tive philology may lawfully
devote herself; but we cannot so readily explain by presumed borrowing
from without the rude xoana of the ancient local temples, the wild myths
of the local legends, the sacra which were the exclusive property of
old-world families, Butadae or Eumolpidae. These are clearly survivals
from a stage of Greek culture earlier than the city state, earlier than
the heroic age of the roving Greek Vikings, and far earlier than the
Greek colonies. They belong to that conservative and immobile period
when the tribe or clan, settled in its scattered kraals, lived a life of
agriculture, hunting and cattle-breeding, engaged in no larger or more
adventurous wars than border feuds about women or cattle. Such wars were
on a humbler scale than even Nestor's old fights with the Epeians; such
adventures did not bring the tribe into contact with alien religions. If
Sidonian merchantmen chanced to establish a factory near a tribe in this
condition, their religion was not likely to make many proselytes.

These reasons for believing that most of the wilder element in Greek
ritual and myth was native may be briefly recapitulated, as they are
often overlooked. The more strange and savage features meet us in LOCAL
tales and practices, often in remote upland temples and chapels.
There they had survived from the society of the VILLAGE status, before
villages were gathered into CITIES, before Greeks had taken to a roving
life, or made much acquaintance with distant and maritime peoples.

For these historical reasons, it may be assumed that the LOCAL religious
antiquities of Greece, especially in upland districts like Arcadia
and Elis, are as old, and as purely national, as free from foreign
influences as any Greek institutions can be. In these rites and myths
of true folk-lore and Volksleben, developed before Hellas won its way
to the pure Hellenic stage, before Egypt and Phoenicia were familiar,
should be found that common rude element which Greeks share with the
other races of the world, and which was, to some extent, purged away by
the genius of Homer and Pindar, pii vates et Phaebo digna locuti.

In proof of this local conservatism, some passages collected by K. F.
Hermann in his Lehrbuch der Griechischen Antiquitaten(1) may be cited.
Thus Isocrates writes,(2) "This was all their care, neither to destroy
any of the ancestral rites, nor to add aught beyond what was ordained".
Clemens Alexandrinus reports that certain T