First published in Time (London), September 1890, pp.916-28.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Thanks to Fritz Keller.
PAUSANIAS, in whose description of Greece we find the popular legends unsophisticated as yet by the philosopher and the grammanan, after relating how Rhea gave to her cannibal mate, Kronos, a foal to eat instead of the little Poseidon, and afterwards in lieu of Zeus, a stone wrapt up in swaddling clothes, goes on to say : “As to these fables, I considered them childish when I began this work, but when I got as far as this book (the eighth) I formed this view, that those who were reckoned wise among the Greeks spoke of old in riddles, and not directly; so I imagine the fable about Kronos to be Greek wisdom.” (viii, 8) The myths of the Greeks are riddles for us still, but they were not intended as such; they expressed the childish conceptions of the world formed by savages; they were the records of their daily lives, embellished by so uncontrolled and fiery an imagination that, as Morgan says, “all primitive religions are grotesque, and to some extent unintelligible.” But what is fabulous and unintelligible to people that take a sober view of nature, appears, on the contrary, simple and natural enough to young and uncultivated minds. The Scandinavian Viking had as firm a belief in the power of the spells of witches to raise storms as the French paysan has in the efficacy of his prayers to produce rainfall for his own, and hailstorms for his neighbours’ vineyards; as the little English boy has in the incidents of the drama of the death and burial of Cock Robin, a nursery, tale that modern mythologists might, without any excessive strain of imagination, transform into a solar myth of Hindoo origin. It is only in the course of time, and when the phenomena which had produced them have passed away, that early popular productions of the intellect are converted into myths. This holds good also of hieroglyphics. At first they were simply meant to express the animals and objects they represented, but the scribes having modified the drawings for convenience’ sake, they ceased to be intelligible to all but the initiated. It is precisely because the true popular legends are naïve and spontaneous productions of the intellect that we are enabled by their study to reconstruct the customs and the ideas of pre-historic men.
The study of the Vedas, like new wine, has intoxicated many a Sanskrit scholar. It is their boast to have round the magic key that shall unlock the secrets alike of the riddle that puzzled Pausanias and of numberless others. Resuscitating a very old theory, they affirm that almost all myths are meteorological allegories.
There are, however, more things contained in a myth than the motions of celestial bodies or changes of the atmosphere.
Bachofen, in his work of genius, Das Mutterecht, has unravelled in the Greek myths the ancient forms of the family, which the great American thinker, Lewis Morgan, succeeded in tracing among the savages of America and Polynesia. Mr. Andrew Lang has, with equal wit and humour, shown that the gross fables of the Greeks owed their origin to the modes of thought habitual to savages.
The myth of Athena, some peculiarities of the origin of which I here propose to examine, is one of supreme importance, not only because Athena was the tutelary goddess of the city that has played so unique a part in the history of mankind, but also because the legends that have grown round her name in the course of time may, if rightly interpreted, afford us an insight into the pre-historic times of Greece.
The epithets bestowed upon Athena for her manifold qualities and functions were easily understood, with the exception of one that has been, and is to this day, a riddle to ancient and modern etymologists This unintelligible epithet is met with in the oldest poets. Homer calls Athena Dioz qug'athr cudisth Tritogeneia [1] (daughter of Zeus, terrible Tritogenea) – Hesiod (Theogony 895) gives her the same epithet, which recurs in the Orphic hymns. (xxxi, 3.) Athens had a war dance in honour of the goddess called Tritogeneia.
The early Greek poets were wont to incorporate with their verses, words and entire sentences that were, traditional and bore a sacred meaning. Clemens Alexandrinus tells us that “Homer had taken much from the Thracian poets, and embodied it in his work.” Van Lennep does not accuse Hesiod of plagiarism when he finds him reproducing Homer, but observes, that probably both poets follow a common and earlier version. It is for the same reason that Æschylus is so rich in old legends and archaic forms of language.
When tradition had crystallized a story, the poet was bound to reproduce it faithfully. Herodotus (vii., 6) informs us that Onomacritus vats banished by Flipparchus for having made an interpolation in a passage from Musæus, a sacred poet. In Iceland, not so very long hack, it was held a grave offence to public morality to modify a saga or “ to recount it untruthfully.”
