Note 10 — INTRODUCTION

I give the suggestion just for what it is worth; but the occurrence of the legend and the counter-legend in regions so far apart as Lesbos and Scotland, Alsace and Lithuania, strongly argues their antiquity, and corroborates the idea that the komodromos was a Gypsy who figures in ‘Anonymus de Passione Domini.’ One would like to know the date of that Greek manuscript; but Professor R. Bensly, in a long letter of 28th May 1879, could only conjecturally identify it with ‘S. Joannis Theologi Commentarius Apocryphus MS. de J. C.’ (? No. 929 or 1001, Colbert Coll. Paris Cat. MSS.10). Probably there are many allusions to komodromoi in Byzantine writers, if one had leisure and scholarship to hunt them up; certainly it is strange that of Du Cange’s six quotations for komodromoi four should seem unmistakably to point to Gypsies. I myself have little doubt of their identity. From which it would follow that more than a thousand years ago south-eastern Europe had its Gypsies, and that not as new-comers, but as recognised strollers, like the Boswells and Stanleys of our old grassy lanes. The verb kōmodromein occurs in Pollux Archæologus (flo. 183 A.D.); and the classic authors present many hints of the possible presence of Gypsies in their midst. Rómani Chals, or Gypsies, would often fit admirably for Chaldæi; and the fact that the water-wagtail is the ‘Gypsy bird’ of both German and English Gypsies reminds one that the Greeks had a saying, as old at least as the fifth century B.C., ‘Poorer than a kinklos’ (κίγκλος = water-wagtail), and that peasants in the third century A.D. called homeless wanderers kinkloi. One need not, with Erasmus and Pierius, derive Cingarus (Zingaro, Tchinghiané, Zigeuner, etc.) from kinklos; the words in all likelihood were as distinct originally as Gypsies (Egyptians) and vipseys or gipseys (eruptions of water in the East Riding of Yorkshire; cf. William of Newburgh’s twelfth century Chronicle). But the Gypsies may have been led, by the resemblance of its name to theirs, to adopt the water-wagtail as their bird; and Theognis and Menander may have applied to the water-wagtail the epithets ‘much-wandering’ and ‘poor,’ because the bird was associated in their minds with some poor wandering race.