Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY.

§ 1. Modern Folklore as a source for the study of Ancient Religion.

The sources of information most obviously open to the student of ancient Greek religion are the Art and the Literature of ancient Greece; and the idea that modern Greece can have any teaching to impart concerning the beliefs of more than two thousand years ago seems seldom to have been entertained. Just as we speak of ancient Greek as a dead language, and too often forget that many of the words and inflexions in popular use at the present day are identical with those of the classical period and even of the Homeric age, while many others, no longer identical, have suffered only a slight modification, so are we apt to think of Greek paganism as a dead religion, and do not enquire whether the beliefs and customs of the modern peasant may not be a direct heritage from his classical forefathers. And yet, if any such heritage exist, there is clearly a fresh source of knowledge open to us, from which to supplement and to correct the lessons of Art and Literature.

Art, by its very nature, serves rather as illustration than as proof of any theory of ancient religion. Sculpture has preserved to us the old conceptions of the divine personalities. Vase-paintings record many acts of ritual and scenes of worship. Architectural remains allow us to restore in imagination the grandeur of holy places. But these things are only the externals of religion: they need an interpreter, if we would understand the spirit which informed them: and however able the interpreter, the material with which he deals is so small a remnant of the treasures of ancient art, that from day to day some fresh discovery may subvert his precariously founded theories. Though all would acknowledge how fruitful in religious suggestion the evidence of art has proved when handled by competent critics, none would claim that that evidence either in its scope, which the losses of time have limited, or in its accuracy, which depends upon conjectural interpretation, is a complete or infallible guide to the knowledge of ancient religion.

From literature more might be expected, and more indeed is forthcoming, though not perhaps where the modern mind, with its tendency to methodical analysis, would look for it. If anyone should attempt to classify ancient Greek literature in modern fashion, under the headings of religion, science, history, drama, and so forth, he would remark one apparent deficiency. While history, philosophy, and poetry of every kind are amply represented and, however much has perished to be read no more, the choicest blossoms and richest fruit of Greek toil in these fields have been preserved to us, religion seems at first sight to have been almost barren of literary produce. The department of religion pure and simple would have little beyond an Hesiodic Theogony or some Orphic Hymns to exhibit,—and even these have little enough bearing upon real religion. In short, it is not on any special branch of Greek literature, but rather upon the whole bulk thereof, that the student of Greek religion must rely. He must recognize that a religious spirit pervades the whole; that there is hardly a book in the language but has some allusion to religious beliefs and customs, to cults and ceremonies and divine personalities. And while recognizing this, he must still admit the fact that nowhere is there found any definite exposition of accepted beliefs as a whole, any statement of doctrine, any creed which except a man believe he cannot be saved. How are we to reconcile these two facts,—the constant presence of religion in all Greek literature, and the almost total absence of any literature appertaining to religion only? The answer to this question must be sought in the character of the religion itself.

Greek religion differed from the chief now existing religions of the world in its origin and development. It had no founder. Its sanction was not the ipse dixit of some inspired teacher. It possessed nothing analogous to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or the Koran. It was a free, autochthonous growth, evolved from the various hopes and fears of a whole people. If we could catch a glimpse of it in its infancy, we should probably deny to it the very name of religion, and call it superstition or folklore. Great teachers indeed arose, like Orpheus, advocating special doctrines and imposing upon their followers special rules of life. Great centres of religious influence were developed, such as Delphi, exercising a general control over rites and ceremonies. But no single preacher, no priesthood, succeeded in dominating over the free conscience of the people. Nothing was imposed by authority. In belief and in worship each man was a law unto himself; and so far as there were any accepted doctrines and established observances, these were not the subtle inventions of professional theologians or an interested priesthood, but were based upon the hereditary and innate convictions of the whole Greek race. The individual was free to believe what he would and what he could; it was the general, if vague, consensus of the masses which constituted the real religion of Greece. The vox populi fully established itself as the vox dei.

Again in this popular religion, when it had emerged from its earliest and crudest form and had reached the definitely anthropomorphic stage in which we know it, we can discern no trace of any tendency towards monotheism. The idea of a single supreme deity, personal or impersonal, appealed only to some of the greatest thinkers: the mass of the people remained frankly polytheistic. For this reason the development of Greek religion proceeded on very different lines from that of Hebrew religion. The earliest Jewish conception of a God ‘walking in the garden in the cool of the day’ was certainly no less anthropomorphic than the Homeric presentation of the Olympian deities: but the subsequent growth of Judaism was like that of some tall straight palm tree lifting its head to purer air than is breathed by men; whereas Greek religion resembled rather the cedar spreading wide its branches nearer the earth. The Jew, by concentrating in one unique being every transcendent quality and function, exalted gradually his idea of godhead far above the anthropomorphic plane: the Greek multiplied his gods to be the several incarnations of passions and powers and activities pertaining also, though in less fulness, to mankind.

It is obvious that in point of simplicity and consistency the monotheistic system must prove superior. As the worshipper’s intellectual and spiritual capacities develop, he discards the older and cruder notions in favour of a more enlightened ideal. Abraham’s crude conception of the deity as a being to whom even human sacrifice would be acceptable was necessarily rejected by an humaner age to whom was delivered the message ‘I will have mercy and not sacrifice.’ In the growth of Greek polytheism, on the contrary, the new did not supersede the old, but was superimposed upon it. Fresh conceptions were expressed by the creation or acceptance of fresh gods, but the venerable embodiments of more primitive beliefs were not necessarily displaced by them. The development of humaner ideas in one cult was no bar to the retention of barbarous rites by another. The same deity under different titles of invocation (ἐπωνυμίαι) was invested with different and even conflicting characters: and reversely the same religious idea found several expressions in the cults of widely different deities. The forms of worship, viewed in the mass, were of an inconsistent and chaotic complexity. Human sacrifice, we may be sure, was a thing abhorrent to the majority of the cults of Zeus: yet Lycaean Zeus continued to exact his toll of human life down to the time of Pausanias[1]. The worship of Dionysus embodied something of the same religious spirit which pervaded the teachings of Orpheus and the mysteries of Demeter, and came to be closely allied with them: yet neither the austerity of Orphism nor the real spirituality of the Eleusinian cult succeeded in mitigating the wild orgies of the Bacchant or in repressing the savage rite of omophagia in which drunken fanatics tore a bull to pieces with their teeth. Aphrodite was worshipped under two incompatible titles: in the rôle of the ‘Heavenly’ (οὐρανία), says Artemidorus[2], she looks favourably upon marriage and childbirth and the home life, while under her title of ‘Popular’ (πάνδημος) she is hostile to the matron, and patroness of laxer ties. It is needless to multiply illustrations. The forms in which the religious spirit of Greece found embodiment are beyond question confused and mutually inconsistent. The same religious idea might be expressed in so great a variety of rites, and the same divine personality might be associated with so great a variety of ideas, that no formal exposition of Greek religion as a whole was possible. The verbal limitations of a creed, a summa theologiae, would have been too narrow for the free, imaginative faith of Greece. It was a necessary condition of Hellenic polytheism that, as it came into being without any personal founder, without any authoritative sacred books, so in its development it should be hampered and confined neither by priestcraft nor by any literature purely and distinctively religious. The spirit which manifested itself in a myriad forms of worship could not brook the restraint of any one form of words.

And not only would it have been difficult to give adequate expression to the essential ideas of Greek religion, but there was no motive for attempting the task. Those of the philosophers who dealt with religion wrote and taught for the reason that they had some new idea, some fresh doctrine, to advance. Plato certainly abounds in references to the popular beliefs of his age: but his object is not to expound them for their own sake: rather he utilizes them as illustration and ornament of his own philosophical views: his treatment of them in the main is artistic, not scientific. In fact there was no one interested in giving to popular beliefs an authoritative and dogmatic expression. There was no hierarchy concerned to arrest the free progress of thought or to chain men’s minds to the faith of their forefathers. A summary of popular doctrines, if it could have been written, would have had no readers, for the simple reason that the people felt their religion more truly and fully than the writer could express it: and few men have the interests of posterity so largely at heart, as to write what their own contemporaries will certainly not read. Thus it appears that there was neither motive nor means for treating the popular religion in literary form: to formulate the common-folk’s creed, to analyse the common-folk’s religion, was a thing neither desired nor feasible.

But because we observe an almost total absence of distinctively religious literature, we need not for that reason be surprised at the constant presence of religious feeling in all that a Greek wrote or sang. Rather it was consistent with that freedom and that absence of all control and circumscription which we have noted, that religion should pervade the whole life of the people, whose hearts were its native soil, and should consequently pervade also the literature in which their thoughts and doings are recorded. For religion with them was not a single and separate department of their civilisation, not an avocation from the ordinary pursuits of men, but rather a spirit with which work and holiday, gaiety and gloom, were alike penetrated. We should be misled by the modern devotion to dogma and definite formulae of faith, were we to think that so vague a religion as Greek polytheism was any the less an abiding force, any the less capable of inspiring genuine enthusiasm and reverence. It is not hard to imagine the worshipper animated for the time by one emotion only, his mind void of all else and flooded with the one idea incarnate in the divine being at whose altar he sat in supplication. It is impossible really to misdoubt the strength and the depth of Greek religious sentiment, however multifarious and even mutually contradictory its modes of display. A nation who peopled sky and earth and sea with godlike forms; who saw in every stream and glen and mountain-top its own haunting, hallowing presence, and, ill-content that nature alone should do them honour, sought out the loveliest hills and vales in all their lovely land to dedicate there the choicest of their art; who consecrated with lavish love bronze and marble, ivory and gold, all the best that wealth could win and skill adorn, in honour of the beings that were above man yet always with him, majestic as Zeus, joyous as Dionysus, grave as Demeter, light as Aphrodite, yet all divine; such a nation, though it knew nought of inspired books and formulated creeds, can be convicted of no shortcoming in real piety and devotion.

