Produced by Keith Edkins, Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). * * * * * Plutarch's Romane Questions. Translated A.D. 1603 by Philemon Holland, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Now again edited by Frank Byron Jebons, M.A., Classical Tutor to the University of Durham With Dissertations on Italian Cults, Myths, Taboos, Man- Worship, Aryan Marriage Sympathetic Magic and the Eating of Beans —— _LONDON. MDCCCXCII. PUBLISHED BY DAVID NUTT_ _IN THE STRAND_ PREFACE. On the whole, with the proper qualifications, Plutarch's _Romane Questions_ may fairly be said to be the earliest formal treatise written on the subject of folk-lore. The problems which Plutarch proposes for solution are mainly such as the modern science of folk-lore undertakes to solve; and though Plutarch was not the first to propound them, he was the first to make a collection and selection of them and give them a place of their own in literature. On the other hand, though Plutarch's questions are in the spirit of modern scientific inquiry, his answers—or rather the answers which he sets forth, for they are not always or usually his own—are conceived in a different strain. They are all built on the assumption that the customs which they are intended to explain were consciously and deliberately instituted by men who possessed at least as much culture and wisdom as Plutarch himself, or the other philosophers who busied themselves with this branch of antiquities. This assumption, however, that the primitive Italians or the pro-ethnic Aryans shared the same (erroneous) scientific and philosophical views as the savants of Plutarch's day, is an unverified and improbable hypothesis. The Aryans were in the Stone Age, and had advanced only to such rudimentary agriculture as is possible for a nomad people. If, therefore, we are to explain their customs, we must keep within the narrow circle which bounds the thought and imagination of other peoples in the same stage of development. Plutarch, however, in effect asks himself, "If I had instituted these customs, what would my motives have been?" and in reply to his own question he shows what very learned reasons might have moved him; and also, quite unconsciously, what very amiable feelings would in reality have governed him; for, if he ascribes to the authors of these customs the learning of all the many books which he had read, he also credits them with a kindliness of character which belonged to himself alone. Thus, to go no further than the first of the _Romane Questions_, viz., _What is the reason that new-wedded wives are bidden to touch fire and water?_ Plutarch first gives four high philosophical reasons, which he may have borrowed, but concludes with one which we may be