I. the Castello Nuovo, and was courteously over these three events; they are called as received by him. For more than a month of old the Moipat, or Fates, and a disconhe was the guest of Gonzalo, who, on tented Greek, when cursing his ill-luck, hearing Cæsar, the astute and consum will tell you how he considers it a misformate diplomate, the skilful and adventur- tune to have been born, a greater one to ous soldier, develop his plans, calculate have been married, and the greatest of all his resources, and call up hopes of easy to have to die. We will first discuss the conquests, safer now that he had the least of the three evils, and collect from support of Spain, was so far convinced various islands the superstitions and cusand so much fascinated that he author- toms which relate to the appearance into ized him to levy troops, and took steps to this world of a modern Greek. smooth the way for him. Borgia's plan was first to alarm the Florentines by bringing assistance to Pisa, which had sent him envoys and offered to give itself up to him. He began to organize his artillery; condottieri from all parts flocked to him, to join a commander of proved valor, now supported by Spain; great enterprises were again to be attempted. On the 25th of May all seemed to be decided, and Cæsar was on the point of starting. In the course of the day he had assisted at the embarking of the last cannons on board the galleys; in the evening he came to Castel Nuovo to take leave of Gonzalo, who embraced him and wished him success; but just as he was about to cross the threshold of the postern, Nuñez de Ocampo, the governor of the fort, demanded his sword, "in the name of the king of Castile." BIRTH. The effect of this breach of faith, pledged by an oath, even against a person whose treachery was notorious, produced a great sensation. After a captivity of some months in the fortress of Ischia, Cæsar Borgia was put on board a ship bound for Spain, as the prisoner of the Catholic king. He was never to see Italy again. CHARLES YRIARTE. From The Scottish Review. THE THREE EVILS OF DESTINY. THIS is the general term given by an inhabitant of the Greek islands to express the three important events of life—birth, marriage, and death; and in considering the folklore concerning these points, we shall see how amongst these remote islands have survived the superstitions of antiquity. Three old women who live up in the mountains, who are always spinning, whose decree is unalterable except on rare occasions, are supposed to preside "through the boastfulness of the Spaniards"-dalla THE myths and superstitions which surround childhood in the Greek islands centre themselves around four different epochs - the actual birth, the fate-telling on the seventh day, the christening, and the early years of life. An expectant mother is grievously beset by superstitions, she may not go to the well for fear of meeting one of those "nymphs of the well water, daughters of Zeus," which are supposed still to haunt the streams, and whose glamor would be fatal to the wellbeing both of her and her child. She may not go to the oven to bake her bread on Saturday for the same reason, nor may she on St. Simeon's day wash her pots and pans or cook anything in her house, or some evil will be sure to befall the child. To insure male offspring she must sleep with a sprig of a certain herb called "male flower" over her bed, for the birth of a daughter is looked upon as a distinct calamity in a modern Greek family. When the time for her delivery draws nigh, the old hag who acts as physician and nurse in the smaller villages, will become excessively domineering; horrible concoctions will be brewed for her victim, a sprig of olive, called the "Madonna's hand" from the fact that it must have five branches coming out of one, is put into her hand, she is told to say her prayers to St. Eleutherios, who has taken the place of the goddess Eileithyia alike both in name and attributes; the doors and windows are closely shut in order to exclude all evil spirits or people who may possess the evil eye, and the greatest care is always taken to prevent an enemy from knowing that the event is imminent, lest he should have an ill-omened thought at the critical moment. The priest is the first person admitted. Even should the father reach home from a jattanza Spagnuola) on his arrival at the siege of Voyage or distant journey after the doors Atella, after the daring capture of Laino and other exare closed, he will be told to seek shelter ploits in the south of Italy. - Translator's note. elsewhere, and not until the priest has -- blessed the child and gone through the | tom's day, and against which he wrote; Liturgy to the Highest are the doors and as it did in the days of Apolodorus, opened. If the parents are rich, and if the who tells us that seven days after the birth child is a male, the priest gets a handsome of Meleager, the Fates told the horoscope present on this occasion ; but if it is a girl, of the child, and the fire was lighted on or the parents are poor, he is satisfied with the hearth. Seven days after the birth a loaf of bread. If a son is born, the (from which the ceremony gains the name father fires off his gun in its honor; if it is of prù) the relatives, friends, godparents, a girl, the event is passed over in silence. and nurse assemble to assist at the fateUntil the christening, the baby goes by telling. A large bowl is placed in the the name of Iron or Dragon to ensure centre of the room, in the bowl are placed strength, and the tiny speck of humanity is clothes, if the child is a male, the faimmediately swaddled in a handsome piece ther's, if a female, the mother's, and on of embroidery prepared for the purpose, the top of the clothes is placed the child and on the third day the friends and rela- itself. Around the pile seven candles are tives are summoned to the public washing, placed of equal length, and when all are when the priest is again in attendance to seated the nurse comes forward to light read his blessing. Tables are spread with them, and names