Note 65 — Chapter I · LEGENDS RESPECTING THE GODS.

Herodot. i. 146. The wives of the Ionic original settlers at Miletos were Karian women, whose husbands they slew.

The violences of the Karian worship are attested by what Herodotus says of the Karian residents in Egypt, at the festival of Isis at Busiris. The Egyptians at this festival manifested their feeling by beating themselves, the Karians by cutting their faces with knives (ii. 61). The Καρικὴ μοῦσα became proverbial for funeral wailings (Plato, Legg. vii. p. 800): the unmeasured effusions and demonstrations of sorrow for the departed, some times accompanied by cutting and mutilation self-inflicted by the mourner was a distinguishing feature in Asiatics and Egyptians as compared with Greeks. Plutarch, Consolat. ad Apollôn. c. 22, p. 123. Mournful feeling was, in fact, a sort of desecration of the genuine and primitive Grecian festival, which was a season of cheerful harmony and social enjoyment, wherein the god was believed to sympathize (εὐφροσύνη). See Xenophanes ap. Aristot. Rhetor. ii. 25; Xenophan. Fragm. 1. ed. Schneidewin; Theognis, 776; Plutarch, De Superstit. p. 169. The unfavorable comments of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in so far as they refer to the festivals of Greece, apply to the foreign corruptions, not to the native character, of Grecian worship.