It is of interest to find that not only were official curses written up at the doors of a Thesmophorion, but, at Syracuse, an oath of special sanctity ‘the great oath’ was taken there. Plutarch[369] tells us that when Callippus was conspiring against his friend Dion, the wife and sister of Dion became suspicious. To allay their suspicions, Callippus offered to give any pledge of his sincerity they might desire. They demanded that he should take ‘the great oath’ (ὀμόσαι τὸν μέγαν ὅρκον). ‘Now the great oath was after this wise. The man who gives this pledge has to go to _the temenos of the Thesmophoroi_, and after the performance of certain sacred ceremonies, he puts on him the purple robe of the goddess, and taking a burning torch he denies the charge on oath’ (ἀπόμνυσι). It is clear that this ‘great oath’ was some form of imprecation on the oath-taker, who probably by putting on the robe, dedicated himself in case of perjury to the goddess of the underworld. That the goddess was Kore we know from the fact that Callippus eventually forswore himself in sacrilegious fashion by sacrificing his victim on the feast of the _Koreia_, ‘the feast of the goddess by whom he had sworn.’ The curse is the dedication or devotion of others; the oath, like its more concrete form the ordeal, is the dedication of the curser himself. The connection between primitive law and agriculture seems to have been very close. The name of the earliest laws recorded—they are rather precepts than in our sense laws—the ‘Ploughman’s Curses’ speaks for itself. Some of these Ploughman’s Curses are recorded. We are told by one of the ‘Writers of Proverbs[370]’ that ‘the Bouzyges at Athens, who performs the sacred ploughing, utters many other curses and also curses those who do not share water and fire as a means of subsistence and those who do not show the way to those who have lost it.’ Other similar precepts, no doubt sanctioned by similar curses, have come down to us under the name of the Thrice-Plougher _Triptolemos_[371], the first lawgiver of the Athenians. He bade men ‘honour their parents, rejoice the gods with the fruits of the earth and not injure animals.’ Perhaps these were to the Greeks the first commandments ‘with promise.’ Such are the primitive precepts that grow up in a community which agriculture has begun to bind together with the ties of civilized life. In the days before curses were graven in stone and perhaps for long after, it was well that when the people were gathered together for sowing or for harvest, these salutary curses should be recited. Amid the decay of so much that is robust and primitive, it is pleasant to remember that in the Commination Service of our own Anglican Church with its string of holy curses annually recited ‘_They keep the Thesmophoria as they always used to do._’ THE HALOA.