FABLE AND FOLKLORE 131 



whole apparatus of the oracle at Dodona . . . was to be 

 matched in the oasis of Ammon. Strabo adds that both 

 oracles gave their responses in the selfsame manner, not 

 by words but by certain tokens, such as the flight of 

 doves." 



The conception of Aphrodite also included that of 

 spring, ushered in by the early return of this migrant 

 from its winter resort in Africa and the time when it 

 cooed for a mate — the season when "a livelier iris changes 

 on the burnished dove"; while the revival of nature in 

 spring has always to imaginative souls typified the Resur- 

 rection as taught in Christian doctrine and exemplified in 

 some of the customs of Easter, which, of course, is only 

 an adaptation of the far more ancient festival of rejoicing 

 at the return of the sun — the rebirth of the year. 



Another line of thought apparently of Oriental origin, 

 but prevalent in northern Europe, connected this dove 

 with the Fates and with death, especially death by 

 violence — a phase that is traced in wearisome detail back 

 to the Rigvedas and other misty sources by the myth- 

 readers, and which probably comes from its plaintive 

 "cooing." Sometimes, however, the fateful dove brings 

 good tidings and succor to the distressed, as in the story 

 of Queen Radegund, who in the form of a dove once de- 

 livered sailors from shipwreck. 



This is an appropriate place, perhaps, to repeat the 

 legend related by the Rhodian Apollonius in his poem 

 Argonautica, concerning the Symplegades — the two 

 islands that stand on opposite sides of the Bosphorus 

 "mouth." It appears that these islands were wont in 

 days ancient even to Apollonius to swing together and 

 crush any living thing that attempted to pass between 

 them and enter the Black Sea. Phineas, who lived on the 



