Note 39.1 — Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

Earliest ritual of purification.—It has been even said that the very idea of the need of purification on special occasions was unknown to Homer. This is demonstrably false; it is enough to mention one passage alone: at the close of the first book of the Iliad, the Achæans at Agamemnon’s bidding, purify themselves from the plague, and throw the infected media of purification into the sea; this is a religious lustration. And when Hesiod mentions the rule that a man returning from an ‘ill-omened’ funeral could not without peril attempt to beget a child on that day,39.1 he happens to be the first literary witness to the Greek tabu of death; but we may be sure that he is giving us a tradition of indefinite age, and that the ‘Achæan’ society, of which Homer is supposed to be the spokesman, had some of the Kathartic rules and superstitions that are found broadcast in later Greece. It may not have elaborated or laid marked stress on them; it may have had no strong sense of the impurity of homicide nor devised any special code for its expiation. But if it was entirely without any instinctive feeling for the impurity of birth and death, and for the danger of the ‘miasma’ arising from certain acts and states, it was almost unique among the races of man. Only, a progressive people does not overstrain such feelings.