Page:EB1911 - Volume 26.djvu/189

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SUTLER—SUTTON, T.
171

Beas; and the indundation canals of the Upper and Lower Sutlej, Ferozepur and Bahawalpur, which come below the junction.

SUTLER, a camp-follower who sells provisions, liquor and other things to an army in the field, in camp or in quarters. The word was one of the numerous naval and military terms adapted in English from the Dutch, where it appears as soetetaar or zoetelaar. It meant originally one who does dirty work, a drudge, a scullion, and' is derived from zoetelen, to foul, sully, a word cognate with “suds,” hot soapy water, “seethe,” to boil, and “sodden.”

SUTRI (anc. Sutrium), a town and episcopal see of Italy, in the province of Rome, 4 m. W.N.W. of the railway station of Capranica, which is 36 m. from Rome; 955 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1001), 2701. The town is picturesquely situated on a narrow hill, surrounded by ravines, a narrow neck on the west alone connecting it with the surrounding country. There are some remains of the ancient city walls of rectangular blocks of tufa on the southern side of the town, and some rock-cut sewers in the cliffs below them. The cathedral is modern, but the crypt, with twenty columns, is old, and the campanile dates from the 13th century. In the cliffs opposite the town on the south is the rock-cut church of the Madonna del Parto, developed, no doubt, out of an Etruscan tomb, of which there arc many here; and close by is a rock-hewn amphitheatre of the Roman period, with axes of 55 and 44 yds., now most picturesque.

The position of Sutri was important, commanding as it did the road into Etruria, the later Via Cassia; and it is spoken of by Livy as one of the keys of Etruria, Nepet being the other. It came into the hands of Rome after the fall of Veii, and a Latin colony was founded there; it was lost again in 386, but was recovered and recolonized in 383 (?). It was besieged by the Etruscans in 30-10 B.C., but not taken. With Nepet and ten other Latin colonies it refused further help in the Hannibalic War in 209 B.C. Its importance as a fortress explains, according to Festus, the proverb Sutrium ire, of one who goes on important business, as it occurs in Plautus. It is mentioned in the war of 41 B.C., and received a colony of veterans under the triumviri (Colonia coniuncta Iulia Sutrina). Inscriptions show that it was a place of some importance under the empire, and it is mentioned as occupied by the Lombards.

See G. Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, i. 62 (London, 1883).  (T. As.) 

SUTTEE (an English corruption of Sanskrit sati, “good woman” or true “wife”), the rite of widow-sacrifice, i.e. the burning the living widow on the funeral pyre of her husband, as practised among certain Hindu castes. As early as the Atharva Veda the rite is mentioned as an “old custom,” but European scholars have shown that the text of the still earlier Rig Veda had been corrupted, probably wilfully, by the Hindu priesthood, and that there was no injunction that the rite should be observed. The directions of the Rig Veda seem to have involved a merely symbolic suttee: the widow taking her place on the funeral pile, but being recalled to “this world of life” at the last moment by her brother-in-law or adopted child. The practice was sporadically observed in India when the Macedonians reached India late in the 4th century B.C. (Diod. Sic. xix. 33-34); but the earlier Indian law books do not enjoin it, and Manu simply commands the widow to lead a life of chastity and asceticism. About the 6th century A.D. a recrudescence of the rite took place, and with the help of corrupted Vedic texts it soon grew to have a full religious sanction. But even so it was not general throughout India. It was rare in the Punjab; and in Malabar, the most primitive part of southern India, it was forbidden. In its medieval form it was essentially a Brahminic rite, and it was where Brahminism was strongest, in Bengal and along the Ganges valley and in Oudh and Rajputana, that it was most usual.

