Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/153

Rh The application of all this for the subject in hand is obvious. If what I have said is true of the uneducated people, and especially of the peasantry at the present time in Europe, must it not have been equally true of uneducated people, and especially of the peasantry in antiquity? If our peasants are, intellectually regarded, simply savages, could the peasantry of ancient Greece and Rome have been any better? And if we moderns have lived so long in ignorance of the mass of savagery lying at our doors, may not the literary classes of antiquity have been equally blind to the mental savagery of the peasants whom they saw at work in the fields or jostled in the streets? There are strong grounds for answering both of these questions in the affirmative. In regard to the former question, the existence of a layer of savagery beneath the surface of ancient society is abundantly attested by the notices of popular beliefs and customs which are scattered up and down classical literature, especially, as might have been anticipated, in the inferior authors, men less elevated above vulgar prejudices than most of the great classical writers. In regard to the second question, the general ignorance of classical writers as to the popular superstitions of their day is not only to be presumed from the fact that they rarely mention them, it is positively demonstrated by their manifest inability to understand even those instances of popular superstition which they are occasionally led to mention. Indeed, from the way in which they refer to these superstitions, it is often plain that they not only did not understand them, but that they did not even recognise them as superstitions at all, that is, as beliefs actually current among the vulgar. Conclusive proof of this is furnished by the treatment which the so-called “symbols of Pythagoras” received at the hands of the polite writers of antiquity. A member of a modern folk-lore society has only to glance at these “symbols” to see that they are common specimens of folk-lore, many of which are perfectly familiar to our European peasantry at the present day. Yet they