It was, I confess, with grave misgivings that I began the revision of Themis. Much water had flowed, was still flowing swiftly under the archaeological bridge. I feared that my work might have to be ‘scrapped,’ or at least—to borrow the drastic phrase of a young reviewer—that ‘nine-tenths of the book would be better away.’ It is difficult justly to appraise one's own work, but I have tried to be dispassionate and I have decided to let Themis stand, substantially unaltered.

I see now what I scarcely realized in the first excitement of writing that, though prompted and indeed forced upon me by a great archaeological discovery, the book is really addressed not so much to the specialist as to the thinker generally. It is in a word a study of herd-suggestion, or, as we now put it, communal psychology. Its object is the analysis of the Eniautos- or Year-Daimon, who lies behind each and every primitive god; of the Eniautos-Daimon and of his ritual. That the gods and rituals examined are Greek is incidental to my own specialism.

My own sobriety and soundness of judgment I might well doubt, but I have confidence in that of Dr Walter Leaf. In his Homer and History he has to my great satisfaction and pleasure accepted the Eniautos-Daimon as an integral factor of pre- and post-Homeric religion.

LIFE OF TACITUS

§ 1. Our knowledge of the chief facts and dates in the life of Tacitus rests mainly on allusions in his own writings and those of his friend the younger Pliny, who addresses several letters to him and often speaks of him in others.

His praenomen is not mentioned in this correspondence, and is differently given by later authorities as Gaius or Publius. His family connexions are unknown; but he would appear to have been the first of his name to attain senatorial rank, though of sufficient position to have begun his ‘cursus honorum’ at the earliest, or almost the earliest, legal age; as he can hardly have been born earlier than 52–54 a. d., and must have been quaestor not later than 79 a. d., by which time he had also received in marriage the daughter of Agricola, who was already a consular, and one of the first men in the State.

His boyhood falls thus under the time of Nero; his assumption of the ‘toga virilis’ would coincide, or nearly so, with the terrible year of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; his early manhood was spent under Vespasian and Titus; the prime of his life under Domitian; the memory of whose tyranny is seen in all his historical writings, which were composed at various dates in the great time of Trajan.

We have seen the Kouros grow out of the band of his attendants the Kouretes, yet the Kouretes and the Kouros remain figures somewhat alien and remote, belonging to a bygone civilization, only to be realized by comparison with barbarous analogies. We have further seen or rather suspected that in the thiasos of Dionysos, in his attendant Satyrs, the band of daimones who attended the Kouros found its closest analogy. This clue if followed leads to a conclusion as unlooked for as it is illuminating—Dionysos is the Kouros. The Cretan cult of the Kouretes and the Thracian religion of Dionysos are substantially one.

Anyone entering the theatre of Dionysos for the first time will probably seat himself at once in the great chair of the high priest of Dionysos, midway in the front row of the spectators’ seats. Immediately opposite him, as his Baedeker will inform him, is the logeion or ‘stage,’ as it is usually though incorrectly called, of Phaedrus. He will be told that this ‘stage’ is late, dating not earlier than the time of Septimius Severus (193–211 a.d.), and, in his haste to search for the traces of the ancient circular orchestra, he may be inclined to pass it by; yet he will do well to give to the sculptured frieze that decorates it a passing glance.