If in Homer and in Hesiod so inexplicable and singular an epithet as Tritogeneia recurs persistently, the inference is that the word is not an indifferent one, employed solely for the sake of the verse, but that it belonged to a popular tradition, and dad an importantand intelligible meaning. That the significance of this did not escape the Greeks, is proved by the contradictory explanations given to the word Tritogeneia.
The word Tritogeneia, if we apply the ordinary rules of etymology to it, is simple enough; it signifies thrice-born, at first sight a meaningless epithet. There are many words in the Greek language constructed in a similar way: tritosporos, of the third generation; tritostates, placed in the third rank; tritonenis, third day of the month, etc., and tritogeneia, triad, ternary number of the Pythagorean doctrine. But those who ignored the primitive meaning of the epithet given to Athena could not admit the absurdity of the ordinary etymology: some affirmed that it was derived from Tritonis, a. Bœotian river, because Athena was said to have been born on its banks; others derived it from an ancient Œolic, Cretan, or Bœotian word, tritw, head, because she had sprung from the head of Zeus in Olympus. Homer, Hesiod, and Æschylus, though they call Athena the daughter of Zeus, make no mention of the manner of her birth. The tradition which makes her jump out of the head of Zeus, split open by Hephæstios, seems to be posterior to Homer. Later on, the poets, improving on the original story, said that she stood in a war chariot on springing from the head of the father of gods and men. But Hesiod tells the story in a different way. Here is a literal translation of the passage: “And Zeus, King of Gods, made Metis first his wife ... When she was about to give birth to Athena, owl-eyed goddess, having by deceit beguiled her mind with flattering words, he hid her within his own belly.” In fact his pregnancy manifested itself in the ordinary way and not in the swelling of the head or thigh as in the case of Dionysius. Thus, when Homer and Hesiod use the won Tritogeneia, it cannot mean, sprung from the head. Diodorus Siculus, not satisfied with the etymological explanation, gives a meteorological one. “The Egyptians called the air Athena, whom they believed to be the daughter of Zeus and always a virgin, because the air is incorruptible and reaches the summit of the universe, for Athena had issued from the head of Zeus. She is also called Tritogeneia, from the three changes experienced by nature in the three seasons of the year – spring, summer, and winter. She bears the name of glaucopis, not because her eyes are blue, as certain among the Greeks believed, but because the immensity of the atmosphere has a blueish tint. (i, 12) The reading of the Vedas has not helped the modern mythologist to anything particularly new.
Let us see if it be possible to recover the lost meaning of Tritogeneia, ter-renata, thrice-born.
Dionysius, surnamed dimetor, having two mothers, has the epithet of trigonos, ter-renatus, thrice-born, given him in the Orphic hymns (xxix., 2); because after Dionysius, son of Persephone, had been torn to pieces by the Titans, Zeus burned his heart to ashes and gave them to Semele to drink, who grew pregnant of Dionysius, the latter, on the death of his second mother, being enclosed in the thigh of Zeus. Athena shared a similar fate. According to Hesiod, Metis, when pregnant with Athena, was swallowed by Zeus, but before descending into the Divine stomach of the “father and mother of Gods,” she gave birth to Athena; and Zeus, in order to make good his claim to the titles of father and mother, made believe to have been delivered of her. The eastern frontispiece of the Parthenon that represented the scene has been so mutilated that the most important personages, Zeus and Athena, have disappeared; but in the University of Bologna there is a bronze Etruscan mirror, on the back of which exists a representation in intaglio of the accouchement of Zeus, which enables us to form an idea of the antique conception of this famous scene. “Zeus appears to faint away with pain,” writes M. Beulé in his description of the mirror ; “Venus supports him in her arms; Diana Lucina delicately extracts from his brain the little Athena shaking her lance. Hephæstios contemplates the group with an air of satisfaction. In fact, the birth of Athena was an ordinary basque Couvade (hatching): the father ... plays the mother’s part, goes to bed, fills the room with his cries and groans, and swears he has been delivered of the new-born baby. This grotesque farce, which has a great historical importance, has been enacted all over the world. Mr. Tylor, in his Early History of Mankind, gives a long but incomplete list of peoples among whom this curious custom has been traced.
