce were free and active. As a result, the
constant intercommunication of men and ideas
[I5]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
created a single civilization which became in-
creasingly homogeneous. Although Latin, not
Greek, was the current language of the western
half of the Empire, it was the eastern half
which supplied the dominating cultural influ-
ence. In particular it was during these years of
peace that a new religion, the form of which
was characteristically Hellenistic (for if the
Founder of Christianity was born in Judaea,
His message was necessarily conveyed to the
gentile world in the language of Greek philoso-
phy), was striking deep roots in every part of
the Roman world. -
In the third century after Christ the decline
of the Roman Empire had set in. From various
causes its internal vitality had been impaired,
and the external pressure on its frontiers had
increased. For two centuries, though with diffi-
culty, the barbarians were more or less kept
out; then in the fifth century after Christ the
Western Empire was overrun. Although the
majesty of Rome was such that a world with-
out a Roman empire was inconceivable even to
the barbarian imagination, and the shadowy
Holy Roman Empire was perpetuated until it
finally vanished, an extremely attenuated ghost,
almost within our own times, yet the shock
[16]
I N T R O D U C T OR Y
to the body politic which was administered by
the invasions of the fifth century, was too vio-
lent to be repaired, and the intrusive racial ele-
ments were too considerable to be assimilated
or absorbed into the old order. Gradually from
the ruins of the western empire there emerged
the great nations of Europe. But though this
process of differentiation was going on, al-
though the spoken Latin was following differ-
ent lines of local development to form the sepa-
rate languages of Italy, France, and Spain, the
main current of civilization still flowed in a
single stream. Increasing political differentia-
tion there was, with all its attendant conse-
quences, but nevertheless there were two forces
which gave a real unity to European civiliza-
tion as a whole. In the first place the Roman
Empire, which finally collapsed, had been a
Christian Empire, and the authority of the
Church ran throughout western Christendom
irrespective of national boundaries. In the sec-
Ond place the knowledge accumulated by the
past was not entirely lost. The ancient lan-
guage in which it was preserved was retained
by the Church and also by scholarship; Latin
remained for centuries an international tongue
spoken and written by men of education. In-
[I7]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
deed, ever since the Roman Empire, European
scholarship has remained international; for
before the almost complete disuse of Latin
in favour of the vernaculars had raised new
barriers to internationalism, the invention of
printing had broken down others in compen-
sation.
The tradition which flows from the ancient
Greeks, through Hellenistic, Roman, and Me-
dieval channels, to the modern world is then a
single stream, but the swiftness of its current
and the limpidity of its waters are not uniform
along its course. The Greek genius in the pe-
riod of the city-state was highly rational. Even
in the sphere of religion, which upon the whole
was very little mystical, the more primitive
survivals tended to be pushed into the back-
ground. A change, however, begins in the Hel-
lenistic period, and Science becomes more and
more infected with superstition. A number of
causes, besides the oriental influences which we
have noticed to be at work, assisted in produc-
ing this result. The sciences became the highly
specialized preserves of experts. Simultane-
ously education was diffused over a wider area,
but its quality was watered down in the proc-
ess. Education by the inculcation of miscellane-
[18]
I N T R O D U C T OR Y
ous information provided by popular hand-
books upon great subjects had its birth. With
the disappearance of the city-state, Greek in-
tellectual power lost much of its dynamic and
creative force. Philosophy now became con-
cerned rather to find a rule of happiness than
to discover truth in the spirit of disinterested
curiosity. Man’s life was viewed against a
wider horizon, that of the individual’s member-
ship in the physical universe rather than that of
his citizenship in a small political community.
The wider horizon, however, was purchased at
the price of sharpness of focus. The influence
of the East showed itself in a growing sense of
human weakness and sin, in a more uneasy
attitude towards Heaven and a future life, and
in a number of specific contributions, of which
the pseudo-science of astrology was one of the
most far-reaching and devastating in its re-
sults. Throughout the later classical antiquity
the force of rationalism declined in favour of
credulity. Whereas the interest of the earlier
Greeks had been to reject what did not stand
the test of reason, that of the later classical age
was to exalt the irrational, on the supposition
that it must conceal Some hidden meaning.
“There must be something in it” expresses the
[19]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
attitude of an age which began to Spend in-
genuity in finding reasons to believe the in-
credible. -
This attitude of mind led to a great revival
of the primitive survivals to which the Greeks
of the classical age, even if their conservatism
had retained them, had paid but little atten-
tion. Both philosophy and science became in-
fected with the new credulity and reassumed
garments which had been discarded in their
vigorous youth. The demonology of Neo-Pla-
tonism helped to rivet upon Christendom the
belief in the incessant intervention of good and
evil spirits in the ordinary affairs of life and to
make real the terrors of witchcraft and the
magician’s art. Science, having abandoned the
touchstone of reason, became indiscriminate in
its erudition. Medicine became as much con-
cerned with “possession * or with magical rem-
edies as with the investigation of natural
causes. Here we may contrast the temper of
Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C., who
stoutly maintained that epilepsy could not be
simply the unavoidable result of divine wrath
on the grounds that all diseases must have a
natural cause, with that of even the greatest
doctor of imperial times, Galen, who recom-
[ 20 J
I N T R O D U C T ORY
mends the suspension of a peony round the neck
to cure this malady.
Now it is in its late classical form that the
intellectual heritage of Greek and Roman civ-
ilization passed on into Europe. Thanks to this
credulous temper, which we have noted, a large
number of revived superstitions, to which the
approval of learning had lent a new dignity,
were transmitted with the sanction of author-
ity to medieval science. Just as in the case of
folktales we shall notice how a concurrent liter-
ary tradition helped to reinforce the chances
of survival of oriental forms of stories, so, par-
ticularly as regards magical remedies, the
written learned tradition reinforced the popu-
larity of certain folklore beliefs. Indeed it is
sometimes difficult to know whether a particu-
lar belief has its source in the genuinely popu-
lar tradition or has been introduced by infiltra-
tion from superstitious learning.
It is indeed to this revival of the super-
stitious attitude in the later classical period
that a great deal of our information about
Greek and Roman folklore is due. Books like
the Natural History of the Elder Pliny col-
lected a mass of information about magical
remedies, pious students of religion like Plu-
[21 J
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
tarch were especially interested in the primitive
elements in Greek religion which demanded
philosophical explanation to justify their exist-
ence, even the archaelogists like Pausanias
Show a marked preference for the more curious
and antique cults. Antiquaries of all kinds
flourished in an uncreative age, and the an-
tiquary is ever a genial Autolycus; all the un-
considered and inconsiderable trifles are grist
to his mill. Thus the Word Book of Julius Pol-
lux has preserved long lists of such details as
children's games, and that extraordinary com-
pilation The Cook’s Oracle (Deipnosophistae)
of Athenaeus contains a mass of information
about every kind of curious detail of classical
life.
A great deal, again, of what belongs properly
to folklore is naturally to be discovered in re-
ligious belief and practice. For religious ritual
in particular is exceptionally conservative, and
ceremonies are often retained even when the
worshippers have forgotten their original mean-
ing or purpose. Here the modern investigator
is assisted by analogies which are provided by
the folklore of other peoples, and there can be
little doubt, for instance, that we have a truer
appreciation of the character of the earliest
[ 22 J
I N T R O D U C T OR Y
stratum of Roman religion today than Varro or
Ovid had in the days of Julius Caesar and
Augustus.
Our other sources of information are natu-
rally capricious, depending as they do upon
chance references in literature. This is inevi-
table. One might be well enough read in English
literature without ever happening to have come
across a reference to a Maypole or to Plough
Monday. The sources in Greek and Roman
literature which do provide us with random but
valuable information, are just what we should
expect. A philosopher may use a riddle or a
childrens' game as an illustration, but the lion's
share of incidental information will naturally
be provided by realistic types of literature such
as the Hellenistic studies of low life, senti-
mentalized as in most of Theocritus or treated
with brutal realism as in the Mimes of
Herodas, or the later picaresque novels like the
Satiricon of Petronius and the Metamorphoses
of Apuleius. True Satire, again, is inevitably
fruitful in allusions to the trivialities and Su-
perstitions of every day life, and a great deal
is to be learned from Horace, Persius, and
Juvenal.
In conclusion I may mention one topic,
[23]
• *
wº * e º e s
* e e
wº
*" e &
ge º
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
which is perhaps expected of me but which
nevertheless I do not propose to handle, viz.
the very difficult question of local and continu-
ous Survivals from the classical civilizations, in
modern Greece and Italy respectively. The
question is highly controversial, though its an-
swer one way or the other is relatively unim-
portant. Some degree of survival no doubt
there may well have been. We may agree, for
example, with Warde Fowler’s comment on the
inherited Italian instinct for processional rit-
ual, which was characteristic of Roman re-
ligion in its earliest days. “The stately pro-
cessions remained, and could be watched with
pride by the patriotic Roman all through the
period of the Empire, until the Roman Church
adapted them to its own ritual and gave them,
as we saw, a new meaning. As the cloud shad-
ows still move slowly over the hollows of the
Apennines, so does the procession of the patron
Saint pass still through the streets of many an
Italian city.” But, as a general rule, the natural
sentiment of classical scholars and, where they
happen to be Greeks or Italians, a wholly ad-
mirable jealousy for their birth-right in a
glorious past, may be thought unduly to load
the scales. Is it really probable, for instance,
[24]
* * e
• e s a " *}
* * * *
• , , *
§ Ç
I N T R O D U C T ORY
that the Carnival or Epiphany mumming plays
of modern Greece are necessarily lineal and di-
rect descendants of Dionysiac ritual, when in
fact they present yet closer analogies to sea-
sonal peasant practices in other parts of Eu-
rope? Or again, if, as is no doubt the case, the
name of the modern Greek Charos or Charon-
das is connected with the ancient name Charon,
does it amount to very much when the whole
conception of the figure is different? For
whereas Charon was the ferryman, who rowed
the souls across the river of the Lower World,
Charos is the ruthless, powerful, and ineluct-
able personification of Death. Often eagerness
has completely outrun discretion, as for ex-
ample in the current statement that St. Elias,
whose chapels crown the hills of modern
Greece, has simply taken the place of Helios,
the ancient sun-god. The apparent phonetic
plausibility is a little discounted when the cer-
tain facts are recollected, that the cult of Helios
was actually of very restricted distribution in
antiquity, and that Zeus, not the sun-god, was
par excellence the god of hill tops. -
Alleged local survivals in modern Greece
and Italy are therefore most safely to be ap-
proached in a somewhat critical spirit. That
[25 |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
Some exist and can be established I have no
doubt, but I am equally certain that a great
number of alleged survivals will not stand criti-
cal examination. But neither the attempt to es-
tablish authentic instances, nor the labour of
refuting popular errors in detail are appropri-
ate to a book of this kind. I propose in conse-
quence deliberately to set these particular prob-
lems on one side, and, as regards survival,
to concentrate our attention not upon the folk-
lore of modern Greece or Italy, but upon the
relation of the classical civilizations to the folk-
lore and the tradition of medieval and modern
Europe.
[261
II. SUPERSTITIOUS BELIEFS AND
PRACTICES

O COMPILE a complete list of the
coincidences between classical and
modern folklore would require not a
chapter, but a larger volume than this. The
following are illustrations only, which have
been selected in order to give an idea of the
range and nature of the similarities. Some may
be due to direct transmission, but these are
probably a small minority; for most of the
Superstitions enumerated are so general in their
distribution that they may be thought to be-
long to the common property of the human
intelligence at a certain stage of its develop-
ment. -
It may also be repeated that these phe-
nomena were survivals in classical antiquity,
just as their analogues are survivals with us.
We may further remember with profit that
though we talk in a superior way of the Super-
stitions of the peasantry, there is not one of us
who does not consciously or unconsciously in-
[27 J
G R E E K. A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
dulge in some Superstitious rite or formula
almost every day of his life. The Elder Pliny’s
words hold good today. “There arises first of
all one question, of the greatest importance and
always attended with the same uncertainty,
whether words, charms, and incantations are of
any efficacy or not. . . . Though the wisest of
our fellow men, I should remark, taken indi-
vidually, refuse to place the slightest faith in
these opinions, yet, in our every day life, we
practically show, each passing hour, that we do
entertain this belief, though at the moment
we are not sensible of it.”
The processes of birth, which in classical
antiquity, as among mankind at large, were re-
garded with Superstitious anxiety, would seem
to provide an appropriate starting point for our
survey. In Greece prophylactic herbs were
placed in the bed of the expectant mother,
whose labour it was feared might be retarded
by magical means. Tying knots, sitting beside
her with the fingers intertwined, or with one leg
placed over the other were magical gestures
which ill-disposed persons might employ to
hinder easy delivery. These devices of sym-
pathetic magic find numerous parallels else-
where. As an example we may take the con-
[28 |
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L T E FS
verse remedy for difficult labour among the
Koita of New Guinea. If labour is unduly pro-
longed, the father is sent for. He opens any
boxes there may be in the house, then sits down
near his wife and unties the cord which con-
fines his hair.
The Greek mother was for a period unclean,
and the women who had assisted at the birth
counted as such, until they were formally puri-
fied at the amphidromia, six days later. In
places of great sanctity, for instance the holy
island of Delos, which was sacred to Apollo, no
birth might take place, and women must be
removed from the island before their time
came. Similarly among the Tlingit a birth must
not take place in the family dwelling. A hole
is dug behind the house inside a little hut or
shelter, and here, regardless of the weather, the
unfortunate mother must go for her confine-
ment. The Superstitious Man in Theophrastus’
Characters felt himself to be infected by pollu-
tion, if he so much as saw a woman who had
recently been delivered.
After a birth the house door was painted
with pitch from thorn bushes, which had the
property of keeping evil spirits away, and a
prophylactic wreath of olive branches (for a
[29]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
boy) or a fillet of wool (for a girl) was hung
outside it as an amulet. On the sixth day after
birth the amphidromia or running round took
place, when the father decided whether the
child was to be reared or to be exposed, as
girl children sometimes were. The festival took
its name from the rite of carrying the child
round the family hearth. The original purpose
of this action is a matter of dispute, and
whether it was sought to bring the child into
touch with the purifying strength of fire or to
incorporate it as a member of the family by
contact with the family hearth, or, as has also
been suggested, to give it fleetness of foot, re-
mains doubtful. But an interesting detail is the
fact that the father ran round naked with the
child, for both the magic circle and the nudity
of the agent are very frequent features of
magical ceremonies in all parts of the world.
An interesting parallel in modern folk practice
is the Esthonian custom, according to which
the father runs round the church in which the
child is being baptised. With reference to the
hearth we may notice also the Irish christening
rite mentioned below. (p. 33.)
At Rome too the period of birth was fraught
with peril for mother and child. A candle was
[30 |
SU P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E FS
kept continuously burning in the room, as it is,
for instance, in Modern Greece and Germany
today, in order to give spiritual protection.
After the birth had taken place three men
armed with an axe, pestle, and broom respec-
tively, swept and struck the threshold. The
original object of this ritual was no doubt to
sweep out any evil that might be in the house
and to drive off any which might be attempting
to come in. In historical times the axe was said
to drive away Silvanus, the spirit of the forest.
We might perhaps compare its use with the
Polish peasant practice of laying an axe-head
with the sharp edge outermost in the gateway
of the home of a newly-married couple.
With regard to the use of the axe, its pro-
phylactic virtue is due not merely to its char-
acter as an instrument of offence but also to
the material of which it is made. To iron magi-
cal properties are often attributed, perhaps a
reminiscence of the time when the metal was
first introduced, and iron implements were re-
garded as strange, novel, magically efficient ob-
jects of wonder. Hence in modern Europe the
iron horse-shoe upon the stable door will pre-
vent the horses from being hag-ridden, and an
iron axe-head upon the barrel of beer will pre-
[31 ||
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
vent it turning sour in thunder. Somewhat
similarly Pliny the Elder, who tells us that eggs
are addled by thunder or spoiled by the cry of
the hawk, recommends us to place an iron nail
or a clod from the plough under the straw upon
which the eggs lie in order to avert the danger
from the thunder. The converse to this attribu-
tion of magical properties to iron is supplied by
the taboo upon the strange metal, which was
retained in some of the most ancient rituals of
Roman religion. Thus, for example, the Flamen
Dialis, holder of the most ancient priesthood of
Jupiter, might not cut his hair nor his nails
with an iron knife; the ploughshare used for
tracing out the circuit of a colony must be of
bronze not of iron; the use of an iron pruning-
hook in the sacred grove of the Arval Brethren
necessitated special piacular or disinfecting sac-
rifices; no iron might be used in the construc-
tion or repair of the Pons Sublicius, the oldest
of Roman bridges. The witch, according to Vir-
gil and Horace, must reap her magic herbs at
midnight with a bronze sickle.
But we have been led to digress from our in-
fant, who is still at a critical stage. The most
anxious and dangerous time of all is, of course,
the helpless period after birth, before the child
[32]
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E FS
has received, as it were, its human identity,
i.e. before the amphidromia in Greece (though
here the name was not conferred until a second
family festival on the eighth or tenth day after
birth) or at Rome before the dies lustricus
upon the eighth (girls) or ninth day (boys).
Similarly in English peasant belief a child
“ never thrives until it is christened,” and it is
during this dangerous period that the Irish
mother dreads the removal of her child and the
substitution of a changeling. In County Leitrim
after a child was christened, a turf from the
fire was quenched and a piece of it sewn on to
the child’s bib. After nine days it was taken off
and sewn into a little bag with a cross worked
upon the outside of it and placed under the
child’s pillow, to prevent it being overlooked.
The chief terror of the classical mother was the
strix, a vampire witch, who came by night to
suck the blood of infants. The anaemic pallor
of the child and perhaps the marks left by the
witches’ talons on its face might betray their
dreadful work. A Greek fragment has survived
of what is perhaps a nursery incantation “to
send away the strix, the crier by night, from
the land, the nameless bird, upon the swift
ships.” Ovid prescribes a more elaborate and
[33]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
perhaps more efficacious remedy. Door-posts
and threshold are three times struck with
boughs of arbutus and purifying water is
Sprinkled. Then a two-months-old porker is
killed, and its entrails are declared to be a
Surrogate offering for the child; a life is offered
for a life. The offering is then placed in the
open air, and everyone who is present must be
careful not to look back. Finally branches of
prophylactic buckthorn are placed in the win-
dow of the room, just as Malays put thistles in
the windows and doors to keep out the similar
blood-sucking Penangal.
After the ceremony of the dies lustricus until
the age of puberty the Roman boy wore the
toga praetexta, a robe with a broad purple
stripe, like that worn by the highest religious
and secular functionaries, and, suspended
round his neck, the bulla, a small circular box
containing usually a representation of the male
organ, a very frequent form of amulet against
the evil eye in all parts of the world. The pur-
pose of the amulet and of the purple stripe
upon the garments, which were peculiar to
childhood and to important political or re-
ligious office, was undoubtedly prophylactic.
The young, like the “tender lambs’ of Virgil's
Ҽ. [34]
SU P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E F S
shepherd, are peculiarly susceptible to being
“overlooked.” Children in Pliny’s time wore
coral amulets. “Coralls,” comments the Caro-
line antiquary Aubrey, “are worne by children
still: but in Ireland they value the fang-tooth
(holder) of an wolfe before it; which they set
in silver and gold as we doe ye Coralls.” Per-
sonally I cut my teeth upon a peccary’s tooth
set in silver.
