Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/232

224 the myth of Pan and Selene ; and as he expressly refers to it in his preface as an illustration of the principle that a late authority may preserve the primitive form of a myth, it will, I hope, not be considered hypercritical if this attempt to estimate the value of Roscher's mythological methods concludes with an examination of his appendix. The myth, as preserved in the words of Philargyrius (ad Virg., Georg., iii, 391) is, "Pan cum Lunae amore flagraret, ut illi formosus videretur, niveis velleribus se circumdedit atque ita eam ad rem veneream illexit." The problem is to explain the myth. The solution which Roscher offers, after making every inquiry into Pan's antecedents — as indeed he was bound to do, if he was to put Pan's alleged conduct in the proper light — is that "originally Pan was not a god of light or a sun-god" — as under the circumstances one might have hastily inferred — "but nothing more than a divine or supernatural type of the goatherds and shepherds of ancient Greece." He was, if we may explain Roscher's meaning, the αύτο-νομεύς, the Herdsman an sich, or Herd-in-himself, living, of course, έν ούρανίω τόπω). This conception is so "simple and natural" that some of Roscher's readers perhaps will require no further proof that it is primitive. Nevertheless, Roscher proceeds to prove it. Shepherds live in caves ; Theocritus and Achilles Tatius say that Pan lives in caves. Shepherds move with their flocks from place to place : "precisely the same roving life is led by Pan according to the Homeric Hymn, v. 8 ff." Many herdsmen fish, and so does Pan (" Opp. Hal. 3, 18 ; mehr b. Welcker Gr. Götterl. 2 S. 662"). Does the shepherd love his pipe? Pan loves Syrinx too (poets passim). Shepherds love to lie in the shade, and "this universal custom of the herdsmen has obviously given rise to the idea that Pan thus lies and sleeps at noon. Cf. especially Th. 1, 15 ff."

Now to say that all this only shows how poets delighted to picture Pan to themselves, and that it does not show what conception their peasant contemporaries had of him,