Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/171

 decrees stand, and as surely as there is transgression thereof, skin will blister and peel off, clothes will rot, and trees will wither. The severity of these pains has in Cyprus changed the name of these days from [Greek: drymais] into [Greek: kakaouskiais], 'the evil days of August .'

Now among a people so superstitious as the Greeks it is reasonable to suppose that days thus marked by special abstinences were originally sacred to some deities. Washing and tree-cutting at this season must, we may assume, have been offences against some supernatural persons whose festival was then observed and who avenged its profanation; and the supernatural persons most nearly concerned would naturally be the tree-nymphs and the water-nymphs.

The association or even confusion of these two classes of nymphs is very common both in ancient literature and in modern belief, and is indeed a natural consequence of the fact that the finest trees, such as that plane under which sat Socrates and Phaedrus, grow only in the close vicinity of water. It would have puzzled even Socrates to say whether the Nymphs by whom he might be seized would be more probably Dryads or Naiads. Homer himself, to go yet further back, suggests the same association, for he tells of 'a spreading olive-tree and nigh thereto' the cave of the Naiads in Ithaca. Again in later times we find a dedication by one Cleonymus to 'Hamadryads, daughters of the river' ; and though an ingenious critic would replace [Greek: Hamadryades] by [Greek: Anigriades] (nymphs of the Arcadian river Anigrus), I believe the fault to lie with Cleonymus and not with the manuscript; for the place where he makes his dedication is beneath pine-trees ([Greek: hypai pityôn]). At the present day the same tendency towards confusion of the two classes is common. This was well illustrated to me by some peasants of Tenos. Ten minutes' walk from the town there is a good spring from which a remarkable subterranean passage cut through the solid rock carries the wateris used in Sikinos to mean actually the sores on limbs, and in other islands the holes in linen caused by washing during Aug. 1-6. But as he appears to have been unaware that [Greek: drymais] usually means the days themselves, I question the accuracy of his statement.], [Greek: Kypriaka],. p. 710, who derives the word from [Greek: kakos] and [Greek: A(ug)oustos].]