Chapter II · THE SURVIVAL OF PAGAN DEITIES. (continued 3)

And they made up their minds and fired a shot at them. Thereupon those that were in front cried out with one voice, “What is it?” and those behind answered, “Our bridegroom is slain, our bridegroom is slain.” And they wept and cried aloud and fled.’

In regard to this story it may be noted that a male form of Nereid (Νεραΐδης) is sometimes mentioned, and here such are undoubtedly implied. The necessity of finding husbands for the Nereids naturally presents itself to the minds of the old women who are the chief story-tellers, and the demand is met by an assorted supply of young men, male Nereids, and devils. As consorts of the last-mentioned, the Nereids enjoy in many places the title of διαβόλισσαις, ‘she-devils’; and it was on the ground of such unions that a peasant-woman of Acarnania once explained to me the belief, held in her own village, that Nereids were seen only at midday. How should the devils their husbands let such beautiful women be abroad at night?

It is on the mountain-nymphs also that the peasants most frequently lay the responsibility for whirlwinds[357], by which children or even adults are said to be caught up and carried from one place to another[358], or to their death. Some such fate, we must suppose, in ancient times also was held to have befallen a seven-year-old boy on whose tomb was written, ‘Tearful Hades with the help of Oreads made away with me, and this mournful tomb that has been builded nigh unto the Nymphs contains me[359].’ The habit of travelling on a whirlwind, or more correctly perhaps of stirring up a whirlwind by rapid passage, has gained for the nymphs in some districts secondary names—in Macedonia ἀνεμικαίς, in Gortynia ἀνεμογαζοῦδες[360]—which might almost seem to constitute a new class of wind-nymphs. But so far as I know the faculty of raising whirlwinds, though most frequently exercised by Oreads, is common to all nymphs.

In Athens whirlwinds are said to occur most frequently near the old Hill of the Nymphs[361]: and women of the lower classes, as they see the spinning spiral of dust approach, fall to crossing themselves busily and to repeating μέλι καὶ γάλα ’στὴ στράτα σας[362] (or ’στο δρόμο σας), ‘Honey and milk in your path!’ This incantation is widely known as an effective safeguard against the Nereids in their rapid flight, and must in origin, it would seem, have been a vow. This supposition is confirmed by the fact that in Corfu[363] a few decades ago the peasantry used to make actual offerings of both milk and honey to the Nereids, and that Theocritus also associates these two gifts in vows made to the nymphs and to Pan. ‘I will set,’ sings Lacon, ‘a great bowl of white milk for the nymphs, and another will I set full of sweet oil’; to which Comatas in rivalry rejoins, ‘Eight pails of milk will I set for Pan, and eight dishes of honey in the honeycomb[364].’ The gift of honey is of special significance. In every recorded case which I know of offerings to Nereids in modern Greece honey is expressly mentioned, and seems indeed to be essential; and it is probably from their known preference for this food that at Kastoria in Macedonia they have even received the by-name, ᾑ μελιτένιαις, ‘the honeyed ones[365].’ And if we look back over many centuries we may find a hint of the same belief in Homer’s description of the cave of the Naiads in Ithaca, wherein ‘are bowls for mixing and pitchers of stone, and there besides do bees make store[366].’ For it is well established that honey was the special offering made to the indigenous deities of Greece before the making of wine such as Homer’s heroes quaff had yet been discovered[367]. Perchance then even in distant pre-Homeric days men vowed, as now they vow, honey and milk to the nymphs whose swift passing was the whirlwind, and felt secure.

The memory of the tree-nymphs is still green throughout Greece. From Aegina their ancient name δρυάδες is recorded as still in use[368]; and in parts of Epirus, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace, as well as in several islands of the Aegean Sea, Chios, Cimolos, Cythnos, and others, there is a word employed which is, I believe, formed from the same root and once denoted the same class of beings. This word is found in the forms δρύμαις[369], δρύμιαις[370], δρύμναις[371], δρύμνιαις[372] and, in Chios, in a neuter form δρύματα[373].

It has been suggested indeed by one writer[374] that this word has nothing to do with Dryads, but that its root is δρυμ- (better perhaps written δριμ- as in the ancient δριμύς, since, so far as the sound of the vowel in modern Greek is concerned, the philologist may write η, ι, υ, ει, οι, or υι, as seemeth him best), in the sense of ‘fierce,’ ‘bitter’; and support for this derivation is sought in a somewhat vague statement of Hesychius who explains the word δρυμίους by the phrase τοὺς κατὰ τὴν χώραν κακοποιούς, ‘the evil-doers in the country’: but whether he took δρυμίους to be the proper name of some class of demons, or an adjective synonymous with κακοποιός, does not appear.

But even on the grounds of form alone (which grounds will be considerably strengthened when we come to consider signification), it appears better to derive this group of words from δρῦς or more immediately from δρυμός, ‘a coppice’; for in ancient literature mention is made of ‘Artemis of the coppice’ and ‘nymphs of the coppice’ (Ἄρτεμις δρυμονία[375] and δρυμίδες νύμφαι)[376], of a particular nymph named Drymo[377], of a Ζεὺς δρύμνιος[378] worshipped in Pamphylia, and of Apollo invoked at Miletus under the title δρύμας[379]. In the last two instances the title may be supposed to have had reference merely to the surroundings of a particular sanctuary; but in relation to Artemis and the nymphs the epithet clearly suggests their woodland haunts.

In present-day usage the words which we are considering almost universally denote, not nymphs or any other supernatural beings, but the first few days of August, which are observed in a special way. The number of these days varies from three in Sinasos[380], in Carpathos[381], and in Syme (an island north of Rhodes), to five in Cythnos[382] and Cyprus[383], and six in most other places where they are specially observed. There are two rules laid down for this observance, though in some places only one of the two is in force: no tree may be peeled or cut (this is the usual practice for obtaining mastic and resin); and the use of water for washing either the person or clothes is prohibited; neither is it permitted to travel by water during this period. In the interests of personal cleanliness it is unfortunate that the month of August should have been selected for this abstention; by that time even the Greeks find the sea tepid enough to admit of bathing without serious risk of chill, and it is a pity therefore that a penalty should be inflicted upon bathers during the first week of the only month in which ablutions extend beyond the pouring of a small jug of water over the fingers. Howbeit the decrees stand, and as surely as there is transgression thereof, skin will blister and peel off, clothes will rot[384], and trees will wither. The severity of these pains has in Cyprus changed the name of these days from δρύμαις into κακαουσκιαίς, ‘the evil days of August[385].’

Now among a people so superstitious as the Greeks it is reasonable to suppose that days thus marked by special abstinences were originally sacred to some deities. Washing and tree-cutting at this season must, we may assume, have been offences against some supernatural persons whose festival was then observed and who avenged its profanation; and the supernatural persons most nearly concerned would naturally be the tree-nymphs and the water-nymphs.

The association or even confusion of these two classes of nymphs is very common both in ancient literature and in modern belief, and is indeed a natural consequence of the fact that the finest trees, such as that plane under which sat Socrates and Phaedrus, grow only in the close vicinity of water. It would have puzzled even Socrates to say whether the Nymphs by whom he might be seized would be more probably Dryads or Naiads. Homer himself, to go yet further back, suggests the same association, for he tells of ‘a spreading olive-tree and nigh thereto’ the cave of the Naiads in Ithaca. Again in later times we find a dedication by one Cleonymus to ‘Hamadryads, daughters of the river’[386]; and though an ingenious critic would replace Ἁμαδρυάδες by Ἀνιγριάδες (nymphs of the Arcadian river Anigrus), I believe the fault to lie with Cleonymus and not with the manuscript; for the place where he makes his dedication is beneath pine-trees (ὑπαὶ πιτύων). At the present day the same tendency towards confusion of the two classes is common. This was well illustrated to me by some peasants of Tenos. Ten minutes’ walk from the town there is a good spring from which a remarkable subterranean passage cut through the solid rock carries the water to supply the town. The spring is within a cave, artificially enlarged at the entrance, over which stands a fine fig-tree. Standing outside while a companion entered first, I noticed that our guides (for several persons had escorted us out of curiosity or hospitality) were distinctly perturbed, and I heard one say to another, ‘See, he is going in, he is not afraid.’ Inferring thence that the place was haunted, and remembering that mid-day, the hour at which we happened to be there, was fraught with special peril, I determined to test my guides, and so sat down under the fig-tree. Then remarking that the sun was hot at noon, I invited them to come and sit in the shade and smoke a cigarette. But the bait was insufficient; they would stand in the sun rather than approach either the spring or the tree, though they were ready enough to accept cigarettes when I moved out of the zone of danger. Afterwards by enquiries made elsewhere I learnt that the spot was the reputed home of Nereids—but whether their abode was tree or water, who should say? Close neighbours in their habitations, indistinguishable in their appearance and attributes, it is pardonable to confuse those sister nymphs,

It is exactly this kind of confusion of the two classes of nymphs which has produced the twofold injunctions for the observance of the days known as δρύμαις: for evidence is forthcoming that this word originally denoted a class of nymphs and not, as generally now, their August festival. From Stenimachos in Thrace comes the statement that by δρύμιαις the people there understand female deities who live in water and are always hostile to man, but specially dangerous only during the first six days of August[388]. Here the name δρύμιαις, if the derivation which I prefer is right, points to the identification of these beings with the ancient Dryads; while their watery habitations proclaim them rather Naiads. Reversely again in Syme, where the word δρύμαις is not in use, there are certain nymphs known as Ἀλουστίναι who live in mountain-torrents, in trees, and elsewhere, and who are seen only at mid-day and at midnight during the first three days of August; but, far from being hurtful to men, they may even themselves be captured by certain magical ceremonies and employed as servants in the house for a period, after which the spell is broken and they return again to their homes. Their name Ἀλουστίναι[389], said to be formed from Ἀλούστος[389], the local name for the month of August, clearly means ‘anti-washing,’ and at once identifies them with those Naiads whose festival, as I believe, has rendered the waters sacred and therefore harmful if disturbed during these days; but on the other hand their dwelling-places include trees. These two pieces of evidence from places so wide apart as Stenimachos and Syme are reinforced by a popular expression formerly, and perhaps still, in use, τὸν ἔπι̯ασαν ᾑ δρύμαις[390], ‘the “drymes” have seized him’; where the word denoting ‘seizure’ is one of those already noted as proper to ‘seizure’ by nymphs.