Their gods were very near to those whom they favoured; no communion or intercourse was beyond hope of attainment; gods fought in men’s battles, guided men’s wanderings, dined at men’s boards, and took to themselves mortal consorts; and when men grew degenerate and the race of heroes was no more, gods still held speech with them in oracles. Religious hopes, religious fears, were the dominant motive of the people’s whole life. It was in religion that sculpture found its inspiration, and its highest achievements were in pourtraying deities. The theatre was a religious institution, and on the stage, without detriment to reverence, figured the Eumenides themselves. Religious duties were excuse enough for Sparta to hang back from defending the freedom of Greece. Religious scruples set enlightened Athens in an uproar, because a number of idols were decently mutilated. Religious fears cost her the loss of the proudest armament that ever sailed from her shores. A charge of irreligion was pretext enough for condemning to death her noblest philosopher. In everything, great and small, the pouring of libations at the feast, the taking of omens before battle, the consulting of the Delphic oracle upon the most important or most trivial of occasions, the same spirit is manifest. Religion used or abused, piety or superstition, was to the Greeks an abiding motive and influence in all the affairs of life.

It is chiefly of these definite doings and customs that literature tells us, just as art depicts the mise-en-scène of religion. Yet it would be inconceivable that a people who displayed so strong and so abundant a religious feeling in all the circumstances and tasks of life, should not have pondered over the essential underlying questions of all religion, the nature of the soul and the mystery of life and death. Literature tells us that to their poets and philosophers these problems did present themselves, and many were the solutions which different thinkers propounded: but of the general sense of the people in this respect, of the fundamental beliefs which guided their conduct towards gods and men in this life and prompted their care for the dead, literature furnishes no direct statement: its evidence is fragmentary, casual, sporadic. Everywhere it displays the externals, but it leaves the inner spirit veiled. Literature as well as art needs an interpreter.

It is precisely in this task of interpretation that the assistance offered by the folklore of Modern Greece should be sought. It should be remembered that there is still living a people who, as they have inherited the land and the language, may also have inherited the beliefs and customs, of those ancients whose mazes of religion are bewildering without a guide who knows them. Among that still living people it is possible not only to observe acts and usages, but to enquire also their significance: and though some customs will undoubtedly be found either to be mere survivals of which the meaning has long been forgotten, or even to have been subjected to new and false interpretations, yet others, still rooted in and nourished by an intelligent belief, may be vital documents of ancient Greek life and thought.

§ 2. The survival of Ancient Tradition.

There may perhaps be some few who, quite apart from the continuity of the Hellenic race, a question with which I must deal later, would be inclined to pronounce the quest of ancient religion in modern folklore mere lost labour. The lapse, they may think, of all the centuries which separate the present day from the age of Hellenic greatness would in itself disfigure or altogether efface any tradition of genuine value. Such a view, however, is opposed to all the lessons that have of late years been gained from a more systematic study of the folklore of all parts of the world. Certain principles of magic and certain tendencies of superstition seem to obtain, in curiously similar form, among peoples far removed both in racial type and in geographical position. It is sometimes urged by way of explanation that the resources of the primitive mind are necessarily so limited, that many coincidences in belief and custom are only to be expected, and that therefore the similarity of form presented by some superstitions of widely separated peoples is no argument in favour of their common origin. But, for my part, when I consider such a belief as that in the Evil Eye, which possesses, I believe, an almost world-wide notoriety, I find it more reasonable to suppose that it was a tenet in the creed of some single primitive people, of whom many present races of the world are offshoots, and from whom they have inherited the superstition, than that scores or hundreds of peoples, who had long since diverged in racial type and dwelling and language, should subsequently have hit upon one uniform belief. Indeed it may be that in the future the study of folklore will become a science of no less value than the study of language, and that by a comparison of the superstitions still held by various sections of the human race it will be possible to adumbrate the beliefs of their remotest common ancestors as clearly as, by a comparison of their various speeches, the outlines of a common ancestral language have been, and are being, traced. The data of folklore are in the nature of things more difficult to collect, more comprehensive in scope, and more liable to misinterpretation, than the data of linguistic study; but none the less, when once there are labourers enough in the field, it is not beyond hope that the laws which govern the tradition and modification of customs and beliefs may be found to be hardly less definite than the laws of language.

But comparative folklore is outside my present purpose. I assume only, without much fear of contradiction, that many of the popular superstitions and customs and magical practices still prevalent in the world date from a period far more remote than any age on which Greek history or archaeology can throw even a glimmering of light. If then I can show that among the Greek folk of to-day there still survive in full vigour such examples of primaeval superstition as the belief in ‘the evil eye’ and the practice of magic, I shall have established at least an antecedent probability that there may exist also vestiges of the religious beliefs and practices of the historical era.

The fear of ‘the evil eye’ (τὸ κακὸ μάτι, or simply τὸ μάτι[3],) is universal among the Greek peasantry, and fairly common though not so frankly avowed among the more educated classes. The old words βασκαίνω and βασκανία are still in use, but ματιάζω and μάτι̯αγμα[4], direct formations from the word μάτι, are more frequently heard. It would be difficult to say on what grounds this power of ‘overlooking,’ if I may use a popular English equivalent, is usually imputed to anyone. Old women are most generally credited with it, but not so much owing to any menacing appearance as because they are the chief exponents of witchcraft and it is only fitting that the wise woman of a village should possess the power of exercising the evil eye at will. These form therefore quite a distinct class from those persons whose eyes are suspected of exerting naturally and involuntarily a baneful influence. In the neighbourhood of Mount Hymettus it appears that blue eyes fall most commonly under suspicion: and this is the more curious because in Attica, with its large proportion of Albanian inhabitants, blue eyes are by no means rare. Possibly, however, it was the native Greeks’ suspicion of the strangers who settled among them, which first caused this particular development of the belief in this district. Myself possessing eyes of the objectionable colour, I have more than once been somewhat taken aback at having my ordinary salutation (’γει̯ά σου, ‘health to you,’) to some passing peasant answered only by the sign of the Cross. Fortunately in other localities I never to my knowledge inspired the same dread; had it been general, I should have been forced to abandon my project of enquiring into Greek folklore; for the risk of being ‘overlooked’ holds the Greek peasant, save for a few phrases of aversion, in awe-stricken silence. My impression is that any eyes which are peculiar in any way are apt to incur suspicion, and that in different localities different qualities, colouring or brilliance or prominence, excite special notice and, with notice, disfavour. The evil eye, it would seem, is a regular attribute both of the Gorgon and of the wolf; for both, by merely looking upon a man, are still believed to inflict some grievous suffering,—dumbness, madness, or death; and yet there is little in common between the narrow, crafty eye of the wolf and either the prominent, glaring eyes in an ancient Medusa’s head or the passionate, seductive eyes of the modern Gorgon, unless it be that any fixed unflinching gaze is sufficient reason for alarm.

Some such explanation will best account for the strange vagary of superstition which brings under the category of the evil eye two classes of things which seemingly would have no connexion either with it or with each other, looking-glasses and the stars.

To look at oneself in a mirror is, in some districts, regarded as a dangerous operation, especially if it be prolonged. A bride, being specially liable to all sinister influences, is wise to forego the pleasure of seeing her own reflection in the glass; and a woman in child-bed, who is no less liable, is deprived of all chance of seeing herself by the removal of all mirrors from the room. The risk in all cases is usually greatest at night, and in the town of Sinasos in Cappadocia no prudent person would at that time incur it[5]. The reflection, it would seem, of a man’s own image may put the evil eye upon him by its steady gaze: and it was in fear of such an issue that Damoetas, in the Idylls of Theocritus, after criticizing his own features reflected in some glassy pool, spat thrice into his bosom that he might not suffer from the evil eye[6].

The belief in a certain magical property of the stars akin to that of the evil eye is far more widely held. They are, as it were, the eyes of night, and in the darkness ‘overlook’ men and their belongings as disastrously as does the human eye in the day-time. Just as a woman after confinement is peculiarly liable to the evil eye and must have amulets hung about her and mirrors removed from her room, so must particular care be taken to avoid exposure to stellar influence. Sonnini de Magnoncourt, who had some medical experience in Greece, speaks authoritatively on this subject. According to the popular view, he says, she must not let herself be ‘seen by a star’; and if she goes out before the prescribed time,—according to this authority, only eight days, but now preferably forty days, from the birth of the child,—she is careful to return home and to shut herself up in her room by sunset, and after that hour to open neither door nor window, for fear that a star may surprise her and cause the death of both mother and child[7]. So too in the island of Chios, if there is occasion to carry leaven from one house to another, it must be covered up,—in the day-time ‘to prevent it from being seen by any strange eye,’ at night ‘to prevent it from being seen by the stars’: for if it were ‘overlooked’ by either, the bread made with it would not rise[8]. Such customs show clearly that the stars are held to exercise exactly the same malign influence as the human eye: the same simple phrases denote in Greek the operation of either, and the ‘overlooking’ of either has the same blighting effect.

