Page:Xenophon by Alexander Grant.djvu/92

82 by omens in sacrifice, but also there appeared be a peculiar appropriateness in the domain selected. In the first place, it was an excellent hunting-ground, and therefore suitable for the divine huntress; and also, by a strange coincidence, there was a stream running through it called Selinus, which was also the name of a stream running close to the temple of Diana at Ephesus. "In both rivers," adds Xenophon—speaking somewhat after the manner of Fluellen—"there are fish and cockles." Here he caused a temple and altar to be raised, and a statue of the goddess in cypress wood to be set up—exact copies, though on a reduced scale, of the world-famous temple and altar and golden statue at Ephesus. And he appointed an annual festival to be held, which was attended by men and women of the surrounding country, who pitched tents on the sacred ground, and were "supplied by the goddess herself with barley-meal, bread, wine, sweetmeats, and a share of the victims offered from the sacred pastures, and of those caught in hunting; for the sons of Xenophon and of the other inhabitants always made a hunt against the festival, and such of the men as wished hunted with them; and there were caught, partly on the sacred lands and partly on Mount Pholoe, boars and antelopes and deer."

The picture presented to us by Xenophon of his life at Scillus is quite idyllic, and thoroughly Greek. A certain phase of religion predominates over the whole, but it is the bright, picturesque, and easy religion common among the Aryan races, which is so different from Semitic earnestness, and which consists in doing,