From the usage of the word therefore as well as from its formation we may conclude that the word δρύμαις is the modern equivalent of the ancient δρυάδες: and the widely-spread custom of abstaining both from tree-cutting and from the use of water during the early days of August is a survival of an old joint festival of wood-nymphs and water-nymphs.

But it is not in the relics of ancient worship only that traces of the Dryads are now to be found. The traveller in Greece will commonly hear that such and such a tree is haunted by a Nereid. Particularly famous in North Arcadia is a magnificent pine-tree on the path from the monastery of Megaspélaeon to the village of Solos. My muleteer enthusiastically compared it to the gigantic tree which is believed to uphold the world; and piously crossed himself, as we passed it, for fear of the nymph who made it her home. In general the trees thus reputed are the fruit-bearing trees which were comprehensively denoted by the term δρῦς, from which the Dryads took their name—the fig-tree, the olive, the holly-oak[391], and the plane. Such trees, especially when conspicuous for age or for luxuriance, are readily suspected to be the abode of Nereids. One Nereid only, it would seem, is assigned to each tree (though, if her retreat be violated, she may swiftly call others of her kind to aid her in taking vengeance), and with the life of the tree her own life is bound up.

For a nymph is not immortal. Her span of life far exceeds that of man, but none the less it is measured. ‘A crow lives twice as long as a man, a tortoise twice as long as a crow, and a Nereid twice as long as a tortoise.’ Such is a popular saying which I heard from an unlettered peasant of Arcadia, to whom evidently had been transmitted orally through many centuries a version of Hesiod’s lines, ‘Verily nine times the age of men in their prime doth the croaking raven live; and a stag doth equal four ravens; and ’tis three lives of a stag ere the crow grows old; but the phoenix hath the life of nine crows; and ye, fair-tressed Nymphs, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus, do live ten times the phoenix’ age[392].’ Commenting on this passage, Plutarch takes the word γενεά in the phrase ἐννέα γενεὰς ἀνδρῶν ἡβώντων, which I have rendered as ‘nine times the age of men in their prime,’ to be used as the equivalent of ἐνιαυτός, a year; and, making a sober computation on this basis, discovers that the limit of life for nymphs and daemones in general is 9720 years. But he then admits that the mass of men do not allow so long a duration, and quotes by way of illustration a phrase from Pindar, νύμφας ... ἰσοδένδρου τέκμωρ αἰῶνος λαχούσας, according to which the nymphs are allotted a term of life commensurate with that of a tree; hence, it is added, the compound name Ἁμαδρυάδες, Dryads whose lives are severally bound up with those of the trees which they inhabit[393]. Other ancient authorities concur. Sophocles markedly calls the nymphs of Mt Cithaeron ‘long-lived’ (μακραιῶνες), not ‘immortal’[394]: Pliny certifies the finding of dead Nereids on the coasts of Gaul during the reign of Augustus[395]: Tzetzes cites from the works of Charon of Lampsacus the story of an Hamadryad who was in danger of being swept away and drowned by a swollen mountain-torrent[396]: and, to revert to yet earlier authority, in one of the Homeric Hymns Aphrodite rehearses to Anchises the whole matter[397]. Speaking of the son whom she will bear to him, she says: ‘So soon as he shall see the light of the sun, he shall be tended by deep-bosomed nymphs of the mountains, even those that dwell upon this high and holy mount. These verily are neither of mortal men nor of immortal gods. Long indeed they live and feed on food divine, and they have strength too for fair dance amid immortals; yea, and with them have the watchful Slayer of Argus and such as Silenus been joined in love within the depths of pleasant grots. But at the moment of their birth, there spring up upon the nurturing earth pines, may be, or oaks rearing high their heads, good trees and luxuriant, upon the mountain-heights. Far aloft they tower; sanctuaries of immortals they are called, and men hew them not with axe[398]. But so soon as the doom of death stands beside them, first the good trees are dried up at the root and then their bark withers about them and their branches fall away, and therewith the soul of the nymphs too leaves the light of the sun.’

So my Arcadian friend was true to ancient tradition both in his estimate of the life of Nereids and in his belief, thereby implied, that they are mortal. Nor is other modern testimony wanting. There are popular stories still current concerning Nereids’ deaths. One has been recorded in which a Nereid is struck by God with lightning and slain as a punishment for stealing a boy from his father, and her sister nymphs in terror restore the child[399]. A pertinent confession of faith has also been heard from the lips of a Cretan peasant. In explanation of the name Νεραϊδόσπηλος, ‘Nereid-grot,’ attached to a cave near his village, he had related a story of a Nereid who was carried off from that spot and taken to wife by a young man, to whom she bore a son; but as she would never open her lips in his presence, he went in despair to an old woman who advised him to heat an oven hot and then taking the child in his arms to say to the Nereid, ‘Speak to me; or I will burn your child,’ and so saying to make show of throwing the child into the oven. He did as the old woman advised; but the Nereid saying only, ‘You hound, leave my child alone,’ seized it from him and disappeared. And since the other Nereids would not admit her again to their company in the cave, as being now a mother, she took up her abode in a spring close by; and there she is seen two or three times a year holding the child in her arms. ‘After hearing this tale,’ says the recorder of it, ‘I asked the old peasant who told it me, how long ago this had happened.’ He replied that he had heard it from his grandfather, and guessed it to be about a hundred and sixty years. ‘My good man,’ said the other, ‘would not the child have grown up in all that time?’ ‘What do you suppose, sir?’ he answered; ‘are those to grow up so easily who live from a thousand to fifteen hundred years?[400]’

How this period was computed by the Cretan peasant, or whether it was computed at all on any system known to him, is not related; but very probably the longevity of trees was the original basis of the calculation; for the peasants will often point out some old contorted olive-trunk as a thousand or more years old; I was once even taken to see a tree reputed to have been planted by Alexander the Great. But at any rate it is clear that both in ancient and in modern times the nymphs have always been believed to be subject to ultimate death, and however the tenure of life may be determined in the case of the others, the Dryads have without doubt been generally reckoned coeval with the trees that are their homes.

An exception to this rule must however be made in the case of Nereid-haunted trees which do not die a natural death, but are felled untimely. A Nymph’s life is not to be cut short by a humanly-wielded axe. In the Homeric Hymn indeed, which I have quoted, we learn that men hew not such trees with steel; and the same might, I think, be said at the present day with certainty of those trees which are known to be haunted. But the unknown is ever full of risk; and the woodcutter of the North Arcadian forests, mindful of the sacrilege which he may commit and fearful of the vengeance wherewith it may be visited, takes such precautions as piety suggests. With muttered appeals to the Panagia or his own patron-saint and with much crossing of himself he fills up the moments between each bout of hewing at any suspected tree (unfortunately the finest timber on which he plies his axe is also the most likely to harbour a Nereid) and finally as the upper branches sway and the tree trembles to its fall, he runs back and throws himself down with his face to the ground, in silence which not even a prayer must break, lest a Nereid, passing out from her violated abode, hear and espy and punish. For, as has been said before, nothing is more sure than that he who speaks in the hearing of a Nereid loses from thenceforth the power of speech; while the practice of hiding the face in the ground is not a foolish imitation of the ostrich, but is prompted by the belief that a Nereid is most prone to injure those who by look, word, or touch have of their own act, though not always of their own will, placed themselves in communication or contact with her[401].

These precautions appertaining to the lore of modern Greek forestry indicate a belief that, when a tree is hewn down, its death does not involve the death of the Nereid within it, but that she escapes alive and vengeful. And herein once more there is agreement between the beliefs of modern and of ancient Greece. Apollonius Rhodius tells the story of the want and penury which befell Paraebius for all his labours. ‘Verily he was paying a cruel requital for the sin of his father; who once when he was felling trees, alone upon the mountains, made light of the prayers of an Hamadryad. For she with tears and passionate speech strove to soften his heart, that he should not hew the trunk of her coeval oak, wherein she lived continuously her whole long life; but he right foolishly did fell the tree, in pride of his young strength. Wherefore the Nymph set a doom of fruitless toil thereafter on him and on his children[402].’

The Naiads, of whose ancient name, so far as I know, no trace remains in the dialects of to-day, are not less numerous than other nymphs and as much to be feared. The peasants speak of them usually as ‘Nereids of the river’ or ‘of the spring’ (νεράϊδες τοῦ ποταμίου or τῆς βρύσης); and only in one place, Kephalóvryso (‘Fountain-head’) in Aetolia, did I find a distinctive by-name for them. This was the word ξεραμμέναις[403], which I take to be a half-humorous euphemism meaning ‘the Parched Ones’; but, so far as sound is concerned, it would be equally permissible to write ’ξεραμέναις (past participle of ’ξερνῶ = Latin respuo) and to interpret therefore in the sense of ‘the Abominable Ones.’ The latter appellation however seems to me too outspoken in view of the awe in which the Naiads are everywhere held.

Wherever fresh water is, whether in mountain-torrent or reservoir, in river or village-well, there is peril to be feared; no careful mother will send her children at noontide to fetch water from the spring, or, if they are sent, they must at least spit thrice into it before they dip their pitchers, nor will she suffer them to loiter beside a stream when dusk has fallen; no cautious man will ford a river without crossing himself first on the brink.

