Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/94

 whose aid is invariably invoked by seamen in time of peril, and who has acquired the byname of 'sailor' ([Greek: nautês]).

The allusion to the sea-god and his trident in the story which I have repeated must, I think, be accepted with some reserve as being possibly a scholastic interpolation. I cannot find confirmation of it in any other folk-story, and moreover the latter part of the tale is familiar to me in another form. The hero is usually a young prince who goes out to seek adventures in the world, not a king who has already a wife at home; and his transformation into a dolphin is effected by some malicious witch into whose toils he falls. But while for these reasons I do not put the story forward as certain evidence of the survival of Poseidon in the popular memory, I have recounted it at some length because it is an excellent type of current folk-tales, and from a study of it, if we may now leave Poseidon and make a brief digression, we may appreciate the relation existing between such stories and the myths of antiquity.

The king who was the strongest man of his time has a classical prototype in the Messenian leader Aristomenes. He too was thrown with his comrades into a pit by his enemies, the Spartans, and alone escaped death from the fall, being borne up on the wings of eagles. Again, the idea of a man's strength residing in a certain hair or hairs is well known in ancient mythology; and although it is by no means peculiar to the Greeks, but is common to many peoples of the world, we may fairly suppose that the modern Greek has not borrowed it from outside, but has inherited it from those ancestors among whose myths was the story of Scylla and Nisus. Lastly, in the incident of the hero fastening wings to his arms with clay and his subsequent fall into the sea there are all the essentials of the legend of Icarus.

Here then combined in one modern folk-story we find the motifs of three separate ancient myths. And from it and others of like nature—for in the collection from which I have borrowed it there are several stories in which such figures as Midas, the Sphinx, and the Cyclopes are easily recognised—an inference may be drawn as to the real relation of ancient mythology to modern folk-stories. Certain themes must have existed from time immemorial, and these have been worked up into tales by(periodical) p. 538, [Greek: hagie Nikola nautê].]