Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/47

 Presidential Address. 19

or allusions which recall something in ancient literature. Pausanias in his visit to Delphi saw, amongst the pictures of Polygnotus, the figure of a man, seated, and inscribed with the title Ocnos, or Indolence ; he was plaiting a rope, and beside him stood a she-ass furtively eating the rope as fast as he made it. " They say," says the traveller, "that this Ocnos was an industrious man who had a spendthrift wife, and as fast as he earned money, she spent it." This episode reappears in the Introduction to Jdtaka, No. ']']} where a king has a number of wonderful dreams which nobody can interpret save the Bodhisat. Here is the seventh dream. "A man was weaving rope, and as he wove, he threw it down at his feet. Under his bench lay a hungry she-jackal, which kept eating the rope as he wove, but without the man's knowing it." The Bodhisat interprets the dream as the Greek does, as referring to the inordinate greed and extravagance of women ; but he is careful to point out that it refers to future time. Who shall say that this prophecy has not ere now come true.? There is again the Greek proverb d\^ fxaxaipav, which is thus interpreted by Zenobius : " The Corinthians kept a yearly feast for Hera, and sacrificed a goat to the goddess. Now some of the men hid the knife, but the goat fumbling with her feet un- covered it, and thus became the cause of her own death." This reappears in an Indian version.^

Another story throws new light on a difficult passage of Sophocles. You will remember the lines where Antigone speaks of the tie which binds her to her dead brother : ^

" A husband dead, another I might find me, Or if my son were dead, another son, But since my parents both are dead and gone, No brother could I ever get again."

^Jat. i. 189 ; Paus. x. 29 ; Folk- Lore, i. 409.

2 Zenobius, Cent. i. 27 ; Jdt. iv. 159 (quoted). 'Soph. Ant. 989.