Many of our mythological personages and legends have their parallel to-day. There are the Lamiæ, for instance, evil-working women who live in desert places, ill-formed like their ancestors, daughters of Belus and Sibyl; utterly unfit are they for household duties, for they cannot sweep, so an untidy woman to-day is said to have made the sweepings of a Lamia (Τῆς Λαμίας τὰ σαρώματα); they cannot bake, for they put bread into the oven before heating it; they have dogs and horses, but give bones to their horses and straw to their dogs. They are very gluttonous, so much so that in Byzantine and modern Greek the verb λαμιώνω is used to express over-eating. They have a special predilection for baby’s flesh, and a Greek mother of to-day will frighten her child by saying that a Lamia will come if it is naughty, just as was said to naughty children in ancient days; for the legend used to run that Zeus loved Lamia too well, untidy though she was, and Hera, out of jealousy, killed her children, whereat Lamia was so grieved that she took to eating the children of others. Some Lamiæ are like the Sirens, and by taking the form of lovely nymphs, beguile luckless men to their destruction; for example, an ecclesiastical legend, savoring strongly of Boccaccio, tells us how a Lamia charmed a monk as he sat by the side of a lake one evening; dawn came, and the monk was seen no more, but some children swore to having seen his hoary beard floating on the waters of the lake. Dragons are common now in every weird place, especially where those large stoned Hellenic walls are standing, and stories like those of Perseus, the Centaurs, the Cyclops, &c., are common among the peasants who speak of these old remains as Τοῦ Δράκου τὸ σπίτι, the Dragon’s house. In one fable we have the exact story of Ulysses and Polyphemus. One Spanos is the traveller, ὁ Δράκος is Polyphemus, and the facts are the same. The witches (στρίγλαι) of modern folk-lore are supposed to be over a hundred, and to be able to turn into birds at will like the harpies of old; they love the flesh of unbaptised babies, and for this reason children wear charms, as they do also against the evil eye (βασκανεῖα). My host on the island of Pholygandros most solemnly told me how a person with the evil eye could wither a fruit-tree by admiring it, and on my looking sceptical, he quoted several instances which had come under his immediate notice. This is the ὀφθαλμὸς βάσκανος of antiquity, the god Fascinus of Latin mythology, whom Pliny tells us was worshipped so strangely by the Vestal Virgins.