In Hesiod, Metis is the mother of Athena, but according to other traditions, she is described as the daughter of Tritonis by Poseidon, and of Coryphe, daughter of Okeanos, by Zeus. Dionysius also had it superfluity of mothers: Demeter, Persephone, Dione, Amalthea, etc. This uncertainty respecting the parentage proves that in the popular mind the tradition was doubtful, either because there was a multiplicity of Dionysiuses and Athenas who contributed to build up the Athena and Dionysius of later days; or because Athena was one of those primitive divinities of savages, living in a social state, in which, the family not being as yet constituted, the children call mother all the women of the tribe belonging to the same generation as their real mother. We know positively that Athena; belonged to a generation of divinities anterior to Zeus, Apollo, and the other “new gods” as Æschylus calls them in the Eumenides. Athena in all likelihood is one of those goddesses who, according to the popular belief, had neither father nor mother, but had sprung from- that “profound abyss from which everything comes and to which everything returns”; like Ghè “the antique mother of Gods and men”; like Tanath, the Phœnician goddess; like the Egyptian Neitha, the mother of Rà, the Sun, worshipped at Sais. If it could be proved that Athena belonged to this very antique generation of divinities, then the meaning of Tritogeneia would be clear. In order to do that, we should have to show how :Athena, before she became the mens divina of the philosophers, the perfect incarnation of intellect and of power, the master-piece. of Greek sculpture, had been the goddess of savage peoples, worshipped under the form of a log of wood ; how, like the butterfly, that does not turn into a winged flower before having crawled in the shape of an ugly worm, she has undergone a series of metamorphoses, was thrice-born and remodelled periodically to suit the progressive ideals of more advanced states of civilisation.
A great diversity of opinion prevailed with regard, to the birthplace of Dionysius and Athena. Wheresoever a river or a fountain was discovered that bore the name of Tritonis, as in Crete, Thessaly; Arcadia, Bœotia, the inhabitants maintained that Athena was born there.
Not a few mythographs believed that Bœotia had serious claims to such an honour, and that the worship of the goddess had spread over Attica from the banks of the river Tritonis, which flows into Lake Copais: Strabo, Pausanias, and other writers record a tradition preserving the memory of two small towns, Athens and Eleusis, situated on the borders of Lake Copais, that were swept away by a winter flood. Considering that incessant warfare was carried on by the savage tribes of primitive Greece; that the towns, in consequence, were built like eagles’ nests, high up amid the rocks, and hence could not easily have been stormed, it is improbable that these two towns should have been built on the borders of a lake. It is true that the towns may have been built on the lake itself, as was the case with the lake habitations of pre-historic Switzerland and New Guinea: the likelier that Herodotus (v, 16) mentions such a city built on Lake Prasias by the Pœonians, who had their women in common and fed their horses on fish. Very possibly the Bœotian Athens, and Eleusis were two lake cities, the rather that [sic] Lake Copais was rich in fishes, and that in the time of Aristophanes and Pausanias its eels were considered very delicate eating. These towns, whose savage inhabitants very probably had their women in common, as had the Lybians living around Lake Tritonis, in Africa (Herod. iv. 180), were a suitable birthplace for such a goddess as Athena.
The Greeks, not unlike other nations, looked upon themselves as being the centre of the universe, whence learning and civilisation flowed over the rest of the world: they held that the Argive king Apis, who gave his name to Peloponesus, once called Apia, land of Apis, had colonised Egypt and imported there the arts of civilisation, in recognition of which the Egyptians worshipped him under the name of’ Serapis. [2] When we bear in mind that the worship of Isis, Osiris, and Apis is as old as the oldest monument of Egypt, and that their names occur in the times of the IVth dynasty, i.e., more than 5000 years before Christ, the probability is that it was Egyptian art which civilised primitive Greece, and Egyptian religion which has had an influence on the formation of the Greek divinities.
The Egyptians having a superstitious horror of the sea, this action was not a direct one, but exercised through the medium of the Phœnicians, Karians, Koushites, Lybians, and other Mediterranean peoples Dr. Schliemann, in his excavations at Tiryus and Mycenæ among other objects of Egyptian origin discovered a number of golden masks in the tombs. Homer and later writers who abound in descriptions of funeral rites, make no mention of the use of such masks so common in Egypt. [3] The soil of Greece bears everywhere the traces of the influence of Egypt: in Acro-Corinthus, the ancient acropolis of Corinth, situated further inland, there were two temples of Isis, one styled Pelasgian and the other Egyptian, and two temples of Serapis, one of the name of Canobus, the town where Menelaus is said to have been wrecked on his return from Troy. (Pausanias Cor. § iv) Among the ruins of the ancient city of Hermione, Pausanias found, contiguous to the sanctuary of Athena, the temples of Isis and Serapis, and a ring of huge unhewn stones, in the interior of which the sacred rites of Demeter were performed. (Cor., § xxxiv.) Serapis had a temple at Copæ, a small town on the banks of Lake Copais, mentioned by Homer. (Tel. ii, 503; Paus. Bœot., § xxxiv) On . the top of Mount Pontinus, near Lerna, was the temple of Saitian Athena, built by Danaos.