The manner of the sacrifice differed according to the district. In south India the widow jumped or was forced into the fire-pit; in western India she was placed in a grass hut, supporting the corpse's head with her right hand while her left held the torch; in the Ganges valley she lay down upon the already lighted pile; while in Nepal she was placed beside the corpse, and when the pile was lighted the two bodies were held in place by long poles pressed down by relatives. The earliest attempt to stop suttee was made by Akbar (1542-1605), who forbade compulsion, voluntary suttees alone being permitted. Towards the end of the 18th century the British authorities, on the initiative of Sir C. Malet and Jonathan Duncan in Bombay, took up the question, but nothing definite was ventured on till 1829 when Lord William Bentinck, despite fierce opposition, carried in council on the 4th of December a regulation which declared that all who abetted suttee were “guilty of culpable homicide.” Though thus illegal, widow-burning continued into modern days in isolated parts of India. In 1905 those who assisted at a suttee in Behar were sentenced to penal servitude.

Widow sacrifice is not peculiar to India, and E. B. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (ch. 11) has collected evidence to support a theory that the rite existed among all primitive Aryan nations. He thinks that in enjoining it the medieval priesthood of India were making no innovation, but were simply reviving an Aryan custom of a barbaric period long antedating the Vedas. See also Jakob Grimm, Verbrennen der Leichen.

SUTTNER, BERTHA, Baroness von (1843-), Austrian writer, was born at Prague on the 9th of July 1843, the daughter of Count Franz Kinsky, Austrian field marshal, who died shortly after her birth. On her mother's side she was descended from the family of the German poet, Theodor Körner. After receiving a careful education she travelled abroad and resided for a long period in Paris and in Italy. In 1876 she married the novelist, Freiherr Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner (1850-1902), and for the next nine years lived with him at Tiflis in the Caucasus. After 1885 she resided at Schloss Harmansdorf, near Eggenburg, in Lower Austria. The Baroness von Suttner, a fertile writer, has produced numerous tales, books on social science and romances, among which the best known are Inventarium einer Seele (1882), Die Waffen nieder (1889), Hanna (1894), La Traviata (1898), Schach der Qual (1898), Martha's Kinder (1903), a continuation of Die Waffen nieder. She was at one time secretary to Alfred Nobel, and as a champion of the “brotherhood of nations,” had much influence on him and others; and in this connexion has published Krieg und Frieden (1896), Das Maschinen-Zeitalter, Zukunfts-Vorlesungen über unsere Zeit (1899) and Die Haager Friedenskonferenz (1900). In 1905 she was awarded a Nobel prize of £5000 for her endeavours in the cause of peace.

Her Memoiren, full of interesting autobiographical matter, were published at Stuttgart in 1908.

SUTTON, SIR RICHARD (d. c. 1524), the founder, with William Smyth, bishop of Lincoln, of Brasenose College, Oxford, and the first lay founder of any college, is said to have come of a good north-country family, the Suttons of that ilk, near Macclesfield, Cheshire. Little is known of his life, but he was a barrister, and in 1497 a member of the privy council. In 1513 he became steward of the monastery of Sion, a house of Brigittine nuns at Isleworth. How Smyth and Sutton came to plan a college is not known, but in 1508 we find Edmund Croston, or Crofton, bequeathing £6, 13s. 4d. towards the building of “a college of Brasynnose” if the projects of “the bishop of Lincoln and master Sotton” were carried into effect within a stipulated period. In the same year Sutton obtained a ninety two year lease of Brasenose Hall and Little University Hall for £3 per annum, and from that time until the end of his life was occupied in purchasing estates with which he might endow the new college. He is thought to have contributed to the funds of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, as well. He was knighted some years before his death, which occurred about 1524.

SUTTON, THOMAS (c. 1532-1611), founder of Charterhouse school and hospital, was the son of an official of the city of Lincoln, and was educated at Eton College and probably at Cambridge. He then spent some time travelling in Europe and appears to have acted as secretary to two or three English noblemen. He became a soldier, and in 1569 was with the troops engaged in suppressing the rising in the north of England; in 1570 he was