each candle after a saint sweets and glasses of raki for the edifica- as she does so. Then all is silence for a tion of the guests, and all who come in long space of time, those assembled being wish the mother a good forty days, for supposed during this time to pray for the still as in the days of Censorinus, "before future of the infant. The priest is of forty days the mother does not proceed to course there, and he has blessed the canthe temple." On the central table is a dles, - the saint whose candle first goes bowl with warm water in it, and the rela-out is to be the patron saint of the child. tives cast therein a little salt and sugar This choosing of the patron saint is a before the nurse proceeds with her ablu- curious survival, for it is this very thing tions; when she has finished these, she that St. Chrysostom inveighs against, and says her" Kyrie Eleison" forty times by is doubtless a survival of the pagan cusway of a prayer of thankfulness, and into tom which was in vogue many centuries the water for her especial benefit each before. When this is over, the baby is relative is expected to cast a coin. A again swaddled, and as this is done one sober man and a handsome woman are godfather says, "You have crossed the next required to embrace the re-swaddled river," and the other replies, "Therefore infant, to the intent that sobriety and good be not afraid; " and when the guests have looks may be secured for it, and before the eaten a sufficiency of the delicacies proguests depart, two so-called "well-footed vided, they take their departure, wishing, men," that is to say, fortunate men, are as they leave, some good fortune to the secured to stand as sponsors at the coming infant, who is now provided with a patron christening. "Bad-footed" men have this saint, as intercessor between it and its distinct piece of good fortune in Greece God. In the evening the nurse has her that they are never pestered with requests own ceremony. She makes what is called to stand as godfathers or to act as best a meal for the Fates, in the same bowl in men, both of which honors imply consid- which the baby has been laid; honey, buterable expenditure and trouble; a good ter and meal form the chief ingredients in godfather has to remember his godchil- this mysterious repast, which is left for the dren at Easter, on their birthdays, and on Fates to eat at midnight, and reminds one their saints' days; and if the parents die, forcibly of the meal laid out in ancient a godchild has more claim on his god- Athens for the appeasing of the Eumeni. father than on the next of kin. des. "Come, Fate of Fates," she says, the last thing at night, "come to bless this child; may he have ships, and mules, and diamonds; may he become a prince; and in the good humor consequent on so sumptuous a repast, the Fates are supposed to be kindly disposed towards the infant, whose destiny is then fixed once and forever. To see the fate-telling ceremony aright it is necessary to go to some of the remotest villages of the remotest islands. In civilized Greek places it is possible to see the fate telling tray, that is to say, a year after birth a tray is handed to the child with things on it, such as a coin, a pen, an apple, and an egg. If the child touches the coin he will be rich; if the pen, a writer; and if the egg, nothing at all. But this is only a faint reflex of the fate-telling, which exists still as it did in St. Chrysos The christening ceremony is of course entirely religious, but it is curious, and in remote villages forms an interesting spectacle. It usually takes place on the eighth day after birth, the day after the fate-tell- awaits the return from church, and the ing. The nurse has possession of the ceremony of "giving up," παράδοσις, is child, and the relatives and godparents gone through. She has a ploughshare in assemble in the church. The font is her hand, in which are some embers from placed in the middle of the nave, generally a large goblet-shaped one of lead; jugs of hot and cold water are brought in, and the priest, as he proceeds with the service, mingles them in the font, until he thinks the temperature suitable enough for the immersion of the infant. The nurse, meanwhile, is busily engaged in removing the swaddling-clothes, whilst the priest reads the service and blows on to the water in the form of a cross, and signs the cross several times over the child and his nurse. The sponsors are on either side of the font; and before immersion oil is poured three times into the water in the form of a cross. Then the tiny object, divested entirely of clothing, is handed to the priest by the godmother; he holds it up with both hands for public inspection, and then oils it with sacred oil in various parts before plunging it three times over head and ears in the font. This ceremony over, the godmother receives her charge into three white cloths, with which to dry him, and after the priest has blessed a tiny shirt and cap, they are put on the poor little shivering body. The nurse then seizes her charge, swaddles him up tightly once more, and as she kisses him, she calls him her little Demetrios, which name the infant has received in place of Iron or Dragon. Demetrios is by no means finished with yet, for his little swaddled body is held upright, his cap is again taken off, and the priest cuts off four locks of hair if he can find them, saying, "One for the Father, one for the Son, one for the Holy Ghost, and one for eternity," as he mixes candlewax with the hair and burns it. A cloak and hat, which the priest has blessed, are next put on to the swaddled infant, and the godmother takes her charge and carries him three times round the font, bowing as she does so to the priest, who waves incense at her from his censer. The priest the fire. This she waves before the approaching guests after the fashion of a censer, and it is called the incense of the ploughshare, which is supposed to secure for the infant success in agriculture and strength commensurate with the material of which the share is made. A godfather carries the