(4) Suidas, s.v. "Prometheus"; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, xviii. 9.
While Greek opinion, both popular and philosophical, admitted, or rather asserted, that savagery lay in the background of the historical prospect, Greek institutions retained a thousand birth-marks of savagery. It is manifest and undeniable that the Greek criminal law, as far as it effected murder, sprang directly from the old savage blood-feud.(1) The Athenian law was a civilised modification of the savage rule that the kindred of a slain man take up his blood-feud. Where homicide was committed WITHIN the circle of blood relationship, as by Orestes, Greek religion provided the Erinnyes to punish an offence which had, as it were, no human avenger. The precautions taken by murderers to lay the ghost of the slain man were much like those in favour among the Australians. The Greek cut off the extremities of his victim, the tips of the hands and feet, and disposed them neatly beneath the arm-pits of the slain man.(2) In the same spirit, and for the same purpose, the Australian black cuts off the thumbs of his dead enemy, that the ghost too may be mutilated and prevented from throwing at him with a ghostly spear. We learn also from Apollonius Rhodius and his scholiast that Greek murderers used thrice to suck in and spit out the gore of their victims, perhaps with some idea of thereby partaking of their blood, and so, by becoming members of their kin, putting it beyond the power of the ghosts to avenge themselves. Similar ideas inspire the worldwide savage custom of making an artificial "blood brotherhood" by mingling the blood of the contracting parties. As to the ceremonies of cleansing from blood-guiltiness among the Greeks, we may conjecture that these too had their primitive side; for Orestes, in the Eumenides, maintains that he has been purified of his mother's slaughter by sufficient blood of swine. But this point will be illustrated presently, when we touch on the mysteries.
(1) Duncker, History of Greece, Engl. transl., vol. ii. p. 129.
(2) See "Arm-pitting in Ancient Greece," in the American Journal of Philology, October, 1885, where a discussion of the familiar texts in Aeschylus and Apollonius Rhodius will be found.
Ritual and myth, as might be expected, retained vast masses of savage rites and superstitious habits and customs. To be "in all things too superstitious," too full of deisidaimonia, was even in St. Paul's time the characteristic of the Athenians. Now superstition, or deisidaimonia, is defined by Theophrastus,(1) as "cowardice in regard to the supernatural" ((Greek text omitted)). This "cowardice" has in all ages and countries secured the permanence of ritual and religious traditions. Men have always argued, like one of the persons in M. Renan's play, Le Pretre de Nemi, that "l'ordre du monde depend de l'ordre des rites qu'on observe". The familiar endurable sequence of the seasons of spring, and seed-sowing, and harvest depend upon the due performance of immemorial religious acts. "In the mystic deposits," says Dinarchus, "lies the safety of the city."(2) What the "mystic deposits" were nobody knows for certain, but they must have been of very archaic sanctity, and occur among the Arunta and the Pawnees.
(1) Characters.
(2) Ap. Hermann, Lehrbuch, p. 41; Aglaophamus, 965.
Ritual is preserved because it preserves LUCK. Not only among the Romans and the Brahmans, with their endless minute ritual actions, but among such lower races as the Kanekas of New Caledonia, the efficacy of religious functions is destroyed by the slightest accidental infraction of established rules.(1) The same timid conservatism presides over myth, and in each locality the mystery-plays, with their accompanying narratives, preserved inviolate the early forms of legend. Myth and ritual do not admit of being argued about. "C'etait le rite etabli. Ce n'etait pas plus absurde qu'autre chose," says the conservative in M. Renan's piece, defending the mode of appointment of
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
(1) Thus the watchers of the dead in New Caledonia are fed by the sorcerer with a mess at the end of a very long spoon, and should the food miss the mouth, all the ceremonies have to be repeated. This detail is from Mr. J. J. Atkinson.