Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/318

 predictions. He is in general secure from ill-treatment, and though he do no work he is not allowed to want. The strangest case which I encountered was that of a man, unquestionably mad, who wandered from place to place and seemed to be known everywhere. I met him in all three times, in Athens, in Tenos, and in Thessaly. He had no fixed home, did no work, and was usually penniless; but a wild manner, a rolling eye, and an extraordinary power of conducting his part of a conversation in metrical, if not highly poetical, form sufficed to obtain for him lodging, food, and clothing, and even a free passage, it appeared, on the Greek coasting steamers. Whether the long monologues in verse in which he sometimes indulged were also improvisations, I could not of course tell; but once to have heard and seen his delivery of them was to understand why, among a superstitious people, he passed for a prophet. He was a modern type of those old seers whose name [Greek: manteis] was believed by Plato to have been formed from the verb [Greek: mainesthai], 'to be mad'; his frenzy really gave the appearance of inspiration.

Dreams furnish a more sober and naturally also a more general means of communion with the gods; and the belief in them as a channel of divine revelation is both firmly rooted and widely spread. This indeed is only natural. The change from paganism to Christianity, even if it had been more thorough and complete than it actually has been, would probably not have affected this article of faith. So long as a people believe in any one or more deities not wholly removed from human affairs, it is logically competent for them to regard their dreams as a special communication to them from heaven; and Christianity, far from repudiating the old pagan idea, confirmed it by biblical authority. The Greek Church, as we shall see, has made effective use of it.

The degree of importance universally attached in old time to dreams is too well known to all students of Greek literature to call for comment. Artemidorus' prefatory remarks to his Oneiro-*critica, or 'Treatise on the interpretation of dreams,' and his criticism of former exponents of the same science, would alone prove that public interest in the subject must indeed have been great to stimulate so serious and so large a literature. There is the same practical evidence of a similar interest in modern Greece. Books of the same nature are sought after and consulted no less eagerly now than then.