Tunc vicina astris Erycino in vertice sedes
Fundatur Veneri Idaliæ; tumuloque sacerdos
Ac lucus latè sacer additur Anchisæo.
Immediately after Ovid’s account of Melicerta, the poet speaks of Cadmus and his wife turn’d into serpents: which I understand of the like serpentine temple made by their sepulchre. Suidas writes, on Epaminondas’s tomb was a shield and a snake carv’d, to shew he was of Spartan race. We may very well imagine the circle and snake, the cognizance of Cadmus.
After Cadmus’s decease, his people built a city called Butua; and near it is a place call’d Cylices, where Cadmus and Hermione were turn’d into serpents: and two stone snakes are there set up by the Phœnicians, to their honour: Bochart page 502, where many authors are quoted to prove these particulars. He says, the word Cylices in Phœnician, means tumulos, our barrows. It was a place full of sepulchral tumuli, as Stonehenge and Abury: cups revers’d, regarding the form of them. Nonnus in Dionys. writes, that there are two great stones or rocks there, which clap together with a great noise, whence auguries are taken. Tzetzes chiliad. iv. hist. 139, mentions the same thing. I take this to be a main ambre, of which I spoke largely in Stonehenge. Herodot. V. 61. says the Cadmeians being admitted citizens of Athens, built temples there, which had nothing common with the Greek temples; particularly they had a temple of Ceres Achæa and mystical rites. Achæa, I suppose, means a serpentine temple, from the oriental name.
We read just now, that the Sidonian women, the mourners for Melcarthus and his mother, were turn’d some into stones, others into birds.
Pars volucres factæ, sumptis Ismenides alis.
I should suppose the internal meaning of this to be, the making an alate temple, of which we are further to speak in [chap. xvi.]
Antoninus Liberalis in his XXXI. tells a very old story of the first inhabitants of Italy before Hercules’s time; a place among the Messapians called the sacred stones: where the nymphs Epimelides had a fane set round with trees, which trees were formerly men. This must be understood as the former.
Thus we see how the ancient Greeks involv’d every thing in fable, but still all fable has some historical foundation, and that we must endeavour to find, by applying things so properly together, as to strike out the latent truth.