The range of this mischievous influence—for I now take it that the evil eye and the stars are indistinguishable in their ill effects—is very large. Human beings are perhaps most susceptible to it. In some districts[9] indeed new-born infants up to the time of their baptism are held to be immune; till then they are the children of darkness, and the powers of darkness do not move against them. But in general no one at any moment of his life is wholly secure. Amulets however afford a reasonable safety at ordinary times; it is chiefly in the critical hours of life, at marriage and at the birth of children, that the fear of the evil eye is lively and the precautions against it more elaborate. Animals also may be affected. Horses and mules are very commonly protected by amulets hung round their necks, and this is the original purpose of the strings of blue beads with which the cab-horses of Athens are often decorated. The shepherd too has cause for anxiety on behalf of his flock, and, when a bad season or disease diminishes the number of his lambs, is apt to re-echo the pastoral complaint,

And the pernicious influence makes itself felt in even a lower scale of life. In the neighbourhood of Sparta, where there is a considerable silk industry, the women believe that silk-worms are susceptible of mischief from the evil eye; and the same superstition is recorded by de Magnoncourt from Chios.

Of inanimate things, those most easily damaged in a similar way are leaven, salt, and vinegar,—as being possessed of quickening or preservative properties to which the blighting, destructive power of the evil eye or of the stars is naturally opposed. The precautions to be observed in carrying leaven from house to house have already been noticed. Equal care is required in the making of the bread. It often happens, so I have been told, that when a woman is kneading, some malicious neighbour will come in, ostensibly for a chat, and put the evil eye upon the leaven; and unless the woman perceives what is going on and averts disaster by a special gesture which turns the evil influence against the intruder, nothing to call bread will be baked that day. Similarly it is unwise to borrow or to give away either salt or vinegar at night[11]; but if it is necessary, it is prudent to take precautions to prevent its exposure to the stars, which may even be cheated of their prey by some such device as calling the vinegar (ξεῖδι) ‘syrup’ (γλυκάδι) in asking for it[12]. Further, an object which has been exposed to the stars may even carry the infection, as it were, to those who afterwards use it. For this reason the linen and clothes of a mother and her new-born infant must never be left out of doors at night[13].

The precaution, as I have said, most commonly adopted is the wearing of amulets. The articles which have the greatest intrinsic virtue for this purpose are garlic, bits of blue stone or glass often in the form of beads, old coins, salt, and charcoal: but many other things, by their associations, may be rendered efficacious. The stump of a candle burnt on some high religious festival, or a shred of the Holy Shroud used on Good Friday, is by no means to be despised; and the bones of a bat or a snake’s skin over which a witch has muttered her incantations acquire thereby an equal merit. But such charms as these are objets de luxe; the ordinary man contents himself with the commoner articles whose virtue is in themselves. No midwife, I understand, would go about her business without a plentiful supply of garlic. It is well that the room should be redolent of it, and a few cloves must be fastened about the baby’s neck either at birth or immediately after the baptism. Blue beads are in general use for women, children, and animals. If men wear them, they are usually concealed from view. But mothers value them above all, because in virtue of their colour—γαλάζιος is modern Greek for ‘blue’—they ensure an abundant supply of milk (γάλα) unaffected by the evil eye or any other sinister potency. Salt and charcoal are most conveniently carried in little bags with a string to go round the neck. An effective charm consists of three grains of each material with an old coin. But many other things are also used; when I have been permitted to inspect the contents of such a bag, I have found strange assortments of things, pebbles, pomegranate-seeds, bits of soap, leaves of basil and other plants, often hard to recognize through age and dirt and grease. One scientifically-minded man recommended me sulphate of copper.

Special occasions also have special precautions proper to them. At a wedding, the time of all others when envious eyes are most likely to cause mischief, the bridegroom commonly carries a black-handled knife slipped inside his belt[14], and the bride has an open pair of scissors in her shoe or some convenient place, in order that any such evil influence may be ‘cut off.’ But some of these magical safeguards concern not only the evil eye, but ghostly perils in general, and will claim notice in other connexions.

If, however, through lack of precautions or in spite of them, a man suspects that he is being ‘overlooked,’ he must rely for protection on the resources with which nature has provided him. The simplest thing is to spit,—three times for choice, for that number has magical value,—but on oneself, not at the suspected foe. Theocritus was scrupulously correct, according to the modern view, in making his shepherd spit thrice on his own bosom. Another expedient, though no garlic be at hand to give effect to the words, is to ejaculate, σκόρδο ’στὰ μάτι̯α σου, ‘garlic in your eyes!’ Or use may be made of an imprecation considered effective in many circumstances of danger, νὰ φᾶς τὸ κεφάλι σου, ‘may you devour your own head!’ Lastly there is the φάσκελον, a gesture of the hand,—first raised with the fist closed and then suddenly advanced either with all the fingers open but bent, or with the thumb and little finger alone extended,—which returns the evil upon the offender’s own head with usury.

But, in spite of these manifold means of defence, the evil eye has its victims; some malady seizes upon a man, for which no other cause can be assigned; and the question of a cure arises. Here the Church comes to the rescue, with special forms of prayer, commonly known as βασκανισμοί, provided for the purpose. The person affected goes to the church, or, if the case be serious, the priest comes to his house, the prayers are recited, and the sufferer is fumigated with incense. Also if there happens to be a sacred spring or well, ἅγι̯ασμα as it is called, in the precincts of any church near,—and there are a fair number of churches in Greece which derive both fame and emolument from the possession of healing and miracle-working waters[15],—the victim of the evil eye is well-advised to drink of them. There are some, however, who rate the powers of a witch more highly than those of a priest, and prefer her incantations to the prayers of the Church. She knows, or is ready to improvise, forms of exorcism (ξόρκια, ξορκισμοί) for all kinds of affliction. A typical example[16] begins, as do many of the incantations of witchcraft, with an invocation of Christ and the Virgin and the Trinity and the twelve Apostles; then comes a complaint against the grievous illness which needs curing; next imprecations upon the man or woman responsible for causing it; and finally an adjuration of the evil eye to depart from the sufferer’s ‘head and heart and finger-nails and toe-nails and the cockles of the heart, and to begone to the hills and mountains[17]’ and so forth; after all which the Lord’s prayer or any religious formula may be repeated ad libitum. During the recitation of some such charm, the witch fumigates her patient either with incense, or,—what is more effectual where a guess can be made as to the identity of the envious enemy,—by burning something belonging to the latter, a piece of his clothing or even a handful of earth from his doorway[18]. Or again, if the patient is at a loss to conjecture who it is that has harmed him, recourse may be had to divination. A familiar method is to burn leaves or petals of certain plants,—basil and gillyflower being of special repute[19],—mentioning at the same time a number of names in succession. A loud pop or crackling denotes that the name of the offender has been reached, and the treatment can then proceed as described above.

No less widespread in Greece than the belief in the evil eye, and equally primitive in character, is the practice of magic. Few villages, I believe, even at the present day do not possess a wise woman (μάγισσα). Often indeed, owing to the spread of education and the desire to be thought ‘European’ and ‘civilised,’ the inhabitants will indignantly deny her existence, and affect to speak of witches as things of the past. But in times of illness or trouble they are apt to forget their pretensions of superiority, and do not hesitate to avail themselves of the lore inherited from their superstitious forefathers. For the most part women are the depositaries of these ancient secrets, and the knowledge of charms, incantations, and all the rites and formularies of witchcraft is handed down from mother to daughter. But men are not excluded from the profession. The functions of the priest, for example, are not clearly distinguished from those of the unconsecrated magician. At a baptism, which often takes place in the house where the child is born and not at the church, the priest opens the service by exorcising all evil spirits and influences from the four corners of the room by swinging his censer, but the midwife, who usually knows something of magic, or one of the god-parents, accompanies him and makes assurance doubly sure by spitting in each suspected nook. Moreover if a priest lead a notoriously evil life or chance to be actually unfrocked, the devil invests him with a double portion of magical power, which on any serious occasion is sure to be in request. But, apart from the clergy who owe their powers to the use or abuse of their office, there are other men too here and there who deal in witchcraft. They are usually specialists in some one branch, and professors of the white art rather than of the black,—one versed in popular medicine and the incantations proper to it, another in undoing mischievous spells, another in laying the restless dead. The general practitioners, causing disease as often as curing it, binding with curses as readily as loosing from them, are for the most part women.

I shall not attempt to enumerate here all the petty uses of magic of which I have heard or read: indeed an exhaustive treatment of the subject, even for one who had devoted a lifetime to cultivating an intimacy with Greek witches, would be hardly possible; for their secrets are not lightly divulged, and new circumstances may at any time require the invention of new methods. I propose only to describe some of the best known and most widely spread practices, some beneficent, others mischievous. Most of them will be seen to be based on the primitive and worldwide principle of sympathetic magic,—the principle that a relation, analogy, or sympathy existing, or being once established, between two objects, that which the one does or suffers, will be done or suffered also by the other.

