36 Rafael Karsten. [N:o 1 



ideas that violent winds, which as a matter of experience mostly 

 appeared as destructive deities not only through their natural 

 force ^) bufc also through the pestiferous diseases which they 

 were supposed to bring with them 2), should be assooiated 

 with the powers of the darkness and accordingly propitiated 

 with nightly holokaumata and other rites performed to such 

 beings? ^). 



Here, however, our task is rather to trace the prevalence 

 of the idea of wind-gods itself than to examine the rites with 

 which it was connected. In Homer we recognise this idea, 

 for instance, in the description of Achilles calling on Boreas 

 and Zephyrus with libations and vows of sacrifice to blow 

 into a blaze the funeral pyre of Patroklus*). But in its most 

 primitive form it was met with in the populär Greek religion. 

 That it lingered on here during the whole of Antiquity is 

 shown by the above mentioned statement of Pausanias of sac- 

 rifices performed to the winds in four pits. The same traveller 

 at Methaua in Troezen witnessed another no less interesting 

 ceremony of averting the winds. A wind called Lips, which 

 rushed down from the Saronic gulf dried up the tender shoots 



^) That the early Greeks had a strong consciousness of the destructive 

 power of the winds, appears, for instance, from the passage in Hesiod's 

 Theogonein, 875 and föll. 



^) Theophr. De ventis, c. 21. Plut. De curiosit. cl. Diog. Laert. VIII, 

 2, 60. 



^) It is no douht, too rash a generalisation Miss Harrisen makes when 

 in her Prolegomena (pp. 176—178) she declares that the wind-deities were 

 by the primitive Greeks thought of as being essentially ghosts, stormghosts, 

 who snatched people to death, and that for this very reason they were pro- 

 pitiated with rites similar to those performed to the dead. However, we may 

 agree with this writer in so for that the winds sometiraes seem to have been 

 regarded as death-demons, an idea which, indeed, easily presented itself espe- 

 cially with regard to thier character as bearers of pestiferous diseases. If, as 

 set forth by Scherer and others (Roscher's Lexikon, p. 2360), Herraes was in 

 his nature a wind-god, this would be one fact more in support of this as- 

 sumption, Hermes being duringj; the whole of antiquity considered as being 

 above all a ohtonic deity who brought the dead down to the realm of shades 

 (Hom. Od. XXIV; 1. Hymn. Hom. ad Herm. V, 572. Diog. Laért. VIII, 31. 

 Cf. Wuensch, Defixionum tahellae Atticae, praef. p. VI). — As to the chtonic 

 rites perforraed to the wind-gods, compare Stengel, Die Opfer der Hellenen an 

 die Winde, in Hermes, 1881, pp. 348—9. 



*) Hom. 11, XXIII, 195 sqq. 