Persius describes how the old wives who are
skilled in averting the “burning eye,” Spit on
their middle finger and rub saliva upon the in-
fant’s forehead. Spitting as a countercharm
is a folklore practice of universal distribution.
Classical literature contains numbers of exam-
ples of spitting to avert the evil, when you see
a maniac or an epileptic. In a German railway
carriage I have myself been requested by a
peasant woman to spit in the face of her hus-
band, who happened to be seized with an epi-
leptic fit. As regards the evil eye the sixth
Idyll of Theocritus provides a good example.
The love-sick Polyphemus, after looking at his
reflection in the sea, persuades himself that he
is not so hideous after all, nay positively good-
looking. “Then to shun the evil eye did I spit
thrice in my breast; for this spell was taught
I35 |
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
me by the crone, Cottytaris, that piped of yore
to the reapers in Hippocoon’s field.” Polyphe-
mus reminds us of the dangers of overt praise
as inducing the evil eye of envy. Amongst any
Superstitious peasantry in Europe it is unwise
to admire a child too explicitly, for that brings
bad luck. Virgil’s shepherds knew this too; their
remedy against the danger was a wreath of ber-
ries. Frequently a mother will try to counteract
the indiscreet admiration which may bring a
nemesis, by some act or speech of disparage-
ment, and this is perhaps why the granny of
Persius, used her middle finger, the digitus
infamis.
The legendary Telchines, the first metallur-
gists, were said to have possessed the power of
the evil eye and to have been able to bring
down rain and hail, as well as to blast the crops
of their neighbours by a glance. The earliest
Roman code of laws, the XII Tables, contained
a provision against those who charmed away
their neighbour's crop. The idea here seems to
have been that it was possible by an incanta-
tion to transfer the fruitfulness of your neigh-
bour's crop to your own, an explanation which,
as C. Furius Cressimus complained, readily
enough suggests itself to envious incompetence
[36]
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E F S
in order to account for the better farmer's bet-
ter harvest. A sure sign that an individual
possessed the evil eye was a double pupil. The
Thibii of Pontus were notorious for this physi-
cal peculiarity and its concomitant magical
power. Like the witches of Europe, if thrown
into water, they were not submerged.
Marriage is everywhere a critical and there-
fore a dangerous moment in human life, when
the evil eye and other hostile influences are to
be feared. Among the preliminary rites of an-
cient Greek marriage was a ritual bath in water
drawn for the purpose in a special kind of
pitcher, usually from a particular local spring
(e.g. in Athens from the fountain Kallirhoë or
at Thebes from Ismenus). In modern Greece
similarly a ritual bath in water from the local
hagiasma or sacred spring is frequently a neces-
sary prelude to marriage. With the ancient cus-
tom no doubt was connected the practice of
placing upon the monuments of girls who died
unmarried, a representation of a water jar of
the kind which was employed in this rite. In
the Troad we are told that girls before mar-
riage waded into the river Scamander and
formally offered to it their virginity. The asso-
ciation of rivers and water-powers with fertility
[37]
GREE K AND Ro MAN Fol K Lo RE
and children is perhaps at the bottom of these
customs. Rivers in ancient Greece were thought
to nurture the growth of children (kourotro-
phoi), and it was the common practice for boys
to dedicate to a river a lock of hair which was
cut off and offered when they reached manhood
or married. Of this the famous example of
Achilles and the Spercheius may remind us.
The favorite time for Greek marriages was in
the winter month Gamelion and at the full
moon. In England it is still thought unlucky
to be married in May, a month which the an-
cient Romans also eschewed, in part no doubt
because the gloomy rites of the Lemuria, which
are described below (p. 45), fell within it. In
Boeotian weddings, when the bride was brought
home to the bridegroom’s house, a wheel of the
chariot was burned, to signify, so Plutarch tells
us, that her stay there was to be permanent.
In Greece generally the bride's arrival was
greeted with a shower of dates, cakes, dried
figs, and nuts. I do not agree with the con-
nection, which some scholars have seen, of
these katachusmata, as they were called, with
offerings to the dead. They were also showered
upon a new household slave, and I should re-
gard them merely as a charm to promote good
[38]
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E F S
luck and plenteous prosperity. We might com-
pare our own practice of showering rice or con-
fetti at weddings. In Athens the bride and
bridegroom, as Lear learned with pleasure after
The Owl and the Pussycat had been written,
ate a quince, which was supposed to have the
property of promoting fertility.
In Rome a bride's hair, like that of a preg-
nant high-caste Hindu, was ceremonially
parted, for the hair is a favorite haunt of evil
spirits. But the Roman used on this occasion
a blunted spear-head, called the bachelor’s
spear. Perhaps this custom originated in the
remote past when an old disused spear was the
handiest iron instrument available in the hut.
This strange comb is another example of the
magical efficacy of iron. A number of features
which could be paralleled in European folklore
were attached to the bringing home of the
Roman bride. Dressed in new clothes, wearing
a veil, and crowned with a wreath, she was
formally torn from the arms of her mother and
brought to the bridegroom's house by an at-
tendant procession. She was preceded by a boy
carrying a torch of white thorn and attended
by two other pages, one holding either hand.
The fathers and mothers of these three boys
[39]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
must all be living, a necessary qualification
which is often demanded of performers in
other kinds of lucky rituals, e.g. the leader of
the Daphnephoria procession, a Maypole rite,
at Thebes, or the runners in the autumn vin-
tage festival at Athens. At Athens, too, the
bride was attended by a boy, both of whose
parents were alive, carrying a winnowing bas-
ket. The members of the bridal procession Sang
loud and obscene songs, the noise of which as-
sisted the torch of magical wood in keeping
evil at a distance, while the character of the
words both averted evil and promoted the fer-
tility of the marriage. We may compare the
fertility magic of the obscene dances connected
with the Dorian May-wreath (korythale), rites
which in historical Greece had become asso-
ciated with Artemis. Meantime the bridegroom
scattered nuts for which the young scrambled,
a very wide-spread form of fertility charm.
Arrived at the new home the bride anointed
the door posts with wolves’ fat and oil, and
wreathed them with wool. Like the bride
among the Moslems of South India, she was
then lifted and carried in, so that her foot did
not touch the threshold.
A modern Persian marriage custom by which
[40]
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E F S
the bridal party passes in procession between
the carcasses and severed heads of five sheep,
has no counterpart in the wedding ceremonies
of Greece and Rome, but it is analogous in pur-
pose and character to the Macedonian and
Boeotian practice of purifying an army by
marching it between the severed portions of a
dog.
A number of primitive beliefs have inevi-
tably left their traces upon the funeral cus-
toms of Greece and Rome. A death natu-
rally made the house impure, and a bough
was placed at the door to warn passers-by of
the fact. In Greece the fire of the household
hearth was allowed to go out; it had been con-
taminated by the infection of death. It was
re-lighted with fresh fire only when the cere-
monies of purification, which included a
thorough sweeping of the house, had been con-
cluded. A vessel of water was placed at the
door, so that those who came out of the house
of mourning might purify themselves before
renewing contact with the world. For the Su-
perstitious Man of Theophrastus this precau-
tion was not sufficient. He was so alarmed at
the possibility of pollution that he would not
pay the last duty of friendship nor enter a dead
[4I |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
man's house at all. These last visits of friends
were paid to the corpse as it lay in state upon
a couch, decked with woollen fillets, and
crowned with vine leaves, flowers, and magic
herbs. Its feet must always be pointed to the
door; for it is advisable to indicate to the dead
the way out, but not the way back. Some sav-
age peoples go even further. The Tlingit, for
example, take a plank from the rear wall of the
house and remove the corpse through the hole,
for fear that if the door were used, the ghost
might return by it. The Moslems of India,
amongst other peoples, observe a similar cus-
tom.
A curious superstition attached in classical
antiquity to persons who had falsely been re-
ported dead in foreign parts. When they re-
turned home, they were not allowed to enter
the house by the door. A hole was made in the
roof, through which they were lowered, and
they were then required to go through a pan-
tomimic ceremony of being treated as a new-
born baby. A curiously exact parallel among the
Persians will be found in the eighteenth chap-
ter of Morier's Hajji Baba of Ispahan. The
official “deadness" of such persons made them
dangerous to the living, until they had been
[42]
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E FS
ceremonially re-born. According to Hesychius,
they might never afterwards enter the temple
of the Revered Goddesses, perhaps because
the powers of the underworld, thanks to the
false announcement of their death, had estab-
lished a certain claim upon them.
At Rome it was the custom for the nearest
kinsman of the dying man to inhale his last
breath, thereby ensuring the continuity of the
family life, in which the lives of individual
heads of the family are but successive inci-
dents. Somewhat similarly among the Semi-
noles of Florida, when a woman died in child-
birth, the infant was held over her face to
receive her parting spirit.
The belief that children who die in infancy
may be re-born to the mother in the persons
of later children, is widespread in the Lower
Culture. A similar belief is perhaps the ex-
planation of a discovery in settlements belong-
ing to the early Bronze Age in the Aegean. The
remains of infants have been found buried in
jars underneath the houses, though adults were
uniformly buried in cemeteries outside the
towns. The explanation of the antique technical
term suggrundaria, which is given by Fulgen-
tius, suggests that a similar belief was once
[43]
G R E E K. A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
held by the Romans. In the remote past Small
children were not cremated but buried under
the eaves of the house.
I do not believe that there are any real
grounds for thinking that the Greeks and Ro-
mans believed in revenants, like the Slavonic
vampire or animated corpse," from which I per-
sonally believe the modern Greek wrykolakas
to be derived. But the spirits of the dead were
popularly supposed to return, though not in
this particularly repulsive form, and we may
notice a few superstitions with regard to ghosts.
It may be well, however, to mention that the
popular ideas about ghosts and the underworld
were not consistent in antiquity, any more than
they are with us, and also that the attitude to-
wards the dead varied considerably at different
periods of classical civilization, though in the
space at our disposal we cannot attempt to
analyze the different stages but must treat clas-
sical antiquity as a whole.
The Athenian festival of All Souls was held
in the Month of Flowers, Anthesterion, Febru-
ary to March. February in the original Roman
calendar was the last month in the year, and as
the meaning of its name implies, it was distin-
guished by ceremonies of purification; the sins
[44]
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E FS
of the old year were expiated ere the new year
began in March. The family dead, who re-
turned at the Anthesteria, do not seem to have
been very formidable. The living, it is true,
chewed buck-thorn and anointed their house-
doors with pitch, for all ghosts, however well
disposed, have the taint of death about them,
and contact with them is likely to be danger-
ous. But the ritual seems to have been of a
friendly character. On the last of the three
days of the festival a pot of porridge was
offered in each household to the ancestral dead,
and the ceremonies were closed by the head of
the house pronouncing the formula: “Be gone,
ye ghosts; it is no longer Anthesteria.” By this
the dead were dismissed to their place until the
following year.
The Roman festivals for the dead in Febru-
ary (Parentalia, Feb. 13–21, and Caristia, Feb.
22) seem also to have been rather festivals of
commemoration than designed to appease ma-
levolent spirits. The Lemuria, however, on the
9th, 11th, and 13th of May, which we have
already mentioned in connection with the re-
luctance to be married in May, had a more sin-
ister aspect. The domestic ceremonies con-
cluded with the following ritual. The house-
[45]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
holder rises at midnight on the last day of the
festival. He has no shoes on his feet, and he
makes a gesture of aversion with his hand—
the well known ‘horn,’ which is frequently
employed against the evil eye. The thumb is
tucked under the two closed middle fingers,
and the index and little fingers extended. He
washes his hands and takes a number of black
beans, which he throws behind him without
looking back. As he does this he nine times re-
cites the formula “with these I redeem me and
mine.” Then he washes his hands again, and
brazen vessels, the efficacy of which in driving
off evil powers is known throughout the world,
are clashed. Then he dismisses the spirits of
the dead by the repetition of a charm, again
nine times repeated: “Depart, ye manes of my
fathers.” Then at last the rite is at an end, and
he may look round.
Turning from these rituals connected with
the regular periodic return of the dead upon
definite dates, we may notice a few of the
popular customs relating to ghosts. Among
many peoples, e.g. the Masai, the dead may
not be mentioned by name. Strabo noticed this
custom among the Albanians, but the Elder
Pliny tells us that the Romans themselves, if
[46]
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E F S
they had occasion to mention a dead man's
name, added a deprecatory formula that they
did not wish to disturb his rest. At old Prussian
funeral feasts any morsels which fell from the
table, were left for the lonely souls who had no
relatives to give them food. When the meal was
over, the priest swept the souls out of the
house, saying: “Dear souls, ye have eaten and
drunk.” If this formula reminds us of the
Anthesteria, the leaving of dropped morsels
squares with Athenian table manners in the
fifth century B.C. What fell from the table
must not be picked up, but must be left for the
“heroes,’ as ghosts had then come to be called
in popular speech. In Persia a meal must not
be completely finished; something must be left
for the Jinn. In East Prussia to throw rubbish
out of the door, might injure the ghosts on the
threshold, and readers of the Arabian Nights
will know how dangerous it is to throw date
Stones about, when you are lunching by a
spring. Probably you will hit an invisible Jinni
in the eye and blind him, and then there will
be trouble in store for you. In Aristophanes'
time to empty a footpan or a bath out of the
door was taboo, for fear of injuring the
“heroes.’
[47]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
By the fifth century B.C. popular superstition
in Greece seems to have become more con-
cerned with malevolent ghosts than it had
earlier been. ‘Heroes’ were supposed to
‘walk' and might strike the nocturnal way-
farer with paralysis. It was wiser to steal past
tombs in silence, for fear of irritating the occu-
pants to emerge and attack you. Such ghosts
were black of visage. Pausanias himself saw a
copy of the picture of the ghost of Temesa,
whom a famous athlete, Euthymus, fought and
drove into the sea in order to rescue from him
the girl whom he subsequently married. “The
ghost was of a horrid black colour, and his
whole appearance was most dreadful, and he
wore a wolfskin.” The classical ghost in gen-
eral seems either to have appeared as a skele-
ton or to have been black, not white.
Plato has alluded to the popular belief in
“ those thick and gloomy shadows damp,
Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres,
Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave
As loth to leave the body that it loved.”
Earthy natures, he explains, are held back by
their impurities from complete and immediate
[48]
S U P E R S T IT IO U S B E L I E FS
release from the world of the body. On the other
hand another popular superstition, to which
Plato also alludes, supposed that the Souls of
the very wicked were scattered and annihilated
in a great wind.
The most dangerous kind of ghost in classi-
cal antiquity, as elsewhere, was the spirit of a
man who had come by a violent end. The con-
verse of this belief is the supposed efficacy for
magical purposes of the remains of such per-
sons. The catalogue of such things in the Elder
Pliny shows that the relics of gladiators and
executed criminals were as widely used in his
time for magical recipes, as were the spoils of
the gibbet in England up to the XVIIIth cen-
tury. A rope or nail from a cross upon which
a man had been executed or the hair of the
criminal was used, he tells us, as a specific for
quartan ague. “This is oftentimes donne in
London: ” runs Aubrey's comment, “many
have great faith in it: yt hangman getts money
for pieces of the halters for this purpose.”
It is widely believed that the activities of a
potentially malevolent ghost may be limited by
the mutilation of his body. Thus the Australian
natives cut off the right thumb of their dead
enemies to prevent their ghosts being able to
[49]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
hurl a spear. In the Herero War the natives
mutilated the bodies of dead Germans with a
similar motive. Further analogies could be
quoted from the New World. This, no doubt,
was the reason why Athenian suicides, like the
victims of the Scythian human sacrifices in
Herodotus, had their right hands cut off. It
explains too the ghastly practice of mascha-
lismos, in accordance with which a murderer
lopped off the hands and feet of his victim and
tied them round the neck of the corpse. This
is what Sophocles makes Clytaemnestra do to
her murdered husband. The motive is to cripple
effectively the activity of the vengeful ghost.
The coin placed in the mouth of a corpse was
said to represent the fare to be paid to Charon,
the infernal ferryman, for his passage across
the Styx. But this is probably an explanatory
story, which is not so old as the rite. Like
“Peter’s penny,” which was similarly said to
be destined to be given by the dead man to St.
Peter, the money was probably originally
placed with the corpse simply for the use of
the dead man in the next world. When crema-
tion was general, articles intended for the dead
man's use must be burned. Thus in a famous
story of Herodotus, Periander, tyrant of Cor-
[50]
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E FS
inth, sent to an Oracle of the dead to ask a
question of his wife's ghost. She replied that
she was cold for want of clothes and would not
answer, until she was properly provided. Peri-
ander thereupon stripped the ladies of Corinth
of their finery and burned it; his wife was then
satisfied and gave him the required informa-
tion. Similar is the theme of a parody of such
stories in Lucian, where the ghost of a dearly
loved wife appears to the husband to complain
that one of her slippers, which had fallen be-
hind a chest, had been overlooked and had not
been burned at her funeral.
Oracles of the dead existed at several places
in the classical world; usually they were situ-
ated at some natural chasm, often at one which
emitted Sulphurous exhalations. Such places
were supposed to be gateways to the nether
regions. Here, as at Endor, the spirits of the
dead could be evoked to answer questions. In
the later classical antiquity there is also record
of the necromancy of Black Magic and the
calling back of the unwilling spirit into the
Corpse by magical conjurations. There were
also ventriloquist diviners (the girl exorcised
by St. Paul is an example), who were supposed
to be possessed by a departed spirit. Something
[5I
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
similar was the vulgar belief at Rome in posses-
sion by larvae. Human sacrifice for necro-
mantic purposes was alleged to be practiced in
the Black Magic of late classical antiquity.
Part of its efficacy depends upon the belief
that those about to die are “fey’’ or prescient.
To this superstition, common in Yorkshire and
other parts of the British Isles, Plato makes
allusion in the Apology of Socrates.
The ghost stories of antiquity are not very
interesting. They belong to familiar types, e.g.
the revelation of the murder in the inn or the
story of the philosopher Athenodorus and the
apparition in the haunted house which van-
ished at a spot in the courtyard, beneath which
a skeleton in chains was subsequently found.
Mr. Collison-Morley, to whose little book on
Greek and Roman Ghost Stories the curious
may be referred, has noted that this latter tale
was told in the XVIIIth century in almost
identical form as the experience of Gilbert
Rule, the founder and first Principal of Edin-
burgh University. Indeed authentic narratives
of apparitions throughout the ages show little
originality and make monotonous reading. Lit-
tle but the names and settings are usually
altered. -
[52]
SU P E R S T IT IO U S B E L I E FS
At the dinner table of the parvenu Trimal-
chio, in the novel of Petronius, old wives' tales
are eagerly recited and swallowed. That tales
of wonder were also a feature of after-dinner
conversation in more refined circles is shown
by the Younger Pliny’s letter about the won-
derful tame dolphin of Hippo. One of Tri-
malchio’s guests, named Niceros, tells a story
of his experiences with a versipellis (turn-
skin) or werewolf. He set out one night to
visit his mistress accompanied by a soldier who
was lodging in the same house. What was his
horror when, as soon as they reached the tomb-
stones, which, of course, lined the roadsides
outside any large town, his companion took off
his clothes, put them on the ground and made a
ring of water round them! The clothes became
stone and the man turned into a wolf. When
Niceros reached the house of his mistress, she
greeted him with the story of how a large wolf
had got in and worried the sheep; it had got
away, but one of the slaves had wounded it in
the neck with a spear. Sure enough, when
Niceros on his return came to the place where
the clothes had been, he found only a pool of
blood and when he reached his lodging the
soldier was in bed with a sore neck. We are
[53]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
reminded of how old women suspected of being
witches have been found with identical injuries
to those which had been inflicted on a cat or a
hare.