Ancient tradition described Athena as a foreign goddess. The Phœnician Kadmos, the founder of Thebes, imported into Bœotia the worship of Athena Onga, a word of Phenician origin, the sense of which is lost. [4] At Delphi and elsewhere she was worshipped under that name. Another tradition has it that the daughters of Danaos, on their flight from Sais, on the fifty-oared vessel built by their father, under the guidance of Athena, had introduced her worship into Lindus, in the isle of Rhodes, where they landed on their way to Lerna, in the neighbourhood of Mycenæ and Tiryus.
When. the Greeks of. historic times came into contact with Egypt, they identified Athena with the great goddess of Sais, Neith or Neitha, by inversion Athena, whose emblem was the ewe. No ewe lamb was sacrificed to Athena. Neitha was the mother of Rà, the Sun; Athena was the mother of Apollo, the Greek sun-god. [5] A weaver’s shuttle was employed to express the name of Neitha, because, like Athena, she was supposed to have invented the art of weaving. Athena is admittedly not a word of Greek origin. M. Ch. Lenormant, in his Galerie mythologique, compares the name of Athena with that of Tanath, the Phenician goddess with whom she has much in common. Neitha and Tanath belong to the primitive group of goddesses who were self-born.
The Egyptians and Phœnicians may have had a part in the formation of the myth of Athena, but the decisive influence was that exercised by the Lybians. How the savage tribes of Africa came into contact with the pre-historic Greek remains to this day an unsolved historical problem. The Greeks could not but recognise the resemblance which their own goddess bore to the divinity worshipped on the banks of the Lybian river, Tritonis, and that this region was considered as the birth-place and abode of Athena. [6] Herodotus tells us that Athena was a goddess held in high honour among the Lybians. The country girls had the manners and customs of Amazons, just as Athena had before she grew to be the personification of wisdom. They indulged in rough sports among themselves, fighting with stones and sticks; those who died of their wounds were reputed false virgins. The Lybian women, like the Australians, studied by Messrs. Fison and Howitt, had for husbands all the men of their marital group, the children being reared by the mothers [7]; when grown up they were taken to the assembly of the men held every month, arid the man whom a child resembled was considered his father. Probably when the Greeks came into contact with the Lybians they were greater savages than the African tribes: according to Herodotus they borrowed from them the costume and “the ægis of Athena ... with this difference that the fringe of their ægis consisted not of snakes but of thongs of leather ... The Lybian women wore over their clothes hairless goat skins, bordered with red fringe, and it is from those skins that the Greeks have drawn the name of œgis. I believe also that the piercing shrieks heard in the temples of this goddess derived their origin from Lybia.” (iv, 189) “The Lybian Athena is the daughter not of Zeus, but of his brother Poseidon; but having quarrelled with her father she goes to Zeus and is adopted by him.” (iv. § 180)
On a closer study of the history of Athena we find that she is characterised by certain features which render her the fitting goddess of a savage people, like the pre-historic Greeks.
A legend preserved by Tzetzes represents Athena killing her father Pallas, in order to escape his lust, flaying his corpse and decking herself with his skin, after the manner of Herakles with the hide of the Nemean lion. During the long period of Athena’s infancy the women were doubtless constantly exposed to the danger of violation; as indeed were all the women of these savage tribes in which marriage by group obtained; numberless nymphs and goddesses had fallen victims to such a fate; nor did Athena escape it. She was violated by Hephæstios and bore Erichthonius, whom Ghè was good enough to go pregnant with for her. The fact of having borne a child or two in no way nullified the claim to the title of virgin. Her temple in the Acropolis of Athens, the Erechtheum, was consecrated to the virgin mother. [8] There is nothing calculated to shock the savage mind in this confusion of virginity and motherhood; and the prerogative of being a virgin mother Athena shared with many Asiatic and Egyptian divinities who gloried in their power to conceive children without the co-operation of the male. Sacred animals shared the same privilege: the divine bull Apis was born of a virgin cow impregnated by the rays of the sun; vultures were rendered fertile by the wind; and Horapollo informs us that the vulture stands for the hieroglyphic symbol of motherhood.
