Note 154.1 — Chapter XXI · THE STORY AS A WHOLE. THE PROBLEM OF ITS PLACE OF ORIGIN. CONCLUSION.

The versions preserved by the author of the Metamorphoses and in a more fragmentary way by Lucian are substantially similar. That other versions were current in antiquity we know from many sources. I have already in the opening chapter given several instances of inconsistent statements pointing unmistakably to this conclusion. The most important of them for this inquiry are derived from Ælian. Writing in the third century after Christ, he tells us of a fish found in the Red Sea and called after Perseus, who was honoured by the Arabs dwelling on the shore. If the modern märchen did not refer to a fish as the source of life of the twin-heroes this would be puzzling, since no reference is made in the classical saga to a fish. But in face of the facts it seems to show, not merely that the literary form of the saga is only one of two or more current in antiquity, but that one at least of the popular and unrecorded variants included a version of the Supernatural Birth which was allied to that in the Breton tale of The King of the Fishes. The same writer in a later passage associates a marine crustacean with Perseus. Many persons abstained from eating it, because they deemed it sacred. This I understand to be an assertion of a practice not confined to the island of Seriphos; whose inhabitants, Ælian goes on to say, if they found it dead would bury it, if they caught it alive would not keep it in their nets, but returned it to the sea. They would even weep over dead specimens, for they held these creatures to be dear to Perseus, the son of Zeus.154.1 The custom of solemnly burying, and mourning for, dead animals is very widespread, and is connected with totemism.154.2 We are probably right in believing that in the first instance the crustacean referred to was the totem of some of the inhabitants of Seriphos, that the national hero was either identified with it or held to be its offspring, and that in process of time this hero was either accepted and glorified as Perseus, the son of Zeus, by the more polished Greeks of the mainland, or from the similarity of his birth and exploits became merged in the hero of Argos and Mykene. Doubtless in the ruder ages tales common in their origin but independent in their development were told both at Seriphos and on the mainland. As intercourse increased, the tales of Argos and Mykene would become known to the people of Seriphos, and vice versâ, their similarity would be recognised and their heroes identified. If the Seriphiote saga connected its hero with the rock-lobster, which was regarded as a totem, as the triplet boys are connected in the Breton märchen with the King of the Fishes, all the conditions would be fulfilled to account for the Seriphiote practices. We seem here, therefore, to have a third version of the story. The two versions which did not reach literary immortality both brought the hero into close relations with a marine animal. We can hardly doubt that in both cases those relations were such as described in so many of the modern variants.