Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/276

 rested. The locked chain was probably the magical means by which the tutelary genius of the city was kept at his post.

But these wide and vague usages of the word and its derivatives have now for the most part disappeared. Leo Allatius still used [Greek: stoicheiômatikos] in the sense of 'magician,' but I have not found it in modern Greek. A remnant of the verb [Greek: stoicheioun] is seen in the past participle [Greek: stoicheiômenos], which at the present day is applied in its true sense to objects 'haunted by genii.' And the word [Greek: stoicheia], though locally extended in scope so as to become in effect synonymous with [Greek: daimonia] or [Greek: exôtika], comprising all non-Christian deities irrespectively of their close connexion with particular natural phenomena, still maintains in its more strict, and I think more frequent, usage the meaning of genii.

The term thus provided by the Platonists and popularised accidentally by the Church is a convenience in the classification of demons; for the ancient Greeks had no popular word which was exactly equivalent; they had to choose between the vague term [Greek: daimonion] which implied nothing of attachment to any place or object, and the special designation of the particular kind of genius. The Latin tongue was in this respect better supplied. It must not however be inferred that the introduction of the useful term [Greek: stoicheia] into the demonological nomenclature of Greece marked any innovation in popular superstition. The Greeks no less than the Romans had from time immemorial believed in genii. That scene of the Aeneid, in which, while Aeneas is holding a memorial feast in honour of his father, a snake appears and tastes of the offerings and itself in turn is honoured with fresh sacrifice as being either the genius of the place or an attendant of the hero Anchises, is throughout Greek in tone; and the comment of Servius thereupon, 'There is no place without a genius, which usually manifests itself in the form of a snake,' revives a hundred memories of sacred snakes tended in the temples or depicted on the tombs of ancient Greece. Moreover several of the supernatural beings whom I have already described, and whose identity with the creatures of ancient superstition is: cf. [Greek: dêlonô] for [Greek: dêloô], etc.]