Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/198

 day. The Albanians have a word [Greek: strigea]triġ[e=]a?], and the people of Corsica a term strega, both of which denote a witch of the same powers and propensities as are feared in Greece; and it is likely that all of them—Greeks, Albanians, Corsicans—have borrowed the conception from Italy. The ancient Greeks indeed had a word [Greek: strinx] identical with the strix of Latin, but the shrieking night-bird denoted by it was not, so far as I can discover, invested by Greek imagination with any terrors. In Italy on the contrary the Strix was widely feared as a bloodthirsty monster in bird-form. Pliny evidently supposed it to be some actual bird, though he doubted the fables concerning it. 'The strix,' he says, 'certainly is mentioned in ancient curses; but what kind of bird it may be, is not I think agreed .' Perhaps in those 'ancient curses' it was invoked to inflict such punishment upon enemies as it once meted out to Otos and Ephialtes for their attempt upon Diana's chastity.

The notion however that Striges were not really birds but witches in bird-form early suggested itself and found an exponent in Ovid. 'Voracious birds,' he says, 'there are that fly forth by night and assail children who still need a nurse's care, and seize them out of their cradles and do them mischief. With their beaks they are said to pick out the child's milk-fed bowels, and their throat is full of the blood they drink. Striges they are called and whether they come into being as birds or are changed thereto by incantation, and the Marsian spell transforms old women into winged things,'—such are their ways.

This was probably the state of the superstition when the Greeks added Striges to their own list of nightly terrors; and the very form of the word in modern Greek, [Greek: strigla] or [Greek: stringla] (being apparently a diminutive, strigula, such as spoken Latin would readily have formed from the literary form strix), testifies to the borrowing of the belief.

In Greece the latter of the two ways in which Ovid explained the origin of the Strix seems to have been generally accepted as correct. It is true that the modern Greeks still have a real bird called [Greek: striglopouli] (either some kind of owl or the night-jar), which not only loves twilight or darkness in the upper worldof Hesychius. The Greek peasants are very vague about the names of any birds other than those which they eat.]