The costume of this primitive Athena no doubt resembled that of the Juno of Lanuvium, as we find it represented on medals and as it is described by Cicero (De nat. Deor. i, § 29). It was composed of the skin of a goat, covering the head and falling over the back, drawn in at the waist, and there tied into a knot formed by the forelegs of the animal. We may presume that her ægis, which has so greatly exercised the minds of the German and French Sanskrit scholars, was nothing else than a goat’s skin wound round her left arm in the way that the Spaniards wrap their cloaks about their arms in their duels with the navaja (bowie-knife). To impart a character of ferocity to this ægis, a border formed of serpents’ heads was added to it, and from the centre of it hung a human head horribly mutilated. The Lexicon of Greek and Roman Mythology, now in course of publication under the direction of W.H. Roscher, reproduces an antique Gorgon’s head having the lips and nose cut off and stretching out its tongue. The later poets and artists, forgetting or disregarding the earlier conception of the ægis, represented it as a breastplate covered with metallic scales and extending from shoulder to shoulder. If this coarse and ferocious costume was little worthy of the Athena destined to become the goddess of divine wisdom, the primitive religious images of her were equally unworthy of that perfect work of art which the Greek statuary was ultimately, to produce in representation of her.
The statue of Athena, left by the daughters of Danaos at Lindus, was, if we credit Callimachus (frag. 105), a mere log of wood. The oldest statue of Athena polias, namely protectress of the city, which was preciously preserved at Athens, and which was said to have fallen from heaven on the day of the foundation of the Acropolis, was like the Athena of Lindus, a shapeless block of wood. [9] At Mantinea Athena was represented by an erect quadrangular stone, to which were added two stumps of arms. [10] Rude images of a similar kind were used to represent other primitive divinities: the Hera of Pharis was a lump of wood; the renowned Aphrodite of Cyprus was represented under the form of a stone pyramid (Tacitus, Hist. ii. § 3). The Dionysius worshipped at Thebes was a piece of wood ornamented with brass (Pausanias, Bœoti. xii). The pre-historic Greeks, like other savages, did not, worship mystic gods personifying the hidden forces of nature; stones, bits of wood or bones endowed with magical properties were the gods of their divinity. It required long ages of development before man gave to his superior beings the animal or human form.
The worship rendered to the savage Athena was in keeping with the coarseness of her images. In the Troade she was a sanguinary divinity, and human blood was spilt upon her altars; yet an object of such profound veneration was this Trojan Athena, that Alexander stopped at Ilios to bring offerings to her, and that Xerxes sacrificed to her a holocaust of a thousand bulls. Porphyrios recounts that it was customary to immolate virgins to the Athena of Laodicea, in Syria (De Abst. ii. § 56). And not only to her, but to her companion Agraulos, daughter of Kekrops were human sacrifices offered: in the temple she inhabited at Salamis, together with Athena and Diomedes, a man was immolated to her.
Before taking up her habitation in the towns, and dwelling in the temples, Athena had climbed the mountain-tops, and lived in caves, in attestation whereof we have her epithet Agraulos, wild, rustic, and the Orphic hymn. She was then “the goddess who strikes doubt and terror into the souls of men”; she resembled the Eumenides, these antique goddesses who, later on, were to choose her for umpire in their quarrel with Apollo, the new god, who violated the ancient usages. (Æschylus, Eumenides). Zeus and the gods of the new Olympus had had for predecessors other divinities that successively had been dethroned and consigned to inferior functions or simply suppressed. The savage Athena and the Eumenides belonged to those antique divinities that had been compelled to submit to Zeus. Hesiod relates that when Zeus married Metis, and gave birth to Athena, he was already the uncontested lord of the heavens. Popular traditions describe Athena as taking part in the struggle with the Titans, burying Enceladus under a rock, and helping Zeus to triumph over his enemies: the child-bed scene, played by the master of men and gods, was but the shamming of his adoption of her, after which Athena consents to recognise his patriarchal authority. It is because Athena belonged to this antique class of divinities that she possessed such virile qualities, and that; according to the Orphic hymn (xxxii, 10), she was “arsen kai thélus,” male and female. Though it is impossible to identify Athena with Dionysius, we cannot help remarking the curious analogies of the two myths: not only is Dionysius thrice-born like Athena, but like her he has a double nature (diphues, Orphic Hymn, xxx, 2). Furthermore, Dionysius was bull-headed (tauropos), and as Schliemann concludes, from certain idols found at Ilios, that glaucopis Athena does not mean blue-eyed, but owl-headed, we may infer that she was a totem goddess of a savage tribe, whose women had the habits of Amazons, and who recognised the owl for its ancestor.
