Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/41

 CHAP. TIL THE SACKED FIRE. 35 As in Greece, the guilty man could not approach lii.s hearth before he had purified hhnself. It is a strong proof of the antiquity of this belief, and of these practices, to find them at the same time among men on the shores of the Mediterranean and among those of the peninsula of India. Assuredly the Greeks did not. borrow this religion from the Hindus, nor the Hindus from the Greeks. But the Greeks, the Italians, and the Hindus belonged to the same race ; their an- cestors, in a very distant past, lived together in Central Asia. There this creed originated and these rites were established. The religion of the sacred fire dates, there- fore, from the distant and dim eijoch when there were yet no Greeks, no Italians, no Hindus; when there were only Aryas. When the tribes separated, they carried this worship with them, some to the banks of the Ganges, others to the shores of the Mediterranean. Later, when these tribes had no intercourse with each other, some adored Brahma, others Zeus, and still otheis Janus ; each group chose its own gods ; but all pre- served, as an ancient legacy, the first religion which they had known and practised in the common cradle of their race. If the existence of this worship among all the Indo- European nations did not sufiiciently demonstrate its high antiquity, we might find other proofs of it in the religious rites of the Greeks and Romans. In all sac- rifices, even in those offered to Zeus or to Athene, the first invocation was always addressed to the fire."- Every prayer to any god whatever must commence and end with a prayer to the fire.* At Olympia, the • Homeric Hymns, 29; Ibid., 3, v. 33. Phito, Cratylus, 18.
 * Porphyry, De Absiin., II. p. lOG. Plutarch, De Frigido.