Ἀθάνατον θεὸν ὧδε βροτῶν ἕνεκα στυφελίζειν.
Ὣς ἔφαθ’· Ἥφαιστος δὲ κατέσβεσε θεσπιδαὲς πῦρ·
Ἄψορρον δ’ ἄρα κῦμα κατέσσυτο καλὰ ῥέεθρα.’
To beings thus conceived in personal divinity, full worship was given. Odysseus invokes the river of Scheria; Skamandros had his priest and Spercheios his grove; and sacrifice was done to the rival of Herakles, the river-god Acheloos, eldest of the three thousand river-children of old Okeanos.[[477]] Through the ages of the classic world, the river-gods and the water-nymphs held their places, till within the bounds of Christendom they came to be classed with ideal beings like them in the mythology of the northern nations, the kindly sprites to whom offerings were given at springs and lakes, and the treacherous nixes who entice men to a watery death. In times of transition, the new Christian authorities made protest against the old worship, passing laws to forbid adoration and sacrifice to fountains—as when Duke Bretislav forbade the still half-pagan country folk of Bohemia to offer libations and sacrifice victims at springs,[[478]] and in England Ecgbert’s Poenitentiale proscribed the like rites, ‘if any man vow or bring his offerings to any well,’ ‘if one hold his vigils at any well.’[[479]] But the old veneration was too strong to be put down, and with a varnish of Christianity and sometimes the substitution of a saint’s name, water-worship has held its own to our day. The Bohemians will go to pray on the river-bank where a man has been drowned, and there they will cast in an offering, a loaf of new bread and a pair of wax-candles. On Christmas Eve they will put a spoonful of each dish on a plate, and after supper throw the food into the well, with an appointed formula, somewhat thus:—
‘House-father gives thee greeting,
Thee by me entreating:
Springlet, share our feast of Yule,
But give us water to the full;
When the land is plagued with drought,
Drive it with thy well-spring out.’[[480]]