Another argument in favour of the general thesis that savagery left deep marks on Greek life in general, and on myth in particular, may be derived from survivals of totemism in ritual and legend. The following instances need not necessarily be accepted, but it may be admitted that they are precisely the traces which totemism would leave had it once existed, and then waned away on the advance of civilisation.(1)
(1) The argument to be derived from the character of the Greek (Greek text omitted) as a modified form of the totem-kindred is too long and complex to be put forward here. It is stated in Custom and Myth, "The history of the Family," in M'Lennan's Studies in Early history, and is assumed, if not proved, in Ancient Society by the late Mr. Lewis Morgan.
That Greeks in certain districts regarded with religious reverence certain plants and animals is beyond dispute. That some stocks even traced their lineage to beasts will be shown in the chapter on Greek Divine Myths, and the presumption is that these creatures, though explained as incarnations and disguises of various gods, were once totems sans phrase, as will be inferred from various examples. Clemens Alexandrinus, again, after describing the animal-worship of the Egyptians, mentions cases of zoolatry in Greece.(1) The Thessalians revered storks, the Thebans weasels, and the myth ran that the weasel had in some way aided Alcmena when in labour with Heracles. In another form of the myth the weasel was the foster-mother of the hero.(2) Other Thessalians, the Myrmidons, claimed descent from the ant and revered ants. The religious respect paid to mice in the temple of Apollo Smintheus, in the Troad, Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos and Crete is well known, and a local tribe were alluded to as Mice by an oracle. The god himself, like the Japanese harvest-god, was represented in art with a mouse at his foot, and mice, as has been said, were fed at his shrine.(3) The Syrians, says Clemens Alexandrinus, worship doves and fishes, as the Elians worship Zeus.(4) The people of Delphi adored the wolf,(5) and the Samians the sheep. The Athenians had a hero whom they worshipped in the shape of a wolf.(6) A remarkable testimony is that of the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius, ii. 124. "The wolf," he says, "was a beast held in honour by the Athenians, and whosoever slays a wolf collects what is needful for its burial." The burial of sacred animals in Egypt is familiar. An Arab tribe mourns over and solemnly buries all dead gazelles.(7) Nay, flies were adored with the sacrifice of an ox near the temple of Apollo in Leucas.(8) Pausanias (iii. 22) mentions certain colonists who were guided by a hare to a site where the animal hid in a myrtle-bush. They therefore adore the myrtle, (Greek text omitted). In the same way a Carian stock, the Ioxidae, revered the asparagus.(9) A remarkable example of descent mythically claimed from one of the lower animals is noted by Otfried Muller.(10) Speaking of the swan of Apollo, he says, "That deity was worshipped, according to the testimony of the Iliad, in the Trojan island of Tenedos. There, too, was Tennes honoured as the (Greek text omitted) of the island. Now his father was called Cycnus (the swan) in an oft-told and romantic legend.(11)... The swan, therefore, as father to the chief hero on the Apolline island, stands in distinct relation to the god, who is made to come forward still more prominently from the fact that Apollo himself is also called father of Tennes. I think we can scarcely fail to recognise a mythus which was local at Tenedos.... The fact, too, of calling the swan, instead of Apollo, the father of a hero, demands altogether a simplicity and boldness of fancy which are far more ancient than the poems of Homer."
(1) Op. cit., i. 34.
(2) Scholiast on Iliad, xix. 119.
(3) Aelian, H. A., xii. 5; Strabo, xiii. 604. Compare "Apollo and the Mouse, Custom and Myth, pp. 103-120.
(4) Lucian, De Dea Syria.
(5) Aelian, H. A., xii. 40.
(6) Harpocration, (Greek text omitted). Compare an address to the wolf-hero, "who delights in the flight and tears of men," in Aristophanes, Vespae, 389.
(7) Robertson Smith, Kinship in Early Arabia, pp. 195-204.