Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/170

 138 'Jlic Cursiiio- of Vcnizclos.

heinous a crime.** Here, again, the writer says nothing about any curses by which the throwing of stones may possibly have been accompanied. But the context proves that, in this part of his ideal legislation, Plato was less concerned with the punishment of the criminal than with the purification of the city, which was believed to have been defiled by his act ; it may be, therefore, that impre- cations formed no part of the ritual of purification con- templated by the philosopher. Whether that was so or not, we may surmise that, in prescribing this form of atonement for parricide, matricide, and similar aggravated cases of murder, Plato had his eye on certain expiatory rites which were either actually observed in his time or traditionally reported to have been observed by gods or men in former ages. For, with the growing conservatism of age, Plato in the Lazus clipped those wings of his imagination which had borne him aloft in the Republic into the blue. In his later work he took a lower flight, and hovered much nearer to Greek earth and Greek usage than when he had surveyed the whole world from the empyreal heights of pure idealism. Now a ritual not unlike that which our philosopher prescribed in the case of parricide was said to have been observed at the trial of the great, god Hermes for the murder of Argus. The gods, we are told, who sat in judgment on the divine prisoner at the bar, each cast a stone at him by way of purifying them- selves from the pollution of his crime ; hence the origin of those heaps of stones which, in ancient Greece, were to be seen by the wayside surmounted by images of Hermes, and to which every passer-by added a stone.^


 * Plato, Laws, \\. 12, p. S73 a.c.

^ Etyiiiologiciim Ma'^nuiii, s.v. 'EpiUaZoj', pp. 375 sq. ; Eustathius on Homer, Odyssey, xvi. 471. As to these heaps of stones, see Cornutus, Theologiae Graecae Coinpendiuni, 16 ; Babrius, Fahitlac, xlviii. i ; Siiidas, s.v. 'Ep/xaiov ; Scholiast on Nicander, Ther. 150. Of these writers Cornutus is the only one who mentions the custom of every passer-by adding to the pile.