politically united with the latter, and that this event only took place shortly before the Peace of Nikias, rests on the interpretation of certain passages of Thucydides and on the axiom that the "cult follows the flag." The question is of great importance for the history of Attic drama. His interpretation of those texts is not convincing, nor is the axiom unquestionable.

Two lectures were delivered in the Summer Term by Professor von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in Oxford at the invitation of the University, and have since been published by the Clarendon Press. The lecture on Apollo is a brilliant exposition of the Hellenic conception of the god. It contains also a statement of the lecturer's well-known thesis that Apollo was aboriginally a non-Aryan god of Lykia, a theory which few who have weighed all the facts are likely to accept, but which he supported by some new and interesting arguments, identifying, for instance, Leto, the mother, with the known Lycian word "Lada" = "Lady" or Пóтna; and hence Apollo alone of Hellenic gods is called Antoïdns, as among the matrilinear Lycians the son was called after his mother. But if for other weighty reasons we believe that Apollo was brought by the Aryan immigrants from the north, we need not be disturbed by the Lycian phenomenon: if the early Greek settlers bringing their god to Lykia found there a great mother-goddess called "Lada," they would be sure to affiliate him to her, as Zeus was affiliated to the Cretan Rhea. For the ethnology of a cult, stories as to where a god was born or who was his mother are rarely of much value; these stories are usually not aboriginal, for as a god wanders about, he picks up many birthplaces and many mothers.

A few words may be here allowed concerning the Congress for the History of Religions, which met at Oxford in September and of which the transactions will be published in a few weeks. The Graeco-Roman section did not produce many papers bearing directly on the popular religion of Greece and Rome of the historic period. But Mr A. B. Cook read a valuable paper on the Cretan Axe cult outside Crete,

in which he showed some survivals even in Hellenic legend and cult, as at Tenedos, of the Minoan worship. A paper on "Bird and Pillar Cults in Relation to Ouranian Religion," written by Miss Harrison, was read for her by Mr Cook, as, much to the regret of every member of Congress, she was prevented by illness from attending. Her paper was a presentation of various evidence to show that a widespread cult of birds, associated with the cult of the pillar, preceded in Hellenic lands the anthropomorphic system of Hellenism. It will be easier to estimate her interesting monograph after it has been published. But it may be useful for the present to mention the fact that one important piece of evidence on which she relied-the priestess wearing a bird's skin on the sarcophagus of Phaistos, soon-and not too soon-to be published by the Italian discoverers of it, is certainly wrong. Dr Evans and others who have seen the sarcophagus are convinced that the skin in question is that of a bull. It is desirable for us all just now to be critical and judicious in our use of the word "worship": the Cretan pillar need not have been worshipped as a god, but magically treated as a kind of lightning-conductor for bringing down the divinity, as we see is the case on a Cretan seal. The bird, seated on the pillar before which worshippers stand may be temporarily divine, may be regarded at that moment as the sign of the presence of the deity who has come down in that form, as the Holy Ghost came down in the form of a dove; yet we should not speak here of bird-cult. We must also bear in mind that "zoolatry" and "anthropomorphism" appear to coexist in the confused imagination of the savage, and should not always be separated as distinct phases of human evolution in religion.

A paper was read in this section by Dr Farnell on Dionysiac ritual, in which the sacramental ritual was examined and a new explanation hazarded of the trieteric rule, connecting it with the trieteric shifting of land-culture found in primitive agricultural societies such as Thrace; the paper will appear in the forthcoming volume of his Cults of the Greek States.

Another department of the whole field-the study of Greek Religious Philosophy-received some attention at the Congress. A paper was read by Mr St George Stock, on "The Daimon in Stoicism," and Professor Lewis Campbell gave a luminous address on "The Religious Element in Plato."

A comprehensive work has recently appeared, bearing on the religious theories expressed in ancient literature and philosophy-The Religious Teachers of Greece, by the late Mr J. Adam. It is clearly and thoughtfully written, and gives a particularly good account of the religious views of Pindar and Euripides.

A review of the year's work cannot close without some expression of the great loss that our studies have suffered from the sudden death of Professor Dieterich of Heidelberg, a scholar of European reputation, in whom great and varied learning was combined with a rare sanity of judgment and a great gift of penetrating research.

LEWIS R. FARNELL

VIII

ROMAN RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY

On this subject no work on a large scale has appeared during the past year. I would, however, draw particular attention to a Dissertation of nearly a hundred closely printed pages on the Deification of Abstract ideas in Roman literature and inscriptions, by Harold L. Axtell, of the University of Idaho, published by the University of Chicago Press. The subject is one of very great interest, whether we look at it from a religious or a literary or a psychological point of view, and, so far as I know, it has never been submitted to a searching investigation. Mr Axtell has seen its importance, has examined the evidence with care, both literary and epigraphical, and has exercised caution and good judgment in forming his conclusions. He owes much, of course, to Wissowa's Religion und Kultus der Römer, but does not hesitate to differ from him, especially in dealing with the question of the origin of some of the deifications discussed.

On pages 59 ff. Mr Axtell discusses this question of origins, and this will be for students of religious history the most interesting part of his work. There are two explanations of the curious tendency of the Romans to deify abstract qualities or virtues; one is that of Mommsen and Boissier, that such abstractions were natural to the Roman mind, and an original part of their religious thought; the other, that of Marquardt and Wissowa, that they were nothing but a late development of the worship of personal deities representing concrete ideas. Most of them are, in fact, according to this view, "split-offs" from a few great deities, e.g. Victoria from Jupiter Victor. Mr Axtell thinks

that the truth is midway between these opposing theories, but seems rather to incline to the first. He points out that even in the agricultural period of Roman life we have one abstraction deified, i.e. Ops, and concludes that the tendency to make numina of purely mental concepts was indigenous with the native Romans, but that the split-off theory may also account for the creation of several deities. Perhaps we may put it thus: if the early Romans had the habit of spiritualising a great variety of material objects, and if they had words (as was the case) for certain mental concepts, there appears to be no reason why they should not have begun to spiritualise those concepts also at a very early period of their history. As a matter of fact, Fortuna, Fides, Salus, and one or two more, are extremely ancient deities, not only in Rome but elsewhere in Italy. All students of the religious side of Roman history will be grateful to Mr Axtell, whether they agree with him or not, for his careful collection of material, and will look to him for further studies in the same domain.

The Pauly-Wissowa "Encyclopaedie" has now reached the letter E, and contains an exhaustive article by Keune on Epona, the deity specially connected with beasts of burden in the northern and western provinces of the Roman Empire. Of late there has been a tendency to take the name of this goddess as Latin or Italian; Keune, on the other hand, believes it to be Celtic (the short o following p is said to prove this), and points out that her real home is Gaul, and that in Italy, the Alps, and even in Narbonensis, she only occurs sparingly. The connection of Epona with other deities in inscriptions, both in Gaul and Britain, is puzzling, and needs still further investigation in connection with the history of the Roman army. Once the name is found in the plural (Eponab(us) et Campestribus), where it looks as though Epona had been drawn by a kind of attraction into the number of those grouped or plural deities so characteristic of Gaul and Britain. In this connection it will be as well to mention a paper by Prof. E. Anwyl of Aberystwith on ancient Celtic goddesses, in the Celtic Review for July 1906,