Classical witches had the usual tastes of such
creatures for graveyards, where they could be
found at midnight muttering their spells and
collecting their noxious herbs. They were re-
puted to be able to draw down the moon by
spells. The most famous witches, in accordance
with a very general psychology, were thought
to be those of backward or remote districts.
The Marsians in the time of Ennius were popu-
larly renowned for wizardry, and the Sabellian
witches were notorious in the days of Horace.
But the home of classical witchcraft was Thes-
saly, where the earlier scenes of Apuleius'
novel are laid. This work contains some ad-
mirable witch stories. We may notice in par-
ticular the tale of how the witches cut the
throat of their victim, extracted his heart, and
closed the wound with a sponge. The unfortu-
nate man wakes up apparently well and Sound,
but as soon as he reaches running water he is
seized with thirst, the sponge drops out, and he
falls down dead. A belief in this form of magi-
cal murder in which the victim is apparently
[54]
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L T E F S
uninjured but has really had his internal organs
removed by a magician or witch, is widely dis-
tributed. Thus for example the Cherokee
“Spear-finger" takes his victims’ livers. They
go about their affairs to all appearances unin-
jured, but they gradually pine away and even-
tually die. In India among the Santal Parganas
witches eat the victims’ liver without any
wound appearing; the man dies in a few days.
Further parallels might be quoted from New
Guinea and elsewhere.
To turn from witches to less noxious super-
natural beings, everyone who has read Irish
fairy tales, knows that the Cluricaune is a lit-
tle fellow “with a little bit of an apron on him,
and a hammer in his hand, and a little red
night-cap on his head and he is making a
shoe.” If you succeed in catching him, while he
is intent on his shoe-making, you can make him
give you his magic purse which always has a
shilling in it, however much you spend. One of
the diners at Trimalchio's table alludes to a
similar Roman belief, when he supposes that
a man who has suddenly and inexplicably risen
from indigence to affluence, must have succeeded
in seizing a goblin's (incubo) hat and so ac-
quired his treasure. Again a mention of ‘fairy
[ 55]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
gold,’ of the kind which turns to ashes on the
morrow, to which there is allusion in prover-
bial usage, will be found in Lucian’s account
of the misanthrope Timon of Athens. With the
dwarfs of Europe we may perhaps compare
the rather shadowy figures of the Idaean .
Dactyls, magical inventors of metallurgy, who
were but a finger high. The stupid ogress, the
Lamia who eats little children and keeps her
eyes in a box, the Acco and Gello whose stu-
pidity was as remarkable as that of the dhra-
kos’ wife in modern Greek stories, were also
known to antiquity.
Many similar superstitions with regard to
the world of nature are to be found in an-
cient and in modern folklore. In Greece a local
reverence was paid to certain birds and ani-
mals, which was once regarded as evidence of
a hypothetical period of totemism through
which the Greeks had passed. The totemic
stage of Greek culture, however, has become
more hypothetical, the more closely the Greek
evidence and the facts about totemism else-
where have been examined. In Thessaly storks
were revered because they killed snakes, and
to injure one was regarded as a crime. In the
island of Seriphos, for what reason we do not
[56 |
SU P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E FS
know, lobsters were regarded with superstitious
reverence. Aristophanes mentions the custom
of saluting the first kite seen in the year, with
which we might compare taking off your hat to
a magpie. Fishermen sacrificed to Poseidon the
first tunny of the catch. The first fish caught
is very frequently the subject of special treat-
ment. Sometimes, like the Scottish “king of
herring,” it must be put back; or like the first
fish on West African rivers, it must be talked
to “with a sweet mouth.”
Hesiod, whose poems reflect the life on a
Greek farm in the eighth century B.C., has spe-
cial names for animals. The snail, for example,
he calls “the house-carrier ‘’; in parts of rural
England it is called “the hodmandod.” In some
cases such expressions may be euphemistic, as
when Hesiod warns us not to let a boy sit
upon “the things which must not be moved,”
i.e. tombstones. It would be as unlucky to say
“tombstones’’ as to say “fairies’’ instead of
“the little people.” But often these periphrases
may be due simply to the attraction which ver-
bal quibbles have for simple minds. Bompas
notices this trait in the Santal Parganas, who
will, for instance, call “a mother ” “a milk
tree,” just as Hesiod calls a hand “the thing
[57]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
with five branches.” This rather childish taste
for verbal ingenuity may under certain condi-
tions be elaborated into a conventional poetic
diction like that of the Scandinavian skalds
with their “battle dew' for blood, or “ship's
road '' for sea, or “flame of the sea '' for gold.
But perhaps we may look nearer home and Con-
sider the peculiar jargon in which a cricket or
baseball match is habitually reported in our
newspapers.
The early farmer dated his seasonal opera-
tions largely by the habits of animals and
birds, and he used them as weather prophets.
“Just-so stories,’ aetiological legends is their
more formidable technical name, were invented
to account for their peculiarities of appearance
or habit. To give one instance, the cry of the
woodpecker in Eastern Europe is popularly
supposed to bring rain, and he is called the
giessvogel. The story is told that once God or-
dered the beasts to dig a well; the gies.svogel
said that he was afraid of dirtying his fine
clothes. In consequence he was cursed that he
should drink out of no pond. Hence in dry
weather he cries “giet ’’ for rain to quench his
parching thirst. In the analogous Greek story,
Apollo sent the raven to fetch water. The bird
[58]
SU P E R S T IT I O U S BE LIE FS
dallied on the way to wait for some corn to get
ripe in order to eat it, and so forgot his
orders,That is why he is punished with per-
petual thirst and Croaks hoarsely for rain.
In Tyrol a story is told how the raven pre-
vented the Holy Child from drinking, with
similar results.
The lugubrious or weird character of certain
animal cries has everywhere earned them a sin-
ister significance. The Greeks were not alone in
regarding as evil omens the cawing of a crow,
the hooting of an owl, or the howling of a dog.
For a weasel to cross your path is regarded
as unlucky in the north of England, as it was
in Athens by the Superstitious Man. Both the
modern and the ancient farmer beat brass pans
when the bees swarm. With us to call a boy
“a cuckoo' or ‘a gowk” is not to flatter his
intelligence. The comic poet Plato made his
Meleager “go about everywhere like a stupid
cuckoo.” Dogs, again, are almost everywhere
credited with the power of being able to see
spirits, which are invisible to the mortal eye.
In Greece the belief was as old as Homer, who
describes the dogs cowering at the invisible
presence of the goddess in the palace at Ithaca.
The observation that dogs lick their injuries
[59]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
has very generally attributed medicinal virtue
to the dog's tongue. At Epidaurus there is rec-
ord of an Aeginetan boy whose tumours were
cured by the licking of dogs, and Sextus Em-
piricus mentions the use of dogs' flesh as medi-
cine. In 1884 it was believed in the Punjab that
the English killed dogs for the amrita in their
tongues.
The charms and magical formulas for deal-
ing with agricultural pests are innumerable.
Pliny recommends putting up the skulls of
horses as a charm in gardens. I have myself
seen them so used in modern Crete. Against
caterpillars Columella directs that a young
menstruous girl should walk three times round
the garden with bare feet and loosened hair
and garments. The bare feet, the circle, the
number three, and the efficacy of menstrual
blood are all commonplaces of magical ritual.
Here is another spell against mice, in which
placation is pleasantly tempered with warning.
“I adjure you, ye mice here present, that ye
neither injure me nor suffer another mouse to
do so. I give you yonder field (compare the
Scottish farmers’ practice of marking off an
area for the powers of evil, the Guid Man's
Croft), but if ever I catch you here again, by
[60 |
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E FS
the Mother of the Gods, I will rend you in
seven pieces.”
In more than one Greek cult the god has
been given a title from the vermin which he
averts [e.g. Apollo Parnopios (Locust)], and
it is possible that Apollo Smintheus (Field
Mouse), who was worshipped in Rhodes and
in the Troad, was originally a vermin god.
What is rather curious about this latter cult is
a story the distribution of which needs investi-
gation. In Egypt Herodotus heard how the
mice came to the rescue of the country and
gnawed the bowstrings of Sennacherib's men,
thereby frustrating his invasion. An identical
story was told in connection with the founda-
tion of the cult of Apollo Smintheus in the
Troad. But more remarkable still, it turns up
again in Khotan! In all three cases the tale
serves to explain the meaning of a statue of a
god or king with a mouse in his hand or at his
feet.
An appendix to the agricultural poem of
Hesiod contains a large number of rules of
avoidance, lucky and unlucky days, and things
you must not do. For example, nails must not
be cut upon a religious festival, with which
we may compare Pliny’s rule that the last day
[61 ||
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
of the Roman secular week should be avoided
for this purpose or the modern superstition that
it is unlucky to trim the nails on Sunday. Many
of these primitive taboos prescribed by Hesiod
were taken up by the Pythagoreans and were
given mystical meanings by them. Among the
Pythagorean rules was the avoidance of beans,
which were taboo also to the Flamen Dialis.
Into the various interpretations ancient and
modern of the significance of the bean it would
take too long to go, but the “lucky bean ' is
still to be seen on sale in the cheaper jewelry
stores. Pliny recommends you to take a bean
with you for luck when you go to auctions.
The minor superstitions of every day are
singularly constant. Lucky days did not go out
with Hesiod, nor even with Trimalchio, upon
whose calendar they were specially marked.
Almost any magazine will offer you an anti-
rheumatic ring. One of Aristophanes’ worthies
possessed a magic ring, and a character of
Antiphanes wore one against indigestion. In
antiquity too they were pretty cheap; each of
these cost only a drachma apiece. The waxing
and the waning of the moon are still a matter
of concern to some. Varro tells us to cut corn
with a waxing moon, but to fell timber, shear
[62 |
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E F S
sheep, cut our hair (unless we want to go bald)
with a waning moon. Pliny prescribes the 16th
or 28th days of the moon for hair-cutting in
order to avoid baldness and headache. From
Petronius we learn that cutting hair or nails
at sea was thought to raise a storm. As among
many savage peoples the cuttings were often
carefully preserved, for fear that someone
might use them for magical purposes against
you. Trimalchio kept his beard trimmings in
a golden box. Special precautions were taken
over the disposal of the hair trimmings of the
Flamen Dialis or those of the Vestal Virgins.
To prevent galling between the legs Pliny re-
commends a sprig of mint, and persons going
a long way on foot are advised to carry a myr-
tle stick. Aubrey tells us that the Wiltshire
farmers and graziers used to carry a piece of
elder stick in their pockets to preserve them
from galling.
It is probably the practice in most nurseries,
when boiled eggs have been eaten, to invert the
shell and break in the top, lest the fairies or
witches should use them. “There is no one,”
says Pliny, “who does not dread being spell-
bound by means of evil imprecations; and
hence the practice, after eating eggs or Snails,
I 63 ]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
of immediately breaking the shells or piercing
them with the spoon.”
Lucky and unlucky signs are still observed.
Odd numbers are still counted lucky by gamb-
lers, as they were by Virgil and Pliny; English
farmers' wives, like the Romans, set for choice
an odd number of eggs beneath the hen. For
omens, Tiberius Gracchus stumbled on the
doorstep on the day of his death; Augustus be-
came anxious if inadvertently he tried while
dressing “to cram a right hand foot into a left
hand shoe.” Trimalchio kept a special slave at
the door to remind each guest as he arrived to
enter “with the right foot first.” The Greeks
and Romans wished their friends who sneezed
good health, as we say “Gesundheit.” and
“God bless you.” Like Pliny, we still wish our
friends “a Happy New Year” on January 1st
for luck. “Why,” asks Aristotle, “are sneezes
unlucky between midnight and midday, but
lucky between midday and midnight?” Of the
unlucky morning sneeze Reginald Scot records
that “many will go to bed againe if they
Sneeze before their shoes be on their feet.”
Augustus’ dreams were least reliable in
spring, and ancient Superstition agreed with
modern that morning dreams were Surest of
[64 l
SU P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I E F S
fulfilment. The Berbers of North Africa agree
about the morning dream, but prefer the
spring among the seasons. When the Super-
stitious Man has had a dream, “he will go to
the interpreter of dreams, the seers, the augurs,
to ask them to what god or goddess he ought
to pray.” In Plautus, dreams are averted by
religious ritual; in Greek tragedy relief is
found by telling them to the open sky. Among
Moslems of North Africa after a bad dream
spit on the right and say “I take refuge with
God’ and never tell it to anyone. The Turkish
traveller Evliya “ did away the evil of the
night' by almsgiving.
Most of the minor methods of divination
were practised in antiquity. The sieve and
shears were consulted by the peasants of The-
ocritus; the method of the Bible and key or the
Moslem practice of acquiring responses from
the chance opening of the Koran or the works
of Sadi or Hafiz were preceded by the sortes
Homericae and the sortes Vergilianae. The
latter were in use as early as Hadrian, and
were employed throughout the Middle Ages. A
famous historical example of their use is the
warning of his fate, which Charles I elicited
from the copy of Virgil which is now in Bod-
| 65||
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
ley's Library at Oxford. Kledonism, or the
drawing of omens from the overhearing of
chance utterances, was practised in ancient, as
it is in modern Greece and in other parts of
Europe. Divination by the pendulum, which is
very commonly worked with a ring and a hu-
man hair as a nursery game today, was known
to antiquity. “May I never have any deal-
ings,” said Plato, “with the diviners, as they
are called, who in any way or manner counsel
me to take up the deposit entrusted to the
earth.” The methods of divination for buried
treasure were not, however, those of Dou-
sterswivel, for there is no evidence of the use
of the “dowser's rod '' by the Greeks and Ro-
mans. The love charms of Simaetha in The-
ocritus or the waxen image, which is pricked
by needles, as described by Ovid, are among
the commonplaces of European popular magic.
Crystal-gazing in oil poured into the hollow of
a shield is mentioned by Aristophanes, and the
magical mirror well, which reflects distant
scenes and events on its surface, was known to
Pausanias.
A conspectus of ancient folklore drawn up
upon the plan of the Folklore Society's volumes
of County Folklore, would include sections
[66 |
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L I H. F S
upon natural objects, local shrines, Seasonal
festivals, games, Songs, riddles, and proverbs.
These sections it would be easy enough to fill
up for the ancient world, did space permit. The
first would include curious natural rocks, to
which legends had become attached, like the
famous weeping figure of Niobe upon Mt.
Sipylus, the petrified ship of the Phaeacians at
Corcyra or Polydectes and the wicked islanders
at Seriphos. Then we should have a list of wells
or springs to which a magical origin was at-
tached, like those which were caused by the
hoof of Pegasus, the club of Heracles, Ata-
lanta's spear, or Poseidon’s trident. Next would
come waters which possessed magical proper-
ties, e.g., which petrify objects thrown into
them or colour the wool of the local sheep or
heal specific diseases. Into healing springs coins
of gold and silver were often cast, as they are
into the local healing wells of rustic England.
For local shrines there would be rich material
in the cults of heroes, persons legendary or
historical, who were supposed once to have
lived on earth as human beings, but to have
been canonized after death. The features of
their cult could be exactly paralleled from the
local cults of Christian and Moslem saints.
[67 |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
Divination and healing were particularly
prominent in the folklore aspects of their wor-
ship, and in Greece, as elsewhere, incubation,
i.e., the practice of making the enquirer or the
patient sleep at the shrine, was the most usual
method of obtaining responses or regaining
health.
For seasonal festivals we should be called
upon to notice such practices as rain-making
by Spilling water from a large jar taken round
in procession on a cart (Crannon in Thessaly),
or the ritual sprinkling of water with a bough
dipped in a sacred spring by the priest in times
of drought (Mt. Lykaion in Arcadia). The
Roman Catholic Rogation ritual and our
“beating of the bounds” are almost certainly
a direct inheritance from the ancient Roman
Ambarvalia or annual lustration of the fields.
The “need fires’ find their parallel in the cere-
monies of the Roman Parilia, when the herds
were driven through the magical flames and
their shepherds leaped over the bonfires. The
evidence about analogous fire-festivals in
Greece has been discussed by Professor Nilsson
in the forty-second volume of the Journal of
Hellenic Studies. The concluding ceremony of
the Roman agricultural year on October 15,
[68 |
SU P E R S T IT I O U S BE LIF FS
with its races, the sacrifice of the near horse of
the winning pair (called the October Horse),
the preservation of its blood for fertility medi-
cine, and the subsequent fight between the in-
habitants of two of the wards of Rome for the
possession of its head, has many counterparts
in European folklore.
Then there is the scape-goat ritual of the
Ionian Thargelia, in which the ills of the com-
munity were annually loaded on to two crimi-
nals. They were beaten with purifying and fruc-
tifying plants (an inconsistent killing of two
birds with one stone is not an infrequent phe-
nomenon in folklore), and originally they were
slain, their bodies burned upon the wood of
unfruitful trees, and their ashes scattered to the
winds. Such festivals again as the Greek Cronia
or the Roman Saturnalia, in which masters
waited upon slaves, and there was a general
licensed equality of merrymaking and a mutual
interchange of presents among friends, have
obvious modern parallels. In festivals of this
character, it was sometimes the custom for the
men to dress up as women and the women as
men, like the “guise dancing’ of Devon and
Cornwall. The assumption of the clothes of the
opposite sex was also a feature of Some local
[69 |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
marriage customs in Greece. This too can be
paralleled from observances elsewhere, and the
motive is probably to cheat by disguise the evil
eye or other magical malevolence.
A number of examples of May-pole cere-
monies, the Daphnephoria at Thebes, the
Eiresione customs at Athens, the obscene
dances connected with the Dorian May-wreath
(korythale), I have collected in Folklore
Studies Ancient and Modern. There too I have
quoted a number of children’s songs and sing-
ing games. They include those of the house-to-
house collecting variety, like the Crow Song or
the Swallow Song of Rhodes, with which our
Hunting of the Wren may be compared; nurs-
ery jingles, like “Come out, dear Sun,” the
counterpart to our “Rain, rain, go to Spain ’’;
counting-out games, like Torty Tortoise or what
is obviously akin to “Here we come gathering
nuts in May,”
Where are my roses, where are my violets, where is
my beautiful parsley?
These are my roses, these are my violets, and this
is my beautiful parsley.
Games similar to the majority of those which
are played in our Streets or nurseries, can be
[7o J
S U P E R S T IT I O U S B E L II. F. S
found in existence in antiquity, for instance
Prisoners’ Base, Blind Man's Buff, Ducks and
Drakes, Hie-spy, or Chuckies. For work songs,
there is the famous mill song of Lesbos;
Grind, mill, grind,
For Pittacus too grinds,
Who is king in great Mitylene.
Riddles, the taste for which is universal,
are everywhere pretty similar. The famous
riddle of the Sphinx, which it took an Oedipus
to Solve, is current, in substance the same,
among the Mongols and among the peasants of
Gascony. In the Greek form it ran: “What is
that which on earth is two-footed, three-footed,
and four-footed, and is weakest when it has
most feet?” The answer, of course, is man, who
crawls as an infant and Supports the tottering
steps of age with a staff. Another favourite was
the eunuch and the bat:
A man, but not a man, but still a man (i.e. an
eunuch),
Casting a stone but not a stone (a pumice stone)
destroyed,
A bird, but not a bird, but still a bird (a bat),
Perched on a stick, but not a stick (a reed).
