Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/311

 Greek Votive Offerings. 285

chapels" or "outside chapels" of modern Greece "may often stand on the site of a hero-shrine, or some farmer's chapel sacred to Pan or Demeter." This is highly pro- bable, and we are grateful for the list of " modern repre- sentations of ancient shrines" given on p. 37 f. There is indeed scope for much further investigation in the same direction, viz. the tracing of classical cults through Byzantine and mediaeval into modern times. The efforts that have been already made by Prof. W. M. Ramsay, Prof. J. Rendel Harris, and a few others have proved very successful.

Dr. Rouse justly lays stress on the antiquity and im- portance of hero-worship. But, when he concludes that "we have here a system of worship which was older than the great gods " (p- 11) and suggests that the cult e.g. of Zeus was post-Pelasgian (p. 12), that the chthonian deities "really are deified ancestors" (p. 13), that "Hades or Pluto has more of the heroic than the divine about him " (p. 28), &c., &c., it is high time to dissent. The Zeus of Dodona, whose cult shows the clearest traces of a hoary antiquity, was invoked by Achilles as " Pelasgian " [Iliad 16. 233). His worship is derived by Strabo from a Pelas- gian district of Thessaly (Strab. 329). It flourished, more- over, among various branches of the Pelasgian stock in North Greece, Central Greece, South Greece, the Islands, North Africa, and Asia Minor. How can it then be main- tained that Zeus was a post-Pelasgian importation ? It is far more probable that the Pelasgians venerated not only their deceased ancestors, whence arose hero-worship, but also the powers of nature, a sky-god Zeus, a water-god Poseidon, an earth-god Hades, not to mention the minor deities of hills and woods and springs. So, and so only, will Greek religion be brought into line with that of all other Indo-European peoples (see e.g. Schrader, Real-lexikon der Indogermanischen Altertumskunde, s.v. " Religion," an article that no student of classical religion can afford to neglect). The question is too large to be argued out here :