If it be desired to cause physical injury or death to an enemy, the simplest and surest method is to make an image of him in some malleable material,—wax, lead, or clay,—and, if opportunity offer, to knead into it or attach to it some trifle from the enemy’s person. Three hairs from his head are a highly valuable acquisition, but parings of his nails or a few shreds of his clothing will serve: or again the image may be put in some place where his shadow will fall upon it as he passes. These refinements of the practice, however, are not indispensable; the image by itself will suffice. This being made, the treatment of it varies according to the degree of suffering which it is desired to inflict.

Acute pain may be caused to the man by driving into his image pins or nails. This device is popularly known as κάρφωμα, ‘pinning’ or ‘nailing,’ and many variations of it are practised. One case recorded in some detail was that of a priest’s wife who from her wedding-day onward was a prey to various pains and ills. The priest tried in vain to relieve them by prayer, and finally called in a witch to aid him. After performing certain occult rites of divination, she informed him that he must dig in the middle of his courtyard. There he found a tin, which on being opened revealed an assortment of pernicious charms,—one of his wife’s bridal shoes with a large nail through it, a dried-up bit of soap (presumably from the bridal bath) stuck full of pins, a wisp of hair (probably some of the bride’s combings) all in a tangle, and lastly a padlock. The nail and pins were at once pulled out and the hair carefully disentangled, with the result that the woman was freed from her pains and her complicated ailments. But the padlock could not be undone, and was thrown away into the sea, with the result that the woman remained childless. The bride had been ‘nailed’ (καρφωμένη) by a rival. In this case, it is true, no waxen or leaden image was used, but the principle is the same. The use of an image is only preferable as allowing the maker of it to select any part of the body which he wishes to torture.

Another method of dealing with the image is to melt or wear it away gradually; if it be of wax or lead, it may be seared with a red-hot poker, or placed bodily in the fire; if it be of clay, it may be scraped with a knife, or put into some stream which will gradually wash it away. Accordingly as it is thus wasted away, slowly or rapidly, so will the person whom it represents waste and die. This is in principle the same system as that adopted by Simaetha in the Idyll of Theocritus to win back the love of Delphis. ‘Even as I melt this wax,’ she cries, ‘with God’s help, so may the Myndian Delphis by love be straightway molten[20]’; and she too used in her magic rites a fringe from Delphis’ cloak, to shred and to cast into the fierce flame.[21] Only, in her case, the incantation turned what might have been a death-spell into a love-charm.

Love and jealousy are still the passions which most frequently suggest the use of magic. Occult methods are necessary to the girl whose modesty prevents her from courting openly the man on whom her heart is set, and not less so to her who would punish the faithlessness of a former lover.

The following are some recorded recipes[22] for winning the love of an apathetic swain.

Obtain some milk from the breasts of a mother and daughter who are both nursing male infants at the same time, or, in default of that, from any two women both nursing first-born male infants; mix it with wheat-flour and leaven, and contrive that the man eat of it. Repeat therewith the following incantation: ὅπως κλαῖνε καὶ λαχταρίζουν τώρα τὰ παιδία ποῦ τοὺς λείπει τὸ γάλα τους, ἔτσι νὰ λαχταρίσῃ καὶ ὁ τάδε γι̯ὰ τὴν τάδε, ‘As the infants now cry and throb with desire for the milk which fails them, so may N. throb with desire for M.’

Take a bat or three young swallows, and roast to cinders on a fire of sticks gathered by a witch at midnight where cross-roads meet: at the same time repeat the words, ὅπως στρηφογυρίζει, τρέμει, καὶ λαχταρίζει ἡ νυχτερίδα ἔτσι νὰ γυρίζῃ ὁ τάδε, νὰ τρέμῃ καὶ νὰ λαχταρίζῃ ἡ καρδι̯ά του γι̯ὰ τὴν τάδε, ‘As the bat writhes, quivers, and throbs, so may N. turn, and his heart quiver and throb with desire for M.’ The ashes of the bat are then to be put into the man’s drink.

Take a bat and bury it at cross-roads; burn incense over it for forty days at midnight; dig it up and grind its spine to powder. Put the dust in the man’s drink as before.

Such are some of the magic means of winning love; and the rites, while involving as much cruelty to the bat as was suffered by the bird of witchcraft, the ἴυγξ, in the ancient counterpart of these practices, are at any rate, save for the ashes in the man’s liquor, innocuous to him. But the weapon of witchcraft wherewith a jealous woman takes vengeance upon a man who has forsaken her or who has never returned her affection and takes to himself another for his bride, is truly diabolical. This is known as the spell of ‘binding’ (δέσιμον or ἀμπόδεμα[23]). Its purpose is to fetter the virility of the husband and so to prevent the consummation of the marriage. The rite itself is simple. Either the jealous girl herself or a witch employed by her attends the wedding, taking with her a piece of thread or string in which three loops have been loosely made. During the reading of the gospel or the pronouncement of the blessing, she pulls the ends of the string, forming thereby three knots in it, and at the same time mutters the brief incantation, δένω τὸν τάδε καὶ τὴν τάδε, καὶ τὸ διάβολο ’στὴ μέση, ‘I bind N. and M. and the Devil betwixt them.’ The thread is subsequently buried or hidden, and unless it can be found and either be burnt or have the knots untied, there is small hope for the man to recover from his impotence. There is no doubt, I think, that the extreme fear in which this spell is held has in some cases so worked upon the bridegroom’s nerves as to render the ‘binding’ actually effective, just as extreme faith in miraculous icons occasionally effects cures of nervous maladies[24]. Sonnini de Magnoncourt vouches for a case, known to him personally, in which the effect of this terror continued for several months, until finally the marriage was dissolved on the ground of non-consummation, and the man afterwards married another wife and regained his energy[25]. I myself have more than once been told of similar cases, in which however divorce was not sought (it is extremely rare in Greece) but the spell was broken by the finding of the thread or by countervailing operations of magic. In Aetolia, where this superstition is specially rife, I knew of a priest, a son of Belial by all accounts, who made a speciality of loosing these binding-spells. By his direction the afflicted man and his wife would go at sunset to a lonely chapel on a mountain-side, taking with them food and a liberal supply of wine, with which to regale themselves and the priest till midnight. At that hour they undressed and stood before the priest, who pronounced over them some form of exorcism and benediction,—my informant could not give me the words. They then retired to rest on some bedding provided by the priest on the chapel-floor, while he recited more prayers and swung his censer over them. I was assured that more than one couple in the small town where I was staying confessed to having obtained release from the spell by a night thus spent and with the extreme simplicity of the peasants of that district thought no shame to confess it. And this is the more easily intelligible, because, as we shall see later[26], the practice of ἐγκοίμησις, sleeping in some holy place with a view to being cured of any ailment, is as familiar to Christians of to-day as it was to their pagan ancestors.

But pure magic too, no less than these quasi-Christian methods, may effect the loosing of the bond, even without the discovery of the knotted thread which is the source of the mischief. In a recent case on record, a witch, having been consulted by a couple thus distressed, took them to the sea-shore, bade them undress, bound them together with a vine-shoot, and caused them to stand embracing one another in the water until forty waves had beaten upon them[27]. On the significance of the details of this charm no comment is made by the recorder of it; but they deserve, I think, some notice. The vine-shoot, like the olive-shoot, is a known instrument of purification, and is sometimes laid on the bier beside the dead during the lying-in-state (πρόθεσις). Salt is likewise possessed of magical powers to avert all evil influences,—we have noticed the use of it in amulets to protect from the evil eye,—and the sea is therefore more efficacious than a river for mystic purposes. Forty is the number of purification; the churching of women takes place on the fortieth day from the birth, whence the Greek word for to ‘church’ is σαραντίζω,—from σαράντα, ‘forty.’ Lastly the beating of the waves seems intended to drive out by physical compulsion the devil or any power of evil by which husband and wife are kept apart.

In view of this danger it is natural that ample precautions should be taken at every wedding. During the dressing of the bride or the bridegroom, it is customary to throw a handful of salt into a vessel of water, saying, ὅπως λυώνει τὸ ἁλάτι, ἔτσι νὰ λυώσουν οἱ ὀχτροί (ἐχθροί), ‘As the salt dissolves, so may all enemies dissolve.’ The black-handled knife worn by the bridegroom in his belt, and the pair of scissors put in the bride’s shoe or sometimes attached to her girdle, both of which have been noticed as safeguards against the evil eye, serve also to ‘cut’ this magic bond of impotence. Sometimes too a pair of scissors and a piece of fisherman’s net are put in the bridal bed. In Acarnania and Aetolia, and it may be elsewhere, a still more primitive custom prevails; both bride and bridegroom wear an old piece of fishing-net,—in which therefore resides the virtue of salt water,—round the loins next to the body; and from these bits of netting are afterwards made amulets to be worn by any children of the marriage. Such customs are likely long to continue among the simpler folk of modern Greece, who frankly and innocently wish the bride at her wedding reception ‘seven sons and one daughter.’

