Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/359

Rh power to enter; presumably, as in the Panjab, through the opening in it. Certainly this would seem the reasonable explanation to a Roman of Plautus' day. That comedian (Amphitruo, 1108), makes the serpents who came to attack the infant Herakles effect their entrance in impluuium, that is through the opening in the roof to the uncovered space below. How the episode was handled in his Greek original we do not know; certainly in Theokritos, xxiv. 13, the monsters come in by the door, the poet, if he gave the matter any thought at all, probably reflecting that the emissaries of so high a goddess as Hera would not be stopped by the usual barriers which guarded that entrance against ordinary bogies. It is by the impluuium again that Terence seems to picture the shower of gold entering Danae's prison; at least in his Eunuchus the lover moralises on the strength of the passion which could set the god "sneaking on to someone else's tiles" (Eun. 588).

The most famous example is that with which Frazer's brilliant and often-quoted article, On certain burial customs, begins, namely, the Roman custom recorded by Plutarch, Q.R. 5, that if a man falsely reported dead came home alive after his funeral rites were celebrated, he was not allowed to come in by the door, but must scramble in by the impluuium. It is the more interesting, when we remember that the sloping roof was much more nearly universal in Italy than in Greece, to read on a little further in Plutarch, and discover that a Greek in similar plight was treated as a new-born baby. The idea was the same in either case. He was a ghost, and must be treated accordingly; just as in the Niger delta a man who has been killed by Long Ju-ju is a spirit, and will not be regarded as anything else by his friends, even if to the eye of flesh he appears merely to have been sold out of the country and to have escaped and