Achaeans left him sick of a grievous wound from a deadly water snake; that he returned home in safety, and that he alone surpassed Odysseus in archery. Though the use of poisoned arrows was familiar to the poet, we do not hear of them in connexion with the hero.

So with Melampus, a notable figure in Greek folk-lore, who was endowed with prophetic power, who first practised the art of medicine and established the cult of Dionysus in Greece. Of him the poet records two different traditions; but we are not told that he knew the language of birds, and that he was warned to leave his house by hearing the wood-worms say that the roof-beam was well nigh eaten through. In this he resembles the Norse Heimdall, who had an ear so fine that he could hear the grass growing in the meadows and the wool on the backs of the sheep. The same tale of semi-divine prescience of coming disaster is told of Gauhar Shah, a modern Hindu saint.3

There is perhaps no tale better adapted to romantic treatment than that of Admetus and his devoted wife, Alkestis. But of her all we learn from Homer is that she was fair among women, the most lovely of the daughters of Pelias, and bore Eumelus, the charioteer to Admetus. We hear nothing of Oenone, or of the Apples of the Hesperides, which appear in Celtic legend and in the Arabic tale of Ala-ud-din. Lastly, Homer tells us little of Herakles, save that many labours were imposed upon him by a man inferior to himself. We learn only of the fetching of the Dog of the Underworld, which the poet does not name. And yet Herakles has a widespread Od. xi. 281 ff., xv. 225 ff.

1 II. ii. 716 ff. [iv.]; Od. iii. 190, viii. 219.

Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 95; Crooke, Popular Religion and Folk-lore of N. India, i. 190.

Il. ii. 713 f. [iv.], xxiii. 532 f. [iv.].

Jacobs, Celtic Fairy Tales, 244; Burton, Arabian Nights (Library ed.), x. 50.

cultus as a god of dreams and of warm springs, as a wormslayer, the counterpart of the Semitic Melkart.1

The best explanation of such omissions is found in what Professor Raleigh says of Shakespeare, a kindred genius: "Plays like those of Shakespeare cannot be written in cold blood; they call forth the man's whole energies, and take toll of the last farthing of his wealth of sympathy and experience. In the plays we may learn what are the questions that interest Shakespeare most profoundly and recur to his mind with most insistence; we may note how he handles his story, what he rejects and what he alters, changing its purport and fashion; how many points he is content to leave dark; what matters he chooses to decorate with the highest resources of his dramatic art, and what he gives over to be the sport of triumphant ridicule; how in every type of character he emphasises what most appeals to his instinct and imagination, so that we see the meaning of character more plainly than it is to be seen in life . . . how dare we complain that he has hidden himself from our knowledge?" 2

Let us now consider some of the folk-lore in the epics. In dealing with Homeric Animism it is hard to say how much represents actual belief and how much metaphor; and its occurrence in what are supposed to be the oldest portion of the poems may be due to the superior energy and imagination of the older writer. Thus, a stone is called "stubborn" or "relentless" in not quite the earliest portions of the Iliad, and also in the Odyssey. At times a distinctly human emotion is ascribed to inanimate nature: the earth laughs or groans, the sea rejoices or rouses the Argives, in the earliest as well as in the latest cantos.* The river Scamander waxes wroth in heart in the "kernel"

1 Pausanias, ii. 35, 5; Müller, Dorians (E.T.) i. 373; Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 12, 35, 41, 118 ff.

2 Shakespeare, 8. 3 II. iv. 521 [ii. A], xiii. 139 [ii. c]; Od. xi. 598.

of the Iliad, but speaks with a voice out of the whirlpool in one of the later lays.1 In the same fashion waves and shores bellow, and the sea is prescient of a storm. The belief in birth from rocks and trees, which is probably mere rhetoric, appears twice in the Menis, once in the Odyssey. Lastly, it is impossible to detect any stratification in the mention of weapons craving for slaughter, which is often quoted as an instance of Animism. In the Ramayana "the great bow embossed with gold Throbs eager for the master's hold.” 5 The spears of the Irish Red Branch champions, we are told, "were regularly seized with the rage for massacre; and then the bronze head grew red-hot, so that it had to be kept in a caldron of cold water, or, more commonly, of black poisonous liquid, into which it was plunged whenever it blazed up with the murder fit." 6

To take the cases in which supernatural intelligence and powers of speech are attributed to animals.-Though the horse Arion is mentioned in the Iliad," the crude legend of its birth from Demeter and its powers of reason and speech are ignored. But we have other instances of these gifted beasts. Antilochus, Achilles, and Menelaus appeal to their horses, and Polyphemus to his ram, throughout the epics, and the horses of Achilles weep in sympathy with their lord.10 This communion of man and beast is common in folk-lore, and the power of understanding beast language is gained in various ways-by eating porridge mixed with

1xxi. 136 f. [i.], xxi. 413 [iv.].