The actual dwelling-place of these nymphs may be either the depths of the water itself or some cave beside the stream. Homer gave to the Naiads of Ithaca for their habitation a grotto, wherein were everflowing waters[404]; and though in some cases the nymphs who haunt the mountain caves may as well be Oreads as Naiads, I have preferred to deal with them in this place; for usually it is river-gods who have hollowed out these rocky homes for their daughters, and in many such caves may be seen the everflowing waters that attest the Naiads’ birthright.

Some such places, whether springs or caves, have, as might be expected, attained greater fame or notoriety than others; some special incident starts a story about them which from generation to generation rolls on gathering it may be fresh volume.

A typical story—typical save only for the absence of tragedy, since the Naiads are wont to drown by mistake those whom they carry off—was heard by Leo Allatius[405] from what he considered a trustworthy source. ‘Some well-to-do people of Chios were taking a summer holiday in the country en famille, when a pretty little girl of the party got separated from the rest and ran off to a well at a little distance. Amusing herself, as children will, she leant forward over the well, and as she was looking at the water in it, was, without perceiving it, insensibly lifted by some force and pushed into the well. Her relations saw her carried off, and running up, perceived the girl amusing herself on the top of the water as if she were seated on a bed. Thereupon her father, emboldened by the sight, tried to climb down into the well, but was pulled in by some force and set beside his child. In the meantime some of the others had brought a ladder, which they lowered into the well and bade the man ascend. Catching up his daughter in his arms, he mounted the ladder safe and sound, and to the amazement of all, though father and daughter had been all that time in the water, they came out with clothes perfectly dry, without so much as a trace of dampness. The seizure of the girl and her father they attributed to Nereids, who were said to haunt that well. The girl too herself asserted that while she was hanging over the well, she had seen women sporting on the surface of the water with the utmost animation, and at their invitation had voluntarily thrown herself in.’

This story, though it ends happily, bears a marked resemblance to that of Hylas. It is specially noted that the child had a pretty face, and this without doubt is conceived as impelling the Nereids to seize her. It is of little consequence that their home is, in this case, a mere well instead of ‘a spring,’ as Theocritus[406] pictures it, ‘in a hollow of the land, whereabout grew rushes thickly and purple cuckoo-flower[407] and pale maidenhair and bright green parsley and clover spreading wide’; for the ancients also attributed nymphs to their wells[408].

Such stories are sometimes causes, sometimes effects, of the not uncommon place-names νεραϊδόβρυσι, νεραϊδόσπηλῃ͜ο[409], ‘Nereid-spring,’ ‘Nereid-cave.’

Two such caves, to which the additional interest attaches of having been in classical times also regarded as holy ground, are found on Parnassus and on Olympus. The former is the famous Corycian cave sacred in antiquity to Pan and the Nymphs[410] and still dreaded by the inhabitants of the district as an abode of Nereids[411]. The latter is thought to be the ancient sanctuary of the Pierian Muses, and the peasants of the last generation held the place in such awe that they refused to conduct anyone thither for fear of being seized with madness[412]. It is right to add that the tenants of this cavern were called by the vague name ἐξωτικαίς, which would comprise not only Nereids, but presumably the Muses also, if any remembrance of them survives in the district; but the fear of being seized with madness suggests the ordinary conception of nymphs. In neither of these instances of course can it be claimed that Naiads rather than Oreads are the possessors of the cave; but as I have said the peasants generally employ the wide appellation ‘Nereids’ or some yet vaguer name, and do not discriminate between the looks and the qualities of the several orders of nymphs. It is only by observing local and occasional distinctions that I have been able to trace some survivals of the four main ancient classes. In general the ‘Nereid’ of to-day is simply the ‘Nymph’ of antiquity.

§ 10. The Queens of the Nymphs.

Travelling once in a small sailing-boat from the island of Scyros to Scopelos I overheard an instructive conversation between one of my two boatmen and a shepherd whom we had taken off from the small island of Skánzoura. The occasion of our touching there, namely pursuit by pirates (from whom the North Aegean is not yet wholly free, though their piracies are seldom of a worse nature than cattle-lifting from the coasts and islands), had certainly had an exciting effect upon my boatman’s nerves, and, as darkness fell, the shepherd responded to his companion’s mood, and their talk ranged over many strange experiences. Very soon they were exchanging confidences about the supernatural beings with whom they had come into contact; and among these figured two who are the queens respectively of the nymphs of land and of sea. Of these deities one only was known to each of the speakers, but on comparing notes they agreed that the two personalities were distinct.

The landsman told of one whom he named ‘the queen of the mountains’ (ἡ βασίλισσα τῶν βουνῶν) who with a retinue of Nereids was ever roaming over the hills or dancing in some wooded dell. In form she was as a Nereid, but taller and more glistening-white than they; and as she surpassed her comrades in beauty, so did she also excel in cruelty towards those who heedlessly crossed her path. The sailor on the other hand had both seen and heard one whom he called ‘the queen of the shore’ (ἡ βασίλισσα τοῦ γιαλοῦ). Most often she stands in the sea with the water waist-high about her, and sings passionate love-songs to those who pass by on the shore. Then must men close fast their eyes and stop their ears; for, if they yield to her seductions, the bridal bed is in the depths of the sea and she alone rises up again to tempt yet others with her fatal love.

The former is without question she of whom Homer sang, ‘In company with her do mirthful nymphs ... range o’er the land.... High above them all she carries her head and brow, and full easily is she known, though they all be beautiful’[413].

Nigh on three thousand years ago was composed this graceful epitome of beliefs still current to-day; for, though the name of Artemis is no longer heard, her personality remains. The peasants in general describe rather than name her. In Zacynthos she is called ‘the great lady’ (ἡ μεγάλη κυρά)[414]; in Cephalonia and in the villages of Parnassus she is distinguished simply as ‘the chief’ or ‘the greatest’ of the Nereids[415]; in either Chios or Scopelos (I cannot say which, for my shepherd had been born in the former but was then living in the latter) her title is ‘Queen of the mountains.’ In Aetolia however I was fortunate enough to hear an actual name assigned, ἡ κυρὰ Κάλω, ‘the lady Beautiful,’ where the shift of the accent in Κάλω as compared with the adjective καλός is natural to the formation of a proper name, and the feminine termination in -ω, almost obsolete now, argues an early origin. The name therefore in its present form may have come down unchanged from classical times; but, whatever its age, we may at least hear in it an echo of the ancient cult-title of Artemis, Καλλίστη, ‘most beautiful’[416]. The same deity, I suspect, survived also until recently, under a disguised form but with a kindred name, in Athens: for the folk there used to tell of one whom they named ‘Saint Beautiful’ (ἡ ἅγι̯α Καλή), but to whom no church was ever dedicated[417]; her canonisation was only popular.

The account which I received in Aetolia of this ‘lady Beautiful’ agreed closely with the description already given of ‘the queen of the mountains.’ In appearance and in character she is but a Nereid on a larger scale. All the beauty and the frowardness so freely imputed to the nymphs are superlatively hers; there is no safety from her; on hillside, in coppice, by rivulet, everywhere she may be encountered; the tongue that makes utterance in her presence is thenceforth tied, and the eyes that behold her are darkened. The punishment that befell Teiresias of old for looking upon Athena as she bathed still awaits those who stray by mischance beside some sequestered pool or stream where the Nereids and their queen are wont to bathe in the heat of noon.

Such a spot, favoured in olden time by Artemis and her attendant Naiads, was the Cretan river Amnisos[418]; and it was probably no mere coincidence, but a good instance rather of the continuity of local tradition, that in comparatively recent times her personality and perhaps even her old name were still known in the district. It is recorded that in the sixteenth century both priests and people of the district declared that at a pretty little tarn near the Gulf of Mirabella they had seen ‘Diana and her fair nymphs’ lay aside their white raiment and bathe and disappear in the clear waters[419]. It would have been highly interesting to know the name of the goddess which the Italian writer translated as ‘Diana.’ Though it is true that in Italy[420] Diana herself was still worshipped in magical nightly orgies as late as the fourteenth century, it is scarcely likely that the Italian name had been adopted in Crete. More probably the slovenly fashion of miscalling Greek deities by Latin names was as common then as now; and in this instance a piece of valuable evidence has thereby been irretrievably lost. Yet the traditional connexion of Artemis with this district of Crete warrants the assumption that the leader of the nymphs of whom the story tells was in personality, if not also in name, the ancient Greek goddess, and no Italian importation.

Distinct reference to the bathing of Artemis is also made in a story which has already been related in connexion with Aphrodite and Eros[421]. A prince, who had journeyed to the garden of Eros to fetch water for the healing of his father’s blindness, saw in the spring there ‘a woman white as snow and shining as the moon. And it was in very truth the moon that bathed here.’ The last sentence, provided always that it be free from modern scholastic contamination, is an unique example of the survival of Artemis in the rôle of the moon; while the healing properties of the spring in which she bathes offer a coincidence, certainly undesigned, with the powers of the goddess whom her worshippers of yore besought to ‘banish unto the mountain-tops sickness and suffering’[422].

