battles are accompanied by heavy rain, and he suggests as possible explanations of the supposed fact, either that the atmospheric moisture is condensed by the exhalations from the slain, or that some pitying god cleanses the bloody earth with the gentle rain of heaven.
When a Roman army sat down before a city to besiege it, the priests used to invite the guardian gods of the city to leave it and come over to the Roman side, assuring them that they would be treated by the Romans as well as, or better than, they had ever been treated by their former worshippers. This invitation was couched in a set form of prayer or incantation, which was not expunged from the Pontifical liturgy even in Pliny’s time. The name of the guardian god of Rome was always kept a profound secret, lest the enemies of Rome should entice him by similar means to desert the city.[1] So, when the natives of Tahiti were besieging a fortress, they used to take the finest mats, cloth, and so on, as near to the ramparts as they could with safety, and there, holding them up, offered them to the gods of the besieged, while the priests cried out, “Tane in the fortress, Oro in the fortress, etc., come to the sea; here are your offerings.” The priests of the besieged, on the other hand, endeavoured to detain the gods by exhibiting whatever property they possessed, if they feared that the god was likely to leave them.[2]
Like modern peasants, the ancients believed that the ghosts of slaughtered warriors appear by night on the battle-field, and fight their battles over again. At Marathon the neighing of horses and the noise of battle could be heard every night.[3] The sound of the sea breaking on the shore in the stillness of night may have originated
- ↑ Pliny, Nat. Hist., xxviii, 18; Macrobius, Saturn., iii, 9, 2 seq.; Servius on Virgil, Æn., ii, 351; Livy, v, 21. On the secret name of Rome itself, see Macrobius, l. c.; Pliny, Nat. Hist., iii, 65; Joannes Lydus, De Mensibus, iv, 50.
- ↑ Ellis, Polynesian Researches, i, 316, cp. 280 (ed. 1832).
- ↑ Pausanias, i, 32, 4.
