According to Euripides, the initiates of the secret cultus of Jupiter in Crete touched no flesh-meat; in the chorus addressed to King Minos, the priests in question are made to speak as follows: “Son of a Phœnician Tyrian woman, descendant of Europa and great Jupiter, King of the Isle of Crete, famous through an hundred cities, we come unto thee, forsaking temples built of oak and cypress fashioned with knives; leaders of a pure life, behold, we come. Since I was made a priest of Jupiter-Idæus, I take no part in the nocturnal feasts of Bacchanals, I eat no half-cooked meats; but I offer tapers to the mother of the gods. I am a priest among the Curetes clothed in white; I keep far from the cradles of men; I shun also their tombs; and I eat nothing which has been animated by the breath of life.” The flesh of fish is phosphorescent and hence is aphrodisiacal. Beans are heating and cause absence of mind. For every form of abstinence, including the most irregular forms, a deep reason, apart from all superstition, can probably be found. There are certain combinations of foods which are opposed to the harmonies of Nature. “Thou shalt not seethe the kid in his mother’s milk,” said Moses—a prescription which is touching as an allegory and wise on the ground of hygiene. The Greeks like the Romans, but not to the same extent, were believers in presages; it was good augury when serpents tasted the sacred offerings; it was favourable or the reverse when it thundered on the right or the left hand. There were presages in the ways of sneezing and in other natural weaknesses which may be left here to conjecture. In the Hymn of Mercury, Homer narrates that when the god of thieves was still in his cradle he stole the oxen of Apollo, who took the youngster and shook him, to make him confess the larceny: _Mercure s’avisant d’un étrange miracle, De ses flancs courroucés fit entendre l’oracle; Jusqu’au grand Apollon la vapeur en monta._[116] It was all presage with the Romans—a stone against which the foot struck, the cry of a screech-owl, the barking of a dog, a broken vase, an old woman who was first to look at you. All such idle terrors had for their basis that grand magical science of divination which neglects no token but from an effect overlooked by the vulgar ascends through a sequence of interlinked causes. This science knows, for example, that those atmospheric influences which cause the dog to howl are fatal for certain sufferers, that the appearance and the wheeling of ravens mean the presence of unburied bodies—which is always of sinister augury; localities of murder and execution are frequented by these fowl. The flight of other birds prognosticates hard winters, while yet others, by their plaintive cries over the sea, give the signal of coming storms. On that which science discerns ignorance remarks and generalises; the first sees useful warnings everywhere; the other distresses and frightens itself at everything.