Bringing down on the folk of the Pigmies battle and murder and blood.[[179]]
[179]. Way’s Iliad, iii. 3-7.
The simile is felicitously plagiarised by Virgil in his
Quales sub nubibus atris
Strymoniæ dant signa grues, atque æthera tranant
Cum sonitu, fugiuntque Notos clamore secundo,[[180]]
but with the omission of the pygmy-element, probably as too childish for the mature taste of his Roman audience. Its origin may perhaps be sought in obscure rumours concerning the stunted races encountered by modern travellers in Central Africa. The association of ideas, however, by which they were connected in a hostile sense with ‘fowls o’ the air’ is of trackless antiquity. It partially survives in the notion, current in Finland, that birds of passage spend their winters in dwarf-land, ‘a dweller among birds’ meaning, in polite Finnish phrase, a dwarf; and bird-footed mannikins have a well-marked place in German folk-stories;[[181]] but the root from which these withered leaves of fable once derived vitality has long ago perished. Aristotle described the ‘small infantry warr’d on by cranes’ as cave-dwellers near the sources of the Nile;[[182]] Pliny turned them into a kind of pantomime-cavalry, mounted on rams and goats, locating them among the Himalayas, and conjuring up a fantastic vision of their periodical descents to the seacoast, to destroy the eggs and young of their winged enemies, against whom they could no otherwise hope to make head.[[183]] For such disinterested ravage as was committed on their behalf by Herzog Ernst, a mediæval knight-errant smitten with compassion for the miserable straits to which they were reduced by the secular feud imposed upon them, could scarcely be of more than millennial recurrence.[[184]]
[180]. Æneid, x. 264-66.
[181]. Grimm and Stallybrass, Teutonic Mythology, pp. 1420, 1450.
[182]. De Animal. Hist. lib. vii. cap. ii.; lib. iii. cap. xii.