296 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



wed his brother's widow, provided the first union was childless, 

 and to raise up seed to the deceased, was only a modification of 

 polyandry and difi^ered from the conjugal relations still in vogue 

 among the Thibetans in the fact that the possession of the same 

 wife was successive instead of simultaneous. Both of these matri- 

 monial customs are survivals of the earliest form of marriage, 

 which was not individual, but tribal. We have a relic of this 

 primitive kind of wedlock among the Californian Indians, who 

 practiced promiscuous sexual intercourse, so far as the members 

 of the same tribe were concerned ; the woman was regarded as 

 faithless or adulterous only when she cohabited with a man be- 

 longing to another tribe. 



The Greeks, with all their superior culture, never became as a 

 people sufiBciently enlightened to lay aside their deep distrust and 

 depreciation of foreigners. Sparta was notoriously hostile to 

 strangers (e'x^/Do^ei/os, or guest-hating), and how impossible it was 

 for even a cultivated Athenian to look at the world at large from 

 any but a strictly Hellenic point of view is curiously and comic- 

 ally illustrated in the drama in which ^schylus glorifies the bat- 

 tle of Salamis, where the Persians are made to speak of them- 

 selves as barbarians balked of their purpose, and to describe their 

 lamentations over their defeat as dismal barbaric wailings. 



It is a somewhat surprising and quite significant concession to 

 Greek arrogance that Plautus should use the phrase vortere har- 

 hare in the sense of turning or translating into Latin. It is pos- 

 sible, however, that he may have borrowed this phrase from Phi- 

 lemon and other Greek playwrights, whose comedies he imitated 

 with more or less freedom, but always with a touch of native 

 genius. Still, we know that the Romans were uniformly called 

 barbarians, and seem to have recognized the correctness of this 

 appellation down to the age of Augustus, when the term began to 

 be applied chiefly, if not exclusively, to the Germans. As our 

 earliest information concerning the Germanic peoples was derived 

 from Greek and Roman sources, we have been misled by the use 

 of this depreciatory designation to think of them as wild and law- 

 less hordes, and to form a wholly false conception of the grade and 

 quality of their civilization. 



When individuals of different race or nationality formed 

 friendships they were wont to confirm the pact by an exchange 

 of tokens, which remained as heirlooms in their respective fami- 

 lies, and were prized by their descendants as pledges of mutually 

 kind and hospitable treatment. The duty of helpfulness was, in 

 such cases, quite as imperative as is the vow of vendetta, which 

 passes as a precious inheritance of hatred from Corsican father 

 to son. These tokens were called by the Greeks a-vfji/SoXa, and by the 

 Romans tesserce, hospitdles, and, although they were eventually 



