Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/158

136 present in the Greek, yet found in the non-Christian Arabic and Hebrew, and even in the Georgian forms, then it becomes impossible to suppose that it is a mere abridgement of Boissonade's Greek text. Let us take some examples.

The Greek text of the apologue of the man pursued into a well or ditch begins as follows: "Those then who serve such a harsh and wicked master, severing themselves in their madness from goodness and kindness, and agape for present things and cleaving thereunto, never taking thought for the future, but pressing on unceasingly to bodily enjoyments, while they leave their souls to starve and famish and to be afflicted with a thousand ills, these I consider to be like unto a man fleeing from the presence of an infuriated unicorn," &c.

Now the Armenian has simply as follows:—"The life of this world is to be likened to a man fleeing from the presence of an unicorn;" and this is very close to the Georgian: "This worldly life is like to a man whom an elephant pursued," &c.

Then again in the Greek, the man in falling into the ditch stretched out his hands, and having caught hold of a certain tree (or plant) held it tightly. But the Armenian says he caught hold of the branch of a tree, which grew on the edge of the pit? How did the Armenian know (1) that it was a branch to which he clung, and (2) that the tree grew on the edge of the pit. We turn to the non-Christian Arabic and there we read that he hung on to two branches that grew on its (i.e. the well's) margin.

It may be noticed that the Christian Arabic, which Zotenberg shows to be in the main a translation of Boissonade's Greek, also adds the words: "which grew on the margin or edge"; whence Weisslovits (Prinz u. Derwisch) infers that its translator knew of the earlier Arabic form and was influenced by it in making his translation. A simpler explanation would be that some older Greek text translated by the Christian Arab included these words, and that they have dropt out of our existing Greek texts. And this hypothesis