[71]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
Popular gnomic wisdom, again, does not
differ very much in different countries or ages.
Hence it is not surprising to find that the
famous skolion (drinking catch) of Simonides
To have health is best for mortal man,
Second best to be of beautiful form,
Third to be rich without fraud,
And fourth to be in the prime of youth with his
friends around him.
has close parallels in modern Greek folksong,
the Avesta, and the Edda.” Proverbs, too, need
not perhaps detain us. Their detailed discussion
would take too long, while their generic simi-
larities are too patent to require it. “One swal-
low does not make the summer,” for example,
which Aristotle knew as a proverbial saying,
has its equivalent in many languages. The
mice, which in Cicero's time deserted a house
about to fall, are equivalent to the rats which
still desert a sinking ship. But we may notice
one example of a proverb which cannot, I think,
have occurred spontaneously in more than one
area. The phrase “where the mice eat iron ’’
for “nowhere in the world,” or alternatively
for a poor country destitute of resources, is as
old as Herodas in classical usage, but the droll
[72]
SU P E R S T IT I O U S B E L IF FS
from which the expression seems to be derived,
occurs frequently and early in Indian litera-
ture.” Had it been unknown to the Greeks, its
European distribution might have been at-
tributed to the medieval popularity of Kalila
and Dimna or works founded upon the Pan-
chatantra and other Indian story-books. But
Seneca and Herodas cannot have got it from
Kalila and Dimna. The proverb, in fact, raises
in an acute form the problem of the relation of
classical to oriental Märchen and fables, which
will mainly occupy us in the next chapter.
[73]
III. FOLKTALES AND FABLES

YTH, legend, and folktale it is con-
venient to distinguish. Myths are ex-
planatory stories, which have been
invented to explain how the world and the
things in it came to be, or to describe and so
to define the nature and peculiarities of the
divine powers, or to give a reason for Some
ritual custom, the origin of which has really
been lost with the lapse of time. It is obvious
that myths about gods or about ritual are
bound up with the particular conception of
divine beings whose nature they seek to illus-
trate or explain, and with the particular cus-
toms for which they attempt to account. We
are not likely here to find stories of universal
distribution, except in so far as material has
been borrowed from folktale and adapted to
the particular purpose of myth. With regard to
cosmogonic myths the case is rather different.
Here the same problems (e.g., how did the world
come into existence or how did the practice
of the arts which distinguish man from animals
take their origin?) everywhere propound them-
[74]
F O L KT A L E S A N D F A B L E S
Selves to man, and certain similarly simple an-
Swers are likely to suggest themselves to him
independently in many parts of the world.
Thus to the first question that the marriage of
sky and earth was the prelude to the birth of
things is the solution which is offered in widely
separate countries, and to the Second that Some
great culture hero learned or stole from the
gods the secrets which had earlier been a divine
monopoly, and had conferred the knowledge
upon man, is an answer which has independ-
ently suggested itself to many peoples. Very
often, as in the case of the Greek Prometheus,
who stole fire in a reed and gave it to man, such
activities on behalf of mankind at the expense
of divine prerogatives have been supposed to
have caused an enmity between the gods and
the benefactor of human civilization.
Such general answers to universal problems
inevitably occur to human beings everywhere
as soon as they begin to reflect upon their own
existence. It is, therefore, not surprising to find
that the marriage of the Sky and the Earth and
their subsequent forcible separation occurs in
Maori mythology as well as in Greek, or that
the story is also told in the Antipodes of how
evil came into the world through the curiosity
[75]
G RE E K AND R O M A N F O L K L OR E
of a woman. In Greece, it will be remembered,
Pandora had been entrusted with a box with
strict injunctions not to look inside it; feminine
curiosity prevailed, she opened it, and thus let
loose all the ills of life which had been securely
shut up within it. There is, however, no need
here to attempt the formidable task of tracing
links of transmission between Greece and New
Zealand; for such relatively simple and obvi-
ous ideas are probably due to independent in-
vention. Coincidence, again, is usually the true
explanation of the similarity in the stories which
are told to explain the peculiar cries or habits
of animals, like the stories of the giessvogel
and the raven, which have been mentioned
above. The problem set is more or less the same
in different countries, e.g., why a particular
bird has a crest of gold (the king wren) or why
its cry seems to portend rain; it is almost in-
evitable that the same kind of stories should be
invented to account for them. Again the Greeks
said that games had been invented in Lydia in
time of famine in order that the distraction
might mitigate the pangs of hunger, and that
Palamedes had invented draughts and dice to
make tolerable the hungry monotony of the
Greek fleet, when weather-bound and short of
[76]
F O L KT A L E S A N D F A B L E S
supplies. In the East chess was said to have
been invented during the siege of the capital
of Ceylon by Rama, to allay the anxiety of
Mandodari, Ravana’s wife, the pieces moving
on the board to represent the greater contest
taking place outside the walls. There is a ge-
neric resemblance between all these tales, but
they are all the kind of inventions which might
naturally suggest themselves to anyone who was
called upon to elucidate the problem, “How did
games ever come to be played?”
Legend, our Second category, is popular his-
tory. Its distinguishing characteristic is that it
contains an element of historical fact for its
core. Round the historical nucleus mythical and
folktale elements have collected and to a
greater or lesser degree have obscured for us
the accuracy of the information which it con-
tains. But in So far as it is legend, it is con-
nected with a specific country and with particu-
lar, if dimly remembered, persons or events.
The historian's difficulty in handling it is that,
though he is well aware that there is in tradi-
tion a substratum of truth, unless there exists
Some external and independent evidence to act
as a touchstone, there is often no means of de-
ciding what part of it is true and what is fiction.
[77]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
The term folktale we apply to stories which
are told primarily for amusement, sometimes
for edification combined with amusement, e.g.,
fables. They are a kind of elementary novel.
Both myth and legends often borrow and
employ elements which properly belong to folk-
tale, but in themselves they differ from folk-
tale, because they have a purpose either ex-
planatory or historical. Although from time to
time far-fetched attempts have been made to
find solar mythology in Little Red Riding
Hood or esoteric meanings, which are alleged to
be concealed beneath an elaborate system of
allegory, in the other favourites of the nursery,
such ingenuities are a waste of time and show
a lack of common sense. The obvious object of
folktales, drolls, and fables is to entertain the
audience to whom they are told.
Now the impetus given to the study of these
popular stories by the work of the Brothers
Grimm in the early part of the last century has
resulted in the accumulation of a large amount
of material from all parts of the world. From
these collections it has become evident that
there is an Indo-European group of stories;
that is to say any one collection of folktales
from any country lying between Iceland and
[78 ||
F O L KT A L E S A N D F A B L E S
India will be found to contain a large propor-
tion of stories in common with any other col-
lection from another country within the same
broad area.
The first question which arises is whether
this similarity is to be accounted for by inde-
pendent invention or by transmission. Obvi-
ously our answer will depend in part upon our
definition of similarity. If by similarity we
mean but a general vague analogy in idea,
clearly it will be unnecessary to postulate trans-
mission. This needs to be emphasized, for it is
often forgotten in the eager pastime of spinning
theories. Suppose we were examining the mod-
ern novel and attempted to work with some
such general and vague formula as this. “A
lack of sympathy between a married couple
and the pity aroused in a hero or heroine by
the unhappiness of the more sensitive member
of the unfortunate union, causes him or her to
fall in love with his or her affinity. The acci-
dental death of the unsympathetic husband or
wife eventually enables the lovers to marry.”
Common sense would surely forbid us to Sup-
pose either that all novels which could be re-
duced to this simple scheme were in fact identi-
cal, or that this simple formula which is rooted
[79 |
G R E E K AND R O M A N F O L K L OR E
in the psychology of human beings and the
practical difficulties arising from the conditions
of civilized marriage, must necessarily have
been the exclusive invention of one particular
genius, which all the other authors have plagia-
rized. The same common sense should be ap-
plied to the classification of folktales. It should
forbid us, on the one hand, to seek for a single
origin of a simple formula, which may well
have occurred independently to more than one
storyteller, e.g., such a formula as “a hero wins
the hand of a princess by the performance of
magical tasks.” On the other hand it suggests
the futility of treating, let us say, the story of
Jason and Medea, as substantially identical
with every other story to which this very vague
and simple formula can be applied.
Only stories which substantially repeat the
same plot, that is to say the same series of inci-
dents arranged in the same logical order of in-
terest, in which the variation is limited to
obvious or accidental omissions or modifica-
tions, can fairly be treated as variants of the
same tale. But where similarity of this kind
does exist, it is very difficult to suppose that
coincidence and independent invention can ac-
count for the occurrence of the variants in dif-
[80 |
F O L K T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
ferent countries. The classic example is the tale
of how the hero sets out to recover a stolen
talisman with the help of a faithful dog and cat.
The villain has secreted the talisman in his
mouth, but the cat catches a mouse and terror-
izes it into putting its tail up the villain's nose,
while he is asleep. As a result the villain coughs
or Sneezes, out drops the talisman and is picked
up by the dog. On the way back, while swim-
ming across Some water, a dispute arises be-
tween the animals, and the dog, opening his
mouth to argue with the cat, drops the talisman
into the water, whence, however, it is eventu-
ally recovered by a fish. Now to attribute the
recurrence of a chain of incidents like this in a
number of different areas to independent inven-
tion is plainly to ask too much of coincidence.
This elaborate series can only have been in-
vented once, and I have no doubt that Cosquin
was right in this particular instance in tracing
the origin of the story to India.
Genuine identity of plot, therefore, must pre-
Suppose that a story was invented once and for
all in some one place and has passed elsewhere
by transmission. Some scholars have gone fur-
ther and have attempted to discover a single
Source from which all European folktales are
[81 |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
derived. India they regard as this original
home of the fairy tale.* With this extreme view
I do not personally agree. I should be inclined
to criticize the interpretation of the evidence
upon which it is based, and it seems to me in-
herently improbable. But for our immediate
purposes, which hardly allow of elaborate dis-
cussion, I must content myself with indicating
very briefly my own view as to the probable
history of European folktales.
The individual folktales I myself believe to
have originated in a number of different areas,
and I should suspect that folktale transmission
has normally been by exchange. There are in-
deed certain types, e.g., the Bluebeard group of
tales or Polyphemus, the distribution and pecu-
liarities of the variants of which seem to me to
indicate that they have travelled eastwards
from the west. On the other hand it is true that
the form in which the larger proportion of
modern European folktales are extant today, is
probably to be derived from Eastern originals.
The reason for this predominance I should ex-
plain by the fact that professional storytelling
early became an important art in the East and
that collections of such stories were made into
books. The result was that when these stories
[82 |
F O L R T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
arrived in Europe, they had a more definite
and permanent form, were in fact technically
better stories, than those which had remained
current upon the basis of oral tradition, which
invariably leads to a disintegration of structure
and failure of precision. Whatever may be
true of money, good stories will always drive
out bad.
As we shall see later, there are difficult in-
stances of correspondence between Eastern and
Western stories which go back as early as the
fifth century B.C., but it was in the Middle
Ages that the great influx of oriental stories
took place. Under the Abbaside caliphs the
great Indian collections of stories were trans-
lated and thus passed into Persian and Arabic
literature. The pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the
Levant trade played their part in transmitting
them further westward, but it was mainly in
the period of the Crusades that oriental stories
may be said to have flooded Europe. Hagiology
had earlier been affected, as for example in the
famous History of St. Barlaam and St. Josa-
phat, attributed to St. John of Damascus, the
material of which is mainly derived from
Buddhist sources. In medieval Europe books
like the History of the Seven Wise Men, a
[83]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
translation of an oriental collection of tales,
in its various forms and editions became widely
popular as a Source of secular entertainment.
A very potent influence too in the distribution
of eastern stories among the people was the
medieval practice of employing them to add
amusement to, or to point the edification of,
popular sermons. There exists a whole series of
collections of such exempla, as they were
called, which served as practical handbooks for
parsons. Such were the Disciplina Clericalis
of Alphonsus, the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry,
the Gesta Romanorum or, latest in date, the
Schimpf und Ernst of Johannes Pauli. Again
the writers of fabliaux of the XIVth and XVth
centuries made use of similar material for pur-
poses of popular satire;” later the writers of
novelle, Straparola and Basile, Sachetti and
Boccaccio draw upon the same Source for plots
to be presented or worked up. The gulf between
the novelle and the modern collections by folk-
lorists is bridged by the Arcadian interests of
the XVIIIth century as represented by Per-
rault and La Fontaine, or perhaps more char-
acteristically by the Comtesse d’Aulnoy and the
Cabinet des Fées.
[84]
F O L K T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
There was, that is to say, a continuous liter-
ary tradition reinforcing the oral tradition, an
important point, for the effect of literature
upon folktale is considerable, though it is often
underrated. I have elsewhere quoted instances
in which a popular tradition can be shown to
be derived directly from a written source, and
will here confine myself to one example. In
modern Crete a story is told of a plant called
Kextrépm, which confers magical vision. Now
kelperi is not a Greek word, but it is a metathe-
sized form of the German kerpel or chervil.
The identical story was popular in the medieval
German fabliaux and in them the plant is called
kerpel. It surely must follow that, through
whatever channel it may have passed, the
Cretan story must have its ultimate origin in
the German fabliau.”
It is perhaps remarkable that constant as
has been its influence upon the sophisticated
literature of Europe, the higher classical
mythology and literature has exercised very
little direct influence upon folktale. I have
somewhere read a distorted version of Orpheus
and Eurydice told by an American negro, which
no doubt has arisen from some classically
[85 |
G R E E K. A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
minded white man entertaining a coloured
audience. But if we put aside cases like this,
there are very few instances known to me of
popular stories which are derived directly from
classical literature. There is one, however,
which is curious in itself and has a curious dis-
tribution. In several parts of modern Greece a
story is told to account for the position of the
chapels of St. Elias upon the tops of mountains.
St. Elias was a sailor who got so tired of the
sea, that he shouldered his oar and went off
until he could find a village where they were
so ignorant of the sea that they did not know
what an oar was. At last on the top of the
mountain when he asked them what the oar
was, they said “a bit of stick”; so there he
stuck his oar upright, built a hut, and Settled
down. The same motif occurs in a Sailor’s Say-
ing, which is current in the British navy today
and has been traced back as early as 1871. No-
where else in modern folklore, so far as I can
learn, does it occur. That both are ultimately
derived from the Odyssey can hardly be
doubted. Odysseus, it will be remembered, was
told to put his oar on his shoulder and travel
until he came to a land where, So ignorant are
the natives of the sea, that a wayfarer will mis-
[86 ||
F O L KT A L E S A N D F A B L E S
take his oar for a winnowing shovel. There he
is to plant his oar upright in the ground and
offer sacrifices to Poseidon.
Speaking generally, there are some instances,
as we shall see, where stories told by the
ancient Greeks and Romans are identical in
plot with modern folktales, but there are not
very many, indeed far fewer than is usually
Supposed, if, as I have suggested, we are rig-
ourous in demanding a real correspondence of
plot. On the other hand single incidents or
general ideas, which recur in European folk-
tales, are common enough, but with regard to
such correspondences a large allowance must be
made for coincidence.
This state of affairs is what we should natu-
rally expect to find, if we are right in thinking
that the majority of the forms of European
folktales are due to the importation of oriental
stories in the Middle Ages. But another factor
must also be taken into consideration. Our
classical material is not derived from any de-
signed collection of the stories which were told
for amusement by the common folk in an-
tiquity. The only complete folktale, which is
recited as such, so far as I can remember, is
the story of Cupid and Psyche, which is told
[87 |
G R E E K. A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
by the old woman in the robber's cave in the
novel of Apuleius. Our folktale material really
consists of the folktale elements, which have
been adapted to the special purposes of mythol-
ogy and legend. It represents therefore frag-
ments in a new and special setting, fragments,
moreover, which have been worked up. Here we
may particularly notice the strong rationalizing
tendency of the Greek mind, and with Profes-
sor Nilsson may perhaps suppose that the more
barbaric or magical features have often been
mitigated or suppressed.
Leaving fables and drolls aside for the mo-
ment, let us then consider some examples of
the kind of correspondences which occur be-
tween classical mythology and Indo-European
folktales. Once more our treatment cannot, of
course, be exhaustive; it can only illustrate the
kinds of correspondences which exist.
Now as regards both general ideas and iso-
lated incidents, there is a quite considerable de-
gree of correspondence. But the resemblances
of general ideas, as we have seen, are too vague
to help us much in classification. With regard
to single incidents the probabilities of inde-
pendent invention or transmission would seem
to me to vary with the character and distribu-
[88 |
F O L KT A L E S A N D F A B L E S
tion of each particular incident. But I must
confess that I can suggest no touchstone of dis-
crimination except the scientifically unsatisfac-
tory one of subjective impression. It may be
well, however, to note that most of the isolated
incidents occur in classical mythology in a dif-
ferent series or setting, to that in which they
normally occur in European folktale.
Jason's companions on the Argonaut include
Heracles the strong man, Polydeukes the boxer,
the sons of Boreas who fly like the wind,
Lynkeus of the keen sight, and so on. Similar
magically endowed champions appear at the
court of King Arthur in the Red Book of Her-
gest. But there is no reason to suppose any con-
nection between the Tale of Kilwych and
Olwen and the Saga of the Argonauts upon
that account, nor is either in any true sense
a variant of any of the group of folktales about
the Champions of which Grimm No. 71 repre-
sents one type. The story of the archer Alcon,
who shot the Snake which encircled his son
with such dexterity that the arrow did not
penetrate through the snake's body to injure
the child, has no relation to the Teutonic and
Scandinavian tale of the Wilhelm Tell type.
Iphiclus could run over corn without bend-
[89 |
G R E E K. A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
ing it and over the sea without sinking, a fleet-
ness also possessed by the horses, sired by the
North Wind, of Milesian Ericthonius and by
those which Idas or Pelops received from
Poseidon. Obviously this is a folktale motif,
but it is the kind of idea appropriate to the
genre, which might occur independently many
times over.
The idea of marriage tests to win a bride oc-
curs everywhere in folktales, but is too general
to give us any help in classification. In Greece,
partly perhaps because of the rationalistic bent
of the Greek mind and partly because of the
special interest of the Greeks in athletic con-
tests, this episode tends to take the form of
racing. Hippodamia is to be won by the man
who beats her father in the chariot race; races
are set for the suitors of Penelope, Pallene, and
the Danaids; the story of Atalanta gives us yet
another form. Iole is to be given to the Suitor
who can beat her father Eurytus in shooting
with the bow. But magical tests also occur.
Apart from the familiar story of Jason, Ad-
metus wins Alcestis by performing, with Apol-
lo's help, the task of yoking a lion and a boar.
The external soul we find in the story of
Meleager, whose mother, angered by his slay-
[90 |
F O L K T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
ing of her brothers, burned the fatal brand
upon which his life depended. The brand is ab-
sent from the oldest, the Homeric, version of
the story, which contains, however, The Neg-
lected Fairy motif; for the trouble had arisen
through the forgetfulness of Meleager's father,
Oineus, who omitted to summon Artemis with
the other gods and goddesses to his harvest-
home. The child who is suckled by a bear (e.g.
Paris) or the winning of a fairy bride (e.g.