Whether ‘the lady Beautiful’ is known now also in her ancient huntress-guise, is a point not readily determined. In Aetolia certainly I once or twice heard mention of her hunting on the mountains, but without feeling sure whether the word ‘hunt’ was being used literally or in metaphor. Expressions borrowed from the chase are not uncommon in the language, and the particular verb κυνηγῶ, ‘I hunt,’ is in the vernacular used of anything from rabbit-shooting to wife-beating. The injuries inflicted by Artemis on those who trespass upon her haunts might possibly be denoted by the same term. On the other hand it is not in the character of ‘the lady Beautiful,’ as it is in that of the ‘hunter’ Charos, to seek men out and slay them; men may fall chance victims to the sudden anger of the goddess, but they are the chosen quarry of the other’s prowess; he is a true ‘hunter’ of men, and, try as they will to evade him, he still pursues; but Artemis strikes none who turn aside from her path. I incline therefore to believe that the word ‘to hunt’ was intended literally when I heard it used of ‘the lady Beautiful,’ and that the ancient Artemis’ love of the chase is not forgotten by the Aetolian peasantry.

Such are the reminiscences of Artemis which I have been able to gather in a few districts of modern Greece. But it is clear that down to the seventeenth century the goddess was much more widely known. Leo Allatius[423], writing about the year 1630, after giving a good description of the Nereids, plunges abruptly into a long quotation from Michael Psellus, from which and from Allatius’ own comments on it some information about the Queen of the Nereids may be gleaned. The passage in question runs as follows, the comments and explanations in brackets being my own:—

‘ἡ καλὴ τὸν ὡραῖον. Supply ἀπέτεκεν. (Apparently a proverb, ‘Fair mother, fine son,’ to the usage of which Psellus gives some religious colour.) For the Virgin that brought forth was wonderfully fair, dazzling in the brightness of her graces, and her son was exceeding beautiful, fair beyond the sons of men. (Notwithstanding however the religious significance of the proverb, he at once condemns the use of it.) As a matter of fact, the phrase is due to faulty speech. For the popular language has perverted the saying. It is right to say καλὴν τῶν ὀρέων (‘fair lady of the mountains’); but the people have made the saying καλὴ τὸν ὡραῖον (‘fair mother, fine son’). (There is no distinction in sound, according to the modern pronunciation, between τῶν ὀρέων and τὸν ὡραῖον.) Hence we see that the popular imagination had once fashioned, quite unreasonably, a female deity whose domain was the mountains and who as it were disported herself upon them.... There is no deity called ‘fair lady of the mountains,’ nor is the so-called Barychnas a deity at all but a trouble arising in the head from heartburn or ill-digested food, ... which is also known as Ephialtes.’

Here Psellus is rambling in his dissertation as wildly as though his own head were affected by this demoniacal ailment. Which Allatius observing comments thus:—

‘What has Barychnas or Babutzicarius[424] or if you like Ephialtes to do with the fair lady of the woods or the mountains (pulcram nemorum sive montium)? From them men suffer lying abed; whereas attacks such as we have said are made by Callicantzarus[425], Burcolacas[426], or Nereid, occur in the open country and public roadways.... And Psellus himself knew quite well that the ‘fair lady of the mountains’ was nothing other than those who are commonly called the ‘fair mistresses’[427] (i.e. Nereids), who have nothing on earth to do with Barychnas and Ephialtes.’

The argument of this strangely confused passage is happily beside our mark, and we need not puzzle, with Psellus, over the demonology of dyspepsia. His interpretation of the phrase καλὴ τῶν ὀρέων I have even ventured to omit, for a devious path of wilful reasoning leads only to the conclusion that it means the tree on which Christ was crucified. The only method in his mad medley of medicine and theology is the intention to refute the popular belief in a beautiful goddess who haunted the mountains.

Some details of the belief may be gathered from Allatius’ criticism of the argument. Psellus mentions only the title ἡ καλὴ τῶν ὀρέων, but Allatius amplifies it in the phrase pulcram nemorum sive montium, implying thereby that in his own time Artemis—for it can be none other—was associated as much with woodland as with mountain; while her intimate connexion with the Nereids is adduced as a matter of common knowledge. The somewhat loose phrase by which Allatius indicates this fact—pulcram montium nihil aliud esse quam eas quas vulgus vocat pulcras dominas—must not be read in any strict and narrow sense. The beautiful lady of the mountains is, he means, just such as are the Nereids; but she is a definite person, distinguished as of old among her comrades by supreme grace and loveliness.

The statements of Leo Allatius, based as they are in the main upon his own recollections of his native Chios, find remarkable corroboration in a history of the same island written a little earlier by one Jerosme Justinian[428]. In the main the history is purely fabulous, taking its start from a point, if my memory serves me rightly, many centuries earlier than the Deluge; but the reference to contemporary superstitions may I think be trusted.

Previously to the passage which I translate, the writer has been telling the tale of the building of a wonderful tower by king Scelerion of Chios, wherein to guard his daughter Omorfia (Beauty) and three maids of honour with her until such time as he should find a husband worthy of her; how the workmen never left the tower till it was finished; how the master-mason threw down his implements from the top and himself essayed to fly down on wings of his own contrivance, which however failed to work as he had hoped, with the result that he fell into the river below the castle and was drowned; and how his ghost was seen there every first of May at midday. This story, which may be taken as a fair type of the whole ‘history,’ leads, by its mentions of apparitions on May 1st, to the following passage[429]:—

‘They have also another foolish belief, that near the tower are to be seen three youthful women, clothed in white, who invite passers-by to throw themselves into the river and get some cups of gold and silver which by diabolical illusion are seen floating on the water, in the hope that going into the river they may be drowned in a whirlpool called by the Greeks Chiroclacas, the water of which penetrates beneath the mountain as far as the precipice where the princess still shows herself. Further, there is no manner of doubt that the three ladies who appear to the inhabitants of the place are those spirits who make their dwelling in the water, assuming the form of women, and called by the ancients Nereides or Negiardes; the good women are so abused by these illusions that on the first of May they are wont to make crosses on their doors, saying that the goddess of their mountains is due to come and visit them in their houses, and that without this mark she would not come in; likewise they say that she would slay any one who should go to meet her. And so they give her the name of ‘good,’ being obliged by the fear in which they hold her to give her this title of honour. Some people are of opinion that this goddess is one of the Oread nymphs who dwell in the mountains....’

This ‘goddess of the mountains’ whom they call ‘good’ (i.e. probably καλή) is beyond doubt the same who was known to Psellus and to Allatius as ἡ καλὴ τῶν ὀρέων, ‘the beautiful lady of the mountains,’ and to my pastoral informant as ἡ βασίλισσα τῶν βουνῶν, ‘the queen of the mountains’; and in general the conception of her is the same as continues locally to the present day. One statement indeed I cannot explain, namely that the women make crosses on their doors with the purpose of attracting the goddess to their houses; for I have already mentioned the same use of the symbol for the contrary purpose of keeping the Nereids out[430]. Possibly as regards this detail of the ‘foolish belief’ the grand seigneur was wrongly informed. But in other respects, in the close association of the goddess with the Oreads or other nymphs, in the fear which she inspired, in the belief that she slew those who ventured upon her path, the Chian record is in complete agreement with the description which I have given from oral sources. In terror, as in charm, the Nereids’ queen is foremost.

A contrary view however is taken by Bernard Schmidt[431], who states that she is pictured by the commonfolk as gentler and friendlier to man than her companions, and even disposed to check their light and froward ways. On such a point, I freely admit, local tradition might well vary; but in this particular case I am inclined to think that Schmidt fell into the error of confusing the wild-roaming, nymph-escorted goddess of hill and vale and fountain with that other goddess who dwells solitary in the heart of the mountain, dispensing blessings to the good and pains to the wicked, and in the conception of whom we found an aftermath of the ancient crop of legends concerning Demeter and Kore. Surely this grand and lonely figure, ‘the Mistress of the Earth and of the Sea,’ is in every trait different from the lovely, capricious, cruel ‘Queen of the Mountains.’ Indeed the very circumstance of both presentations being known in one and the same district—as, to my own knowledge, in Aetolia, and, on Schmidt’s own showing, in Zacynthos[432]—proves that two divine persons, in type and in character essentially different, are here involved, and not merely two accidental and local differentiations of the same deity. Doubtless in the more ‘civilised’ parts of Greece (to use the word beloved of the half-educated town-bred Greek), in the parts where old beliefs and customs are falling into decay and contempt while nothing good is substituted for them, even the lower classes have lost or are losing count and memory of many of those powers whom their forefathers acknowledged; but in the more favourably sequestered villages, let us say, of Aetolia, where superstition still fears no mockery, no peasant would commit the mistake of confounding his Demeter with his Artemis. Between majestic loneliness and frolicsome throng, between dignified beauty and bewitching loveliness, between gentleness and lightness, between love of good and wanton merriment, between justice and caprice, the gulf is wide.

But while the modern Artemis is the leader of her nymphs in mischief and even in cruelty, it must not be thought that she is always a foe to man. In Aetolia ‘the lady Beautiful’ is quick to avenge a slight or an intrusion; but for those who pay her due reverence she is a ready helper and a giver of good gifts. Health and wealth lie in her hand, to bestow or to withhold, as in the hands of the Nereids. Hence even he whom her sudden anger has once smitten may regain her favour by offerings of honey and other sweetmeats on the scene of his calamity. And probably peace-offerings with less definite intent have been or still are in vogue; for it is reported that presents used to be brought to the cross-roads in Zacynthos at midday or midnight simply to appease ‘the great lady’ and her train[433], a survival surely of the ancient banquets of Hecate surnamed Τριοδῖτις, ‘Goddess of the Cross-roads.’

In some cases hesitation may be felt in pronouncing an opinion whether it is for Artemis and the nymphs or for the Fates[434] (Μοῖραι) that these gifts are intended; and in the category of the doubtful must be included all those cases where the dedication of the offerings is merely to the καλαὶς κυρᾶδες[435], ‘good ladies,’ no further information being vouchsafed. Several writers, including the German Ross and the Greek Pittakis, appear to have assumed without sufficient enquiry that none but the Nereids could be thus designated; but as a matter of fact, the same euphemistic title is occasionally given also to the Fates[436]; and while I incline to trust the experience and judgement of Ross in the general statement which he makes concerning such offerings at Athens, Thebes, and elsewhere[437], the accuracy of Pittakis[438] on the other hand is challenged by the actual spot which he is describing when he identifies the ‘good ladies’ with the Nereids; for the place was none other than the so-called ‘prison of Socrates,’ which the testimony of many travellers concurs in assigning to the Fates.

