‘It is said that when the Arcadians had once invaded Elis, and the Eleans lay encamped opposite to them, a woman came to the generals of the Eleans, with a child at her breast, and said that, though she was the mother of the child, she offered it, bidden thereto by dreams, to fight on the side of the Eleans. And those in command, trusting the woman’s tale, put the child in the forefront of the army naked. Then the Arcadians came to the attack, and lo! straightway the child was changed into a serpent. And the Arcadians, dismayed at the sight, turned to flight, and were pressed by the Eleans, who won a signal victory and gave to the god the name of Sosipolis (“saviour of the state”). And at the place where the serpent disappeared in the ground after the battle they set up the sanctuary; and along with him they took to worshipping Ilithyia, because she was the goddess who had brought the boy into the world.’
Is this story complete, or did Pausanias’ informants suppress one material point out of shame? How came a mortal infant to assume the form of a serpent which is proper only to apparitions from the lower world? The missing episode is, I believe, the sacrifice of the child, which having been offered willingly became after death a daemon friendly to the Eleans and fought, in the form of a serpent, on their side. Human sacrifice before a battle was not unknown in ancient Greece[718], but by Pausanias’ time the inhabitants of Elis might well have hesitated to impute to their forefathers so barbarous a custom, and have modified the story by omitting even that incident which alone could make it harmonise with ancient religious ideas[719].
A similar view has been taken of another story of Pausanias[720], also from Elis. ‘Oxylus (the king of Elis), they say, had two sons Aetolus and Laias. Aetolus died before his parents and was buried by them in a tomb which they caused to be made exactly in the gate of the road to Olympia and the sanctuary of Zeus. The cause of their burying him thus was an oracle which forbade the corpse to be either within or without the city. And up to my time the governor of the gymnasium still makes annual offerings to Aetolus as a hero.’ Commenting on this passage Dr Frazer[721] says, ‘The spirit of the dead man was probably expected to guard the gate against foes.... It is possible that in this story of the burial of Aetolus in the gate we have a faded tradition of an actual human sacrifice offered when the gate was built.’ Certainly the facts that Aetolus was young and that he was not head of the royal house make his elevation to the rank of tutelary hero after death difficult to understand on any other hypothesis; and it should be noted too that the oracle, in obedience to which his tomb was made in the gateway, probably came, as the preceding context suggests, from Delphi, that same shrine which was responsible for the sacrifice of Aristodemus’ daughter in the Messenian war.
Thus there is some probability that in ancient, as in modern, Greece the genius was sometimes superseded by the victim offered to him, but bequeathed to his successor something of his own character. The victim, now become a hero, manifested himself in the old-established guise of a serpent, and, if we may judge from the case of Sosipolis at Olympia, continued to be fed with honey-cakes, the same food which had been considered the appropriate diet for the original snake-genii such as those dwelling in the Erechtheum. But, when once the transition of worship was well advanced, the power to assume serpent-form was naturally extended to all tutelary heroes and even to gods; to have been sacrificed was no longer the sole qualifying condition. The hero Cychreus went to the help of the Athenians at Salamis in the form of a serpent[722]. Two serpents were the incarnations of the heroes Trophonius and Agamedes at the oracle of Lebadea[723]. Amphiaraus was represented by a snake on the coins of Oropus. An archaic relief of the sixth century B.C. in the Museum of Sparta, to which Miss Harrison has recently called attention, represents ‘a male and a female figure seated side by side on a great throne-like chain.... Worshippers of diminutive size approach with offerings—a cock and some object that may be a cake, an egg, or a fruit.... It is clear that we have ... representations of the dead, but the dead conceived of as half-divine, as heroized—hence their large size as compared with that of their worshipping descendants. They are κρείττονες, “Better and Stronger Ones.” The artist of the relief is determined to make his meaning clear. Behind the chair, equal in height to the seated figures, is a great curled snake, but a snake strangely fashioned. From the edge of his lower lip hangs down a long beard, a decoration denied by nature. The intention is clear; he is a human snake, the vehicle, the incarnation of the dead man’s ghost[724].’
In this relief the offerings depicted also are, I think, no less instructive than the bearded snake. If we may suppose that the somewhat indeterminate object, cake, egg, or fruit, was intended for a honey-cake, the offerings combine that which was the accustomed food of snake-genii in ancient times with a cock, the victim most frequently sacrificed to the same genii at the present day.
Of gods, Asclepius, perhaps because he began life as a hero, was most frequently represented in serpent-form. It was in this guise that he came to Sicyon, Epidaurus Limera, and Rome[725]; and in later times Lucian tells a humorous tale of how an impostor effected by trickery a supposed re-incarnation of Asclepius in snake-form before the very eyes of the people out of whose superstitions he made a living and indeed a fortune[726]. Here again, if we may argue from modern custom, the serpent-form carried with it the traditional offering of a ‘cock to Asclepius.’ But other gods too had sometimes their attendant snakes, as had Asclepius at Epidaurus; and in every case it is likely that the particular god had originally dispossessed a primitive snake-genius, but inherited from him and retained for a time in local cults the form of a snake; until, as the conception of the gods became more and more anthropomorphic, the snake ceased to be a manifestation of the god himself and became merely his minister or his symbol. Even Zeus himself, under the title of Meilichios, is proved by two reliefs found at the Piraeus to have been figured for a time by his worshippers as a snake[727].
In many such cases doubtless the substitution of the cult of a new and named god for that of a primitive and nameless genius explains adequately the incomer’s inheritance and temporary retention of the snake-form; but in the case of tutelary heroes, above all, the analogy of modern folk-lore, in which the human victim is sometimes erroneously elevated to the rank of guardian-genius, supplies, I think, the right clue to the process by which in ancient times the snake came to be the recognised incarnation of the spirits of dead men and heroes.
The genii of water, to whom we now turn, are sometimes imagined in the form of dragons or of bulls, but more often by far in human or quasi-human shape. An exception to the general rule must of course be made in the case of the genii of bridges, if, as I suppose, they were originally identical with the genii of those rivers which the bridges span; for these, as I have said, are usually dragons. But if in this case there is a difference in outward appearance, there is a general agreement at any rate in characteristics; for the genii of water are no less hostile to man than those who demand human sacrifice as the price of their permission to build a bridge.
At Kephalóvryso in Aetolia the genii of a river were described to me as red, grinning devils who might often be seen sitting in the bed of the stream beneath the water. They were believed to mate with Lamiae who infested several caves on the bank of the river; and together these two kinds of monster would feed on the bodies of men whom they had dragged into the river and drowned.