How far each of these names may be applied in general to all the
classes of pagan gods and demons and monsters whom I am about to
describe is a question which I cannot determine. On the one hand
many of the names, as we have seen, are purely local, confined to a
few villages or districts or islands and unknown and unintelligible
elsewhere: and on the other hand some of these supernatural beings
themselves are equally local, and my information concerning them has
been gathered from widely separated regions of the Greek world. Hence
it follows that while the several terms which I have explained are
comprehensive in local usage and include all the supernatural beings
locally recognised, it is impossible to say whether the users of them
would think fit to extend them to the deities of other districts.
Probably they would do so; but only for the most widely current
terms, δαιμόνια and ἐξωτικά, can I claim with assurance anything like
universal application.
The surviving pagan deities fall naturally into two classes. There are
the solitary and individual figures such as Demeter, and there is the
gregarious and generic class to which belong for example the Nymphs. An
exceptional case may occur in which some originally single personality
has been multiplied into a whole class. The Lesbian maiden Gello, who,
according to a superstition known to Sappho[127], in revenge for her
untimely death haunted her old abodes preying upon the babes of women
whose motherhood she envied, is no longer one but many; the place of a
maiden, whom death carried off ere she had known the love of husband
and children, has been taken by withered witch-like beings who none the
less bear her name and resemble her in that they light, like Harpies,
upon young children and suck out their humours[128]. But in the main
the division holds; there are single gods and there are groups of gods.
Of the former, in several cases, there is very little to record. Such
memory of them as still lingers among the people is confined perhaps
to a single folk-story out of the many that have been preserved. In
such cases I do not feel entire confidence that the reference is a
piece of genuine tradition; in spite of the popular form in which the
stories are cast, it is always possible that, owing to the spread of
education, some scholastic smatterings of ancient mythology have been
introduced by the story-teller. There are certainly plenty of tales
to be heard about Alexander the Great which are drawn from literary
sources; and it is possible that two stories published by Schmidt which
contain apparent reminiscences of Poseidon and of Pan are vitiated,
from the point of view of folklore, in the same way. Fortunately the
cases in which this reserve must be felt are few and in the nature
of things unimportant: for, though proof of genuine tradition would
be interesting, yet a single modern allusion is not likely to throw
any light on the ancient conception of a deity or his cult. Where
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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