But, though some of the evidence concerning offerings demands closer scrutiny before it can have any bearing upon the continued belief in the existence of Artemis, there are certainly some corners of Greece in which that goddess is still worshipped. ‘The great lady,’ ‘the Queen of the mountains,’ ‘the lady Beautiful’ are the various titles of a single goddess whose beauty and quick anger have ever since the heroic age held the Greek folk in awe and demanded their reverence; and until the inroads of European civilisation destroy with the weapon of ridicule all that is old in custom and creed, Artemis will continue to hold some sway over hill and stream and woodland.

The other queen, of whom my boatman spoke, ‘the Queen of the Shore,’ she who stands in the shallows and by her beauty and sweet voice entices the unwary to share her bed in the depths of the sea, must I think be identified with a being who is more commonly called ‘the Lamia of the Sea’ or ‘the Lamia of the Shore.’ A popular poem[439] from Salonica, in which these two titles are found side by side, tells of a contest between her and a young shepherd. One day, in disregard of his mother’s warning, he was playing his pipes upon the shore, when the Lamia appeared to him and made a wager with him that she would dance longer than he would go on playing. If he should win, he should have her to wife; if she should win, she was to take all his flocks as the prize. Three days the shepherd played, three whole nights and days; then his strength failed him, and the Lamia took his sheep and goats and left him destitute.

This poem has some points in common with a belief said to be held in the district of Parnassos, that if a young man—especially one who is handsome—play the flute or sing at mid-day or midnight upon the shore, the Lamia thereof emerges from the depths of the sea, and with promises of a happy life tries to persuade him to be her husband and to come with her into the sea; if the young man refuse, she slays him[440]; and presumably, though this is not mentioned, if he consent, she drowns him.

The same Lamia, it is recorded[441], is also known on the coasts of Elis as a dangerous foe to sailors; for her work is the waterspout and the whirlwind, whereby their ships are engulfed. Among the Cyclades too the same belief certainly prevails (though I have never obtained there any details concerning the character of the Lamia); for on seeing a waterspout the sailors will exclaim, ‘the Lamia of the Sea is passing’ (περνάει ἡ Λάμια τοῦ πελάγου), and sometimes stick a black-handled knife into the mast as a charm against her[442].

In these somewhat meagre accounts of the Lamia of the Sea, there are several points in harmony with the general conception of Nereids. She is beautiful; she seeks the love of young men, even though that love mean death to them; she is sweet of voice and untiring in dance; and she passes to and fro in waterspout or whirlwind. It is not surprising then to find that in Elis she is actually named queen of the Nereids[443], that is, without doubt, of the sea-nymphs only, since she herself has her domain only in the sea. And the title ‘queen of the shore’ which I learnt of my boatman from Scyros points to the same belief; for as we found Artemis, ‘queen of the mountains,’ to be the leader of all the Nereids of the land, so should ‘the queen of the shore’ be ruler over the Nereids of the sea.

How far this conception of the Lamia of the Sea accords with classical tradition, it is impossible to decide. Only in one passage, a fragment of Stesichorus[444], is there any evidence of the connexion of a Lamia with the sea. There the marine monster, Scylla, was made ‘the daughter of Lamia,’ a phrase which has given rise to the conjecture that the ancients like the moderns, as we shall see in the next section, recognised more than one species. A marine Lamia would supply the most natural parentage for Scylla; and if her mother may be identified with the modern Lamia of the Sea, the foe of ships and creator of the waterspout, the character of Scylla is true to her lineage.

But the other traits in the character of the modern Lamia of the Sea can hardly be hers by such ancient prescription. It is difficult to suppose that Stesichorus pictured Scylla’s mother as a thing of beauty; and the charm of the modern Lamia’s love-songs which seduce men to their death is perhaps an attribute borrowed from the Sirens. It is therefore in virtue of acquired rather than original qualities that the Lamia of the Sea has come to be queen of the sea-nymphs.

§ 11. Lamiae, Gelloudes, and Striges.

The three classes of female monsters, of whom the present section treats, have ever since the early middle ages[445] been constantly confounded, and the special attributes of each assigned promiscuously to the others. This is due to the fact that all three possess one pronounced quality in common, the propensity towards preying upon young children; and wherever this horrible trait has absorbed, as it well may, the whole attention of mediaeval writer or modern peasant, the distinctions between them in origin and nature have become obscured. Yet sufficient information is forthcoming, if used with discrimination, to enable some account to be given of each class separately.

The Lamiae are hideous monsters, shaped as gigantic and coarse-looking women for the most part, but, with strange deformities of the lower limbs such as Aristophanes attributed to a kindred being, the Empusa[446]. Their feet are dissimilar and may be more than two in number; one is often of bronze, while others resemble those of animals—ox, ass, or goat[447]. Tradition relates that one of these monsters was once shot by a peasant at Koropíon, a village in Attica, and was found to measure three fathoms in length; and her loathsome nature was attested by the fact that, when her body was thrown out in a desert plain, no grass would grow where her blood had dripped[448]. The chief characteristics of the Lamiae, apart from their thirst for blood, are their uncleanliness, their gluttony, and their stupidity. The details of the first need not be named, but would still furnish a jest for Aristophanes in his coarser mood as they did of old[449]. Their gluttony is clearly proved by their unwieldy corpulence. Their stupidity is best shown in their sorry management of their homes; for even the Lamiae have their domestic duties, being mated usually, according to the folk-tales[450], with dragons (δράκοι), and making their abode in caverns and desert places. They ply the broom so poorly that ‘the Lamia’s sweeping’ (τῆς Λάμιας τὰ σαρώματα) has become a proverb for untidiness[451]; they are so ignorant of bread-making that they put their dough into a cold oven and heap the fire on top of it[452]; they give their dogs hay to eat, and bones to their horses[453]. But they have at least the redeeming virtue of sometimes showing gratitude to those who help them out of the ill plight to which their ignorance has brought them[454].

Their stupidity also is regarded by the Greeks as a cause of honesty. Though they are often rich, as being the consorts of dragons whose chief function it is to keep guard over hidden treasure, they have not the wit to keep their wealth, but foolishly keep their word instead. Athenian tradition tells of a very rich Lamia (known by the name of ἡ Μόρα, perhaps better written Μώρα, a proper name formed from μωρός, ‘foolish’), who used to walk about at night, seizing and crushing men whom she met till they roared like bulls. But if her victim kept his wits about him and snatched her head-dress from her, she would, in order to get it back, promise him both life and wealth, and keep her word[455].

Such aspects of the Lamiae however are by no means universally acknowledged; nine peasants out of ten, I suspect, could give no further information about their character than that they feed on human flesh and choose above all new-born infants as their prey. Hence comes the popular phrase (employed, it would appear, in more than one district of Greece) in reference to children who have died suddenly, τὸ παιδὶ τὸ ἔπνιξε ἡ Λάμια[456], ‘the Child has been strangled by the Lamia.’

But in general I think the ravages of Lamiae have ceased to inspire much genuine fear in the peasants’ minds. One there was, so I heard, near Kephalóvryso in Aetolia, whose dwelling-place, a cave beside a torrent-bed, was to some extent dreaded and avoided. But in most parts the Lamia only justifies the memory of her existence by serving to provide adventures for the heroes of folk-stories; by lending her name, along with Empusa and Mormo (who still locally survive[457]), as a terror with which mothers may intimidate naughty children, or by furnishing it as a ready weapon of vituperation in the wordy warfare of women.

The word Lamia, which has survived unchanged in form down to the present day save that the by-forms Λάμνα, Λάμνια and Λάμνισσα are locally preferred, did not originally it would seem indicate a species of monster but a single person. Lamia according to classical tradition was the name of a queen of Libya who was loved by Zeus, and thus excited the resentment of Hera, who robbed her of all her children; whereupon the desolate queen took up her abode in a grim and lonely cavern, and there changed into a malicious and greedy monster, who in envy and despair stole and killed the children of more fortunate mothers[458].

But a plural of the word, indicating that the single monster had been multiplied into a whole class, soon occurs. Philostratus[459] in speaking of ‘the Empusae, which the common people call Lamiae and Mormolykiae,’ says, ‘Now these desire indeed the pleasures of love, but yet more do they desire human flesh, and use the pleasures of love to decoy those on whom they will feast.’ A plural such as is here used might of course be merely a studied expression of contempt for vulgar superstitions; but the latter part of the quotation seems to give a fair summary of the character of ancient Lamiae. This is illustrated by a gruesome story, narrated by Apuleius[460], of two Lamiae who, in vengeance for a slight of the love proffered by one of them to a young man named Socrates, tore out his heart one night before the eyes of his companion Aristomenes.

Of these two main characteristics of the ancient Lamiae, the one, lasciviousness, has come to be mainly imputed in modern times to the Lamia of the Sea, the single deity who rules the sea-nymphs; while the craving for human flesh is the most marked feature of the terrestrial tribe of Lamiae. But the latter certainly are the truest descendants of the ancient Lamia, and occupy a place in popular belief such as she held of old; for few, it would seem, stood then in any serious fear of the Lamia; the testimony of several ancient writers[461] (the story of Apuleius notwithstanding) proves that more than two thousand years ago she had already fallen to the level of bogeys which frighten none but children.

Gelloudes.