Peleus and Thetis) are general themes which
occur everywhere in folktales, but may have
occurred independently in different areas. The
circumstances of the winning of Thetis may
perhaps be paralleled by the popular ballads
of The Twa Magicians type, though it would
be hardy to maintain that the ballad neces-
sarily derived from the classical myth. It may
be noted in passing that the widely distributed
Swan Maiden motif does not occur, So far as
I am aware, in classical folklore.
Mr. Hartland has written an exceedingly
valuable and learned work in three volumes to
show that The Legend of Perseus is the parent
of Grimm No. 60. But in fact his theory de-
mands the reconstruction of a hypothetical older
form of the classical story, for the existence of
[91]
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
which there is no other reason. Nor does it even
so correspond exactly. I should agree with
Bolte and Polívka that he has failed in his
main purpose. Once more the resemblances
with which we have actually to deal are of a
vague and general order. The idea of the de-
struction of a dragon, which defends a spring,
is to be seen in its simplest form in the fights
between Apollo and the Python or Cadmus and
the Snake. Of the winning of a bride by rescu-
ing her from a monster, St. George and the
Dragon, a number of forms occur in Greek
mythology and legend — Perseus and Andro-
meda, Heracles and Hesione, or the legends of
Cleostratus of Thespiae, Eurybatus of Delphi,
and, perhaps we might include, Euthymus and
the Ghost (p. 48 above).
More distinctive, it seems to me, is the use
by Perseus of the cap of darkness, the shoes of
Swiftness, and the magical wallet." The acquisi-
tion by the hero of similar magical objects is
widely distributed, but the mode of acquisition
tends to fall into two types, acquisition by gift
from Some friendly magical person or acquisi-
tion by fraud practised upon the previous pos-
sessors. On the whole the first is more general
in the West and the second in the East. The
[92 J
F O L K T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
interesting thing about the story of Perseus is
that there is evidence of the early existence in
Greece of two different versions representing
these alternative methods of acquisition re-
spectively. Further the kibisis, as the wallet is
called, is not a Greek word; possibly it is Ana-
tolian. Whether the kibisis was originally a
tischen-deck-dich, which has been adapted to
the particular purpose of the Gorgon story, I
am not sure. But it is not impossible. If so, it is
the only exact counterpart of the magic table of
Grimm's stories in classical antiquity, though
Amalthea's horn and Fortunatus’ purse have
a certain generic resemblance. The apparent
tischen-deck-dich in the comic poet Crates is
really deceptive. It is a chance coincidence in
a parody of the alleged delightful ease of the
Golden Age. The whole passage indeed is nearer
akin to the liigenmärchen of Schlauraffenland
(Grimm 158), though it has not any direct
literary connection with it.
The flight of Jason and Medea was regarded
by Andrew Lang as a variant of Grimm 79, in
which a pair of lovers escape from the magical
parent of the girl by throwing behind them a
series of toilet accessories which turn into
physical obstacles to delay pursuit. Nilsson
[93 ]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
too sees in the device of Medea to delay her
father by cutting up her small brother and
throwing the pieces overboard one by one, a
rationalized version of The Magical Flight. It
may be so, but the rationalization has then
effected a pretty extensive change. But the al-
ternative form of this story, The Transforma-
tion Flight, in which the lovers escape pursuit
by a series of metamorphoses (Grimm 51, 56)
does seem to have left traces in the story of the
elopement of Zeus with Aegina. The angry
father, Asopus, learned from Sisyphus, who had
seen them from his lofty perch at Acro-Corinth,
of the flight of the lovers; thereupon Zeus
turned Aegina into the island of that name and
himself into a stone.
The story of how Daedalus hurled his
nephew, who had aroused his professional jeal-
ousy by the invention of the saw, from the cliff
of the Acropolis, is undoubtedly a variant of
one form of a widespread legend of The Jealous
Architect and his Apprentice.” On the other
hand the story is one which might well have
been invented wherever the peculiarities of the
artistic temperament had attracted popular at-
tention.
For identical incidents but in a different set-
[94 |
F O L K T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
ting, there is the ruse by which a hero sets
Stupid magical perSons to fight and destroy
each other by throwing a stone into their midst
and inducing them to quarrel (Grimm 20).
This is how Cadmus dealt with the warriors
who sprang from the dragon's teeth, and from
the Cadmus story the episode probably passed
into the Argonaut Saga. But this secondary
form seems to go back as early as Eumelus,
and was therefore current in Europe before the
Second half of the eighth century B.C. It has
therefore a very respectable European antiq-
uity, if we may regard the incident as distinc-
tive. Rejuvenation by cutting up the old man
and boiling the pieces (Medea and Aeson) oc-
curs in a different context in stories of the type
of Grimm 8I.
The variant forms of the Aedon story contain
Some interesting incidents. The story itself is a
“Just-so story '' to explain the peculiarities of
the swallow, the nightingale, the woodpecker
and so on, though I think myself that it has
been modelled upon a type of hieratic myth
connected with very early and barbaric ritual.
You will remember the common tale of how the
clever member of a band of brothers or sisters,
when sleeping at an ogre's house, changes their
[95 ||
G R E E K. A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
nightcaps, night clothes or positions in the bed,
with the result that the ogre kills his own chil-
dren in mistake. In the version of the Aedon
story which was used by Euripides in his Ino
the nightclothes, in Pherecydes the caps, and in
a variant given by the scholiast the positions
of the children were changed.
Again, in Antoninus Liberalis, the wrongs of
Chelidonis are made known by her telling them
to the water-vessel; compare Grimm, Nos. 89,
91. In the Tereus of Sophocles, Philomela pub-
lished her plight by weaving the story on a
cloth. The peculiarity of this method of con-
veying the news of incarceration or of injury
unjustly received is that it is rather character-
istically oriental. In Eastern stories it occurs
frequently, often to point the moral of the
value for everyone to learn a trade, as the
Ottoman Sultans, for example, were required
by custom to do.
All the correspondences which we have so
far noticed, are interesting enough in them-
selves, but the similarities are hardly suffi-
ciently detailed or elaborate to bear the weight
of argument, which is sometimes put upon
them. Let me now take an instance of an un-
questionable debt. The external soul meets us
[96]
Fol K T A L E S AND F A BLEs
again in the purple lock of Nisus of Megara
and with it is bound up the tale of The Treach-
erous Maiden. A king is being besieged and is
invincible so long as his life token is intact.
His daughter either for love of the besieging
captain or for gold betrays him. The victor
spurns her and puts her to death; in some ver-
sions she is crushed by the weight of the gold
or of the bracelets or shields of the victorious
Soldiery. I know seven classical heroines of this
tale (Scylla, Comaetho, Peisidice, Arne, Demo-
nice, Polycrite, Tarpeia). Gibbon alludes to a
version, attached to a Mesopotamian war, in a
Byzantine writer, and the Gesta Romanorum
has taken another from the Lombard histories
of Paulus Diaconus. It is current today in the
Levant as a frequent though not invariable
(e.g., with Leander’s tower on the Bosporus,
the Turkish name for which is Kiz Kulesi, a
variant of the Maid of the Mill is associated)
explanation of the not uncommon place-name,
The Maiden's Castle. That these stories and
legends are all connected I have the less doubt
because I believe that even the classical variants
are not genuine folktales in origin, but are de-
rived from literary invention. Though repudi-
ated by native tradition in Megara, the story of
[97 |
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
Scylla's betrayal of her father's purple lock is
alluded to by Aeschylus, but there is no hint in
his allusion of the love-interest. This, there is
reason to think, the story owes to the romantic
literary taste of the Hellenistic age, when it first
achieved its great popularity and became a
model for imitation.
There are, however, some complete series of
genuine folktale incidents in classical mythol-
ogy, which recur in European folktales. Odys-
seus and Polyphemus must have been already
current as a folktale when Homer made use of
it for the Odyssey. Forms of it are widely dis-
tributed both in the medieval story books and
in modern collections. It has been incorporated
in the Arabian Nights and is found in modern
Persia — a poor version has even reached
Korea—but the literary history of the story
in the Middle Ages and the character and dis-
tribution of the modern variants seem to me to
make it quite certain that the tale is of Eu-
ropean, not of Indian, origin.
The story of how Zeus sent Death to Sisy-
phus, but how that cunning ruffian succeeded
in tying Death up, thereby bringing the course
of nature to a temporary standstill, was known
to the author of the Iliad. A variant of it forms
[981
IF O L K T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
part of Grimm 82. It too would seem definitely
European. -
European again I believe to be the story of
Polyidus and the Snakes (duplicates were told
in antiquity of Tylo and of Ptolemy, son of
Lagus) which is a variant of part of Grimm I6.
Polyidus, it will be remembered, was immured
in a tomb with the dead son of Minos. He
killed a snake and observed how another snake
laid a leaf upon its fellow and restored it to
life. By the use of this herb he then resurrected
the boy. -
The earlier part of Grimm 16 may remind us
of a story, which was extremely popular in the
medieval books and was eventually to supply
material for Voltaire's Zadig, the Widow of
Ephesus. This first occurs in Petronius, but I
am far from confident that it is not of oriental
origin, for it appears early in oriental literature
and belongs to a rather characteristic oriental
group of stories. Further by the time of Petro-
nius oriental stories, though not in their later
profusion, were already beginning to filter
through to Europe.
That the famous tale of Cupid and Psyche in
Apuleius, though it has been dressed up by the
author, is genuinely a folktale, not a mere alle-
[99]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
gory, there can be no doubt whatever. It is a
variant in fact of Grimm 88. The forms of this
story are legion, and between them they cover
the whole Indo-European area. I am myself of
opinion that the version followed by Apuleius
is European in origin.
On the other hand, the story of The Master
Thief and the King’s Treasury is told by Hero-
dotus as an Egyptian story. It was told also
in Greece of Trophonius and Agamedes as
early as the last of the cyclic poets, Eugammon
of Cyrene. In India it occurs early and is popu-
lar, and it is one of the stories which passed
with Buddhism from India into China.” As we
shall presently see, I am inclined to suggest
that the original home of the story was in
Egypt and that it passed thence on the one
hand to Greece and on the other to the East.
But about this hypothesis we shall have more
to say, when we have taken a glance at the
problem of the fable.
Fables and drolls still remain to be con-
sidered. That drolls were current in antiquity
there can be very little doubt, and the Atheni-
ans will have enjoyed popular stories at the ex-
pense of the Boeotian “pigs,” as they called
their slower witted neighbours, not unlike those
| Iool
F O L K T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
which are told by the modern Greeks about the
men of Chios, which is the Gotham of the Asia
Minor coast. A series of proverbial sayings
about noodles such as Morichus, Praxilla,
Meletius, or Margites, who would not touch
his wife for fear that she would complain to her
mother, shows that stories of the general char-
acter of The Three Sillies were current in antiq-
uity. The so-called Sybaritic Tales probably
belonged to the genre of drolls, but unfortu-
nately we know very little about their actual
COntentS.
With regard to fables we are more fortunate.
Aesop, the alleged father of the European fable,
was reputed to have been a Phrygian slave, who
belonged to a Samian master in the sixth cen-
tury B.C. Whether Aesop was really an histori-
cal person or not, is of as little importance for
our purpose as the question whether Joe Miller
was a real or fictitious character. For once the
Aesop tradition was started, all fables were
fathered upon him, and, what in reality is a
story frame, the Life of Aesop prefaced to the
fables, began to be built up out of folklore
material.
The fables of Aesop became very popular in
the fifth century B.C., as is shown by numerous
[ IoI
G R E E R A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
allusions to them in Aristophanes. Socrates in
prison contemplated turning Aesop into verse,
but the first collection actually published in
book form was that of Demetrius of Phalerum
at the beginning of the third century B.C.
This collection has been lost, and the Aesop,
which we know, goes back through a series of
medieval collections, which will be found enu-
merated in Jacobs' edition of Caxton's Aesop,
to Phaedrus in the first century after Christ
and Babrius in the third, a Greek who wrote in
Latin and a Latin who wrote in Greek. The
Life of Aesop in the older editions will be
found to be attributed to the fifteenth-century
scholar Planudes, but that it was already in
the process of formation in the fifth cen-
tury B.C. is clear from the allusions of Herodo-
tus, and references to incidents from it occur
in later classical authors. Probably Planudes’
version is substantially a Hellenistic compi-
lation; except, however, for incidents, which
can be identified by external evidence, we can-
not be sure how old may be the other parts
of a popular romance, which has grown by
accretion.
Many primitive peoples tell beast stories; in
the continent of Africa, whence Uncle Remus’
[ Io2 |
F O L R T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
forbears took them to America, they are espe-
cially popular. To look for a single original
inventor or even an original home for the beast
fable would probably be to chase a Will o' the
Wisp. The fable, as the story of Abimelech re-
minds us, was early known among the He-
brews, and even in Greek literature it occurs
before the supposed date of Aesop. Hesiod
quotes the fable of The Hawk and the Night-
ingale and Archilochus The Eagle and the Fox
(Aesop 5), The Monkey and the Fox (Aesop
44), and possibly The Lion's Den, (Aesop 243),
which was certainly known to Solon. The mon-
key, of which the passage in Archilochus is the
first mention in European literature, is not na-
tive to Greece, and it is reasonable to suppose
that this story reached the Greeks from some
land where apes were indigenous. For though
the practice of telling beast stories may have
developed independently in different parts of
the world, it is difficult to believe that particu-
lar fables were invented more than once.
Here lies the great importance of the liter-
ary history of Aesop, for there are a number
of correspondences between the fables of Aesop
and Indian beast stories. In the East an im-
portant fable literature was early put together,
| Io9 l
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
because the fable was used as a vehicle of
Buddhist instruction. The Jatakas or Birth
Stories of Buddha are collections of stories,
which purport to be experiences which had
happened to the Buddha in the course of his
previous animal incarnations and were narrated
by him to his disciples to illustrate ethical pre-
cepts. It is very unfortunate that the earliest
literary source for these Birth Stories does not
seem to be older than the fifth century after
Christ. It is usually supposed, however, that
this is an accident of manuscript tradition, that
the Birth Stories are very ancient and may in
Substance go back to the teaching of Buddha
himself (fifth century B.C.), who adapted a
popular form of storytelling for the purposes
of his teaching much as Christ made use of
the parable. Some support is lent to this view
by the fact that certain reliefs upon early
Buddhist temples in Ceylon show that at least
some of the Birth Stories existed in the same
form, in which we have them in the written
records, at least two centuries earlier. Al-
though, therefore, it is quite true that Pau-
sanias’ version of the Beth Gellert story is
earlier as a literary record than the version in
the Jatakas, we cannot, if this hypothesis is
[IO4]
F O L K T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
correct, draw the conclusion that the Greek is
the older story and that the tale has travelled
from Greece to India.
It seems to me that there is a good deal of
probability in the current view that the Jatakas
are by many centuries older in substance than
the oldest literary record of them which we
possess, and that at any rate the safest plan
for the present is to accept their great antiq-
uity as a working hypothesis, remembering, of
course, that it is nothing more.”
The problem then arises, what is the relation
between the stories which are common to Aesop
and to Buddhist India? As regards the Aesop
of Planudes, it is obvious that there has been
ample opportunity for direct contact between
Europe and the East, which might enable the
stories to be transmitted to and fro. If we then
go back to Babrius and Phaedrus, the far-
Eastern trade under the Roman empire pro-
vided a channel by which the exchange of
stories was possible, and earlier still the Alex-
andria of the Ptolemies was a center where
East and West met and mingled. In point of
fact characteristically oriental incidents can be
traced in Strabo and Aelian, and long ago
Rohde showed that oriental stories of the Sin-
[Io5 |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
bad the Sailor type were known in Alexandria
and affected the form of Hellenistic romance.
But when we turn back further to the period
which preceded the conquests of Alexander, it
becomes more difficult to account for a cultural
contact which would have enabled Greece and
India to interchange stories. Nevertheless it is
certain that fables and stories which are com-
mon to Greece and India were current in the
Greek world before Demetrius published his
collection of Aesop's Fables, for the fortunate
accident of allusions to specific fables in Aris-
tophanes and other Greek writers has provided
us with some actual examples.
Such are Eagle and Fox (Archilochus, Aris-
tophanes), Eagle and Dungbeetle (Aristoph-
anes), Weasel as Bride (Strattis), Dog and
Shadow (Democritus). We may notice also
two oriental stories in Herodotus: the story
of Intaphernes' Wife, ostensibly a Persian
story, which Sophocles in the Antigone no
doubt took over from his friend, and the Tale
of Hippocleides. The first, the point of which
is that a woman is prepared to sacrifice hus-
band and children rather than a brother, be-
cause in the course of nature the former can
be replaced, but the latter cannot, occurs,
[ Ioé I
F O L K T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
clearly from a common source, both in the
Jatakas and in the epic Ramayana. The second
has been shown to be a version, and surely a
secondary version, of The Dancing Peacock in
the Jatakas.”
Clearly these early similarities demand ex-
planation. Direct contact between India and
Greece before Alexander there was none; in-
direct contact can only have been affected
through the Middle East. Of a drift in some of
our stories from East to West there are certain
indications. Even Hesiod's father came from
Cyme on the Asiatic coast. Archilochus be-
longed to the same area, and another lyric
poet, Alcaeus, who wrote a poem to his brother
who had received a sword of honour from the
king of Babylon in recognition of his distin-
guished services as a mercenary soldier, shows
us one channel by which stories might be
brought back from Mesopotamia. Aesop is tra-
ditionally a native of Asia Minor, and his mas-
ter was a man of Samos, the home of Pytha-
goras, which in the sixth century B.C. was the
principal commercial state in the Egyptian
trade. In Herodotus, Intaphernes’ Wife is con-
fessedly Persian, and Rhampsinitus and the
Thief is Egyptian, while the earlier Greek form
[ Io7 J
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
of the latter story was recorded by Eugammon
of Cyrene in Africa. Again the incident of the
prophetic “game of King ” in Herodotus’ nar-
rative of the childhood of Cyrus is rather char-
acteristically oriental and is connected with the
Child Kadi motif. Cinnamon, in Herodotus, is
used by giant carrion birds for building their
nests; the natives put out carcasses, which the
birds carry off to their nests, thereby breaking
them down with the weight and enabling the
watchers to pick up the fragments. This seems
to me (a view independently confirmed by the
opinion of Rohde) to be a perverted version of
the well-known motif of the inaccessible gorge
full of precious stones and serpents. The jewels
are collected by rolling carcasses into the gorge
which giant birds carry off. If they can be made
to surrender their prey, jewels will be found
sticking to the meat. Forms of this story will
be familiar from the adventures of Sinbad the
Sailor; they occur in the big Indian collections,
e.g. Somadeva's Katha Sarit Sagara, and run
through medieval European literature from
Epiphanius (fifth century after Christ) on-
wards.
There seems, therefore, to be some indication
of a drift of certain stories from the East into
[ Io8 |
F O L K T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
Greece in the fifth century and earlier. Imme-
diately, they come from Egypt, Mesopotamia,
and Persia. Is it not possible that it was from
this area of the Middle East that they passed
also to India, that is to say that these early
correspondences are to be explained not by
Indian stories passing into Greece or Greek
into India but by stories passing both into
Greece and into India from a common center
in the Middle East?