2 xvii. 265 [i.], ii. 210, iv. 425 [ii. a], xiv. 17 [iii.], xiv. 394 [v.].

3 Il. xvi. 34, xxii. 126 [i.]; Od. xix. 162 f.

4/7. xi. 574, xxi. 70 [i.], iv. 125 [ii. B], xv. 317 [iii.], xxi. 168 [iv.].

5 Griffith, Ramayan, 256. Joyce, Social History of Ancient Ireland, i. 114.

7 xxiii. 346 [v.]. 8 Pausanias, viii. 25, 4, with Frazer's note.

9 Il. xxiii. 402 ff. [iv.], xix. 399 ff. [i.], viii. 184 ff. [iii. B]; Od. xv. 150 ff., ix. 446 ff.

the slaver of tortured snakes, by Finn's broiled fish and Sigfried's roasted dragon's heart, or by eating a white snake or a herb like a fern.1 With these gifted horses which speak and lament the fate of their owner we may compare the Karling legend of Bayard, and Skirnir in the Edda talking to his horse, as Godrun does with Grani after the murder of Sigurd.2 In Persian myth the same power is attributed to the steed of Rustum; in an Irish story the ram speaks to St. Magnenn, as in a Kashmir tale the horse warns his master, the Raja, against his treacherous Wazir; and in the Hindu tale of Vidhusaka, the hero, seeing no means of escape from his trouble, and knowing what his horse had been in a previous birth, bows before him and says: "Thou art a god; a creature like thee cannot commit treason against his lord." On which appeal the horse obeys his master, "for excellent horses are divine beings."

Another of these sacred Homeric beasts is the boar, which the offended Artemis sends against the garden land of Oineus. This reminds us of the mythic swine of Ireland, reared with malice and venom that it might be the bane of the men of Erinn, or the Erymanthian boar slain by Herakles.

Again, to take the cult of trees-A phrase employed by Homer implies that the earliest temple was a booth of branches, and it has been supposed that the same idea is involved in the custom of hanging up the arms of defeated combatants, which appears in the second canto of the Iliad as well as in the Odyssey. In the same canto of the

1 Elton-Powell, Saxo, Intro. lxix.; Miss Cox, Cinderella, 496 ff.

2 Grimm, Teutonic Mythology [E.T.], i. 392.

3

Clouston, Popular Tales, i. 45 f.; O'Grady, Silva Gadelica, ii. 37; Knowles, Folk Tales of Kashmir, 353; Tawney, Katha Sarit Sagara, i. 130. 4II. ix. 533 ff. [iv.].

* Rhys, Hibbert Lectures, 511; id. Celtic Folk-lore, ii. 509 f.

6 II. i. 39 [i.].

7 II. v. 82 f. [ii. A]; Od. iii. 274 f.

Iliad we find a reference to the very archaic belief in the grave-tree as an abode for the spirit of the dead man, when the mountain Nymphs plant elm-trees round the barrow of Aetion.1 A similar tale is told of Protesilaus, round whose barrow elm-trees grew; those which faced towards Troy bloomed early and withering fell untimely, like the hero himself, and of Geryon, on whose grave the trees dropped blood.2 We have the same idea in the folktales of the grave-trees springing from the corpse and becoming a refuge for the spirit.

"Margaret was buryed in the lower chancel,

And William in the higher :

Out of her breast there sprang a rose,

And out of his a briar."3

In Samoa the grave of a chief is called "the house thatched with the leaves of the sandal-wood," in allusion to the custom of planting some tree with pretty foliage near the grave. So in the Celtic tale of Baile and Ailinn the yew and apple trees grew from the lovers' graves and when cut down were made into tablets on which the poets inscribed their pitiful story. It is only in the Odyssey that we have a vague hint of the equally archaic belief in the birth-tree, if the palm springing at the altar of Apollo which Odysseus saw, refers to the birth-palm under which Leto was delivered.

It seems equally impossible to discover any stratification of the more primitive religious beliefs in the Iliad. Perhaps the most archaic cultus recorded in the poems is that of Dodonaean Zeus. It is at the supreme crisis

1 II. vi. 419 f. [ii. a].

2 Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 473, 483.

3" Fair Margaret and Sweet William," Percy, Ballads, ed. Wheatley, iii. 126.

Miss Stokes, Indian Fairy Tales, 244, 250 f.; Turner, Samoa, 147.

Joyce, Social History, i. 481 f.

Od. vi. 162 f.; Pausanias, viii. 4, 7; Plutarch, De Iside, 15; Grimm,