Excerpt from The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 7
It is in fact a sufficiently literal adaptation by Hellenic cult of a well-known scene of Egyptian sepulchral iconography, though the later scheme of the couch and recumbent figure betrays the influence of Assyrian fashions and recalls the feast of Assurbanipal as depicted for us in the Kujundjik relief.
Great, however, as the resemblance is between these terracotta objects and the familiar sepulchral subject, there are, as I hope to show, strong reasons for believing that in the present instance we have to deal with the same design as transferred from the cult of the dead person to that of Chthonic divinities, and modified to suit its new religious application. The scene before us represents, in fact, the mystic union of Persephone-Kora and the Chthonic Dionysos, and the infant is no other than Iacchos, the child of Kora, the annual pledge of the New Birth from the sleep of Winter and the sleep of Death. These ex-votos, for such we may regard them, fit in thus with a Chthonic cult widely spread throughout Southern Italy, and that in Greek colonies of most heterogeneous origin, a cult which at Tarentum as elsewhere had its roots no doubt in the pre-existing belief of the older inhabitants of the country which had been adopted and adapted by the later Hellenic colonists. The survival of earlier cults is indeed nowhere more marked than at Tarentum itself, where over and above the appropriation of the indigenous horse-god of the Messapians and Iapygians we find the cult of the eponymic founder of the pr?-Hellenic city almost entirely displacing that of the Lacedaemonian Phalanthos to whom the Greek settlement owed its origin. Sometimes the adaptation of the earlier worship to a Hellenic guise attributes it to a different personality, but at bottom the worship is the same. At Kroton we see the cult of the indigenous Earth-goddess identified with that of the Argive Hera Antheia, but, as Lenormant has pointed out, the name of the 'Lakinian Hera' presents a suggestive analogy with lakis a Pelasgian word for earth. In the same way the male deity with which this Chthonic worship is associated may take the form of Poseidon as well as of Dionysos.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 7 (Classic Reprint) (Macmillan Macmillan)