In my account of the Nereids properly so-called, reference was made to certain beings known in the Cyclades as ἀγιελοῦδες or γιαλοῦδες and reckoned by several writers[462] among the nymphs of the sea. In this they certainly have the support of popular etymology; for in Amorgos Theodore Bent[463] heard that ‘an evil spirit lived close by, which now and again rises out of the sea and seizes infants; hence it is called Gialoù (from γιαλός[464], the sea (sic)).’ But it is, I think, only an erroneous association by the inhabitants of the Cyclades of two like-sounding words which has caused the Ἀγιελοῦδες to be regarded as marine demons; Bent’s information transposes cause and effect. Elsewhere in Greece there are known certain beings called Γελλοῦδες or Γιλλοῦδες, female demons with a propensity to carry off young children and to devour them; and it is strange that so careful an authority on Greek folk-lore as Bernhard Schmidt should not have recognised that the name ἀγιελοῦδες employed in some of the Cyclades is only a dialectic form of the commoner γελλοῦδες[465] with an euphonetic ἀ prefixed as in the case of νεράϊδες and ἀνεράϊδες. Enquiry in Tenos revealed to me the fact, not mentioned, though perhaps implied, in the statement of Bent, that the ἀγιελοῦδες are there believed to feed upon the children whom they carry off. This trait at once confirms their identity with the γελλοῦδες, and renders it impossible to class them as a form of nymph. It is of course believed that nymphs of the sea or of rivers, when they carry off human children to their watery habitations, do incidentally drown them, but by an oversight and not of malice prepense. But savagely to prey upon human flesh—for all the nymphs’ wantonness and cruelty, that is a thing abhorrent from their nature and inconceivable in them. This horrid propensity proves the γελλοῦδες or ἀγιελοῦδες to be a separate class of female demons.

The chief authority on these malignant beings is Leo Allatius[466], who both quotes a series of passages which enable us to trace the development of the belief in them, and also tells a story which is the only source of evidence concerning other of their characteristics than their appetite for the flesh of infants.

Their prototype, mentioned, we are told, by Sappho, was the maiden Gello, whose spectre after her untimely end was said by the people of Lesbos to beset children and to be chargeable with the early deaths of infants[467].

The individuality of this Gello continued to be recognised to some extent as late as the tenth century[468]; for Ignatius, a deacon of Constantinople, in his life of the Patriarch Tarasius named her as a single demon, though he added that the crime of killing children in the same way was also imputed to a whole class of witches. ‘Hence,’ comments Allatius, ‘it has come about that at the present day Striges (i.e. the witches of whom Ignatius speaks), because they practise evil arts upon infants and by sucking their blood or in other ways cause their death, are called Gellones[469].’ In the story also which exhibits the chief qualities of this demon, her name (in the form Γυλοῦ) appears still as a proper name.

But the multiplication of the single demon into a whole class dates from long before the time of Allatius. John of Damascus in the eighth century used the plural γελοῦδες as a popular word, the meaning of which he took to be the same as that of Striges (στρίγγαι); and Michael Psellus too in the eleventh century evidently regarded these two words as interchangeable designations of a class of beings (whether of demons or of witches, he leaves uncertain); for after an exact account of the Striges and their thirst for children’s blood, he says that new-born infants who waste away (as if from the draining of their blood by these Striges) are called Γιλλόβρωτα[470], ‘Gello-eaten.’

The story of Leo Allatius[471], which sets forth the chief qualities of Gello, is a legend of which the Saints Sisynios and Synidoros are the heroes. The children of their sister Melitene had been devoured by this demon, and they set themselves to capture her. She, to effect her escape, at once changed her shape, and became first a swallow and then a fish; but, for all her slippery and elusive transformations, they finally caught her in the form of a goat’s hair adhering to the king’s beard. Then addressing to her the words ‘Cease, foul Gello, from slaying the babes of Christians,’ they worked upon her fears until they extorted from her a confession of her twelve and a half names, the knowledge of which was a safeguard against her assaults.

It is this list of names in which the various aspects of her activity appear. The first is Γυλοῦ, one of the forms of the name Gello; the second Μωρά[472], the name of a kind of Lamia; the third Βυζοῦ or ‘blood-sucker’; the fourth Μαρμαροῦ, probably ‘stony-hearted’; the fifth Πετασία, for she can fly as a bird in the air; the sixth Πελαγία, for she can swim as a fish in the sea; the seventh Βορδόνα[473], probably meaning ‘stooping like a kite on her prey’; the eighth Ἀπλετοῦ, ‘insatiable’; the ninth Χαμοδράκαινα, for she can lurk like a snake in the earth; the tenth Ἀναβαρδαλαία[474], possibly ‘soaring like a lark in the air’; the eleventh Ψυχανασπάστρια[475], ‘snatcher of souls’; the twelfth Παιδοπνίκτρια, ‘strangler of children’; and the half-name Στρίγλα, the kind of witch whereof the next section treats.

Whether these names are anywhere still remembered as a mystic incantation, or all the qualities which they imply still imputed to the Gelloudes, I cannot say. But a modern cure for such of the demon’s injuries as are not immediately fatal has been recorded from Amorgos. ‘If a child has been afflicted by it, the mother first sends for the priest to curse the demon, and scratches her child with her nails; if these plans do not succeed, she has to go down at sunset to the shore, and select forty round stones brought up by forty different waves; these she must take home and boil in vinegar, and when the cock crows the evil phantom will disappear and leave the child whole[476].’

Striges.

The Striges, though often confused with Lamiae and with Gelloudes, are essentially different from them. The two classes with which I have dealt are demons; the Striges, in the modern acceptation of the term, are women who possess the power to transform themselves into birds of prey or other animals; and it is only the taste for blood, shared by them with those demons, which has created the confusion.

The Striges moreover cannot, like the Lamiae or Gelloudes, be claimed either as an original product of the Greek imagination or as the exclusive property of Greek superstition at the present day. The Albanians have a word σ̈τρῑ́γ̇ε̱α, and the people of Corsica a term strega, both of which denote a witch of the same powers and propensities as are feared in Greece; and it is likely that all of them—Greeks, Albanians, Corsicans—have borrowed the conception from Italy. The ancient Greeks indeed had a word στρίγξ identical with the strix of Latin, but the shrieking night-bird denoted by it was not, so far as I can discover, invested by Greek imagination with any terrors. In Italy on the contrary the Strix was widely feared as a bloodthirsty monster in bird-form. Pliny evidently supposed it to be some actual bird, though he doubted the fables concerning it. ‘The strix,’ he says, ‘certainly is mentioned in ancient curses; but what kind of bird it may be, is not I think agreed[477].’ Perhaps in those ‘ancient curses’ it was invoked to inflict such punishment upon enemies as it once meted out to Otos and Ephialtes for their attempt upon Diana’s chastity[478].

The notion however that Striges were not really birds but witches in bird-form early suggested itself and found an exponent in Ovid[479]. ‘Voracious birds,’ he says, ‘there are ... that fly forth by night and assail children who still need a nurse’s care, and seize them out of their cradles and do them mischief. With their beaks they are said to pick out the child’s milk-fed bowels, and their throat is full of the blood they drink. Striges they are called ... and whether they come into being as birds or are changed thereto by incantation, and the Marsian spell transforms old women into winged things,’—such are their ways.

This was probably the state of the superstition when the Greeks added Striges to their own list of nightly terrors; and the very form of the word in modern Greek, στρίγλα or στρίγγλα (being apparently a diminutive, strigula, such as spoken Latin would readily have formed from the literary form strix), testifies to the borrowing of the belief.

In Greece the latter of the two ways in which Ovid explained the origin of the Strix seems to have been generally accepted as correct. It is true that the modern Greeks still have a real bird called στριγλοποῦλι[480] (either some kind of owl or the night-jar), which not only loves twilight or darkness in the upper world but is also said to haunt the gloomy demesnes of Charos below—thereby revealing perhaps some slight evidence of its relationship to the strix which tormented the brother giants; but the Strigla has long ceased to be a real bird, and (apart from the confusion with a Lamia or Gello) is always a witch.

The condition of the belief in the eighth century is noticed by John of Damascus[481]. ‘There are some of the more ignorant who say that there are women known as Striges (Στρῦγγαι), otherwise called Geloudes. They allege that these are to be seen at night passing through the air, and that when they happen to come to a house they find no obstacle in doors and bolts, but though the doors are securely locked make their way in and throttle infants. Others say that the Strix devours the liver and all the internal organs of the children, and so sets a short limit to their lives. And they stoutly declare, some that they have seen, and others that they have heard, the Strix entering houses, though the doors were locked, either in bodily form or as a spirit only.’

Again in the eleventh century Michael Psellus noticed the same superstition, though as we have seen his language suggests some confusion of Striges with Gelloudes. But he is really describing the faculty of the former to assume the shape of birds when he says, ‘The superstition obtaining nowadays invests old women with this power. It provides them with wings in their extreme age, and represents them as settling[482] unseen upon infants, whom, it is alleged, they suck until they exhaust all the humours in them’[483].

Leo Allatius, by whom this passage is cited, produces both from his own experience and from the testimony of others several instances of such occurrences, and mentions also the various precautions taken against them. These include all-night watches, lamps suspended before the pictures of patron-saints, amulets of garlic or of coral, and the smearing of oil from some saint’s lamp on the face of the child or invalid. It will suffice however to quote his general description of the Striges according to the beliefs of the seventeenth century. Striges (στρίγλαις), he tells us in effect, are old women whom poverty and misery drive to contract an alliance with the devil for all evil purposes; men are little molested by them, but women and still more commonly children, being a weaker and easier prey, suffer much from them, their breath alone[484] being so pernicious as to cause insanity or even death. They are especially addicted to attacking new-born babes, sucking out their blood and leaving them dead, or so polluting them by their touch that what life remains to them is never free from sickness.

