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to the forms which it GREECE. 13 superseded, and these by degrees crop up again, and eventually become part at least of the outward faith of people whose real sentiments may, nevertheless, be most diametrically opposed to such superstition. One of the oldest and most celebrated myths of Greece relates the destruction of the dragon* Python by Apollo, and his taking possession of the oracle which the serpent guarded.f Cadmus fought and killed the dragon that devoured his men, and sowing its teeth raised soldiers for his own purposes. In Indian language, he killed the Naga Raja of Thebes, and made sepoys of his subjects. The tradition of the close of the career of Cadmus and his wife is even more suggestive of Serpent Worship than the events of their life. Their conversion into serpénts as a cure for ‘ills that had become unbearable, and the respect with which it is represented they were afterwards regarded, point to a form‘of faith that must have been at that time familiar to the inhabitants of Greece.t . The Argonautic Expedition was undertaken to recover a fleece that hung on a sacred tree, guarded by a dragon that Jason and his companions would have been unable to cope with, unless they had been aided by the enchantments of Medea. But the great destroyer of serpents in those days was Hercules. Most appropriately was he represented as strangling two serpents sent by Juno to destroy him while he was yet in his cradle.. Ilis adventures in the Garden of the Iesperides is the pagan form of the myth that most resembles the precious serpent-guarded fruit of the Garden of Eden, though the moral of the fable is so widely different. Iis fight with the many-headed Lernean Hydra, on the other hand, suggests the origin in the West of many-headed serpents with which we are becoming so familiar in the East. “In the earlier representations, apparently, he had only seven heads, but afterwards, as was also the case in India, they were indefinitely multiplicd. A still earlier, perhaps the earliest, mention of this mythological animal is in Ifomer, who spcaks of a three-headed snake as adorning the baldrick of the buckler of Agamemnon.§ As a Grecian peculiarity, this many-headedness might be passed over, but it is interesting as bearing on the subject we have specially in hand. Thoueh generally represented as the destroyer of Serpents, Hercules, on the other hand, is said to have been the progenitor of the whole race of Serpent-worshipping Scythians, through his intercourse with the Serpent Echidna.|| There’ is nothing, however, inconsistent in this. The age in which he js said to have lived was one of transition between two civilizations. An old Turanian Serpent-worshipping race were, in Greece, passing away, to make place for one of Aryan form. Hercules was the popular embodiment of all the favourite myths of the age; and to him consequently was ascribed the destruction of the old faith wherever it was destroyed, as well as its perpetuation wherever if was known to have been preserved. — ee * There seems to be no real or scientific difference in Greek between the word Apéxay and "Opis. Generally, however, Draco is applied to the larger, and serpent to the, smaller kinds of snakes. Draco would hardly be applied to an asp or cobra ; nor Ophis to one of the great guardian serpents so freqaently alluded to. I cah hardly admit, however, the popular definition :—Anguis aquarum, Serpens terrarum, Draco templorum. + Python terre filius draco ingens. Hie aute Apollinem ex oraculo in Monte Parnasso responsa dare solitus erat.—Hyginus, fab. 140. If we may trust Lucian, de Astrologia, p. 544, at Delphi a virgin delivers the oracle, (henee, the symbol of the constellation Virgo,) and a dragon speaks from under the tripod, because the constellation Draco appears among the stars. + Ovid’s Metamorph. ITI. 1. and IV. 9. § Iliad, XI. 38, | Herodotus, IV. 9 16 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. serpent oracle of the neighbouring Temple‘ of Delphi. It was from the branches of this time-honoured tree that the sacred pigeons, combining the rustling of their wings with that of the leaves, made up those sounds which were interpreted as oracles throughout the whole period of Grecian history. It was not, ‘however, only as a shelter for the sacred pigeons, or that the wind might “rustle through their leaves and agitate the bells that hung among their branches, that the trees of the Dodonian grove were held to be sacred. ‘Tradition ascribed to them the power of speaking for themselves, and even when cut down, as in the case of the ship Argo, a picce of the saered oak inserted either in prow or keel, had the power, of communicating to these adventurous navigators the will of Jove.