View PDF - the CDI home page.

THE ENGLISH REVIEW
bigots and ruffians never breathed), but only of its teachers
who resented ugliness as a sin and ever held up to them the
ideal of nemesis—measure.
Homer began the work, and nothing is more true than that
saying of Herodotus, that " Homer arranged the generations of
the gods." The Odyssey which sweeps along its current the
legend-wrecks of multitudinous extra-Hellenic races, has wafted
down to us a fragment of the foreign and cannibalistic old
Siren-lore :
In verdant meads they sport, and wide around
Lie human bones, that whiten all the ground;
The ground polluted floats with human gore,
And human carnage taints the dreadful shore. . . .
but there is no further elaboration of this ungracious aspect ;
on the contrary, their song, which follows, is conceived in the
true spirit of beauty and quite at variance with this primaeval
picture of crude bloodthirstiness. A characteristic hellenisation,
caught in the act. This first step towards purification
accomplished, later poets and philosophers dwelt ever more on
the human attributes of the Sirens, on their charms of voice
and feature, till finally the " whitening bones " and other
harsh traits faded from sight.
After Hellas came the Alexandrian period with its philological
and historical vagaries, and the prodigious syncretism of
gods in the first four centuries ; then mediaevalism, which
dwarfed Hellenic shapes into caco-demons and with their glories
crowned its saints.
The Siren Parthenope escaped by taking refuge during
mediaeval storms in the narrow confines of an amulet, such Sirencharms
as are still seen in the streets of Naples and credited
with peculiar efficacity against the evil eye. In this, I seem to
see the homoeopathic principle at work, for the Sirens themselves
were witches at the time—sea-witches, and to this day the
bathing population may be observed to cross themselves devoutly
before plunging into the water, in order to paralyse these malevolent
genii of the deep. Others, such as Venus, sheltered
themselves behind musty saints ; Santa Venere is in high repute
as healer of certain diseases.
And another point of general interest becomes clear from
these scientific disquisitions : that the Sirens of Homer must
be sought in the west rather than where Gladstone and others
have located them. A variety of speculations are now converging
to show that the Odyssean fable is the record of one of
many westward processions of gods and men and is, indeed,