Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/369

 Moreover my contention that Herodotus had in mind some Greek rite, with which he was contrasting that of the Getae, is borne out by the passage immediately following, in which the idea of comparison comes to the surface. This Zalmoxis, he continues, according to the Greeks of the Hellespont and the Euxine, was in origin not a god but a man. He served for a time as a slave to Pythagoras in Samos, but having gained his liberty and considerable wealth returned to Thrace and tried to reclaim his countrymen from savagery and ignorance. The ways of life and the doctrines which he inculcated were such as he had derived from intercourse with Greeks and above all with Pythagoras, whose teachings concerning immortality and a future life in a happier land he both preached and (by the trick of hiding himself for three years in a subterranean chamber and then re-appearing to those who had believed him dead) illustrated in his own person. This story is neither accepted nor rejected by Herodotus, but, estimating Zalmoxis to have been of much earlier date than Pythagoras, he inclines slightly to the view that Zalmoxis was really a native god of the Getae.

If we may assume this view to be correct, what significance is to be attached to the story of Zalmoxis' relations with Pythagoras? Evidently it is one of those fictions by which the ancient Greeks loved to bring the great figures of history into contact and personal acquaintance. Pythagoras and Zalmoxis were two names with which was associated the doctrine of immortality; some story therefore of their meeting was desirable. And since Pythagoras was Greek, Zalmoxis barbarian, the legend that the slave Zalmoxis was instructed by his master Pythagoras was more flattering to Hellenic pride than the idea that Pythagoras in his travels should have borrowed so important a doctrine from a foreign religion; and if chronology did not concur—well, imagination always had precedence of accuracy. To the Greeks who invented the tale fitness was of more account than fact; and for us who dismiss the actual story as mere fiction their sense of its fitness remains instructive. It shows that the Greeks recognised the existence of specially close relations between the religion of the Getae and their own—relations attested probably not only by their common acceptance of the doctrine of immortality, for that was the property of other peoples too, but also by some resemblance