At the present state of our knowledge this
theory is purely a guess, though we may hope
that new discoveries and the publication of the
voluminous papyri which are already waiting
in museums to be made accessible to learning,
will eventually confirm or refute it. The guess,
however, is not intrinsically improbable. A
Common center from which the influences of
popular literature may well have radiated both
eastward and westward, is provided by the
Persian Empire, which, in the middle of the
sixth century B.C., fused into a single cultural
unit with a common language, Aramaic, the
great nations of the Middle East. The boun-
daries of this empire extended to the vale of
Kashmir, while there was commercial contact
with the Indian peoples on the north by the
[Io9 l
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
Caravan routes and on the south by Sea through
the Persian Gulf.
The difficulty in testing our hypothesis arises
from the almost total loss of the secular popu-
lar literature of the ancient Middle East. Ex-
cept for the contents of a few Egyptian papyri
and the fragments of secular tradition which
have chanced to become incorporated in the
canon of the Old Testament, and one other
very important exception, we are completely
ignorant of its content. This exception is the ro-
mance known as The Words of Ahikar, of
which versions, derived from some common
prototype, exist in a large number of languages.
Although Clement of Alexandria states that
Democritus had translated Ahikar into Greek
from a Babylonian original, it was the general
view until recently that this attribution was
fraudulent, and that the work, Greek or Jewish
in origin, was a compilation of the Hellenistic
age and not much older than the Book of Tobit
in which allusions to it occur. Now Ahikar con-
tains some property in common with Aesop's
Fables and The Life of Aesop. Upon the old
view this was naturally explained as having
been taken from the Greek Aesop by the com-
pilers of Ahikar. But a few years ago a frag-
[ IIo |
F O L KT A L E S A N D F A B L E S
mentary and poor version of Aſhikar was
discovered among the Aramaic papyri at Ele-
phantine, showing that the book was actually in
popular circulation among the Jewish garrison
at that frontier fortress of Egypt as early as
the fifth century B.C. The antiquity of the book
was thus vindicated, and the best opinion ap-
pears to assign a Mesopotamian origin to the
prototype of this Aramaic version. It follows
that the tradition about Democritus may well
be true after all, and that Aesop may just as
well have borrowed from Ahikar as Ahikar
from Aesop.
Following this up, Smend re-examined the
fables which are common to the two and
showed that in some cases the Aesopic version
seemed definitely to be an adaptation or sec-
ondary version of the one in Ahikar. One of
these, Aesop's The Goat and the Vine, in which
the fable in Ahikar has clearly been altered and
its point blunted in order to adapt it to a pe-
culiarity of Greek sacrificial ritual, can be
dated as early as the beginning of the third
century B.C. when Leonidas of Tarentum made
a famous epigram out of it. It is therefore rea-
sonable to suppose that it was included in the
first collected edition of the Fables by Deme-
[ III |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
trius of Phalerum. I should myself guess that
the Ahikar version was translated into Greek
by Democritus, and that the Aesopic adapta-
tion may have been made by Theophrastus, the
master and friend of Demetrius, who wrote an
elaborate treatise upon sacrificial rites, and
among whose lost papers an “Achikaros" is
recorded.”
My view about the whole matter is this,
though it cannot be stated as more than a prob-
ability, because of the defective nature of the
evidence. A certain number of folktales, though
not a very large number, were certainly current
in classical antiquity in much the same form,
in which they are today current in Europe.”
There are further a very large number of gen-
eral ideas and isolated incidents which are
common to classical antiquity and to modern
European folktale, but the incidents occur in
a different context and the correspondence does
not extend over a connected series of episodes.
The general practice is to take these, and to
suppose the existence of original versions of
stories analogous to the modern ones in which
they are found, and to explain the difference of
context by supposing that the modification nec-
essary to adapt them to the specific purposes
[ II 2 ||
F O L R T A L E S A N D F A B L E S
of mythology is the cause of it. I do not myself
believe that, where the evidence is already so
defective and difficult to handle, these adven-
tures into the realms of pure speculation are
very profitable, nor do they make sufficient
allowance for the chances of coincidence and
the hopeless vagueness of generic similarities
of primitive ideas for purposes of identifica-
tion and classification. Further the very marked
influence of oriental forms of story telling upon
modern European folktales seems to me unde-
niable. There are curious correspondences be-
tween classical and Indian stories before Alex-
ander. If the Indian stories are as old as the
orientalists claim, I should suggest that this
may be due to a diffusion of stories eastward
and westward from a common center in the
Persian Empire. After Alexander, Alexandria,
and, later, the Eastern contacts of the Roman
empire provided means of transmission, and I
do not think that it would be difficult to show
that the number of oriental motifs, say in
Aelian, supported this view. But it was in the
Middle Ages that the big Indian collections
were first translated into Persian and Arabic,
and through these media they were transmitted
to Europe. They caught the popular taste and
III.3 |
G RE E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
spread throughout Europe, not merely by oral
transmission, but in the more permanent form
of literature. Further from the Dolopathos or
the Gesta Romanorum onwards, European lit-
erature of one form or another has never ceased
to repeat them and keep them alive. It is to
this fact that I should attribute their vitality
and the predominance, which seems to me un-
questionable, of the oriental types over the
tales indigenous to Europe.
III.4.1
IV. THE CLASSICAL AND THE
MEDIEVAL TRADITIONS

HE brief outline of the history of clas-
sical civilization which was given in
our first chapter, will have suggested
that the contact of the medieval world was
not with ancient Greek culture; with Greek
thought, that is to say, at the height of its power
and achievement. That did not effectively influ-
ence European culture until the re-discovery of
Greek letters at the Renaissance. The classical
tradition in the West which persisted was the
Hellenistic, transmitted through the channels
of the later Latin writers. Further, before the
collapse of the Western Empire there had been
a long and steady decline of rationalism, a slow
continuous process which began as early as the
influence of Posidonius in the first century B.C.,
and of which the medieval attitude of mind is
the inevitable conclusion. Credulity gradually
ousted rationalism. Stoicism, which had disas-
trously accepted astrology as the necessary
consequence of its physical conception of the
III.5 |
GREE K AND ROMAN F O L KLORE
nature of the universe as a finite organism of
which the earth was the center, became increas-
ingly coloured by religious emotion and Super-
stitious belief. Neo-Platonism developed the
speculations of Plato's Timaeus into a System-
atic demonology. Intermediate spiritual agents
in the new Platonism served to bridge the
difficult gulf which the Platonic theory of ab-
solute “ideas" had left between the separated
worlds of Appearance and Reality. This doc-
trine provided the basis for a general belief
in the incessant interference of omnipresent
Supernatural agencies in the ordinary affairs of
life. This in turn produced a habit of mind
which regarded it as more probable that a
given phenomenon should have a spiritual or
Supernatural than a natural cause.
An age of erudition but of very little creative
power professed an increasing respect for
antiquity and authority. The growing popular-
ity of allegory, which the Stoics had first
brought into general use in order to reconcile
their philosophic conception of the nature of
God and the universe with the continued prac-
tice of pagan religion, assisted in discounting
the value of practical experience and common
sense. It came to be considered that an obvious
[ II6 ||
T R A D IT I O N S
could not be a true meaning, but that behind
the obvious, there must lurk some deep esoteric
significance. Long before the fall of the West-
ern Empire reason, though not reasoning, had
been dethroned. The reasoning indeed remains
Subtle, the arguments are often sound, and, at
any rate when we come to the great medieval
masters, there is no lack of mental power. It
is the premises, not the logical methods, that
are at fault in the later classical and medieval
learning, and this in turn is due to uncritical
respect for authority and a taste for the mar-
vellous and the irrational, the spirit of credo
quia impossibile, which led indiscriminate eru-
dition to perpetuate and emphasize precisely
what was worthless in the inheritance of learn-
ing, and relatively to neglect the submission of
its postulates to the test of practical experi-
ment.
This world of declining rationalism had be-
come Christian, but the intellectual conse-
quences from our point of view were negligible
one way or the other. The early Christians
were men of their time and shared its intellec-
tual weaknesses. The demonology of Christian
Fathers does not differ in essentials from that
of pagan Neo-Platonists; the Christian devils
III.7 |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
and angels merely step into the shoes of the
good and bad daemons of the pagans. Again
the Christian use or abuse of allegory is no
better nor worse than that of the later Stoics
nor are its results less fantastic. To take but
One familiar example, you may read in the
headings to the chapters in the authorized ver-
sion of the Bible the explanation of the love
Song called The Song of Songs in terms of an
allegory of Christ and his Church.
Although these changes in mental outlook
were gradual and continuous, there is normally
acceleration upon a downward slope. The gulf
between medieval learning and Greek science
at its best is wide indeed, and both the lapse
of time and the political disintegration of the
Roman Empire increasingly distorted the popu-
lar idea of the character of ancient civilization.
Of its grandeur the ordinary man, say in the
XIIth century, had no doubt, but its character
he discerned strangely refracted through the
medium of certain pre-conceived ideas. The an-
cients he knew were heathens, not Christians;
they had been both idolators and worshippers
of devils. Here he but followed the Christian
Fathers, who, seizing upon the indiscreet ad-
mission of the Platonists that Some daemons
[ 118 |
T R A DIT I O N S
were evil, had maintained not that the pagan
gods were empty fabrications of the fancy, but
that they were evil spirits. This view lingered
even among the learned into the nineteenth
century, for Rawlinson, the great translator of
Herodotus, thought that the responses of the
oracle at Delphi were uttered by an evil spirit.
The grandeur that was Rome was therefore,
plausibly enough, attributed to the magical skill
of these mighty men of the past with the assist-
ance of their demons. Apart from political tra-
dition, there were two main witnesses to this
mighty past, books and monuments. Some of
the great works of the ancient poets, Ovid's
Metamorphoses, Statius’ Thebaid, or Virgil's
Aeneid were still read by men of learning. But
their contents had also been made accessible
to a wider public in romances, in which the
old material had been worked up in a new form
consonant with the medieval imagination. This,
like that of children, had little sense of histori-
cal change and conceived the figures of the an-
cient world as moving against a background of
circumstances like their own. Aeneas becomes
a worthy knight and Virgil, a learned clerk;
Dido and the romantic love interest take on a
new importance.
[ II9 |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
But apart from this literary witness there
was ocular testimony to the greatness of the
ancient civilization in the archaeological re-
mains, of which in particular Rome and Con-
stantinople were full. These impressed popular
imagination less with their aesthetic or histori-
cal interest than with their supposedly magical
origin and purpose. For these idols had either
been the habitations of the ancient gods or they
were instruments of enchantment. That is pri-
marily the view of the antiquities of Rome
which the medieval pilgrim found expressed in
the curiously mixed and imaginative informa-
tion which was contained in his guide book to
the monuments, the Mirabilia Urbis Romae.
The same attitude is characteristic of similar
Byzantine treatises on the monuments of Con-
stantinople of Codinos and Choniates. There
the tradition was simply taken over by the
Turks, and we find a similar list of talismans
given by the Turkish Evliya Effendi in the
XVIIth century. An example of how widely
the popular imagination was impressed by
these remains is shown for instance by the
popular English ballad of King Arthur and
King Cornwall, which is derived from a chan-
son de geste relating the visit of King Charle-
[I2O J
T R A DIT I O N S
magne to Constantinople and the worldrous
magical machinery of the emperor's palace
there. The view that antique monuments are
magical is not dead today. To take but one ex-
ample, there is the Corinthian colonnade at
Salonica to which the resident Spanish Jews
have given the name Incantadas, “the en-
chanted figures.”
Of course people knew that though some of
these talismans might be prophetic and their
efficacy remained to be tested, there were
others which were no longer active, and they
were conscious too that the remains of antiq-
uity were often mutilated and had certainly
been more numerous than they now were. But
this was accounted for by the belief, which is
expressed for instance in Milton's Hymn to the
Wativity, that at the Birth of Christ the pagan
gods and pagan magic fell and ceased to func-
tion, or the corresponding Moslem tradition
that at the birth of the Prophet their virtue left
the ancient idols.”
The religion of the heathen was thought of
as idolatrous magic; the most useful part of
magic is the power to foretell the future and
in what may be called practical magic, divina-
tion will always be found to be prominent. As
[I2I
G R E E K. A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
a result ancient religion was thought of as pri-
marily oracular and the oracles as having func-
tioned by means of Speaking images, a view
which coloured classical scholarship well into
the XVIIIth century. The shape of the Pan-
theon at Rome led to the general belief that
the normal form of a classical temple was a
round building, surrounded inside by a row of
statues. The superstition that every round
church is necessarily placed upon the site of a
classical temple is still rife among the local
antiquaries of Europe.
Both in the East and in the West the names
of great men of antiquity survived in the popu-
lar memory, but just as the Aeneid was trans-
mogrified into a medieval romance, so the char-
acter of the great authors was metamorphosed
by medieval imagination. These great wise men
had been enchanters and a series of legends de-
rived from folklore material collected around
them. The most famous of such histories is
the medieval life of the enchanter Virgil. The
material for what thus became a popular ro-
mance was mainly put together by the Scho-
lastics, such as Neckham, John of Salisbury, or
Gervase of Tilbury who systematized popular
[I22 J
T R A DIT I O N S
legends and recollections of classical learning
into a composite whole.
Further, some of these wise men of the past,
either because of their greatness and goodness,
e.g. Trajan for his justice to the widow, or be-
cause of their supposed prophecies about Chris-
tianity, e.g. Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, or be-
cause of a common moral sentiment, which as
early as the end of the second century had led
Tertullian to speak of “our Seneca ’’ and by
the fourth century had given rise to the forged
Correspondence of Seneca and St. Paul, were
popularly Supposed either to have been par-
tially Christians, where an acquaintance with
chronology necessitated bringing in the doc-
trine of progressive revelation, or else to have
become wholly Christians by conversion. Hence
the Christian Sibyl, who adds her witness to
that of David, the Christian Augustus, or that
sweet Christian poet Statius.
The same sort of thing happened also in the
Moslem world, which retained similarly dis-
torted memories of the Greek men of learning.
The enchanter Iſlatoun (Plato) is still locally
held to have been responsible for draining the
plain of Konia. Among Evliya’s magicians we
[I23 ]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
meet with Apollonius of Tyana, Galen, Hippo-
crates, Aristotle, and Pythagoras, and it is noto-
rious that the Alexander of Hellenistic romance
fired the imagination of the East more perma-
nently even than it did that of the West. We
may notice too that Evliya speaks of Fisagho-
rat (Pythagoras) as “the Unitarian,” i.e. he
anticipated the Moslem doctrine of the Unity
of God and was partially a Mohammedan be-
fore Mohammed, just as Virgil was partially a
Christian before Christ.
Although the belief in talismanic statues was
thus fostered by the medieval view of archae-
ology, it had been a growing force in the declin-
ing classical world. Already in the first cen-
tury B.C. Sulla, that strange compound of
Scepticism and superstition, went nowhere
without a little image of Apollo. In the second,
third, and fourth centuries after Christ, as
magic became more and more the vogue, it be-
came also more and more elaborate. Inevitably
an increasing importance attached to magical
paraphernalia, as any reader of the magical
papyri will recognize. Conjuring apparatus be-
came more and more cunningly devised by the
impostors who everywhere flourish in a society
with magical leanings, and the account of
[I24 J
T R A DIT I O N S
fraudulent apparatus which is preserved in the
polemic of Hippolytus does not differ in char-
acter from the description by Reginald Scot in
The Discoverie of Witchcraft of that which
was employed in his day to couzen the simple.
This increased vogue of formal magic and
the apotheosis of its apparatus prepared the
way for the medieval interpretation of archae-
ology which we have noticed, and for the great
popularity of the talisman both in the East
and in the West. The word talisman itself is
probably not derived, as is generally supposed,
from the Arabic tilsam, Turkish tilisim. Both
the Arabic and the European forms are almost
certainly independent and parallel derivatives
from the common source in the past participle
passive of the Greek TeXà , “to do ’’ or “per-
form,” in the specialized sense of “to perform
magical rites,” a usage with which we may com-
pare the threat of the witch in Macbeth, “I’ll
do, and I’ll do, and I’ll do.”
Medieval talismans were mainly of five
kinds. Either they concealed or contained or in
Some way guarded the luck of the city or the
empire. Constantine, for instance, was known
to have placed both the Palladium of old Rome
and also a mixed assortment of Christian relics
[I25 |
G R E E K. A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
beneath the column in his new city. Relics were
increasing in popularity in the later paganism,
and here Christianity took over much of pagan
custom and beliefs. As an example, we might
compare the pagan tombs in Asia Minor, which
have a tomb beneath and a shrine above, with
the Christian counterpart of a tomb below and
a reliquary above, like that described by Greg-
ory of Nazianzus in an epigram: “One struc-
ture this, but tomb beneath and shrine above;
tomb for its builders, shrine for the martyrs.”
Other antique statues were supposed to have
been erected on the principle of “like cures
like ’’ (we might compare the Brazen Serpent
erected by Moses in the wilderness), a bronze
gnat to keep gnats away, a Scorpion to prevent
a plague of Scorpions, or a stork to get rid of
storks.
Others again served to imprison bad luck or
diseases, which were held fast in captivity so
long as the monument remained undisturbed.
In modern Athens there is a square, which is
never known by its official name but always as
Colonaki, because beneath the column in it a
number of diseases have thus been securely
imprisoned.
Others again guarded Secret treasures, like
[I26 |
T R A D IT I O N S
that in the well-known story which is told,
amongst others, of Gervase and of Virgil, of
the subterranean treasury lighted by a car-
buncle at which the statue of an archer is aim-
ing his arrow. The folly of the intruders allows
the statue to discharge its arrow, the vault is
plunged in darkness, and the adventurers es-
cape with difficulty ere worse befalls.
Others served as ordeals, like the Bocca della
Verità at Rome, which was really a slab carved
like a mouth, which had formed the covering
for an ancient drain. If a person with his hand
within its jaws committed perjury, the hand
was bitten off. With this type of talisman is
associated the story of the clever ruse by which
a lady who has been guilty of infidelity, when
forced to face the ordeal, escapes by framing
an ambiguous oath.
An interesting piece of literary evidence for
the growing taste for talismans may perhaps be
noticed. In the XIIth century the Byzantine
Eumathius or Eustathius wrote a feeble copy
of the novel of Achilles Tatius. Now in Achilles
there is a virginity test, in which a magical
spring rises and covers the forsworn. In the in-
sipid Byzantine imitation the spring has been
improved by the addition of a magical statue
[I27 J
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
of Artemis, which bends its bow, if the girl has
been guilty.
The better I become acquainted with the lit-
erature of the late classical period, the more I
am struck with the continuity of the literary
tradition which ultimately did so much to
mould the popular religious and superstitious
legends of Europe. How ‘medieval’ is the ro-
mance of Philostratus In Honour of Apollonius
of Tyana / The genre, to begin with, is that of
the aretalogy, that is to say a collection of won-
derful stories to the credit of an exorcist and
prophet, which will serve both to confirm the
faith of believers and to provide them simul-
taneously with entertainment. The Christian
counterpart to this pagan type of literature is
provided by the Apocryphal Acts of the Apos-
tles and the Lives of the Saints, literary works,
it may be mentioned, which exercised a far
greater influence upon popular belief and
legend than is often recognized. The court at
Babylon, which Apollonius visits, is distin-
guished by magical images of wrynecks which
sing, just like the mechanical wonders for
which Constantinople was famous in the chan-
son de geste. Again the king of the Indians has
magical automata, which on the one hand go
I 128 |
T RADITIONS
back to the living images of the legendary
Daedalus and also to the satires of Attic com-
edy upon the comforts of “The Golden Age,”
and upon the other hand remind us of the auto-
mata of Simon Magus in the Clementine Rec-
ognitions or the animated statuary which was
later attributed to medieval masters of the
magical art. At Gades Apollonius saw a talis-
man, a speaking statue of Themistocles. His
exorcism of the evil spirit, which then over-
turned an adjacent statue as a sign of its exit,
can be exactly paralleled in the Apocryphal
Acts.