child and goes straight up to the mother and puts it into her arms, saying as he does so, "I deliver up to you the child baptised, incensed, anointed, and made a Christian, that you may protect it carefully from fire, precipices, and all evil; that you may deliver it again to us at the second coming, spotless and undefiled." The mother has honey cakes covered with sesame seeds and other sweets spread on a table, and lots of glasses of raki with which to regale her guests. The "forty days" ceremony is curious too. The mother is then received again into the church and into the houses of her neighbors, for until the forty days have elapsed it is considered improper for a mother to pay any visits. The mother and child go to church with a jug of water, and after the service is over and the water blessed, they visit their neighbors, and the mother sprinkles each house she visits with water out of the jug, saying as she does so, "That your jugs may not break." As she crosses the threshold it is expected of her to put the handle of the door-key into her mouth to secure the plates from breaking, and to make them "as strong as the iron of the key," as the expression goes. The early years of childhood are surrounded by numerous superstitious observances. Amulets to ward off the evil eye, to preserve the little dears from stomach-aches and fevers, are hung round their necks; red strings in March, which are afterwards burnt with the Easter lamb, are considered most efficacious in keeping off infection. But nothing recalls antiq takes Demetrios once more from his god-uity so much as the devices an anxious passes the naked infant through a hole, and then, if it recovers, she will thank St. Artemidos for the blessing vouchsafed, unaware that by so doing she is perpetuat- their dreaming a dream in which their ing the worship of Artemis, which in olden future husband will figure, and these divi mother, and places his lips against all the sacred pictures on the screen before the high altar, lays him on a bench alone, as if to give him time to meditate on what has happened, and then takes him into the Holy of Holies behind the screen, after which Demetrios is considered as a properly enrolled member of the Orthodox Church. After the christening all go in procession to the mother's house, where she mother is put to to ward off the fell influence of those uncanny spirits, the Nereids and the Lamiæ, which are supposed to take special delight in sucking the blood of infants. In Keos, St. Artemidos is patron of such weaklings, and to his church up on the hill-slope a mother takes her child afflicted by a mysterious wasting. She strips off its clothes and puts on new ones blessed by the priest, leaving the old ones as a perquisite to the church. She ing of the oracle, truly Delphic in its character. They eat salt cakes of most indigestible material that night to ensure days on this very island was most popular Artemis the nourisher of children, παιδοτρόφος. On this same island they have another remedy for a sickly boy. The parents take it into the country, where the father selects a young oak. This he splits up, and with the assistance of another man holds it open while the mother passes her infant through it three times. Then they bind up the tree again, cover it with manure, and water it for forty days. In the same fashion they bind up the child for a like period, and after the lapse of this time they expect it will be well. But the most barbarous custom of this sort is in vogue on the island of Melos, where a mother loves to take an emaciated child to a tiny church, strip it naked, and leave it on the cold marble altar for a season. To effect a radical cure the child should remain there all night, but the mother is afraid of detection, for the government is trying to put this custom down. If the babe survive this treatment, there is not much the matter with it; but if, on the contrary, as often happens, the poor little creature dies, the parents are content to think that all has been done for the child that could be, and that God has willed that it should be a victim to the Nereids, the evil spirits, which, with curious blending of Christianity and paganism, they think he uses to punish man kind. II. MARRIAGE. PERHAPS the most palpable cause for a modern Greek classifying marriage under the head of evils of destiny, is the way in which marriages amongst them are for the most part brought about. There is no such thing as romance to be found in the Greek islands, and if there is, it is rapidly nipped in the bud; we certainly do find young women, on the eve of St. John the Baptist, using a divination peculiarly their own for the discovery of their future husbands. Around a vase of water drawn without speaking, and since called "the speechless water," they say divers incantations. Into it they cast trinkets and so forth, which are drawn out at haphazard by a child as songs are sung, and she nations are called the akleidones. The parents or next of kin usually arrange marriages for those whom they think fit to enter that estate, and in some islands there are certain old women whose duty it is to carry the proposal and bring back the answer, which old women correspond to the προμνήστριαι of antiquity (Pollux. iii. 31). These old women know many love potions which they administer for money, one of which says that a lovesick girl, if she wishes to win the object of her aff affections, must get the milk of forty mothers, and of forty of their married daughters; these she must mix, and if she can succeed in getting her young man, by stealth or otherwise, so much as to taste a drop of the mixture, he will be hers for life. When the old woman goes to propose she must wear stockings of different colors. "She has on stockings of two colors," says a modern Greek rhyme, "methinks we shall have an offer." If the proposal is refused, the young man is said "to eat gruel." The cause of the frequency of these marriages de convenance is to be found in the peculiar law of inheritance still in vogue in some of the remoter islands. The eldest