Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/572

 530 Reviews.

the book is in one respect almost worthless owing to its inaccuracy. The writer sets out upon perfectly sound principles, namely, with the idea of illustrating from the present beliefs of the conservative peasantry the popular beliefs of ancient times. He succeeds in telling us something about modern Greek super- stitions; but his comparisons with ancient ideas break down hopelessly, because, — to be frank, — the religion of ancient Greece is a subject about which he knows less than nothing. What is to be made, for example, of such statements as these ? " Nothing was imposed [in ancient Greece] by authority. In belief and in worship each man was a law unto himself" (p. 3). Every man "a law unto himself" in worship, in any ancient state or any part of the countryside, of which we know anything ! Probably nothing outside of savage communities was ever so completely controlled by sacred and inviolable rules, observed to the letter by the whole community, as the religion of ancient Greece, unless it was that of ancient Rome. After this we are quite prepared to find him reversing the functions of the Heavenly Aphrodite and Aphrodite Pandemos (p. 4), on the strength of a passage in Artemidorus, — he does not seem to know that the blunder, or rather the deliberate misrepresentation, dates from Plato, — and trying to find, in the confused ancient way of speaking of the dead, now as corpses and again as phantoms, a trace of some- thing like the Slavonic belief in vampires, or stating (p. 572) that the date of the Mysteries coincides roughly with that of Easter, — a glaring error from which any handbook would have saved him. His handling of ancient texts also is childish. Not only does he accept, with hardly a trace of criticism, any and every piece of vaporing of late authors on such dark subjects as the ritual of Eleusis, — (Lobeck, whom he quotes, might have taught him a little caution, to say nothing of later works), — but he continually mis- interprets perfectly straightforward statements of, e.g. Herodotus. Her. IV. xciv. (the human sacrifices of the Getae) is thus expounded, — "No one can fail to notice that Herodotus' own interest in the custom centres not in the idea which prompted it but in the manner of carrying it out. His account of it reads as if he knew his Greek readers to be familiar enough with the con- ception of human sacrifice as a means of sending a messenger to