If we turn to the natural sciences we find a
similar continuity. Pliny’s Natural History, an
amazingly industrious and uncritical collection
of information which has been assembled into a
miscellaneous compendium of knowledge, is at
Once the model and the source of most of the
medieval works upon natural science. The type
and much of the specific information is re-
peated in Such analogous compendia as those
of Isidore of Seville or Hildegarde of Bingen.
Similarly in Aelian we may notice the begin-
nings of the interpretation of the habits of ani-
mals in terms of moral qualities, a distortion of
natural history more silly than but not different
[I29 |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L R L OR E
in kind from Plutarch’s view of history as a
gallery of moral examples of vice and virtue,
which leads through the Physiologus to the
allegorical nonsense of the medieval Bestiaries.
In the same way the medieval Lapidaria,
or treatises on the occult virtues of pre-
cious stones, go back through Epiphanius'
treatise On the Gems in the Breastplate of
the High Priest to the Elder Pliny and his
congenerS.
“Some of Galen’s works,” says Dr. Singer,
“are mere drug lists, little superior to those of
Dioscorides; with the depression of the intel-
ligence that corresponded with the break up
of the Roman Empire, it was these that were
chiefly seized on and distributed in the West.
Attractive, too, to the debased intellect of the
late Roman world were certain spurious, Super-
stitious, and astrological works that circulated
in the name of Galen and Hippocrates.””
Thanks to the prevailing interest in the marvel-
lous, the increasing belief in the greater proba-
bility of magical than of natural causation, and
the complete confusion of moral and religious
with scientific issues in the interpretation of na-
ture, this perpetuation of the mistakes rather
than the triumphs of the learning of the past
[I3o ||
T R A D IT I O N S
was unfortunately the rule. Thus Aristotle's
work as a naturalist was discarded; his bio-
logical method and some of his individual dis-
coveries have been rediscovered only in recent
times. Aristotle's mistaken notions of physics
and physiology, which were themselves due to
a neglect of the methods of direct personal ob-
servation, which made him so great a natural-
ist, were perpetuated as axioms. In Persia, dis-
eases are still classified by their humours, are
divided into hot and cold and damp and dry,
and are treated accordingly.
Certain magical remedies persisted right
through the Middle Ages, and, as my colleague,
Dr. Dilling, informs me, many ingredients in
the ordinary prescriptions of our pharmacopoeia
today are quite worthless if harmless relics of
classical antiquity. The supposed efficacy of
such remedies is often based upon the magical
principle that “like cures like.” Thus, ever
since Andromachus, the physician of Nero, the
recipe for theriac, a specific against Snake-bite
and poison, has had for its chief constituent the
flesh of vipers. Another antidote, the earth of
Lemnos, the famous terra sigillata of medicine,
was sold in sealed packets in the time of Pliny.
Its use has a rather curious history.” Between
[I31
G R E E K AND R O M A N F O L K L OR E
the late classical period and the XVIth century
there is no evidence that the doctors of the West
had any first-hand acquaintance with Lemnos
and the genuine earth. But Terra Lemnia Con-
tinued to be prescribed, and so dear was the
alleged article of commerce that Maimonides in
the XIIth century could propose powdered
emeralds as a substitute! In the XVIth century,
when the Spanish Jews settled in Turkey, there
was a great revival. The earth was annually ex-
cavated with a Solemn religious ceremony and
was exported by the Turks. It was still, of
course, a monopoly and consequently dear, and
it is interesting to find that one of the attrac-
tions set forth in Heriot’s Report of Virginia
(1558), is the prospect of finding equally effec-
tive substitutes for the genuine earth of Lem-
nos, in the New World.
Where modern peasant folklore agrees with
ancient medicine it is not always easy to know
whether the recipe has filtered down from the
tradition of the learned or has a local and in-
dependent origin. Thus Pliny records two
kinds of magical snake-stone. One, the adders’
egg, is made by a congress of Snakes at Mid-
Summer, who collect and blow the stone from
their spume; the other is a bezoar obtained
[I32 |
T R A DIT I O N S
from the head of serpents or dragons. The first
Pliny had from the Druids, the second from
Eastern sources. Both persist in the medieval
tradition. The adders' egg exactly corresponds
to the Cornish milpreve or the Welsh maen
magl (spotted Stone) of modern Superstition.
Since Pliny heard of it from the Druids, it may
may well be Celtic in origin. Nevertheless it is
possible that learned tradition may have some-
thing to do with its perpetuation even in Wales,
if magl, as I am informed, is a rare loan word
from the Latin macula.
Chester in Love's Martyr says of the Swal-
low:
His yong ones being hurt within the eies,
He helps them with the herb calcedonies.
The idea that if young swallows or serpents
were blinded, their eyes grew again, is as old as
Aristotle. Pliny tells us that the herb celandine
is used by the parent birds for the purpose.
Was Chester’s information of erudite or of
popular origin? Similarly the plant dracun-
culus is recommended by Pliny as a cure for
Snake-bite; dragontia or snakeweed is one of
the regular remedies of medieval learning; in
[I33 ]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
modern Leicestershire viper’s bugloss is a
popular specific. Is this folk recipe due to
learned tradition or is it merely the product
of the independent application of the “like
cures like ’’ principle, which has led the peas-
ants of Leicestershire also to use a plant which
resembles a snake for snake-bite?
Of witches and the practices of Black Magic
we have said something in the second chapter.
When Piso was accused of murdering Ger-
manicus, Tacitus tells us that “there were
found hidden in the floor and in the walls of his
room disinterred remains of human bodies, in-
cantations, and spells, and the name of Ger-
manicus inscribed on leaden tablets, half burnt
cinders smeared with blood and other horrors
by which in popular belief souls are devoted to
the gods below.” The leaden tablets are those
which are technically known as defixionum tab-
ellae. A spell against a person was inscribed
upon a small sheet of lead, which was then
placed in a grave or nailed to the wall of a
tomb. The practice possibly came from the
East; it took firm root in Attica in the fourth
century B.C.; thence it spread later throughout
the Roman empire. Hundreds of such spells
have been found in various provinces; in
[I34 |
T R A DIT I O N S
Africa, the land of Superstition, they are ex-
ceptionally frequent. This precise method is
not, I think, characteristic of European witch-
craft. .
But in general magical methods everywhere
much resemble each other, and the magical
papyri of the fourth century after Christ pre-
Sent a good many analogies to medieval magic.
Characteristic of them are words of power,
which are sometimes Semitic names of God or
titles of Egyptian divinities; often they consist
of an arrangement of letters of the alphabet,
and combinations of the seven vowels, which
were supposed to have an affinity with the
Seven planets, were especially popular. Some-
times they are just gibberish, and sometimes
Sonorous nonsense words with terminations in
beth or oth to give them the appearance of
Egyptian or Oriental words. With these we may
perhaps compare an English charm against
thieves as quoted by Reginald Scot. Drochs
myroch esenaroth betu baroch ass maaroth.
The gibberish form of charm is at least as old
in Latin as the elder Cato, who recommended
for a dislocation the use of huat haut haut
istasis tarsis ardannabou damnaustra. A Roman
charm for curing a flux was the following; if
[I35 |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
written out and tied round the middle, the flow
of blood will decrease as the word gets shorter:
s ic u cu m a
i c u c u m a
C 7/ C / ??? (?
?/ C / ??? (Z
C M, 7% (Z
1/ ??? (Z
777 (7.
0.
The famous Abracadabra could be somewhat
similarly used as a diminishing charm. In the
Middle Ages it was inevitable that Latin, the
language at once of learning and of religion,
should be the most efficient vehicle for charms.
Hocus pocus is, of course, a corruption of the
words of the Mass, Hoc est corpus meum,
“this is My body.” The following, which is
recommended by Aubrey in his Miscellanies to
cure a bite of a mad dog, consists of nonsense
words which are intended to sound like Latin.
“Rebus Rubus Epitepscum, and give it to the
Party, or Beast bit, to eat in Bread, or etc. A
Gentleman of good Quality, and a Sober grave
Person, did affirm, that this Receipt never
fails.”
[I36 ||
T R A DIT I O N S
The witchcraft persecution flourished in Eu-
rope mainly between the XIIIth century, when
the state employed it as a political weapon
against individuals and the Church against
heretical sects, and the XVIIth century, when
in England the protests of brave men like Regi-
nald Scot mark the beginning of a reaction
against an epidemic of hysterical cruelty. But
the basis of the proceedings against witches
was really laid by the creation of a systematic
demonology for the Latin-speaking public of
Europe by the scholastics. For it is on the foun-
dation of a pretty rigid and generally accepted
theory of witchcraft, that the inquisitors’ hand-
books, like Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum,
are based. Certain classical elements entered
into this medieval system of demonology. In
particular we may notice the adaptation of
Diana-Hecate to be the leader of the witches’
revels. The history of this identification must
be as follows. Artemis in Greek mythology was
the huntress-goddess of the wilds, who was ac-
companied by a band of attendant nymphs.
Already in Greece she had been identified with
Hecate, a goddess of magic and the underworld,
who might be seen at night at the cross-roads
with spectral hounds about her and the com-
[I37 |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
pany of the dead. Artemis and Hecate were
also identified with the Moon. As Diana this
composite figure passed into the Roman pan-
theon, and in later classical antiquity her lunar
and ghostly characteristics became more and
more emphasized. As a pagan goddess she was
for medieval Christians a devil, she was the
special patroness of magic and her nocturnal
rout exactly fitted the requirements of the
witches' sabbath.
Meantime I have omitted to mention the
debt of European folklore and superstition to
the pseudo-science of the later classical epoch.
The printed dream-books which servant girls in
most European countries still consult, have
been handed down on the same principles as
medieval science. For through such medieval
dream-books as those of Germanos, Nicepho-
ros, Pseudo-Daniel, and Achmet, they go back
in the main to the Oneirocriticon of Artemi-
dorus. How far the similar Indian books have
been influenced by Artemidorus, I have not
sufficient knowledge to judge.” The problem is
complicated by the fact that Artemidorus him-
self has included some oriental material in his
work and by the consideration that the prin-
ciples of association and contradiction, upon
[I38 |
T R A DIT I O N S
which, in the long run, all dream interpreta-
tion is based, may well have led to the inde-
pendent invention of similar details in different
places. But that Artemidorus' work has domi-
nated the subsequent dream-books of Europe
I have little doubt.
What Artemidorus did, was to collect and
Systematize popular interpretations of dreams.
These usually proceed by association (e.g. the
loss of a tooth means the death of a close friend
or climbing upwards indicates success), or else
by contradiction (e.g. to dream of a wedding
means a funeral). But in the systematic dream-
book, apart from the collection and interpreta-,
tion of authentic extraordinary dreams, like
the long story about playing draughts with
Charon which concluded with grass sprouting
on the dreamer's thigh, the whole business is
elaborated by taking into consideration all the
attendant circumstances of the dream. Its
meaning will be affected by the sex, status, and
profession of the dreamer, the time, day of the
week, and season of the year at which the
dream occurred, and so on. These complications
in fact produce a very intricate if nonsensical
System.
Another work of similar character, which
[I39 |
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
was produced in the late classical period, has
had a similar effect upon the folklore of Eu-
rope. This is the treatise upon the significance
of involuntary motions of the body which, fol-
lowing the habit of the ascription of magical
treatises to apocryphal names which is common
to the late classical and medieval periods, was
said to be the work of the legendary Greek seer
Melampus. This Pseudo-Melampus did for the
involuntary motions of the body (e.g. tingling
of the ear means that someone is speaking of
you, or an itching of the palm means that you
will receive money) what Artemidorus did for
dreams, by prescribing the variations of inter-
pretation which the attendant circumstances in
each case necessitate. Diels has collected a
number of modern books of a similar character
and again I should be inclined to think that
much that is in them comes ultimately from
Pseudo-Melampus.”
The influence of astrology upon science and
superstition, until the discoveries of Coperni-
cus and Galileo deprived it of its scientific justi-
fication by showing that the universe did not
in fact have the earth for its fixed center, is too
well known to need elaboration. It may be men-
tioned in passing that a Greek, Aristarchus of
II40 |
T R A DIT I O N S
Samos, actually anticipated their discovery,
that the universe was not geo-centric but that
the earth diurnally rotated and annually re-
volved round the sun. Unfortunately his specu-
lations fell flat, mainly because of the quasi-
theological hostility of the Stoics, whose whole
system rested upon the theory of a geo-centric
universe.
The influence of Neo-Platonism, from which
the Greek Fathers mainly drew their metaphys-
ics, upon Christian mysticism in all periods
would take us rather beyond the scope of our
subject, though it would necessarily touch
folklore at points. So would the consideration
of the great influence which was exercised by
Neo-Platonism on the Moslem world. Even a
second-hand acquaintance with the Persian
poets or with such mystical works as the
Mesnevi of Jellaludin Rumi, the virtual
founder of the sect of Bektashi dervishes at
Konia, is sufficient to make it clear that a very
large element in Sufism and Moslem mysticism
has been derived directly from Platonism.
Leaving these great topics, which indeed I
am not qualified to handle with authority, I will
give one last illustration of the continuity of
tradition from early classical folklore through
[I4I
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L O RE
the modifications of the Hellenistic and late
classical periods to the medieval and modern
world. We all know the description of the Seven
Ages of Man which the melancholy Jacques in-
troduces with the image of “All the world's a
stage,” itself a commonplace of the moralist, the
literary ancestry of which can be traced in the
diatribes or popular sermons of the Cynics.
The number seven had early an importance in
Greek folklore, perhaps through the divisions
into which the lunar month naturally falls. In
the VIth century B.C. a poem of the Athenian
statesman Solon divided the life of man upon a
Septennial system. At seven years the teeth
change; at fourteen comes puberty; at twenty-
one the beard is grown; twenty-eight is the age
of maximum physical strength; thirty-five is
the age for marriage and begetting children; at
forty-two the character is completely formed;
from forty-nine (7 × 7, which therefore be-
came the well-known “climacterical year ”) to
fifty-six the intellectual faculties are at their
best; fifty-six to sixty-three marks a decline;
seventy is the natural term of life. In the Hip-
pocratic writings we next find a modification,
which divides life into seven periods. First come
the stages of infant, boy, youth, and young man,
[I42 |
T R A DIT I O N S
which end at Seven, fourteen, twenty-one, and
twenty-eight respectively; then from twenty-
eight until forty-nine, a period of 3 × 7 years,
is the adult stage; from forty-nine to fifty-six
we have the senior (Tpeggirms; and finally the
Seventh stage of old age (Yépav) from fifty-six
to death. In Hellenistic times the seven ages of
man inevitably became involved with the seven
planets. It was further an essential feature of
Stoic astrology that man was a microcosm, i.e.
a miniature reproduction or model of the uni-
verse, a dogma which the Middle Ages took over
from classical antiquity. Now it also came to be
generally believed in the later classical period
that the soul at birth descended to the body
through the planetary spheres, through which it
also reascended after the dissolution of the
body. In its descent it progressively accumu-
lated impurities, which it progressively shed
during its return. The impurities so acquired
were then defined as vices peculiar to each of
the successive planets which it passed, the speci-
fic vice of each planet being determined by the
associations of its name. Thus Servius tells us
what Horace knew, that from Saturn the soul
acquires sloth, from Mars anger, from Venus
lust, from Mercury avarice, from Jupiter ambi-
II43 ]
G R E E K A N D R O M A N F O L K L OR E
tion, from the sun gluttony, and from the moon
envy. We have thus found in classical tradition
not only the source of the belief in the climac-
terical year and the seven ages of man but also
the origin of The Seven Deadly Sins.”
II.44 |
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
I. The contrary view to mine is developed by J. C.
Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Re-
ligion, Cambridge, England, 1910, pp. 360 foll, and Classical
Review, XL. 52–58, II6–121 (1926).
2. See W. Schultz, “Das Glück des Lebens in alter
Spruchdichtung,” in Laographia, VII. Ioo—II4 (1923).
3. For the distribution of this proverb see O. Wein-
reich, Seneca's Apocolocyntosis, Berlin, 1923, p. 74; Bolte
and Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Haus-
märchen der Brüder Grimm, II, p. 372; the classical refer-
ences are collected in W. Headlam and A. D. Knox, Hero-
das, the Mimes and Fragments, Cambridge, England, 1922,
p. I53.
4. The chief protagonist of the extreme oriental theory,
in the generation which succeeded Benfey, was the late
Emmanuel Cosquin. The notes in his Contes populaires de
Lorraine, 2 vols., Paris, 1886, are invaluable. Two posthu-
mous volumes, Les contes Indiens et l'Occident, Paris, 1922,
and Études Folkloriques, Paris, 1922, contain not only his
latest views but many of his more important contribu-
tions to the periodical literature of the subject. English
readers will get a useful idea of the indebtedness of Eu-
rope to oriental stories from the books of W. A. Clouston,
which have further the advantage of being written in an
agreeable and interesting style: The Book of Noodles, Lon-
don, 1888; Eastern Romances and Stories from the Persian,
Tamil, Urdu, Glasgow, 1889; Popular Tales and Fictions:
their Migrations and Transformations, 2 vols., Edinburgh,
1887.
5. For exempla consult T. F. Crane, The Exempla of
Jacques de Vitry, London, 1890, reprinted Ig24; Johannes
Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, edited by J. Bolte, Berlin, 1924;
[ I47 |
N O T E S
H. Oesterley's is still the best edition of the Gesta Ro-
manorum, Berlin, 1871; the last edition of the English
translation of Charles Swan, which is known to me, was
published in London, 1906 (Editor, W. Hooper). Cf., also,
the same in “The Broadway Translations,” London and
New York. Moses Gaster, The Exempla of the Rabbis,
London and Leipzig, I924, contains some useful compara-
tive material. For fabliaux see F. H. von der Hagen,
Gesammtabenteuer, 3 vols., Stuttgart, I850, which has use-
ful notes and J. Bédier, Les fabliaux, Paris, 1895. For folk-
tales in the xviii century see Andrew Lang's introduction to
Perrault’s Popular Tales. -
6. For this story see P. Kretschmer, “Das Schwank-
märchen von dem Kraut das doppelsichtig macht,” in
Laographia, VII. 18–24 (1923).
7. I have published a more elaborate note upon Per-
Seus and the magical articles in Journal of the Gypsy Lore
Society, Third Series, III. I51—8 (1924).
8. For the Architect and Prentice story see W. Crooke
in Folk-Lore, XXIX. 219 foll. (1918), and F. W. Hasluck
in Folk-Lore, XXX. I34–5 (1919).
9. For the distribution of this story see Bolte and
Polivka, op. cit., III. pp. 395 foll.
Io. For the view that the fable is of oriental origin
see Theodor Benfey, Pantschatantra, Leipzig, 1859, the in-
troduction to which remains a classic. For an uncompromis-
ing defence of Greek priority see Hausrath in Pauly–Wis-
Sowa, VI, ii, pp. 1704–1736, S.v. Fabel, a good and
important article with useful bibliography. Joseph Jacobs'
introduction to his edition of Caxton's Aesop's Fables, 2
vols., contains a great deal of information but it is mixed
with wild speculation.