But it is not only for ailments induced by malicious magic that magical means of cure or aversion are used. The whole of popular medicine is based upon the knowledge of charms and incantations. Many simples and drugs are of course known and employed; but it is still generally believed, as it was in old time, that ‘there would be no good in the herb without the incantation[28].’ For the most ordinary diseases are credited to supernatural causes, and there is no ill to which flesh is heir,—from a headache to the plague,—without some demon responsible for it. A nightmare and the sense of physical oppression which often accompanies it are not traced to so vulgar a cause as a heavy supper, but are dignified as the work of a malicious being named Βραχνᾶς[29], who in the dead of night delights to seat himself on the chest of some sleeper, and by his weight produces an unpleasant feeling of congestion. Material for a similar personification has been found also in the more terrible pestilences by which Greece has from time to time been visited. It is still believed among the poorest folk of Athens that in a cleft on the Hill of the Nymphs, undisturbed even by the modern observatory on its summit, there lives a gruesome sisterhood, a trinity of she-devils, Χολέρα, Βλογι̯ά, and Πανοῦκλα,—Cholera, Smallpox, and Plague.

Granted then that illness in general is the malicious work of supernatural beings, common reason recommends the employment of supernatural means to defeat and expel them. Forms of exorcism have in past times been provided by the Church and are still in vogue; but here, as in other matters, the functions of the priest are shared with the witch, and an old woman versed in the traditional lore of popular medicine is as competent as any bishop to cast out the devils of sickness. Nor do the popular incantations differ much in substance from the ecclesiastical. The witch knows better than to try to cast out devils in the Devil’s name, and her exorcisms contain invocations of God and the saints of the same character as those sanctioned by the Church; only in her accompanying rites and gestures there is a picturesque variety which is lacking in the swinging of the priest’s censer.

The details of the rites and the full forms of incantation are in general extremely difficult to obtain. The witches themselves are always reticent on such points, and I have known one plead, by way of excuse for her apparent discourtesy in withholding information, that the virtue of magic was diminished in proportion as the knowledge of it was disseminated. One cure, however,—a cure for headache—will sufficiently illustrate the principle on which the healing art among the common-folk generally proceeds. This cure is based upon the assumption that the tense and bruised feeling of a bad headache is due to the presence of some demon within the skull, and that the room which he occupies must have been provided by distention of the head,—which will therefore measure more in circumference while it aches than when the demon has been exorcised. This is demonstrated in the course of the cure. The witch takes a handkerchief and measures with it the patient’s head. Doubling back the six or eight inches of the handkerchief that remain over, she puts in the fold three cloves of garlic, three grains of salt, or some other article of magical virtue, and ties a knot. Then waving the handkerchief about the patient’s head, she recites her form of exorcism,—but usually in a tone so low and mumbling that the bystanders cannot catch the words. The exorcism being finished, she again measures the head, and this time the knot, which marks the previous measurement, is found to overlap, by two or three inches it may be, the other end of the kerchief,—a sure sign that the intruding demon has been expelled and that the head having returned to its natural dimensions will no longer ache[30]. The exact words of the incantation which should accompany this rite I could not obtain; but I make little doubt that in substance they would differ little from a Macedonian formula recently published:—

‘For megrim and headache:

‘Write on a piece of paper:—God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, loose the demon of the megrim from the head of Thy servant. I charge thee, unclean spirit which ever sittest in the head of man, take thy pain and depart from the head: from half-head, membrane, and vertebra, from the servant of God, So-and-so. Stand we fairly, stand we with fear of God. Amen[31].’

In this instance we have the formula but not, it seems, the rite which should accompany it; for the mere act of committing the words to paper is hardly likely to be deemed sufficient. Probably the paper would be laid under the pillow at night, or, as I have known in other cases, would be burnt, and its ashes taken as a sedative powder.

The various charms which we have so far considered are directed towards the hurt or the healing of man: but external nature is also responsive to magic spells. It is rumoured that there are still witches who have power to draw down the moon from the heavens by incantation; but a more useful ceremony, designed to draw down the clouds upon a parched land, may still be actually witnessed. The most recent case known to me was in the April of 1899, when the rite was carried out some few days, unfortunately, after I had left the district by the people of Larissa. The custom is known all over the north of Greece—in Epirus[32], Thessaly, and Macedonia,—and also it is said among some of the Turks, Wallachs, and Servians; to the south of those regions and in the islands of the Aegean I heard nothing of it. A boy (or sometimes, it is said, a girl[33]) is stripped naked and then dressed up in wreaths and festoons of leafage, grass, and flowers, and, escorted by a troop of children of his own age, goes the round of the neighbourhood. He is known as the περπερία, and his companions sing as they go,

and so forth in such simple strain[34]. At each doorway and more particularly at every spring and well, which it is the special duty of the Perpería to visit, anyone who will may empty a vessel of water over the boy, to whom some compensation for his drenching is usually made in the form of sweetmeats or coppers.

The word περπερία has been the subject of considerable discussion. By-forms περπερίτσα, περπεροῦνα, and παππαροῦνα also occur. The first two are of the nature of diminutives; the last-named is a corrupt form used only, so far as I know, in one district of Epirus, and means a ‘garden-poppy.’ The perversion of the word has in this district (Zagorion) affected the rite itself; for it is considered necessary for this flower to be used largely in dressing up the chief actor in the ceremony[35]. But the most general, and, as I think, most correct form is περπερία (or περπερεία). With the ancient word περπερεία, derived from the Latin perperus and used in the sense of ‘boasting’ or ‘ostentation,’ it can, I feel, have no connexion; and I suggest that it stands for περιπορεία, with the same abbreviation as in περπατῶ for περιπατῶ, ‘walk,’ and subsequent assimilation of the first two syllables. If my conjecture is right, the word originally meant nothing more than a ‘procession round’ the village; next it became confined in usage to a procession for the particular purpose of procuring rain; and finally, the words πορεία[36] and πορεύομαι having been lost from popular speech, it was taken to be the name of the boy who plays the uncomfortable part of vegetation craving water. And indeed it would seem likely that the song which forms part of the ceremony was actually first composed at a time when περπερία was still understood in the sense of ‘procession’: for in every recorded version known to me it would be still possible to interpret the word in this meaning without detriment to the context.

The rite itself as an example of sympathetic magic requires no commentary: a simpler application of the principle that like produces like could not be found.

Other examples of primitive customs and beliefs still prevalent in Greece might easily be amassed: but I have preferred to select these few for detailed treatment rather than to glance over a larger number, in order that they may the more clearly be seen to belong to certain types of superstition found the whole world over and therefore presumably dating from prehistoric ages: for if the population of Greece has proved a good vehicle for the transmission of superstitions so primaeval, it will surely follow that there is nothing extravagant in hoping to learn also from their traditions something of the religion of historic Hellas.

§ 3. The survival of Hellenic Tradition.

There may however be some who, while admitting that mere lapse of time need not have extinguished ancient Hellenic ideas, will be disposed to question the likelihood, even the possibility, of their transmission on racial grounds. The belief in the evil eye and the practice of sympathetic magic were once, they may say, the common property of the whole uncivilised world; and though the inhabitants of modern Greece have inherited these old superstitions and usages, there is nothing to show from what ancestry they have received the inheritance. The population, it may be urged, has changed; the Greeks of to-day are not Hellenes; their blood has been contaminated by foreign admixture, and with this admixture may have come external, non-Hellenic traditions; has not Fallmerayer stoutly maintained that the modern inhabitants of Greece have practically no claim to the name of Hellenes, but come of a stock Slavonic in the main, though cross-bred with the offscourings of many peoples?

The historical facts from which Fallmerayer argued are not to be slighted. It is well established[37] that, from the middle of the sixth century onwards, successive hordes of Slavonic invaders swept over Greece, driving such of the native population as escaped destruction into the more mountainous or remote districts; that in the middle of the eighth century, when the numbers of the Greek population had been further reduced by the great pestilence of 746, ‘the whole country,’ to use the exact phrase of Constantine Porphyrogenitus[38], ‘became Slavonic and was occupied by foreigners’; that the Slavonic supremacy lasted at least until the end of the tenth century; that thereafter a gradual fusion of the remnants of the Greek population with their conquerors began, but proceeded so slowly that at the beginning of the thirteenth century the ‘Franks,’ as the warriors of Western Christendom were popularly called, found Slavonic tribes in Elis and Laconia quite detached from the rest of the population, acknowledging indeed the supremacy of the Byzantine government, but still employing their own language and their own laws; and finally that the amalgamation of the two races was not complete even by the middle of the fifteenth century, for the Turks at their conquest of Greece found several tribes of the Peloponnese, especially in the neighbourhood of Mount Taygetus, still speaking a Slavonic tongue.

If then, as is now generally admitted, Fallmerayer’s conclusions were somewhat exaggerated, it remains none the less an historical fact that there is a very large admixture of Slavonic blood in the veins of the present inhabitants of Greece. The truth of this is moreover enforced by the physical characteristics of the people as a whole. Travellers conversant alike with Slavs and with modern Greeks have affirmed to me their impression that there is a close physical resemblance between the two races; and while I have not the experience of Slavonic races which would permit me to judge of this resemblance for myself, it certainly offers the best explanation of my own observations with regard to the variations of physical type in different parts of the Greek world. In the islands of the Aegean and in the promontory of Maina, to which the Slavs never penetrated, the ancient Hellenic types are far commoner than in the rest of the Peloponnese or in Northern Greece. Not a little of the charm of Tenos or Myconos or Scyros lies in the fact that the grand and impassive beauty of the earlier Greek sculpture may still be seen in the living figures and faces of men and women: and if anyone would see in the flesh the burly, black-bearded type idealised in a Heracles, he need but go to the south of the Peloponnese, and among the Maniotes he will soon be satisfied: for there he will find not merely an occasional example, as of reversion to an ancestral type, but a whole tribe of swarthy, stalwart warriors, whose aspect seems to justify their claim that in proud, though poverty-stricken, isolation they have kept their native peninsula free from alien aggression, and the old Laconian blood still pure in their veins. The ordinary Greek of the mainland, on the other hand, is usually of a mongrel and unattractive appearance; and in view of the marked difference of the type in regions untouched by the Slavs, I cannot but impute his lack of beauty to his largely Slavonic ancestry.

