about women or cattle. Such wars were on a humbler scale than even Nestor's old fights with the Epeians; such adventures did not bring the tribe into contact with alien religions. If Sidonian merchantmen chanced to establish a factory near a tribe in this condition, their religion was not likely to make many proselytes.
These reasons for believing that most of the wilder element in Greek ritual and myth was native may be briefly recapitulated, as they are often overlooked. The more strange and savage features meet us in local tales and practices, often in remote upland temples and chapels. There they had survived from the society of the village status, before villages were gathered into cities, before Greeks had taken to a roving life, or made much acquaintance with distant and maritime peoples.
For these historical reasons, it may be assumed that the local religious antiquities of Greece, especially in upland districts like Arcadia and Elis, are as old, and as purely national, as free from foreign influences as any Greek institutions can be. In these rites and myths of true folk-lore and Volksleben, developed before Hellas won its way to the pure Hellenic stage, before Egypt and Phœnicia were familiar, should be found that common rude element which Greeks share with the other races of the world, and which was, to some extent, purged away by the genius of Homer and Pindar, pii vates et Phœbo digna locuti.
In proof of this local conservatism, some passages collected by K. F. Hermann in his Lehrbuch der
