Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/184

 Such are the reminiscences of Artemis which I have been able to gather in a few districts of modern Greece. But it is clear that down to the seventeenth century the goddess was much more widely known. Leo Allatius, writing about the year 1630, after giving a good description of the Nereids, plunges abruptly into a long quotation from Michael Psellus, from which and from Allatius' own comments on it some information about the Queen of the Nereids may be gleaned. The passage in question runs as follows, the comments and explanations in brackets being my own:—

'[Greek: hê kalê ton hôraion.] Supply [Greek: apeteken]. (Apparently a proverb, 'Fair mother, fine son,' to the usage of which Psellus gives some religious colour.) For the Virgin that brought forth was wonderfully fair, dazzling in the brightness of her graces, and her son was exceeding beautiful, fair beyond the sons of men. (Notwithstanding however the religious significance of the proverb, he at once condemns the use of it.) As a matter of fact, the phrase is due to faulty speech. For the popular language has perverted the saying. It is right to say [Greek: kalên tôn oreôn] ('fair lady of the mountains'); but the people have made the saying [Greek: kalê ton hôraion] ('fair mother, fine son'). (There is no distinction in sound, according to the modern pronunciation, between [Greek: tôn oreôn] and [Greek: ton hôraion].) Hence we see that the popular imagination had once fashioned, quite unreasonably, a female deity whose domain was the mountains and who as it were disported herself upon them There is no deity called 'fair lady of the mountains,' nor is the so-called Barychnas a deity at all but a trouble arising in the head from heartburn or ill-digested food, which is also known as Ephialtes.'

Here Psellus is rambling in his dissertation as wildly as though his own head were affected by this demoniacal ailment. Which Allatius observing comments thus:—

'What has Barychnas or Babutzicarius or if you like Ephialtes to do with the fair lady of the woods or the mountains (pulcram nemorum sive montium)? From them men suffer lying abed; whereas attacks such as we have said are made by Callicantzarus ,