Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/167

 Rh hostile to the Achaeans, take the opposite view, we must not ignore Homer and Hesiod and treat the figments of Attic poets as in a way historical.

Now, to return to the Minotaur, we must steadily remember that the whole story about him and his victims is an Attic, a non-Achæan, legend. Socrates, in the Minos, justly says that it was an invention of Attic poets, made because they were on ill terms with Minos, whom Homer applauds, with Hesiod's consent, above any other mortal man. Next, we must remember that the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, and all the pseudo-historic legends of the Greek states, (except probably as to migrations of peoples), are merely the "saga" forms of märchen of world-wide diffusion and of dateless antiquity. The story which a Greek tells of Theseus or Œdipous, of Pelops or Minos, of Orpheus or Zagreus, of Hesione or Andromeda, is only a märchen or folk-tale, equipped with names of legendary heroes and heroines, and of known places. The Bechuana, the Samoans, the Samoyeds, the Santals, even the Arunta, the Huarocihiri, the Maoris, not to mention the folk-tales of Europe, repeat the same stories and story-incidents about unnamed persons in No-man's-land. It appears to me that some of our most erudite mythologists have not these facts present to their minds in each case. Therefore, when they find in the pseudo-historic legend and in poetry traces of a custom, say the bride-race, or royalty acquired by success in running or boxing, or by solving a riddle, or bringing some rare object through many perils, or slaying a monster like the Minotaur; or find exogamy, indicated by the crown going to an alien adventurer who wins the heiress by answering her riddle, or defeating her in a race, or making her laugh, or who runs away with her after she has magically enabled him to achieve some perilous adventure, (Theseus and Ariadne, and Medea and Jason); mythologists leap to the conclusion