Note 72.2 — Chapter III · NOTES

According to Aelian, certain sparrows were sacred to Asklepios, and the Athenians put a man to death for slaying one (Var. Hist., v. 17). Did Asklepios as an anthropomorphic divinity emerge from the sparrow? What, then, should we say of the sacred snake who might better claim to be his parent? Was Hermes as a god evolved from a sacred cock? Miss Harrison believes it (op. cit., ii. p. 161), because he is represented on a late Greek patera standing before a cock on a pillar. But the cock came into Europe perhaps one thousand years after Hermes had won to divine manhood in Arcadia. On the same evidence we might be forced to say that the goddess Leto came from the cock (vide Roscher’s Lexikon, ii. p. 1968, cock on gem in Vienna, with inscription Λητω Μυχια).