II. For Intaphernes' Wife see R. Pischel, “Zu Sophokles
Antigone gog—912,” in Hermes, XXVIII. 465–8 (1893). For
Hippocleides see S. J. Warren, “Herodot vi. 126,” in
Hermes, XXIX. 476–8 (1894), and R. W. Macan, He-
rodotus IV-VI, vol. II, pp. 304–311, London, 1895.
I2. For Ahikar see F. C. Conybeare, J. Rendel Harris
and Agnes Smith Lewis, The Story of Ahikar,” Cambridge,
[ I48 ||
N O T E S
1913, A. E. Cowley, Aramaic papyri of the Fifth Cen-
tury B.C., translation, etc., Oxford, 1923. For Ahikar and
Aesop, R. Smend, “Alter und Herkunft des Achikar Ro-
mans und sein Verhältnis zu Aesop,” in Beiheft zur Zeit-
schrift für die alt-testamentliche Wissenschaft, XIII, Gies-
sen, Igo.8. For the fable of The Goat and the Vine, W. R.
Halliday, in Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology, XI.
95–Io2 (1924).
13. Some examples I have given. The reader may ex-
pect, but I am unwilling at the present stage of my inves-
tigations to give him a definitive list of such stories. For,
to be of practical use, such a catalogue ought to be ex-
haustive and should also indicate the literary history of
each combination of incidents together with some con-
sideration of the setting in which they are found. For
example, the Polyidus story is a sufficiently elaborate
chain of incidents to be called a story, but its setting in
Greek mythology and in Grimm I6 is different. An analysis
upon these lines of the common property of classical and
Indo-European folktale I have long had in mind and hope,
if other occupations allow me the necessary leisure, some
day to complete it. I do not know that anyone else has
done it; but though it is a longer and more laborious
task than perhaps the uninitiated would guess, it is the
indispensable prelude to any sound advance in respect of
these particular problems.
I4. The best idea of how classical antiquity appeared
to the medieval mind is most pleasantly acquired by read-
ing Dante. Upon the whole subject of talismans and me-
dieval archaeology see R. M. Dawkins, “Ancient Statues in
Medieval Constantinople,” in Folk-Lore, XXXV. 209—248
(1924). For King Arthur and King Cornwall see F. J.
Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, No. 30,
Vol. I, pp. 274–288.
15. Charles Singer, Greek Biology and Greek Medicine,
Oxford, Ig22, a very good and interesting little book.
I6. See F. W. Hasluck, “Terra Lemnia,” in Annual of
the British School at Athens, XVI. 221 foll. (1910).
17. For the oriental dream-book tradition see Julius
[I49 |
N OT ES
von Negelein, Der Traumschlüssel des Jagaddeva, Giessen,
I9I2.
18. H. Diels, “ Beiträge zur Zuckungsliteratur des Okzi-
dents und Orients,” in Abhandlungen der königlichen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2 vols., Berlin, I908, 1909.
19. The history of the idea of The Seven Ages of Man
is treated in detail by Franz Boll, Die Lebensalter, Leipzig
and Berlin, 19I3.
[ I 5o ]
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. ENCYCLOPEDIAs, ETC.
DAREMBERG, C., and SAGLIO, E., Dictionnaire des Antiquités
Grecques et Romaines. 5 vols. Paris, 1877–1919.
HASTINGS, JAS., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. 12
vols. Edinburgh, Igo8–1921.
PAULY, A. F. von, WISSowA, G., KROLL, W., Real-Encyclo-
pädie der klassischen Altertum swissenschaft. 13 vols.
(incomplete). Stuttgart, 1894–1922.
RoscIIER, W. H., Ausführliches Lexikon der Griechischen
wnd Römischen Mythologie. Leipzig, 1885 fſ.
Valuable material will be found not only in the journal
Folk-Lore but also in the volumes of County Folk-Lore,
which the Folk-Lore Society has issued from time to time.
II. OTHER WORKS
ABT, A., Die Apologie des Apuleius von Madaura und die
antike Zauberei. Giessen, 1908.
AUBREY, JoHN, Miscellanies. London, 1784. Remaines of
Gentilisme and Judaisme, I686–7, annotated by J. Brit-
ten. Folk-Lore Society, London, 1881.
BAILEY, CYRIL, Ovid, Fasti, Book III. Oxford, 1921. The
Religion of Ancient Rome. London and Chicago, Igo7.
BoLTE, J., and PolívKA, G., Anmerkungen zu den Kinder-
wnd Hausmärchen der Brider Grimm. Leipzig, 1913–
18. Three volumes have appeared; the fourth, which
will contain the index, is still awaited.
BRAND, JoHN, Observations on Popular Antiquities (edited
by Sir H. Ellis). 2 vols. London, 1813. An elaborate
new edition of this work is in preparation by the
Folk-Lore Society.
[I51 |
S E L E C T B I BL I O G R A P H Y
BROwn E, SIR THOMAS, Pseudodoxia epidemica. A con-
venient edition is the three-volume edition of the
Works by C. Sayle. London, 1904–7.
CHILD, FRANCIS JAMES, The English and Scottish Popular
Ballads. 5 vols. Boston, n.d.
CoLLISON-MoRLEY, L., Greek and Roman Ghost Stories.
Oxford, 1912.
CoMPARETTI, Dom ENICO, Researches respecting the Book of
Sindibad. Folk-Lore Society, 1882. Vergil in the Mid-
dle Ages, translated E. F. M. Benecke. London, 1895.
DIETERICH, ALBRECHT, Kleine Schriften. Leipzig and Berlin,
I9II.
ELwoRTHY, FREDERICK THOMAS, The Evil Eye. London,
I895.
FAHz, LUDw1G, De poetarum Romanorum doctrina magica
quaestiones. Giessen, Igo4.
FowleR, W. WARDE, The Religious Experience of the Ro-
man People. London and New York, 1911. Roman
Essays and Interpretations. Oxford, 1920.
FRAzER, SIR J. G., Apollodorus: The Library, with an Eng-
lish translation and commentary, in the Loeb Classical
Library. 2 vols. London and New York, Ig21. The
Golden Bough, II vols. and index. London, Igrg–22.
Pausanias’s Description of Greece, translated with com-
mentary. 6 vols. London, 1898.
Gomſ ME, ALICE BERTHA, Traditional Games of England,
Scotland and Ireland. 2 vols. London, 1894–8.
HALLIDAY, W. R., Folklore Studies Ancient and Modern.
London, 1924. Greek Divination. London, 1913. Lec-
tures on the History of Roman Religion from Numa
to Augustus. Liverpool, Ig21. “Notes upon Indo-Eu-
ropean folk-tales and the problem of their diffusion,”
in Folk-Lore, XXXIV. II 7–140 (1923). The Pagan
Background of early Christianity. Liverpool, IQ25. Fore-
word to volume viii of N. M. Penzer, The Ocean of
Story, London, 1927.
HALLIWELL-PHILIPs, JAMES ORCHARD, (Editor), Nursery
Rhymes of England.* London, 1844. Popular Rhymes
and Nursery Tales. London, 1841.
[I52 |
SE L EC T B I B L I O GR A P H Y
HARTLAND, EdwIN SIDNEY, The Legend of Perseus; a study
of tradition in story, Custom and belief. 3 vols. Lon-
don, 1894–6. The Science of Fairy Tales. London and
New York, I89I.
KöHLER, REINHOLD, Kleinere Schriften. 3 vols. Weimar,
I898–1900.
KUTSCH, F., Attische Heilgötter und Heilheroen. Giessen,
I9 I3.
LANG, ANDREw, Custom and Myth. New York, 1885. Myth,
Ritual and Religion.” 2 vols. London, 1899. Perrault's
Popular Tales, edited with introduction and notes.
Oxford, 1888.
MARETT, R. R., (Editor), Anthropology and the Classics.
Oxford, 1908.
MooNEY, JosEPH J., Hosidius Geta's tragedy “ Medea.” A
Vergilian cento. Latin text and metrical translation.
Appended outline of ancient Roman magic. Birming-
ham, I919.
NILssoN, M. P., A History of Greek Religion. Oxford,
I925. P
PRELLER, L., Griechische Mythologie,4 edited by Karl
Robert. Berlin, 1894–1926.
RoHDE, ERwIN, Der griechische Roman und seine Vor-
laüfer.° Leipzig. I914. Psyche; Seelencult u. Unsterb-
lichkeitsglaube der Griechen.* (cf. English transla-
tion, in The International Library of psychology,
philosophy and scientific method. London, I925.)
RosE, H. J., The Roman Questions of Plutarch. Oxford,
1924. Primitive Culture in Greece. London and New
York, 1925. Primitive Culture in Italy. I926.
SAMTER, E., Familienfeste der Griechen und Römer. Berlin,
19oI. Geburt, Hochzeit und Tod. Leipzig and Berlin,
1911. Die Religion der Griechen. Leipzig, 1914. Volks-
kunde im altsprachlichen Unterricht, Teil I, Homer.
Berlin, 1923.
ScoT, REGINALD, Discoverie of Witchcraft . . . a reprint of
the first edition (1584), edited with notes etc., by B.
Nicholson. London, I886.
[ I53
S E L E C T B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Swanson, CHARLEs, Provincial names and folklore of
British birds. London, 1885.
TAVENNER, E., Studies in Magic from Latin Literature.
New York, Igró.
THORNDIKE, LYNN, A History of Magic and experimental
Science during the first Thirteen Centuries of our
Era. 2 vols. New York, 1923.
TYLOR, SIR EDwARD BURNETT, Primitive Culture.* 2 vols.
London, 1903.
WACHTER, TH., Reinheitsvorschriften im griechischen Kult.
Giessen, 1910.
[I54 |
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE “OUR DEBT TO GREECE AND ROME
FUND,” WHOSE GENEROSITY HAS MADE
POSSIBLE THE LIBRARY
g|Dut Debt to (5tzetz and 180mt
Philadelphia
DR. ASTLEY P. C. ASHHURST
THOMAS G. ASHTON
WILLIAM L. AUSTIN
JOHN C. BELL
HENRY H. BONNELL
JASPER YEATES BRINTON
GEORGE BURNHAM, JR.
JOHN CADWALADER
MoRRIS L. CLOTHIER
MISS CLARA COMEGYS
MISS MARY E. CONVERSE
ARTHUR G. DICKSON
WILLIAM M. ELKINS
H. H. FuRNESs, JR.
THOMAS S. GATES
WILLIAM P. GEST
JoHN GRIBBEL
MISS M. S. HINCHMAN
SAMUEL F. Houston
CHARLES EDWARD INGERSOLL
JOHN STORY JENKS
BA B. JoHNSON
MISS NINA LEA
HORATIO G. LLOYD
GEORGE McFADDEN
MRS. JoHN MARKOE
J. WILLIS MARTIN
JULES E. MASTBAUM
J. VAUGHAN MERRICK
DAVID MILNE
EFFINGHAM B. MoRRIS
WILLIAM R. MURPHY
JOHN S. NEWBOLD
S. DAVIS PAGE (memorial)
OWEN J. ROBERTS
JOSEPH G. ROSENGARTEN
MISS CAROLINE SINKLER
WILLIAM C. SPROUL
JoHN B. STETson, JR.
DR. J. WILLIAM WHITE
(memorial)
GEORGE D. WIDENER
MRS. JAMES D. WINSOR
OWEN WISTER
The Philadelphia Society for the Pro-
motion of Liberal Studies
Boston
ORIC BATEs (memorial)
MISS MARY H. BUCKINGHAM
FREDERICK P. FISH
WILLIAM AMORY GARDNER
Joseph CLARK HoPPIN
WILLIAM CALEB LORING
MISS ELLEN F. MASON
Chicago
JoHN C. SHAFFER
HAROLD H. SWIFT
HERBERT W. WOLFF
Cincinnati
HERBERT G. FRENCE
CHARLEs PHELPs TAFT
Cleveland
SAMUEL MATHER
Detroit
JoBN W. ANDERSON
DEXTER M. FERRY, JR.
Doylestown, Pennsylvania
“A LovER of GREECE AND
ROME”
Kansas City
CHARLES BAIRD
Lancaster
WILLIAM. H. KELLER
New York
“ANONYMoUs”
JoHN JAY CHAPMAN
OTTO H. KAHN
WILLARD V. KING
THOMAs W. LAMONT
DWIGHT W. MORRow
MRS. D. W. MoRRow
Senatori Societatis Philosophiae,
q BK, gratias maximas agimus
ELIHU ROOT
MoRTIMER L. SCHIFF
WILLIAM SLOANE
GEORGE W. WICKERSHAM
MISS NELLIE C. WILLIAMs
one contributor, who has
asked to have his name with-
held:
Maecenas atavis edite regibus,
O et praesidium et dulce decus meum
Providence
JoHN NICHOLAs Brown
Washington
The Greek Embassy at Washington,
for the Greek Government
g|Dut Debt to (5tette ant, 380m2
AUTHORS AND TITLES
IOA.
IOB.
II.
I2.
I3.
I4.
I5.
I6.
I7.
I8.
I9.
2O.
2I.
22.
23A.
23B.
24.
25.
AUTHORS AND TITLES
HOMER. John A. Scott, Northwestern University.
SAPPHO. David M. Robinson, The Johns Hopkins
University.
EURIPIDEs. F. L. Lucas, King’s College, Cambridge.
AESCHYLUS AND SOPHOCLES. J. T. Sheppard, King's
College, Cambridge.
ARISTOPHANES. Louis E. Lord, Oberlin College.
DEMOSTHENEs. Charles D. Adams, Dartmouth College.
ARISTOTLE's PoETICs. Lane Cooper, Cornell University.
GREEK HISTORIANs. Alfred E. Zimmern, University
of Wales.
LUCIAN. Francis G. Allinson, Brown University.
PLAUTUS AND TERENCE. Charles Knapp, Barnard
College, Columbia University.
CICERO. John C. Rolfe, University of Pennsylvania.
CICERO As PHILOSOPHER. Nelson G. McCrea, Columbia
University.
CATULLUs. Karl P. Harrington, Wesleyan University.
LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM. George Depue
Hadzsits, University of Pennsylvania.
OvID. Edward K. Rand, Harvard University.
HoRACE. Grant Showerman, University of Wisconsin.
VIRGIL. John William Mackail, Balliol College, Oxford.
SENECA. Richard Mott Gummere, The William Penn
Charter School.
ROMAN HISTORIANs. G. Ferrero, Florence.
MARTIAL. Paul Nixon, Bowdoin College.
PLATONISM. Alfred Edward Taylor, University of
Edinburgh.
ARISTOTELIANISM. John L. Stocks, University of
Manchester, Manchester.
STOICISM. Robert Mark Wenley, University of Michigan.
LANGUAGE AND PHILOLOGY. Roland G. Kent, University
of Pennsylvania.
RHETORIC AND LITERARY CRITICISM. (Greek) W. Rhys
Roberts, Leeds University.
RHETORIC AND LITERARY CRITICISM. (Roman)
G. C. Fiske, University of Wisconsin.
GREEK RELIGION. Walter W. Hyde, University of
Pennsylvania.
ROMAN RELIGION. Gordon J. Laing, University of
Chicago.
A U THORS AND TITLES
26.
27.
28.
29.
3O.
3I.
32.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
4O.
4I.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
5O.
5.I.
52.
MYTHOLOGIES. Jane Ellen Harrison, Newnham College,
Cambridge.
THEORIES REGARDING THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.
Clifford H. Moore, Harvard University.
STAGE ANTIQUITIES. James T. Allen, University of
California.
GREEK POLITICS., Ernest Barker, King's College,
University of London.
ROMAN POLITICS. Frank Frost Abbott, Princeton
University.
ROMAN LAW. Roscoe Pound, Harvard Law School.
ECONOMICS AND SOCIETY. M. T. Rostovtzeff, Yale
University.
WARFARE BY LAND AND SEA. E. S. McCartney,
University of Michigan.
THE GREEK FATHERS. Roy J. Deferrari, The Catholic
University of America.
BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE. Henry Osborn Taylor,
New York.
MATHEMATICs. David Eugene Smith, Teachers College,
Columbia University.
LovE OF NATURE. H. R. Fairclough, Leland Stanford
Junior University.
ASTRONOMY AND ASTROLOGY. Franz Cumont, Brussels.
THE FINE ARTs. Arthur Fairbanks, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston.
ARCHITECTURE. Alfred M. Brooks, Swarthmore College.
ENGINEERING. Alexander P. Gest, Philadelphia.
MoDERN TRAITS IN OLD GREEK LIFE. Charles Burton
Gulick, Harvard University.
ROMAN PRIVATE LIFE, ITs SURVIVALs. Walton B. Mc-
Daniel, University of Pennsylvania.
Folk LoRE. W. R. Halliday, University of Liverpool.
GREEK AND ROMAN EDUCATION.
CHRISTIAN LATIN WRITERs. Andrew F. West, Princeton
University.
ROMAN POETRY AND ITS INFLUENCE UPON EUROPEAN
CULTURE. Paul Shorey, University of Chicago.
PSYCHOLOGY. G. S. Brett, University of Toronto.
MUSIC. Théodore Reinach, Paris.
ANCIENT AND MODERN ROME. Rodolfo Lanciani, Rome.
ANCIENT WRITING. B. L. Ullman, University of Chicago.
APULEIUS. Elizabeth H. Haight, Vassar College.
|
|
;
|
;
\
||||
|
|
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
4.
||||
******~ -.. … . .
t
f
3 9015 00533 4662
|
|
|
**************~*~*~*~*~~~~, •• …-…… - „ …-…-..- … …--
- -------····
-:º） ..……….… • … : .









±√∞'，:：:：：：:：：: - ， " * （، ، ، ، ،-：: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ **** º * * * · * * * * * * *·-ſºſiaeaeaeae，··§§§©®
· · ·********， …; ; ， ， ，º ， ， ， ， ）d.·* - šº: ） （ * * * * * * ， ， ,-§§§, ， ）'.'） : · · ··- -， ， ， ， ， ， *§§、、、。
！*******************************~*~*~~~~ ~~~~ · · · · · · · · · --~~~~ ~~~~，~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~.~~~~ -..….…….…..….… … …,,.，,，.I.:）-• • •¿***§§§§§§- ·-- · · · · · -ſae:، ، ، ، ، ، ،№.
ſae， №wºsº، ، ،·***********&&&،-&& ！！！*****************ſ*<！--******！*®see，
***********************-słºwºsº）， ºg sºss！！！！！！！~, ， , , ,. .
-* * * * , , ， ， ， , ， ， , ， ， ， ， ） »· · * * · * （º.; ; ， ; ， ; * * * * * *' . . . . . ., ， ， ， ， ， ， ， ， ， . . .-¿¿.************************ ~&& ！srae~，~~***
ºſº， sºy.se&~&a， & ºsº， ºs,ºsºvººººº..ººº..ººº，
ſºssssssssssssssss！！！№ss-，
ſº
· · · · · · · * * · *
§§§
Nº. ！！ ！！
sººſ ~ ， ， ， ， ， ，
∞∞∞∞∞
\， ，
！3！！！）
，
e.*.
gº-
º
¿№
, ， ， ，~， ， ，，.：.∞
§§§§gºſº，
§§§§§§§§§§
（№.
§§§§§§§§§§§§§
∞
（*） ***
：ºs sae +
№sſºſ