XLIX] Studies in primitive Greeiv religion. 79 



Even when asleep primitive man feels himself exposed to 

 the afflictions of" supernatural tormentors, their presence mani- 

 festing itself in hideous dreams and visions and especially in 

 nightmares. The world-wide doctrine of nightmares, of incubi 

 and succubi, evil spirits who pain and trouble man in sleep, 

 seems to have been familiar to tlie early Grreeks as to other 

 uncivilised races. Etymologicum Magniim explains the night- 

 mare or hepialos, as a shivering fever and „a daimon that 

 conies upon those that are asleep" '). That the populär belief 

 preserved this ancient idea even in låter times of Antiquity 

 appears also clearly from statements of Hellenic physcians 

 who from a scientific point of view tried to corabat the old 

 superstition, declaring that the hepialos or ephialtes in is „not 

 an evil demon but a härd disease" ^). 



Although some ills were especially likely to call forh the 

 idea of their being caused by malevolent demons who had taken 

 possessiou of man, we may assiime that among the primitive 

 Greeks the same theory — or modifications of it — was 

 applied to most diseases. In fact, at a stage of culture where 

 death itself is to man the greatest of mysteries and strikes 

 his imagination more than anything else, where, in the raa- 

 jonty of cases, the real nature of diseases cannot be found 

 oiTt, and where every movement and every remarkable change 

 in tho world, the cause of which is not manifest, is accoun- 

 ted for by the intervention af living agents, the rise of 

 such a view seems natural enough. Certain ills may, of course, 

 have been accounted for without the theory of immediately 

 present possessing spirits. Thus the poetical description in the 

 ■first book of the Iliad of Apollo raining his pestiferous 

 arrows upon the Achaian camp •''), is obviously based upon 



') Etymol.. Magn. s, v. (tiyonvQsrov. 



^) Oribasius Synops. VIII, 2: ovx tOTiv o xakovuevog éq^iåltqi baiacav 

 xaxös, äXXä öguev tu vunog tayv(iå . . . (Soranos). Aetius Amid. Libri medicin. 

 I, p. 104: ovx tffriv u xaXoviievog écpLåXjris öalucov, bXka u.äX}.ov fieXéTij xai 

 stoooluLoi^ éjnXi-fipiag i) uaviag i] åjtofcXi^^lag (Poseidonios). — On the Greek 

 ideas of nightmares, Cf. more fullj Roscher, Ephialtes, eine pathologisch- 

 mythologishe Abhandlung iiber die Alpträumen and Alpdämone des klassischen 

 Alterthums, in Abh. der königl. sachs. Ges. der Wiss., hist.-phil. Classe, vol. 

 XX, p. 28 sqq. 



') Hom. II. I. 42 sqq. 