Yet even in the centre of the Peloponnese where the Slavonic influence has probably been strongest, the pure Greek type is not wholly extinct. I remember a young man who acted as ostler and waiter and in all other capacities at a small khan on the road from Tripolitza to Sparta, who would not have been despised as a model by Praxiteles; and elsewhere too, now and again, I have seen statuesque forms and classic features, less perfect indeed than his, but yet proclaiming beyond question an Hellenic lineage; so that I should hesitate to say that in any part of Greece the population is as purely Slavonic as in Maina or many of the islands it is purely Greek.

But, as I think, the exact proportion of Slavonic and of Hellenic blood in the veins of the modern Greeks is not a matter of supreme importance. Even if their outward appearance were universally and completely Slavonic, I would still maintain that they deserve the name of Greeks. Though their lineage were wholly Slavonic, their nationality, I claim, would still be Hellenic. For the nationality of a people, like the personality of an individual, is something which eludes definition but which embraces the mental and the moral as well as the physical. A man’s personality is not to be determined by knowledge of his family and his physiognomy alone; and similarly racial descent and physical type are not the sole indices of nationality. Even if a purely Slavonic ancestry had dowered the inhabitants of Greece with a purely Slavonic appearance, yet, if their thoughts and speech and acts were, as they are, Greek, I would still venture to call them Greek in nationality. Ce n’est que la peau dont l’Ethiope ne change pas.

But the people of modern Greece do not actually present so extreme a case of acquired nationality. They are partly Greek in race: and if it should appear that they are wholly Greek in nationality, the explanation must simply be that the character, no less than the language, of their Hellenic ancestors was superior in vitality to that of the Slavs who intermarried with them, and alone has been transmitted to the modern Greek people.

What, then, is the national character at the present day?

The first feature of it which casual conversation with any Greek will soon bring into view is that narrow patriotism which was so remarkable a trait in the Greeks of old time. If he be asked what is his native land (πατρίδα), his answer will be, not Greece nor any of the larger divisions of it, but the particular town or hamlet in which he happened to be born: and if in later life he change his place of abode, though he live in his new home ten or twenty years, he will regard himself and be regarded by the native-born inhabitants as a foreigner (ξένος). Or again if a man obtain work for a short time in another part of the country, or if a girl marry an inhabitant of a village half a dozen miles from her own, the departure is mourned with some of those plaintive songs of exile in which the popular muse delights. Nor are there lacking historical cases in which this narrow love of country has produced something more than fond lamentations; the boast of the Maniotes that they have never acknowledged alien masters is in the main a true boast, and it was pure patriotism which nerved them in their long struggle with the Turks for the possession of their rugged, barren, storm-lashed home. It was patriotism too, narrow and proud, that both sustained the heroic outlaws of Souli in their defiance of Ottoman armies, and also,—because they disdained alliance with their Greek neighbours,—contributed to their final downfall.

But so tenacious and indomitable a courage is in modern, as it was in ancient, Greece the exception rather than the rule. The men of Maina and of Souli are comparable to the Spartans: but in no period of Greek history has steadfast bravery been commonly displayed. Yet, in spite of the humiliating experiences of the late Graeco-Turkish war, the Greek people should not be judged devoid of courage. But theirs is a courage which comes of impulse rather than of self-command; a courage which might prompt a charge as brilliant as that of Marathon, but could not cheerfully face the hardships of a campaign; a courage which might turn a slight success into a victory, but could not save a retreat from becoming a rout.

It must be acknowledged also that the rank and file are in general more admirable than their officers. The bravery of the men, impulsive and short-lived though it be, is inspired by a real devotion of themselves to a cause; whereas among the officers self-seeking and even self-saving are conspicuous faults. Even the really courageous leaders seldom have a single eye to the success of their arms. Their plans are marred by petty jealousies. The same rivalries for the supreme command which embarrassed the Greeks of old in defending their liberty against Persia, were repeated in the struggles of the last century to throw off the Turkish yoke. And if in both cases the Greeks were successful, in neither was victory due to the unity and harmony of their leaders, but rather to that passionate hatred of the barbarians which stirred the people as a whole.

Indeed, not only in war but in all conditions of life, any personal eminence or distinction has been apt to turn the head of a Greek. ‘The abundant enjoyment of power or wealth,’ said the ancients not without knowledge of the national character, ‘begets lawlessness and arrogance’; and in humbler phrase the modern proverb sums up the same qualities of the race,—καλὸς δοῦλος, κακὸς ἀφέντης, ‘a good servant and a bad master.’ In all periods of Greek history there have been few men who have attained to power without abusing it. The honour of being returned to the Greek Parliament upsets the mental balance of a large number of deputies. Without any more intimate knowledge of politics than can be obtained from second-rate newspapers, they believe themselves called and qualified to lead each his own party, with the result—so it is commonly said—that no government since the first institution of parliament has ever had an assured majority in the House, and on an average there have been more than one dissolution a year. The modern parliament is as unstable an institution as the ancient ecclesia of Athens when there was no longer a Pericles to control it, and its demagogues are as numerous.

Even the petty eminence of a village schoolmaster proves to be too giddy a pinnacle for many. Such an one thinks it necessary to support his position—which owing to the Greek love of education is more highly respected perhaps than in other countries—by a pretence of universal knowledge and a pedantry as lamentable as it is ludicrous. I remember a gentleman who boasted the title of Professor of Ancient History in the gymnasium or secondary school of a certain town, who called to me one day as I was passing a café where he and some of his friends were sitting, and said that they were having a pleasant little discussion about the first Triumvirate, and had recalled the names of Cicero and Caesar, but could not at the moment remember the third party. Could I help them? I hesitated a moment, and then resolved to risk it and suggest, what was at least alliterative if not accurate, the name of Cato. ‘Of course,’ he answered, ‘how these things do slip one’s memory sometimes!’ Yet this Professor posed as an authority on many subjects outside his own province of learning, and frequently when I met him would insist on talking dog-Latin with an Italian pronunciation, a medium in which I found it difficult to converse.

In this readiness to discourse on any and every subject and to display attainments in and out of season, he and the class of which he is typical are the living images of the less respectable of the ancient Sophists. And in pedantry of language too they fairly rival their famous prototypes. The movement in favour of an artificial revival of ancient Greek has already been of long duration, and has had a detrimental effect upon the modern language. The vulgar tongue has a melodious charm, while many classical words, in the modern pronunciation, are extremely harsh and uncouth. The object of the movement is to secure an uniform ‘pure’ speech, as they call it, approximate to that of Plato or of Xenophon; and the method adopted is to mix up Homeric and other words of antiquarian celebrity with literal renderings of modern French idioms, inserting datives, infinitives, and other obsolete forms at discretion. To aid in this movement is the task and the delight of the schoolmasters: and such is their devotion to this linguistic sophistry, that they are not dismayed even by the ambiguity arising from the use of ancient forms indistinguishable in modern speech. The two old words ἡμέτερος and ὑμέτερος have now no difference in sound: yet the schoolmaster uses them and inculcates the use of them, with the lamentable result that the children are not taught to distinguish meum and tuum even in speech.

And here again the character of the modern Greek reflects that of his ancestors. Honesty and truthfulness are not the national virtues. To lie, or even to steal, is accounted morally venial and intellectually admirable. It is a proof of superior mother-wit, than which no quality is more valued in the business of everyday life. Almost the only things in Greece which have fixed prices are tobacco, newspapers, and railway-tickets. The hire of a mule, the cost of a bunch of grapes, the price of meat, the remuneration for a vote at the elections,—such matters as these are the subject of long and vivacious bargaining, and if the money does not change hands on the spot, the bargain may be smilingly repudiated and an attempt made, on any pretext which suggests itself, to extort more. Yet there is a certain charm in all this; for, if a man get his own price, it is not so much the amount of his profit which pleases him as his success in winning it; and if he fail, he takes a smaller sum with perfect good humour and increased respect for the man who has outwitted him. Anyone may be honest; but to be ἔξυπνος, as they say, shrewd, wide-awake,—this is Greek and admirable. The contrast of an Aristides with a Themistocles is the natural expression of Greek thought. Moral uprightness and mental brilliance are not to be expected of one and the same man; and for the most part the Greeks now as in old time praise others for their justice and pride themselves on their cunning. The acme of cleverness is touched by him who can both profit by dishonesty and maintain a reputation for sincerity.