The epithet Tritogeneia meant that Athena was thrice-born – for she belonged originally to the group of antique self-born goddesses – but, in the course of time, when her savage adorers reached the stage of development in which the matriarchal family was constituted, she was endowed with a mother, who bore different names, according to the people who worshipped Athena; and at last, when on earth, and afterwards in heaven, man bad become the ruling power in the family, she consented, to the great joy of the gods, to recognise the authority of Zeus, who went through the ludicrous ceremony of giving her birth, as was the custom in case of an adoption. Hera, to adopt Herakles, went to bed, hid the child under her clothing, and let it drop as in a natural accouchement. (Diod. Sic. iv, § 39) [11] Savages and barbarians always want to have the material scene reproduced. Plinius (In Paneg. § 8) relates that even in his time adoption was made in front of the nuptial bed, in order to make believe that the adopted person was the real offspring of the conjugal bed.
Thus, the epithet Tritogeneia not only takes us back to the remotest times of Greek history, but marks three most important epochs of human pre-historic evolution.
Philosophers and grammarians of antiquity have diverted themselves by transfiguring Athena into a divinity as imponderable as wisdom and as it impalpable as the air; but the popular traditions, the coarse fables, the meaningless epithets which cling to her, enable the unbiased student to reconstruct a primitive Athena adapted to the character of a savage tribe, war-loving and ferocious, who sent colonies from Africa to Greece and Asia Minor.
The myth of Athena was not produced all of a piece, nor does it present the immutability of t mathematical formula. In common with all things, both in the natural and the intellectual world, it has been subject to the laws of evolution. Athena had the same fate as other supreme beings who evolve as their savage creator evolves, and are informed with a higher life as man advances in civilisation: like the soul in the Egyptian hell, she has passed through so many states that the goddess of the savage tribes is barely discoverable in the divinity of the poets and in the agia sofia of the philosophers.
1. Iliad, iv. 515.
2. The bull-god, Apis, was allowed to live upwards of twenty-five years; when the time allotted him for his terrestrial existence had expired, if he did not die of his own accord, he was drowned. The priests killed him on earth in order to raise him to life again, a god in heaven, where he was identified with Osiris and raised to the rank of Osiris-Apis, or by abbreviation, Osar-Apis, Sarapis, transformed by the Greeks into Serapis.
3. The Egyptian museum at Paris possesses many gold masks, and a considerable quantity of pasteboard ones.
4. M. Maury derives the word onga from ógen or iggoum, anchor, supposing that Onga Athena was represented on the anchor of Phœnician vessels. (Histoire des religions de l’ancienne Grèce, i, 97.)
5. Cicero, De naturâ Deorum, iii, 23.
6. Æschylus, Eumenides 292-296; Diod. Sic. iii., § 70.
7. Fison anti Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, 1880, Melbourne.
8. Emile Burnouf, directeur de l’Ecole francaise d’Athèns, La Légende Athénienne, 1872, ch. iii.
9. Rudi palo et informi Ligno. Tertullianus, Apol. adv. Gent. xvi.
10. F. Lenormant, Les Betyles, Rev. Hist. des Religions, Janvier 1881.
11. Wesse1ing quotes a passage of the Abbé Guibert (Histor. Hierosl. iii, 13), who narrates in this wise the adoption of Baudouin by the Prince of Edessa: – Adoptationis autem talis pro gentis consuetudine dicitur fuisse modus. Intra lineam interulam, quam nos vocamus camisiam, nudum intrare fecit et sibi adstrinxit; et haec omnia osculo libato firmavit; idem et mulier postmodum fecit.
Last updated on 13.11.2003