* It is not quite clear whether or. not any structural temple, properly so called, ever was erected in the grove at Dodona. None certainly is described by Pausanias or any one else, and on the whole the context seems to bear out the conclusion that the grove was the fepsy, and that except altars and minor adjuncts it was not profaned by any works of human hands. The laurel at Delphi was as pishontsd as Dodona’ s oak. It was under its shade that Python the son of Earth sought refuge when wounded by the arrows of Apollo, and where his oracle existed before the Sun god conquered it.t The earliest temple here was constructed of laurel wood, afterwards’ of bronze, and only in later days of stone, when apparently the oracle and with it the site of the tree was included in the sanctuary. The story of Daphne need hardly be alluded to.{ It is so well known, and so is the continual use of the laurel throughout classical antiquity as a sacred emblem of Ayollo, as a sign of victory, the indispensable accompaniment of every triumph, and also as a healing | power almost as important as the serpent of Aisculapius.§ as In the opening cantos of the Tliad there is a scene which may serve as well as any other to illustrate the feelings of the Greeks on this-subjéct.| When the. host’ was detained in Aulis, and Agamemnon was sacrificing under the shade of a sacred plane tree, a serpent creeps from under the altar, and, climbing the tree, devours deliberately, one after the other, the eight nestlings of a sparrow. The ninth one was the mother bird herself, thus prophesying the nine years they were to tarry before they conquered the wide-streeted Troy. .To authenticate the wonder, the serpent was then metamorphosed by Jupiter into stone, and we learn afterwards, that the tree was considered as sacred, inasmuch as Pausanias saw the wood of it preserved in the Temple of Diana in the second century.4; That nothing may be wanting to complete this as an illustration of thei worship, it was while the Grecks were detained at Aulis that Agamemnon was—like Abraham—constrained to sacrifice his child, but as a goat was accepted for the one, so the Grecian hero was saved from a similar sorrow. by the substitution of a decr by the goddess Diana. This looks like a period -of transition, when at Icast the most objectionable features of the old faith were becéming obsolete, and might pracuoally be set aside. It would be easy to multiply these instances of Tree and Serpent Worship among. the Greeks to almost any extent; but cnough has: probabyy been adduced to show how * * See Botiichor, Baamiediend pp. 113, 164. § See Bitticher, pp. 838-393. } Euripides, Iph. in Taur. 1245. || Pausanias, DX. 748.- { At conjux quoniam mea non potes esse. , | { Homer, Iliad 11.°304, et seq. Arbor eris corte, dixit, mea.—Ovid, Meta. I. 558. ITALY. 17 important a part it played in the mythology of Greece during the whole’ period of her independent history. "When to this we add the knowledge of the purely anthropic and ancestral character of her popular Pantheon, we cannot but feel how little title Greece has to that purely Aryan rank-which her language would seem to assign to her. There must always have been a very large admixture of Turanian blood in the veins of the inhabitants of that country, varying, of course, in extent in the different states, but except, perhaps, in Sparta, nowhere entirely evanescent. Iraty. It does not appear, from anything that has yet been brought to light, that the Etruscans were either worshippers of Serpents or of Trees. It is true the evidence is not conclusive, and is at best merely negative. We have none of the ‘scriptures of the people. We cannot read their inscriptions, and such temples and religious edifices as remain are all of late date, contemporary with the advanced Roman civilization, and when consequently they may have been weaned from their earlier superstitions. It may also be observed that Serpent and Tree Worship are exactly those forms which are least likely to leave permanent traces of their existence except through the traditions of the people in some form of writing. When the Tree or Grove is cut down all traces of it'sire soon obliterated, and natural decay alone is quite sufficient to cause its complete disappearance, and when the Serpent dies there is no longer a god or an image of cne in the sanctuary. These considerations must make us pause before giving any very decided opinion on the subject; for, reasoning @ priori, the :Etruscans were just such a people as one would suspect of being likely to indulge in such a form of faith. Their gvusi Turanian origin, their ancestral worship, the importance they attached to sepulchral rites, the very absence of temples of a permanent character, and many other, circumstances, would lead us to expect to find this worship among them, but till it is found it is needless to insist on what at best are mere probabilities. One, however, of the first religious acts of the Romans brings us back to an old linc of memories.