But, while truthfulness and fair dealing are certainly rare, there is one relation in which the most scrupulous fidelity is unfailingly shown. The obligations of hospitality are everywhere sacred. The security and the comfort of the guest are not in name only but in actual fact the first consideration of his host. However unscrupulous a Greek may be in his ordinary dealings, he never, I believe, harbours for one moment the idea of making profit out of the stranger who seeks the shelter of his roof. For hospitality in Greece, it must be remembered, means not the entertainment of friends and acquaintances who are welcome for their own sake or from whom a return in kind may be expected, but real φιλοξενία, a generous and friendly welcome to a stranger unknown yesterday and vanished again to-morrow. To each unbidden chance-comer the door is always open. For lodging he may chance to have an incense-reeking room where the family icons hang, or a corner of a cottage-floor barricaded against the poultry and other inmates; for food, hot viands rich in circumambient oil, or three-month-old rye-bread softened in a cup of water; but among rich and poor alike he is certain of the best which there is to give. Even where there are inns available, the stranger will constantly find that the first native of the place to whom he puts the Aristophanic enquiry ὅπου κόρεις ὀλίγιστοι[39]—which inn is of least entomological interest—will constitute himself not guide but host and will place the resources of his own house freely at the service of the chance-found visitor.

The reception accorded by Eumaeus to Odysseus, in its revelation of human—and also of canine—character, differs in no respect from that which may await any traveller at the present day. As Odysseus approached the swineherd’s hut, ‘suddenly the yelping dogs espied him, and with loud barking rushed upon him, but Odysseus guilefully sat down and let fall his staff from his hand[40].’ Such is the opening of the scene; and many, I suppose, must have wondered, as they read it, wherein consisted Odysseus’ guilefulness. A shepherd of Northern Arcadia resolved me that riddle. I had been attacked on a mountain-path by two or three of his dogs,—‘like unto wild beasts[41],’ as Homer has it,—and the combat may have lasted some few minutes when the shepherd thought fit to intervene. Sheep-dogs are of course valued in proportion to their ferocity towards any person or animal approaching the flock, and a taste of blood now and again is said to keep them on their mettle. Fortunately matters had not reached that point; but none the less I suggested to the man that he might have bestirred himself sooner. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘if you are really in difficulties, you should sit down’; and when I showed some surprise, he explained that anyone who is attacked by sheepdogs has only to sit down and let go his walking-stick or gun or other offensive weapon, and the dogs, understanding that a truce has been called, will sit down round him and maintain, so to speak, a peaceful blockade[42]. On subsequent occasions I tested the shepherd’s counsel, beginning prudently with one dog only and, as I gained assurance, raising the number: it is uncomfortable[43] to remain sitting with a bloodthirsty Molossian hound at one’s back, ready to resume hostilities if any suspicious movement is made; but I must own that, in my own fairly wide experience, Greek dogs, as they are sans peur in combat, are also sans reproche in observing a truce. The traveller may fare worse than by following the example of guileful Odysseus.

But if the scene of the encounter be not a mountain-path but the approach to some cottage, the dogs’ master will, like Eumaeus, hasten to intervene, ‘chiding them and driving them this way and that with a shower of stones[44],’—for the Greek dog does not heed mere words,—and again like Eumaeus will assure his visitor that he himself would have been ‘covered with shame[45]’ if the dogs had done his guest any hurt. Then he will conduct his guest into his cottage and bid him take his fill of bread and wine before he tells whence he is come and how he has fared[46]: for Greek hospitality spares the guest the fatigue of talking until he is refreshed. The visitor therefore sits at his ease, silent and patient, while his host catches and kills such beast or fowl as he may possess, cuts up the flesh in small pieces, threads these on a spit, and holds them over the embers of his fire till they are ready to serve up[47]: similarly, in Homeric fashion, he mixes wine and water[48]; and then, all the preparations being now complete, he urges his guest to the meal[49].

Thus the hospitality of to-day, in its details no less than in its spirit, recalls the hospitality of the Homeric age. The supreme virtue of the ancient Greek remains the supreme virtue of the modern, and a familiarity with the manners of the present day alone might suffice to explain why Paris who stole another man’s wife was execrable but Admetus who let his own wife die for him could yet win admiration. The one broke the laws of hospitality; the other, by hiding his loss and entertaining his guest, upheld them.

A comparative estimate, such as I have essayed, of the characters of Greeks of old and Greeks of to-day is perhaps evidence of a somewhat intangible nature to those who are not personally intimate with the people: but no foreigner, even though he were totally ignorant of the modern language, could chance upon one of the many festivals of the country without remarking that there, in humbler form, are re-enacted many of the scenes of ancient days. The πανηγύρια, as they call these festivals,—diminutives, both in name and in form, of the ancient πανηγύρεις,—present the same medley of religion, art, trading, athletics, and amusement which constituted the Olympian games. The occasion is most commonly some saint’s-day, and a church or a sacred spring (ἅγι̯ασμα) the centre of the gathering. Art is represented by the contests of local poets or wits in improvising topical and other verses, and occasionally there is present one of the old-fashioned rhapsodes, whose number is fast diminishing, to recite to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument still called the κιθάρα[50] the glorious feats of some patriot-outlaw (κλέφτης) in defiance of the Turks. Then there are the pedlars and hucksters strolling to and fro or seated at their stalls, and ever crying their wares—fruit, sausages, confectionery of strange hues and stranger taste, beads, knives, cheap icons ranging in subject from likenesses of patron-saints to gaudy views of hell, and all manner of tin-foil trinkets representing ships, cattle, and parts of the human body for dedication in the church. Then in some open space there will be a gathering of young men, running, wrestling, hurling the stone; yonder others, and with them the girls, indulge in the favourite recreation of Greece, those graceful dances, of which the best-known, the συρτός[51], and probably others too, are a legacy from dancers of old time. It is impossible to be a spectator of such scenes without recognising that here, in embryonic form, are the festivals of which the famous gatherings of Olympia and Nemea, Delphi and the Isthmus, were the full development.

And it may well happen too that the observant onlooker will descry also the rudiments of ancient drama. Often, as is natural in so mountainous and rugged a country, the only level dancing-place which a village possesses is a stone-paved threshing-floor hewn out of the hill-side. Hither on any festal occasion, be it a saint’s-day or one of the celebrations which naturally follow the ingathering of harvest or vintage, the dancers betake themselves. Here too a small booth or tent, still called σκηνή, is often rigged up, to which they can retire for rest or refreshment, while on the slopes above are ranged the spectators. The circular threshing-floor is the orchestra, the hill-side provides its tiers of seats, the dancers, who always sing while they dance, are the chorus; add only the village musician twanging a sorry lyre, and in the intervals of dancing an old-fashioned rhapsode reciting some story of bygone days, or, it may be, two village wits contending in improvised pleasantries, and the rudiments of ancient Tragedy or Comedy are complete.

Other illustrations might easily be amassed. On March 1st the boys of Greece still parade the village-streets with a painted wooden swallow set on a flower-decked pole, and sing substantially the same ‘swallow-song’ (χελιδόνισμα)[52] as was sung in old time in Rhodes[53]. On May 1st the girls make wreaths of flowers and corn which, like the ancient εἰρεσιώνη, must be left hanging over the door of the house till next year’s wreaths take their place. The fisherman still ties his oar to a single thole with a piece of rope or a thong of leather, as did the mariners of Homer’s age[54]. The farmer still drives his furrows with an Hesiodic plough.

Such are a few of the survivals which bear witness to the genuinely Hellenic nationality of the inhabitants of modern Greece: and last, but not least, there is the language, which, albeit no index of race, is most cogent evidence of tradition. To the action of thought upon language there corresponds a certain reaction of language upon thought: it is impossible to speak a tongue which contains, let us say, the word νεράϊδα (modern Greek for a ‘nymph’) without possessing also an idea of the being whom that word denotes. Therefore even if the whole population of Greece were demonstrably of Slavonic race, the fact that it now speaks Greek would go far to support its claim to Hellenic nationality: for its adoption of the Greek language would imply its assimilation of Greek thought.

But, quite apart from the evidence of custom and language, the occasional perpetuation of the ancient Greek physical type and the general survival of the ancient Greek character plainly forbid so extreme a supposition as that of Fallmerayer: no traveller familiar with the modern Greek peasantry could entertain for a moment the idea that at any period the whole of Greece became Slavonicized, but, whatever might be the historical arguments for such a theory, would reject it, on the evidence of his own eyes, as ludicrously exaggerated. Fusion of race, no doubt, there has been; but in that fusion the Hellenic element must have been the most vital and persistent; for if the present population of Greece is of mixed descent, in its traditions at least it is almost purely Hellenic.

§ 4. The Survival of Pagan Tradition.

It appears then that notwithstanding the immigration of Slavonic hordes, and notwithstanding also, it may be added, the influences exercised in later periods by ‘Franks,’ Genoese, Venetians, and Turks, the traditions of the inhabitants of Greece still remain singularly pure; and their claim to Hellenic nationality is justified by their language, by their character, and by many secular aspects of their civilisation. But in the domain of religion it might reasonably be expected that a large change would have taken place. There is the obstinate fact, it may be thought, that the Greeks are now and have long been Christian. Did not the new religion dispossess and oust the ancient polytheism? Are we to look for pagan customs in the hallowed usages of the Greek Church? What can the simple Christian peasant of to-day, subject from his youth up to ecclesiastical influence, know of the religion of his distant ancestors,—of those fundamental beliefs which guided their conduct towards gods and men in this life, and inspired their care for the dead?

