[111] Plato, _Rep._ 373. [112] Far more explicit and detailed is the comparative study of foreign customs which _underlies_ Socratic doctrine in the _Laws_. The stock examples of the fifth century, Sarmatians (804 E), Amazons (806 A), Thracians (805 D), and the like, are all there, side by side with the Spartans and the Cretans, the Persians, the Egyptians, and the Phoenicians (750 C). But the anthropological basis of fourth-century thought is a distinct subject, and would require a whole chapter to itself. [113] Hdt. i. 59. [114] P. Ure, _Journ. Hell. Studies_, xxvi. pp. 134 ff. LECTURE VI LUSTRATIO The practice which is the subject of this lecture was a comparatively late growth in the religious history of ancient Italy. We commonly and vaguely translate _lustratio_ by ‘purification’, _lustrare_ by ‘purify’; but in Latin literature there is another sense of the word, which shows well how one particular kind of purification had become associated with it--I mean the sense of a slow ordered movement in procession. This stately processional movement, so characteristic of the old Roman character, so characteristic still of the grandeur and discipline of the Roman Church in Italy, impressed itself for ever on the Latin language in the word _lustrare_. Let me quote a single beautiful example of it. When Aeneas first sees and addresses Dido he says: In freta dum fluvii current, _dum montibus umbrae Lustrabunt convexa_, polus dum sidera pascet, Semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt, Quae me cumque vocant terrae.[115] ‘So long as the cloud-shadows move slowly over the hollows on the hills.’ Long ago, when fishing in Wales, I watched this procession of the shadows, and ever since then it has been associated in my mind with the many ancient Italian processions which I have had to study. Such is the magical power of a great poet of nature. But before we go on to examine the nature and meaning of these processions it is necessary to go much further back, in order to get some idea of the primitive Italian ideas of ‘purification’ out of which they were developed. We know them only in the farm and the city of historical times; they belong at the earliest to the comparatively settled and civilized life of the Italian agricultural community, and reached their highest development in the highly organized City-State. But there is much to be said--much more than I have time to say now--about the ideas to which they owe their origin.