Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/660

 350 Museums and Raree Shoivs in Antiquity.

head as a false tail. The fact that the creature was head- less seems to show that it was a real marine animal, which the priests palmed off upon the credulous as a Triton. As the popular idea of a Triton was a fish with a man's head, it became necessary, before exhibiting a real fish as a Triton, to cut off its head or at least to mangle it past all recognition, and then to invent some story to account for the mutilation. It is not surprising, however, that on the coins of the city the creature should appear with its head complete. The people of Tanagra were doubtless proud of their Triton, which probably drew sightseers from afar ; and in putting him on their coins as a badge of their city they naturally represented him, not in the mauled and mangled condition which all the exigencies of natural history rendered necessary, but in all his glory with a human head and a fish's tail."

Augustus was in many ways intensely modern : he collected antiquities and took a deep interest in the history and relics of the great episodes of the past. An incident which illustrates this is narrated by Livy, who writes : ^ " This fact I learnt from Augustus Caesar, the second founder of every shrine in Rome, for this I heard him say that when he entered the shrine of Jupiter Feretrius, which he restored from an almost ruinous state, he read with his own eyes the inscription on the linen corselet." The corse- let was that dedicated by Aulas Cornelius Cossus, who defeated an Etruscan chief in the fifth century b.c. and won the spolia opima by defeating the enemy's leader in single combat. Professor Conway comments on the story : " What interests Livy is the picture of the young triumphant emperor Augustus, in the course of his devout restoration of the shrines of Rome, stopping to read the archaic letters written on a linen breastplate torn from a dying Etruscan chief by his vanquisher, the consul Cossus, 400 years before." ^

1 Livy, iv. 20. 5. ^ New Studies 0} a Great Inheritance, pp. 197-9.