Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/338

316 oaths, belonging especially to the lower culture; let us call them "mundane oaths." Now, it is at a point above the savage level in culture that the thought first comes in of the perjurer being punished in a world beyond the grave. This was a conception familiar to the Egyptians in their remotely ancient civilization. It was at home among the old Homeric Greeks, as when Agamemnon, swearing his mighty oaths, calls to witness, not only Father Zeus, and the all-seeing sun, and the rivers, and earth, but also the Erinnys who down below chastise the souls of the dead, whosoever shall have been forsworn. Not less plainly is it written in the ancient Hindoo "Laws of Manu"—"A man of understanding shall swear no false oath even in a trifling matter, for he who swears a false oath goes hereafter and here to destruction." To this higher stage of culture, then, belongs the introduction of the new "post-mundane" element into oaths. For ages afterward nations might still use either kind, or combine them by adding the penalty after death to that in life. But in the later course of history there comes plainly into view a tendency to subordinate the old mundane oath, and at last to suppress it altogether. How this came to pass is plain on the face of the matter. It was simply the result of accumulated experience. The continual comparison of opinions with facts could not but force observant minds to admit that a man might swear falsely on sword's edge or spear's point, and yet die with a whole skin; that bears and tigers were not to be depended on to choose perjurers for their victims, and that in fact the correspondence between the imprecation and the event was not real, but only ideal. How judgment by real results thus shaped itself in men's minds we may see by the way it came to public utterance in classic times, nowhere put more cogently than in the famous dialogue in the "Clouds" of Aristophanes. The old farmer Strepsiades asks, "Whence comes the blazing thunderbolt that Zeus hurls at the perjured?" "You fool," replies the Socrates of the play, "you smack of old Kronos's times—if Zeus smote perjurers, wouldn't he have been down on those awful fellows Simon, and Kleonymos, and Theoros? Why, what Zeus does with his bolt is to smite his own temple, and the heights of Sunium, and the tall oaks! Do you mean to say that an oak-tree can commit perjury?" What is said here in chaff full many a reasonable man in the old days must have said to himself in the soberest earnest, and, once said or thought, but one result could come of it—the result which history shows us did come. The venue of the judicial oath was gradually changed, till the later kind, with its penalties transferred from earth to the region of departed souls, remained practically in possession of the field.

As a point in the science of culture, which has hitherto been scarcely if at all observed, I am anxious to call attention to the historical stratification of judicial oaths, from the lowest stratum of mundane oaths belonging to savage or barbaric times, to the highest