marriage was required to go and bathe in the Skamandros, and standing in the water to pronounce the sacred formula: ‘Skamandros, take my maidenhood as a gift.’” Dr Farnell, citing the fictitious letter of Aischines on which the evidence for the custom rests, observes: “The letter narrates how a mortal assumed the human form of the god and took a treacherous advantage; but originally, we may suppose, the rite of consecration was not associated with any anthropomorphic divinity, but was performed in the hope that the spirit of the river might enter into the maiden, and that the child she might afterwards bear to her wedded husband might thus be mystically akin to the guardian of the land. The many early myths concerning heroines and princesses being made pregnant by river-gods suggest that the ritual just described was once prevalent in primitive Greece; for such myths could arise naturally from such a custom.”[282.1] But the ritual itself suggests that it is a relic of a still older rite parallel with the rite at the temple of Mylitta. The last of the problems connected with the rite is to explain why it must be accomplished with a stranger. If, as has been alleged, the act of defloration of a maiden were held to be in itself dangerous, it is not easy to say why anyone, even a stranger, should undertake it, unless he were strangely ignorant of the risk or strangely careless. In some places, indeed, a maiden who had come to submit to the rite may have been outwardly indistinguishable from one of the _hierai_; and hence the man may have been unconscious {283} of his risk, or may have been willing to undertake a risk thus diminished. But at Babylon the women who came thus to offer themselves wore a distinctive head-dress of cords, the emblem, perhaps, of their condition of virginity. Moreover, they seem to have been penned in enclosures divided from each other by ropes, which were broken to let them out for the accomplishment of the rite. There was therefore no mistake as to their status or object.[283.1] On the other hand, if the defloration simply involved ritual impurity such as could be removed by the proper ceremonies, it must be asked why the task was left to a stranger. None of our ancient authorities have condescended to define a stranger. We are probably to understand by that term one who was not an inhabitant of the town or who was not a member of the community. The analogy of certain Australian rites already referred to, and of rites of marriage in some other parts of the world, would lead us to suppose that what was really intended in the first instance was one who was not eligible for sexual relations with the woman in the ordinary course. Thus in Peru and New Granada “the nearest relations of the bride and her most intimate friends” are said to have performed the corresponding rite[283.2]; and even her father is credited {284} with the labour among the Orang-Sakai of the Malay Peninsula, the