On the conduct of man towards his fellow-men in this life the influence of Christianity appears to have been as great as that of paganism was small. Duty towards one’s neighbour hardly came within the purview of Hellenic religion. If we look at the supreme acts of worship in ancient times, we cannot fail to be struck by the disunion of the religious and the ethical. A certain purity was no doubt required of those who attended the mysteries of Eleusis; but by that purity was meant physical cleanliness and, strangely enough, a pure use of the Greek language, just as much as any moral temperance or rectitude; and the required condition was largely attained by the use or avoidance of certain foods and by bathing in the sea. Their cleanliness in fact was of the same confused kind, half physical and half moral, as that which the inhabitants of Tenos were formerly wont, and perhaps still continue, to seek on S. John the Baptist’s day (June 24) by leaping thrice through a bonfire and crying ‘Here I leave my sins and my fleas[55]’: and it was acquired by means equally material. There is nothing conspicuously ethical in such a purity as this.

If moreover, as has been well argued[56], a state of ecstasy was the highest manifestation of religious feeling, and this spiritual exaltation was the deliberate aim and end of Bacchic and other orgies, it must be frankly avowed that religion in its highest manifestations was not conducive to what we call morality. The means of inducing the ecstatic condition comprised drunkenness, inhalation of vapours, wild and licentious dancing. With physical surexcitation came, or was intended to come, a spiritual elevation such that the mind could visualise the object of its desire[57] and worship, and enjoy a sense of unity therewith. On the savagery and debauchery which accompanied these religious celebrations there is no need to enlarge. The Bacchae of Euripides, with all its passion for the beauty of holiness, is a standing monument to the excesses of frenzy: and that these were no mere figment of the poet’s imagination nor a transfiguration of rites long obsolete, is proved by a single sentence of a sober enough writer of later times, ‘The things that take place at nocturnal celebrations, however licentious they may be, although known to the company at large, are to some extent condoned by them owing to the drunkenness[58].’

There were of course certain sects, such as the Orphic, who, in strong contrast with the ordinary religion, upheld definite ethical standards, preaching the necessity of purification from sin, and advocating moral and even ascetic rules of life. Yet, in spite of this, we find a certain amalgamation of Orphic and Bacchic mysteries. And why? Simply because both sects alike had a single end in view, a spiritual exaltation in which the soul might transcend the things of ordinary life, and see and commune with its gods. What did it matter if the means to that end differed? The one sect might reduce the passions of the body by rigid abstinence; the other might deaden them with a surfeit of their desire; but, whether by prostration or by surexcitation, the same religious end was sought and gained, and that end justified means which we count immoral.

In effect the morality of a man’s life counted for nothing as compared with his religion. Participation in the mysteries ensured blessings here and hereafter which an evil life would not forfeit nor a good life, without initiation, earn. ‘Thrice blessed they of men, who look upon these rites ere they go to Hades’ home: for them alone is there true life there, and for the others nought but evil[59].’ It was this that made Diogenes scoffingly ask, ‘What, shall the thief Pataecion have a better lot than Epaminondas after death, because he has been initiated[60]?’ Seemingly religion and morality were to the Greek mind divorced, or rather had never been wedded. Religion was concerned only with the intercourse of man and god: the moral character of the man himself and his relations with his fellows were outside the religious sphere.

Indeed it would have been hard for the ancients to regard morality as a religious obligation, when immorality was freely imputed to their gods. This was a real obstacle to the ethical improvement of the people at large, and was recognised as such by many thinkers. Pindar strove to expurgate mythological stories which brought discredit on the morals of Olympus. Plato would have banished the evil records of Homeric theology from his ideal state, and ridicules Musaeus for forming no more lofty conception of future bliss than ‘eternal drunkenness.’ Epicurus defended his own attitude towards the gods on the plea that there was ‘no impiety in doing away with the popular gods, but rather in attaching to the gods the popular ideas of them[61].’ In effect, in order to reconcile religion with the teaching of ethics, the would-be preacher of morality had either openly to discard a large amount of the popular theology or else to have recourse to adaptation and mystical interpretation of so artificial and arbitrary a kind that it could gain no hold upon the simple and spontaneous beliefs of the common-folk. Yet even among the ordinary men of those days there must have been some who, though they did not aspire to instruct their fellow-men, yet in hours of sober reason and cool judgement cannot have viewed unabashed the inconsistencies of a religion whose gods were stained with human vices. But such thoughts, we may suppose, were swept away, as men approached their sanctuaries and their mysteries, by a flood of religious fervour. Passion in such moments defeated reason. Emotion, susceptibility, imagination, impetuosity, powers of visualisation regarded among western nations as the perquisite of the inebriate, powers of ecstasy not easily distinguished from hysteria,—such were the mental conditions essential to the highest acts of worship; by these, and not by sober meditation, the soul attained to the closest communing and fullest union with that god whose glory for the nonce outshone all pale remembrance of mere moral rectitude and alone was able to evoke every supreme emotion of his worshipper.

If then morality was ever to be imposed and sanctioned by religion, a wholly new religion had to be found. This was the opportunity of Christianity. Paganism, in some of its most sacred rites, had availed itself even of immoral means to secure a religious end: Christianity gave to ethics a new and higher status, and was rather in danger of making religion wholly subservient to morality. That it was difficult to bring the first converts to the new point of view, is evident from the rebukes administered by S. Paul to the Corinthians, who seem not only to have indulged in many gross forms of vice in everyday life, but even to have made the most sacred of Christian services an occasion for gluttony and drunkenness[62].

In all then that concerns the ethical standards of the people, our study of modern Greece will contribute little to the understanding of ancient thought or conduct. Christianity has fenced men about with a rigid moral code, and has exerted itself to punish those who break bounds. Duty towards man is now recognised as the complement of duty towards God; and any one who by a notoriously evil life has outraged the moral laws of conduct, is liable to be deprived by excommunication of the established means of worship. The frailties of the Greek character remain indeed such as they always were: but now religion at least enjoins, if it cannot always enforce, the observance of a moral code which includes the eighth commandment, and Pataecion, though he go regularly to church, yet lacks something.

But while the Church had an open field in matters of morality and had no system of ethics based on Hellenic religion to combat in introducing her higher views of man’s duty towards his fellow-men, in the province of pure religion and of all that concerns the relations of man with his God or gods she necessarily encountered competition and opposition. Primarily the contest between paganism and Christianity might have been expected to resolve itself into a struggle between polytheism and monotheism: but as a matter of fact that simple issue became considerably complicated.

The minds of the educated classes had become confused by the subtleties of the Gnostics, who sought to find, in some philosophical basis common to all religions, an intellectual justification for accepting Christianity without wholly discarding earlier religious convictions. This however was a matter of theology rather than of religion, appealing not to the heart but to the head: and so far as the common-folk were concerned we may safely say that such speculations were above their heads.

Yet for them too the issue was confused in two ways. The first disturbing factor was the attitude adopted by each of the two parties, pagan and Christian, towards the object of the other’s worship. The pagans—so catholic are the sympathies of polytheism—were ready enough to welcome Christ into the number of their gods. Tertullian tells us that the emperor Tiberius proposed the apotheosis of Christ[63]. Hadrian is said to have built temples in his honour[64]. Alexander Severus had in his private chapel statues of Christ, Abraham, and Orpheus[65]; and a similar association of Homer, Pythagoras, Christ, and S. Paul is noted by S. Augustine[66]. Since then there is no reason for supposing that the common-folk were more exclusive in their religious sympathies than the upper classes, it may safely be inferred that the average Pagan was willing to admit Christ to a place among the gods of Greece. The Christians on the other hand did not attack paganism by an utter denial of the existence of the old gods. They sought rather to ridicule and discredit them by pointing out the inconsistencies of pagan theology, and by ransacking mythology for every tale of the vices and misdoings of its deities. They even appealed to the testimony of Homer himself to show that the so-called gods (θεοί) of the Greek folk were mere demons (δαίμονες)[67],—for since Homer’s day the latter word had lost caste. Such methods, had they been wholly successful, might have produced similar results to those which followed the conflict of two religions in the early ages of Greece. As the Titanic dynasty of gods had fallen before the Olympian Zeus, and in their defeat had come to be accounted cruel and malicious powers rightly ousted from heaven by a more just and gracious deity, so too in turn might the whole number of the pagan gods have been reduced to the status of devils to act as a foil to the goodness of the Christian God. But this did not happen. One reason perhaps was that Christianity came provided with its own devil or devils, and the pagans were naturally averse from placing the gods whom they had been wont to venerate in the same category with spirits so uncompromisingly evil. The main reason however must be found in the fact that the Church had nothing to offer to the pagans in exchange for the countless gods of the old religion whom she was endeavouring to displace and to degrade. Indeed the real difficulty of the Christian Church was the tolerant spirit of the Greek people. They would not acknowledge that any feud existed. They were ready to worship the Christian God: but they must have felt that it was unreasonable of the Christian missionaries to ask them to give up all their old gods merely because a new god had been introduced. Even if their gods were all that the Christians represented them to be—cruel, licentious, unjust—that was no reason for neglecting them; rather it furnished a stronger motive for propitiating them and averting their wrath by prayer and sacrifice. Tolerant themselves, they must have resented a little the intolerance of the new religion.