So far the sacrifice of Dasius looks rather like a cruelty introduced into decadent Rome, and at the good-humoured Saturnalia, by Oriental legionaries, than like a Roman survival or recrudescence of a regular original feature of the Saturnalia. In any case the stripping and scourging of the Sacæan mock-king, his hanging, and his simulated resurrection (at which we shall find Mr. Frazer making a guess) are absent, while the date of the alleged transaction (November-December) does not tally with Purim, or Eastertide, or the date of the Sacæa. The duration of the Dasius feast, thirty days, is neither Roman nor Oriental. Thus, far from illuminating the Oriental practice, the rite reported in Mœsia does but make the problem more perplexing. The evidence has all the faults possible, and the conjecture that the Greek writer invented the sacrifice, to throw discredit on the New Year revels of his contemporaries, may be worth considering. Perhaps I may hint that I think the historical evidence of the author of the Dasius legend so extremely dubious that I might have expected Mr. Frazer to offer a criticism of its character. The general reader can gather from the 'Golden Bough' no idea of the tenuity of the testimony, which, of course, is at once visible to readers of French and Greek. We address ourselves to scholars, and for scholars Mr. Frazer has provided the necessary citations, but my heart inclines to regard the needs of the general reader. (Cf. 'Man,' May 1901, No. 53.) VI. THE GREEK CRONIA From Rome we turn to Greece. Cronos, in Greece, answered, more or less, to Saturn in Rome, though how much of the resemblance is due to Roman varnishing with Greek myth I need not here discuss. Now the Athenian festival of Cronos fell neither in November, December, February, nor March, but in July.[71] Therefore Mr Frazer needs to guess that the July feasts of Cronos were once, or may have been, a spring festival, like the carnival and like the Saturnalia, which (by another hypothesis) were _originally_ in February or March, though of this we have no proof. Indeed, it is contrary to use and wont for a populace to alter a venerable folk-festival because of an official change in the calendar. If the Romans for unknown ages had kept the Saturnalia in spring they would not move the date of their gaieties, and cut off three weeks (or twenty-nine days) of their duration, because the new year was shifted from March to January. In Scotland, all through the Middle Ages and much later, the year began in March. But Yule was not shifted into March: it remained, and remains, like the Saturnalia, at the winter solstice.