It will have been noticed in this last account of the Striges, that the range of their activity is somewhat enlarged, so that women as well as children fall victims to them. At the present day, though they are believed to prey chiefly upon infants, even grown men are not immune, as witness a story[485] from Messenia.

Once upon a time a man was passing the night at the house of a friend whose household consisted of his wife and mother-in-law. About midnight some noise awakened him, and listening intently he made out the voices of the two women conversing together. What he heard terrified him, for they were planning to eat himself or his host, whichever proved the fatter. At once he perceived that his friend’s wife and mother-in-law were Striges, and knowing that there was no other means of escaping the danger that was threatening him, he determined to try to save himself by guile. The Striges advanced towards the sleeping men and took hold of their guest’s foot to see if it was heavy, and consequently fat and good for eating; he however, understanding their purpose, raised his foot of his own accord as they took it in their hands and weighed it, so that it felt to them as light as a feather, and they let it drop again disappointed. Then they took hold of the foot of the other man who was sleeping, and naturally found it very heavy. Delighted at the result of their investigation, they ripped open the wretched man’s breast, pulled out his liver and other parts, and threw them among the hot ashes on the hearth to cook. Then noticing that they had no wine, they flew to the wine-shop, took what they wanted and returned. But in the interval the guest got up, collected the flesh that was being cooked, stowed it away in his pouch, and put in its place on the hearth some animal’s dung. The Striges however ate up greedily what was on the hearth, complaining only that it was somewhat over-done. The next day the two friends rose and left the house; the victim of the previous night was very pale, but he did not bear the slightest wound or scar on his breast. He remarked to his companion that he felt excessively hungry, and the other gave him what had been cooked during the night, which he ate and found exceedingly invigorating; the blood mounted to his cheeks and he was perfectly sound again. Thereupon his friend told him what had happened during the night, and they went together and slew the Striges.

This story exhibits all the essential qualities of Striges. The pair of them are women, and one at least, the mother-in-law, is old; they choose the night for their depredations; they can assume the form of birds, for ‘they flew,’ it is said, to the wine-shop; and their taste for human flesh is the motif of the story.

It must however be acknowledged that as the area of the Striges’ activities has become somewhat extended, so also has the ancient limitation of the term to old women become locally somewhat relaxed. In many parts of Greece a belief is held that certain infants are liable to a form of lycanthropy; and female infants so disposed are sometimes called Striges. A story from Tenos[486], narrated in several versions, concerns an infant princess who was a Strigla. Every day one of the king’s horses was found to have been killed and devoured in the night. The three princes, her brothers, therefore kept watch in turn; and it fell to the fortune of the youngest of them, owing to his courage and skill, to detect the malefactor. About midnight he heard a noise, and fired into the middle of a cloud that seemed to hang over the horses, thereby so wounding his sister that the mark observed on her next day betrayed her nightly doings. Not daring however to accuse her to his father, he fled from home with his mother to a place of safety, while the girl remained undisturbed in her voracity and consumed one by one all the people of the town.

But in other places where the same belief prevails, as we shall see later, these enfants terribles, who may be of either sex, are called not Striges but by some such name as ‘callicantzaros,’ ‘vrykolakas,’ or ‘gorgon’; and this variety of names is in itself a proof that, while the idea of infant cannibals is widespread, no exact verbal equivalent now exists, and each of the several names used is only requisitioned to supply the deficiency. A child can indeed enjoy the title of Strigla by courtesy; only an old woman can possess it of right.

Thus the old Graeco-Roman fear of Striges still remains little changed. The Church has repeatedly forbidden belief in them[487]; legislation has prohibited in times past the killing of them[488]. But the link of superstition between the past and the present is still unbroken; and witch-burning is an idea which in any secluded corner of Greece might still be put into effect[489].

§ 12. Gorgons.

The modern conception of the Gorgon (ἡ γοργόνα) or Gorgons (γοργόνες)—for popular belief seems to vary locally between recognising one or more such beings—is extremely complex. Of my own knowledge I can unfortunately contribute nothing new to what has been published by others concerning them; for though I have several times heard Gorgons mentioned, and always on further enquiry found them to be terrible demons who dwell in the sea, it has so chanced that I have been unable to get any more explicit information on the subject. The present section is therefore, so far as the facts are concerned, a compilation from the researches of others, especially of Prof. Polites of Athens University.

A Gorgon is represented as half woman, half fish. Rough sketches on the walls of small taverns and elsewhere may often be observed, depicting a woman with the tail of a fish, half emerging from the waves, and holding in one hand a ship, in the other an anchor; sometimes also she is armed with a breastplate[490]. Similar designs are also to be seen tattooed upon the arms or breasts of men of the lower classes, especially among the maritime population.

The Gorgons themselves are to be encountered in all parts of the sea; but their favourite resort, especially on Saturday nights, is reputed to be the Black Sea, where if one of them meets a ship, grasping the bows with her hand she asks, ‘Is king Alexander living?’ To this the sailors must reply ‘he lives and reigns,’ and may add ‘and he keeps the world at peace,’ or ‘and long life to you too!’; for then the awful and monstrous Gorgon in gladness at the tidings transforms herself into a beautiful maiden and calms the waves and sings melodiously to her lyre. If on the contrary the sailors make the mistake of saying that Alexander is dead, she either capsizes the ship with her own hand or by the wildness of her lamentations raises a storm from which there is no escape nor shelter[491]. The mention of Alexander the Great in these stories of the Gorgons, as also sometimes in connexion with the Nereids, is unimportant; it is not an instance of purely oral tradition, but has its source in the history of Alexander by Pseudocallisthenes[492], of which there exist paraphrases in the popular tongue. The interest of such fables lies in the association of beauty and melody as well as of horror with the Gorgons, and in the rôle of marine deity which they play.

In general however it is upon the monstrous and terrifying aspect of the Gorgons that the common-folk seize, so that the name Gorgon is metaphorically applied to ill-favoured and malevolent women[493]. Thus in Rhodes it is used of any large fierce-looking virago[494]; in Cephalonia (where also the word Μέδουσα, Medusa, survives in the same sense) of any lady conspicuously ill-featured[495]. Allusion too has already been made to the case where a child possessed by a mania of bloodthirstiness is occasionally called a Gorgon[496].

But there is another and fresh aspect of the Gorgon’s nature suggested by the use of the word in Cythnos. There it is metaphorically applied to depraved women[497]; and this isolated usage is in accord with one description of the Gorgon which has come down from the middle ages. This description forms part of a poem entitled ‘The Physiologus[498]’ (written in the most debased ecclesiastical Greek and supposed to date from before the thirteenth century), which gives a fantastic account of the habits of many birds and beasts among which the Gorgon is included.

‘The Gorgon is a beast like unto a harlot; the hair of her head is all auburn; the ends thereof are as it were heads of snakes; and her body is bare and smooth, white as a dove, and her bosom is a woman’s with breasts fair to behold; but the look of her face brings death; whatsoever looks upon her falls down and dies. She dwells in the regions of the West. She knows all languages and the speech of wild beasts. When she desires a mate, she calls first to the lion; for fear of death he draws not near to her. Again she calls the dragon, but neither does he go; and even so all the beasts both small and great. She pipes sweetly and sings with charm beyond all; lastly she utters human voice: “Come, sate fleshly desire, ye men, of my beauty, and I of yours.” The men, knowing then their opportunity against her, lay snares that she may lose her pleasure; and stand afar off, that they may not see her, and raise their voice and cry and say unto her: “Dig a deep pit and put thy head therein, that we may not die and may come with thee.” She straightway then goes and makes a great hole and puts her head therein and leaves her body; from the waist downward it is seen naked; so she remains and awaits the pains of lewdness. The man goes from behind, cuts off her head, holds it face downward, and places it in a vessel, and if he meet dragon or lion or leopard, he shows the head, and the beasts die.’

These modern or mediaeval descriptions of the Gorgons, though they are by no means consistent one with another, offer four main aspects in which the modern Gorgon may be compared with the creatures of ancient mythology. Her face is terrible either in its surpassing loveliness or in its overwhelming hideousness. She possesses the gift of entrancing melody. She is voluptuous. She dwells in the sea.

The first aspect may be derived directly from the ancient conception of the Gorgons. The word Γοργώ itself is a name formed from the adjective γοργός and means simply ‘fierce’ or ‘terrible’ in look, without implying anything of beauty or the opposite; while of Medusa, the Gorgon par excellence, tradition relates that once she was a beautiful maiden beloved of Poseidon, and that it was only through the wrath of Athena that her hair was changed into writhing snakes and her loveliness lost in horror. Moreover in ancient works of art the representation of the Gorgon’s head varies from a type of cruel beauty to a grinning mask. But it is also possible that the idea of their beauty is due to a confusion of Gorgons with Sirens, from whom, as we shall see, certain traits have certainly been borrowed.

These traits are the two next aspects of the modern Gorgons which we have to consider, the sweetness of their singing and their voluptuousness. These were the essential qualities of the Sirens, and have undoubtedly been transferred to the Gorgons no less than to the Lamia of the Sea[499].

Possibly also from the same source comes the mixed shape, half woman and half fish, in which the Gorgon is now pourtrayed. The Sirens were indeed originally terrestrial, dwelling in a meadow near the sea, yet not venturing in the deep themselves, but luring men to shipwreck on the coast by the spell of their song; and an echo perhaps of this conception, though the Sirens themselves are no longer known, lives on in a folk-song which pictures the enchantment of a maiden’s love-song wafted to seafarers’ ears from off the shore: ‘Thereby a ship was passing with sails outspread. Sailors that hearken to that voice and look upon such beauty, forget their sails and forsake their oars; they cannot voyage any more; they know not how to set sail[500].’ But by the sixth century[501] the traditional habitat of the Sirens had changed. ‘The Sirens,’ says an anonymous work on monsters and great beasts, ‘are mermaids, who by their exceeding beauty and winning song ensnare mariners; from the head to the navel they are of human and maidenly form, but they have the scaly tails of fishes[502].’ This description establishes an unquestionable connexion between the Sirens and the modern Gorgons.