daughter inherits everything, to the exclusion of her brothers and younger sisters, even her mother's embroidered garments and the slab on which she says her prayers in church. In other parts of Greece no girl can ever hope to find a husband until she has a house of her own; hence providing his daughters with houses is an onerous duty which falls to the lot of every paterfamilias, and this system results in leaving a very large portion of the female population to pass their days in single blessedness; and where the above-mentioned matriarchal system is still in vogue the parents always ays aspire aspi to obtain for their eldest daughter a good match, and the proposals always come from the lady's family. Marriages are almost invariably celebrated on the Sundays immediately preceding the great Lenten fast. This is a distinct survival of the ancient custom of marrying during the first month of the year, from which fact that month was formerly called Gamelion; and in the islands, where the men are often absent The first ceremony takes place ten days before the crowning, with what they call the "little flour," when each household brings a handful of meal to the bride as an earnest that more will come presently, and as an intimation that all know about the wedding, and are prepared to share in the coming festivities. On this day and on every day before the wedding, the female male friends of the bride assemble to assist in preparing the trousseau. Two days afterwards the "greater flour" takes place, when large quantities of grain are brought by all the friends for the wedding cakes. This is distributed by the young men to all the houses which possess a grindstone, to be ground, and late in the evening, accompanied by the sound of bagpipe and lyre, they go round to each house to collect it, and deposit it in that of the bride, where a table is spread, and great festivity and dancing ensue. whose trinket comes out deciphers from during the summer months in search of the words at that moment sung the mean-work abroad, the betrothals usually take place shortly before Christmas, with a luggage. Then follows a very curious view to the marriage being solemnized on ceremony, when the stone walls are hung one of the Sundays of the great marriage with embroidery, and the clothes of the month. On the remote island of Telos, happy couple are suspended one by one which is inhabited by semi-barbarous from a pole which has been hung for that Greeks, they retain the most extraordinary and elaborate system of wedding festivities, which continue for the space of a fortnight, during which time the village enjoys one long holiday and cessation from work. The Sunday immediately preceding the wedding is called the "maccaroni day," when the female friends go each to the house of the bride with their low wooden tray to assist in making this commodity. But on the Wednesday before the wedding the festivities begin with real earnest. The young men go on this day to the mountains for brushwood to heat the oven for baking the wedding cakes, and are accompanied for part of the way by all the villagers, and are met in the evening on their return with music, and the night is spent in dancing and revelry. Next day the same ceremony is gone through with regard to providing fish for the wedding banquets; all day the young men cast their nets into the sea, and again pass the evening in festivities. On Friday they go to the mountain farms for the kids and lambs necessary for supplying the table, and thus the preparations are concluded. On Saturday the bridegroom moves to the house his bride is bringing to him as her dower; he is accompanied by his young male friends to the sound of the lyre and song; his bride is there to greet him, and both of them have brought their purpose just over the door; first a pair of trousers is hung up, and then a dress, and as each garment is suspended a song appropriate to each is sung by the young men and maidens who have assembled. When all are hung up the priest blesses them, and then the nuptial couch is decorated, a sort of tent being formed over it with an old piece of embroidery, called a sperberi, which is handed down in families until quite worn out. This sperberi is commonly known as "the heaven," and is most elaborately blessed by the priest on each occasion that it is called into use. When all this ceremony is over the marriage contract is signed; the most worthy men of the village are called in to append their signatures to it; congratulations follow, and then a little dancing, but the party breaks up much earlier than usual on this evening, and the bridegroom is left in sole possession ssession of his new house; the key is turned in the door by the best man, and he is left thus to meditate over the second evil of destiny which the Fates have ordained for him. The ceremony of crowning, which takes place all over Greece on a Sunday, is of course attended by high festivity. The father of the bride and the priest go alone to the vineyard to fetch the two vine tendrils with which to make the two wedding crowns. The guests assemble in the bride's old home; and when the sound of a gun being let off, and the strains of bagpipe and lyre are heard, all know that the bridegroom is approaching. In some places in Imbros, more especially, the bride's bath (the old νυμφικὸν λουτρὸν) and her subsequent decoration form a very important part in the ceremony, and then she is expected to go and wash her fatherin-law's hands as a symbol of the respect she is prepared to pay him. In Santorin a bridesmaid meets the bridegroom on the threshold with a saucerful of honey, into which he dips his fingers and makes three crosses with it on the door, one on the lintel, and one on each post. After this he eats a mouthful of honey, which the bridesmaid puts into his mouth with a spoon, wipes his fingers on a towel, and retires to the side of his bride. In Eubæa they still go through the ancient farce of the bridegroom pretending to snatch his bride by force from the care of her parents, but this is now only an excuse |