Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/537



HE author of The Golden Bough, in a recent discussion as to the observance among the Greeks of a superstition which is very prevalent among savage races, remarks upon the comparative paucity of the evidence on these matters which has come down to us. Probably the absence of such evidence is merely accidental; for "considering", he says, "the small chance any popular superstition had of getting into classical literature, and, if it did get in, of surviving the shipwreck of ancient books, this lack of evidence is not surprising." And yet, from the little that we do know, we may safely argue that the harvest to be gathered is of the richest. The difficulty that confronts us is twofold: first, in the fact that Greek literature and Greek art, of the periods at least of which we should like to learn, are occupied more with the higher intelligence and the public life than with the bourgeois and work-a-day aspect of the people, from which we have most to expect; and secondly, because they present to us a people who have long since emerged from the primitive condition, and are no longer in the earliest natural stage of their existence. It is precisely of this early stage that archæology has much to tell us; when art and literature are not, and historical records fade away into the legendary tradition of the past, the ultimate appeal is to the spade: and inasmuch as death is the leveller of persons, and decay covers equally the temple and the hovel, the impression which we get when, however little, the veil is thus drawn aside, is often more broadly true and valuable, where customs and ideas are concerned, than that which the eclecticism of the artist or historian can give.