Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/461

Rh also the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the Taurian Artemis, was inspired by the apparition of two eagles feasting on a pregnant hare, and the anger of the goddess is expressly ascribed by Æschylus to this event. According to the poet, her tender heart is outraged by the sacrifice of the helpless brood, but this is a poetical and Hellenistic version, for the Taurian "Artemis" was no gracious lady of the Greek Pantheon, but a cruel and barbaric deity, probably a moongoddess who protected the hare as her messenger and servant. Upon more historical occasions omens have been derived from hares. Thus, in Pausanias, the priest of the moon-goddess instructs some exiles, who are searching for a propitious place to found a city, to build it in a myrtle grove into which they should see a hare flee for refuge. When Arnold and his German hordes besieged Rome, a hare ran towards the walls, and, the Teutons pursuing, a panic seized the Romans, who looked on it as a fatal omen; they deserted the gates without striking a blow, and the barbarians entered. And in our own country hares were employed for purposes of divination. Thus Boadicea, when she harangued her soldiers to spirit them up against the Romans, opened her bosom and let go a hare, which she had there concealed, that the augurs might thence proceed to divine.

The main evidence for the ancient sacredness of the hare rests upon its subsequent unpopularity, and the superstitions which cluster round it. It is of course a matter of common observation that the deities of one age become the devils of another; that, in the lapse of years, objects which were formerly worshipped and held in pious honour,