But the fourth aspect of the Gorgons on which I have to touch, their connexion with the sea, is not, I think, to be explained as another loan from the Sirens. On the contrary the Gorgons were it would seem deities of the sea, when the Sirens were still dwellers upon the shore; and it was their originally marine character which enabled them to absorb the qualities once attributed to the Sirens. Thus according to Hesiod[503] the three Gorgons were daughters of the sea-deities Phorcys and Ceto, and their home was at the western bound of Ocean. Further one of their number, Medusa, was loved by the sea-god Poseidon, and gave birth both to the horse Pegasus whose name may be a derivative of πήγη, ‘water-spring,’ and whose resort was certainly the fountain of Pirene[504], and also to Chrysaor whose bride was ‘Callirrhoe, daughter of far-famed Ocean.’ Whether this mythological problem is capable of solution in terms of natural phenomena[505] does not here concern us; but it is a straightforward and necessary inference from these genealogical data, that an early and intimate connexion existed between the Gorgons and the sea. And here art comes to the support of literature. In the National Museum of Athens are two vases of about the sixth century, depicting Gorgons in the company of dolphins. The first, an early Attic amphora[506] represents the three Gorgons, of whom Medusa appears headless, surrounded by a considerable number of them. The second, a kylex[507] with offset lip of the Kleinmeister type, pourtrays a single Gorgon with a dolphin on either side. These artistic presentments furnish the strongest possible corroboration of Hesiodic lore, and justify the assertion that from the earliest times the Gorgons were deities of the sea. It was clearly then in virtue of their own marine character that they were able later to usurp also the place of the Sirens.

But the Sirens are not the only ancient beings who have contributed to the formation of the popular conception of modern Gorgons. In one story[508] the personality of Scylla is unmistakeable beneath the disguise of name. This fusion is the more natural in that Scylla was from the beginning[509] a monster of the sea, whose form, according to Vergil[510], terminated like that of latter-day Gorgons in a fish’s tail; a monster too fully as terrible in her own way as any Gorgon. The following extract from the story contains all that is pertinent.

‘So the lad departed and tramped on for twenty hours. Then he came to a village by the sea, and saw some men busy lading a boat with oil, and they were carrying on board each one a barrel. When he drew near to them, he said, “Can you carry but one barrel at a time, my good fellows? See how many I will carry.” So saying, he took a barrel on each shoulder, and placed them in the boat. Then said the captain to him, “Thank you, my lad” (for he was afraid of him), “come and have some food.” “No, thank you, captain,” he replied, “I do not want any. But when you are passing yonder straits, please take me along with you.” The captain was delighted to do so, for in the sea at that place there was a Gorgon, and from every boat that passed she took one man as toll and devoured him, or else swamped the whole boat. So they set out, and as they were going the captain said to the lad, “Take a turn at the tiller, my boy, that we may go and sleep, for we are tired.” Accordingly they went below—to sleep, so they pretended—and the lad remained at the helm. Suddenly the boat stopped. He was looking about on each side when he heard a voice behind him. He turned at once and saw a beautiful woman with golden hair, who said to him, “Give me my tribute.” “What tribute?” replied the lad. “The man whom I devour from each boat that passes.” “Give me your hand,” said the lad to her. Straightway without demur she gave it to him, and tried to pull him down into the sea. At this the lad grew angry. “Come up, you she-devil, come up here,” he cried, and dashed her upon the deck. Then he belaboured her soundly, and said to her: “Swear to me that you will never molest man again, or I will not let you go.” “I swear,” she said, “by my mother the sea and by my father Alexander, that I will molest none.” Then he threw her back into the sea.’

Apart from the description of the Gorgon in this story, as in others, as a ‘beautiful woman with golden hair,’ the tradition which has contributed chiefly to the invention of the episode is the ancient myth of Scylla and, we may perhaps add, of Charybdis; for here too the straits are the scene of alternative horrors, either the devouring of one man out of the crew or the sinking of the whole craft.

But in spite of the fusion of both Scylla and the Sirens with the Gorgons in the crucible of popular imagination, analysis of the complex modern conception still reveals two elements in the Gorgons’ nature which vindicate their claim to their ancient name, their association with the sea and the terror that they inspire.

§ 13. The Centaurs.

Ἀνάγκη μετὰ τοῦτο τὸ τῶν Ἱπποκενταύρων εἶδος ἐπανορθοῦσθαι.

Plato, Phaedrus, 7.

The Callicántzari (Καλλικάντζαροι) are the most monstrous of all the creatures of the popular imagination, and none are better known to the Greek-speaking world at large; for even where educated men have ceased to believe in them, they still figure in the stories told and retold to children with each recurring New Year’s Day; and, among the peasants, many reach manhood or womanhood without outgrowing their early fears of them.

The name Callicantzaros itself appears in many dialectic and widely differing forms, and there are also a multitude of local by-names. Of the former I shall treat later in discussing the origin of the word Callicantzaros, while the by-names, being for the most part descriptive of the appearance or qualities of these monsters, will be mentioned as occasion requires. But even where other local names are in common use, some form of the word Callicantzaros is almost always employed as well, or at least is understood.

As in the nomenclature, so too in the description of the Callicantzari, one locality differs very widely from another. And this cannot be merely a result of the wide distribution of the belief in them; for the Nereids certainly are equally widely known, and yet their appearance and habits are, broadly speaking, everywhere the same. The extraordinary divergences and even contradictions in different accounts of the Callicantzari demand some other explanation than that of casual variation. That explanation, as I shall show later, lies in their identity with the ancient Centaurs. But before I discuss their origin, I must attempt as general a description of their appearance and habits as the vast variation of local traditions permits. In revising this description I have had the advantage of consulting Prof. Polites’ new work on the traditions of modern Greece[511], from which I have learnt some new facts, and have obtained on several points confirmation from a new source of what I had myself heard or surmised. I take this opportunity of gratefully acknowledging my indebtedness to him.

In describing the Callicantzari, although the diversities of their outward form are almost endless, two main classes of them must be distinguished, because corresponding with that physical division there is also a marked difference in character. The two classes differ physically in stature, and, while all Callicantzari are essentially mischievous in character, the mischief wrought by the larger sort is often of a malicious and even deadly order, while the smaller sort are more frolicsome and harmless in their tricks.

The larger kind vary from the size of a man to that of a gigantic monster whose loins are on a level with the chimneypots. They are usually black in colour, and covered with a coat of shaggy hair, but a bald variety is also sometimes mentioned. Their heads and also their sexual organs are out of all proportion to the rest of their bodies. Their faces are black; their eyes glare red; they have the ears of goats or asses; from their huge mouths blood-red tongues loll out, flanked by ferocious tusks. Their bodies are in general very lean, so that in some districts the word Callicantzaros is applied metaphorically to a very lean man[512]; but a shorter and thickset variety also occurs. They have the arms and hands of monkeys, and their nails are as long again as their fingers and curved like the talons of a vulture. They are sometimes furnished with long thin tails. They have the legs of a goat or an ass, or sometimes one human leg and one of bestial form; or again both legs are of human shape, but the foot so distorted that the toes come where the heel should be[513]. Hence it is not surprising that they are often lame, but even so they are swift of foot and terrible in strength. ‘They devour their road at the pace of Pegasus,’ wrote Leo Allatius[514]; and at the present day several by-names bear witness to their speed. In Samos they are called Καλλισπούδηδες[515], ‘those who make good speed’; in Cyprus Πλανήταροι[516], ‘the wanderers’; in Athens they have the humorous title Κωλοβελόνηδες, formed from the proverbial expression βελόνια ἔχει ’στὸν κῶλο του, ‘he has needles in his buttocks,’ said of any one who cannot sit still, but is always on the move[517]. Their strength also has earned them one by-name, reported from Kardamýle in Maina, τὰ τσιλικρωτά, said to be formed from the Turkish tselik (‘iron’), in the sense of ‘strong as iron[518].’

All or any of the features which I have mentioned may be found in the person of a single Callicantzaros; but it must be allowed also that no one of them is essential. For sometimes the Callicantzaros appears in ordinary human form without so much as a cloven hoof to distinguish him from ordinary mankind, or again completely in animal shape. In one place they are described as ἀγριάνθρωποι[519], savages but human in appearance, while in another they are ἄγρια τετράποδα[520], ‘savage quadrupeds.’

Yet in general the Callicantzari are neither wholly anthropomorphic nor wholly theriomorphic, but a blend of the two. In a story of some men at Athens who dressed themselves up as Callicantzari, it is said that they blacked their faces and covered themselves with feathers[521]. Again two grotesque and bestial clay statuettes from the Cabirium near Thebes and now in the National Museum at Athens, were identified by peasants as Callicantzari[522]; an identification I have also met with when questioning peasants about similar objects in local museums; in one case it was a Satyr and in another a Centaur which my guide identified as a Callicantzaros. On the whole I should say that the goat contributes more than any other animal to the popular conception of these monsters. Besides having the legs and the ears of goats, as was noted above, they are sometimes said to have their horns also; and in Chios their resemblance to goats is so clearly recognised that in one village they have earned the by-name of Κατσικᾶδες[523], which by formation should mean ‘men who have to do with goats (κατσίκια),’ though it has apparently been appropriated to the designation of beings who are in form half goat and half man. There are however districts, as we shall see later, in which some other animal than the goat forms the predominant element in the monstrous ensemble.