Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/164

 the same hour of the same day in week, month, or year, when by some capricious reversal of fate the presence of the Nereids is apt to remove the hurt which it formerly inflicted.

Thus far I have dealt with the main characteristics of nymphs in general: it remains to consider the several classes into which they were anciently divided; and though for the most part the old appellations, Nereids, Naiads, Oreads, and Dryads, have either disappeared or else changed their form or meaning, we shall find that the old division of them into these four main classes according to their habitation still to some extent survives.

The Nereids, whose name is now extended to comprise all kinds of nymphs, are in the ancient and proper sense of the term among the rarest of whom the peasant speaks. But here and there mention is made of genuine sea-nymphs, and also of their queen, the Lamia of the Sea, who has superseded Amphitrite. In 1826 a villager of Argolis described to Soutzos, the historian of the Greek revolution, a true Nereid. Her hair was green and adorned with pearls and corals; often by moonlight she might be seen dancing merrily on the surface of the sea, and in the daytime she would come to dry her clothes upon the rocks near the mills of Lerna. These, I may add from my own knowledge, are reputed to be haunted by Nereids down to this day. Happily a peasant of that period cannot be suspected of any education; he was not recalling a piece of repetition mastered at school when he spoke of

viridis Nereidum comas ,

but knew by tradition from his ancestors what Horace learnt of them by study.

In the Greek town of Sinasos also, in Cappadocia, a class of sea-nymphs is popularly recognised and distinguished under the name [Greek: Zabetai], a word said by the recorder of it to be derived from a Cappadocian word zab meaning the 'sea .' But of the districts known to me the most fertile in stories of sea-nymphs is the province of Maina, the middle of the three peninsulas south of the Peloponnese; One such story attaches to a fineCf. the periodical [Greek: Parnassos]. p. 773, and Wachsmuth, Das alte Griechenland im Neuen, p. 30. See also below, pp. 171 ff.], p. 90.]