The boar is a solitary animal. Like Hal o’ the Wynd, he fights for his own right hand; and he was accordingly appropriated by Homer to image the valour of individual chiefs, while the rank and file figure as wolves and jackals, hunting in packs, pinched with hunger, bloodthirsty and desperately eager, but formidable only collectively. Jackals still abound in the Troad and throughout the Cyclades, and their hideous wails and barkings enhance the desolation of the Nauplian and Negropontine swamps.[167] Neither have wolves disappeared from those regions; and the old dread of the animal which was at once the symbol of darkness and of light, survives obscurely to this day in the vampire-superstitions of Eastern Europe. The closeness of the connexion between vampires and were-wolves is shown by a comparison of the modern Greek word _vrykolaka_, vampire, with the Zend and Sanskrit _vehrka_, a wolf.[168] Nor were the Greeks of classical times exempt from the persuasion that men and wolves might temporarily, or even permanently, exchange semblances. Many stories of the kind were related in Arcadia in connexion with the worship of the Lycæan Zeus; and Pausanias, while critically sceptical as regards some of these, was not too advanced a thinker to accept, as fully credible, the penal transformation of Lycaon, son of Pelasgus.[169] Such notions belonged, however, to a rustic mythology of which Homer took small cognisance. His thoughts travelled of themselves out from the sylvan gloom of primeval haunts into the open sunshine of unadulterated nature. In wood or wilderness, forest or den, he met with no bogey-animals. For him neither beast nor bird had any mysterious significance. He attributed to encounters with particular species no influence, malefic or beneficial, upon human destiny. Of themselves, they had, in his view, no concern with it, although ordinary animal instincts might, under certain conditions, be so directed as to be expressive to man of the will of the gods. In the Homeric scheme, birds and serpents exclusively are so employed, without, however, any departure from the order of nature. Thus, by night near the sedgy Simoeis, a heron, _Ardea nycticorax_, disturbed by the approach of Odysseus and Diomed, assured them, by casually flapping its way eastward, that their expedition had the sanction of their guardian-goddess.[170] The choice of the bird was plainly dictated by zoological considerations alone; it had certainly no such recondite motive as that suggested by Ælian,[171] who, with almost grotesque ingenuity, argued that the owl, as the fowl of Athene’s special predilection, could only have been deprived of the privilege of acting as her instrument on the occasion through Homer’s consciousness of its reputation as a bird of sinister augury— Ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen—