The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 28

Lucian has one or two incidental references to Christians.[41]

Alexander warned them, in company with the Epicureans, to keep away from his shrine. But we hear more of them in connexion with Proteus Peregrinus. Lucian is not greatly interested in them; he ridicules them as fools for being taken in by the impostor; for Peregrinus, he tells us, duped them with the greatest success. He became a prophet among them, a thiasarch, a ruler of the synagogue, everything in fact; he interpreted their books for them, and indeed wrote them a lot more; and they counted him a G.o.d and a lawgiver. "You know," Lucian explains, "they still worship that great man of theirs, who was put on a gibbet in Palestine, because he added this new mystery (_teleten_) to human life." In his mocking way he gives some interesting evidence on the attention and care bestowed by Christians on those of their members who were thrown into prison. He details what was done by the foolish community for "their new Socrates" when Peregrinus was a prisoner.

When he was released, Peregrinus started wandering again, living on Christian charity, till "he got into trouble with them, too,--he was caught eating forbidden meats."[42]

Lucian differs from Voltaire in having less purpose and no definite principles. He had no design to overthrow religion in favour of something else; it is merely that the absurdity of it provoked him, and he enjoyed saying aloud, and with all the vigour of reckless wit, that religious belief was silly. If the effect was scepticism, it was a scepticism founded, not on {213} philosophy, but on the off-hand judgment of what is called common-sense. Hidden meanings and mysteries were to him nonsense. How little he was qualified to understand mysticism and religious enthusiasm, can be seen in his account of the self-immolation of Peregrinus on his pyre at the Olympian games[43]--perhaps the most insufficient thing he ever wrote, full of value as it is. Peregrinus was a wanderer among the religions of the age. Gellius--who often heard him at Athens, calls him a man _gravis atque constans_, and says he spoke much that was useful and honest. He quotes in his way a paragraph of a discourse on sin, which does not lack moral elevation.[44] To Lucian the man was a quack, an advertiser, a mountebank, who burnt himself to death merely to attract notice.

Lucian says he witnessed the affair, and tells gaily how, among other jests, he imposed a pretty miracle of his own invention upon the credulous. He had taken no pains to understand the man--nor did he to understand either the religious temper in general, or the philosophic, or anything else. His habit of handling things easily and lightly did not help him to see what could not be taken in at a glance.

What then does Lucian make of human life? On this he says a great deal. His most characteristic invention perhaps is the visit that Charon pays to the upper world to see what it really is that the dead regret so much. It is indeed, as M. Croiset points out, a fine stroke of irony to take the opinion of a minister of Death upon Life. Charon has left his ferry boat and comes up to light. Hermes meets him and they pile up some mountains--Pelion on Ossa, and Parna.s.sus on top, from the two summits of which they survey mankind--a charm from Homer removing Charon's difficulty of vision. He sees many famous people, such as Milo, Polycrates and Cyrus; and he overhears Croesus and Solon discussing happiness, while Hermes foretells their fates. He sees a varied scene, life full of confusion, cities like swarms of bees, where each has a sting and stings his neighbour, and some, like wasps, hara.s.s and plunder the rest; over them, like a cloud, hang hopes and fears {214} and follies, pleasures and pa.s.sions and hatreds. He sees the Fates spinning slender threads, soon cut, from which men hang with never a thought of how quickly death ends their dreams; and he compares them to bubbles, big and little inevitably broken. He would like to shout to them "to live with Death ever before their eyes"--why be so earnest about what they can never take away?--but Hermes tells him it would be useless. He is amazed at the absurdity of their burial rites, and he astonishes Hermes by quoting Homer on the subject. Last of all he witnesses a battle and cries out at the folly of it. "Such," he concludes, "is the life of miserable men--and not a word about Charon."[45]

In the same way and in the same spirit Menippus visits the Lower World, where he sees Minos judging the dead. Minos too seems to have been interested in literature, for he reduced the sentence upon Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, on the very proper ground of his generosity to authors. But the general picture has less humour. "We entered the Acherusian plain, and there we found the demi-G.o.ds, and the heroines, and the general throng of the dead in nations and tribes, some ancient and mouldering, 'strengthless heads' as Homer says, others fresh and holding together--Egyptians these in the main, so thoroughly good is their embalming. But to know one from another was no easy task; all become so much alike when the bones are bared; yet with pains and long scrutiny we began to recognize them. They lay pell-mell in undistinguishable heaps, with none of their earthly beauties left.

With so many skeletons piled together, all as like as could be, eyes glaring ghastly and vacant, teeth gleaming bare, I knew not to tell Thersites from Nireus the fair.... For none of their ancient marks remained, and their bones were alike, uncertain, unlabelled, undistinguishable. When I saw all this, the life of man came before me under the likeness of a great pageant, arranged and marshalled by Chance," who a.s.signs the parts and rea.s.signs them as she pleases; and then the pageant ends, every one disrobes and all are alike. "Such is human life, as it seemed to me while I gazed."[46] Over and over again with every accent of irony the one moral is enforced--sometimes with sheer brutality as in the tract on _Mourning_.

{215}

Menippus asked Teiresias in the shades what was the best life. "He was a blind little old man, and pale, and had a weak voice." He said: "The life of ordinary people is best, and, wiser; cease from the folly of metaphysics, of inquiry into origins and purposes; spit upon those clever syllogisms and count all these things idle talk; and pursue one end alone, how you may well arrange the present and go on your way with a laugh for most things and no enthusiasms."[47] In fact, "the unexamined life" is the only one, as many a weary thinker has felt--if it were but possible.

[Sidenote: Criticism of Lucian]

Goethe's criticism on Heine may perhaps be applied to Lucian--"We cannot deny that he has many brilliant qualities, but he is wanting in love ... and thus he will never produce the effect which he ought."[48]

Various views have been held of Lucian's contribution to the religious movement of the age; it has even been suggested that his Dialogues advanced the cause of Christianity. But when one reflects upon the tender hearts to be found in the literature of the century, it is difficult to think that Lucian can have had any effect on the ma.s.s of serious people, unless to quicken in them by repulsion the desire for something less terrible than a G.o.dless world of mockery and death, and the impulse to seek it in the ancestral faith of their fathers. He did not love men enough to understand their inmost mind. The instincts that drove men back upon the old religion were among the deepest in human nature, and of their strength Lucian had no idea. His admirers to-day speak of him as one whose question was always "Is it true?" We have seen that it was a question lightly asked and quickly answered.

It is evident enough that his mockery of religion has some warrant in the follies and superst.i.tions of his day. But such criticism as his, based upon knowledge incomplete and sympathy imperfect, is of little value. If a man's judgment upon religion is not to be external, he must have felt the need of a religion,--he must have had at some time the consciousness of imperative cravings and instincts which only a religion can satisfy. Such cravings are open to criticism, but men can neither be laughed out of them, nor indeed reasoned out of them; and however absurd a religion may seem, and however defective it may be, if it is {216} still the only available satisfaction of the deepest needs of which men are conscious, it will hold its own, despite mockery and despite philosophy--as we shall see in the course of the chapter, though two more critics of religion remain to be noticed.

[Sidenote: s.e.xtus Empiricus]

Lucian was not the only man who sought to bring the age back to sound and untroubled thinking. There was a physician, s.e.xtus--known from the school of medicine to which he belonged as s.e.xtus Empiricus--who wrote a number of books about the end of the second century or the beginning of the third in defence of Scepticism. A medical work of his, and a treatise on the Soul are lost, but his _Pyrrhonean Sketches_ and his books _Against the Dogmatists_ remain--written in a Greek which suggests that he was himself a Greek and not a foreigner using the language. Physicists, mathematicians, grammarians, moralists, astrologers, come under his survey, and the particular attention which he gives to the Stoics is a material fact in fixing his date, for after about 200 A.D. they cease to be of importance. His own point of view a short extract from his sketches will exhibit fully enough for our present purpose.

"The aim of the Sceptic is ataraxia [freedom from mental perturbation or excitement] in matters which depend on opinion, and in things which are inevitable restraint of the feelings (_metriopatheian_). For he began to philosophise in order to judge his impressions (_phantasias_) and to discover which of them are true and which false, so as to be free from perturbation. But he came to a point where the arguments were at once diametrically opposite and of equal weight; and then, as he could not decide, he suspended judgment (_epeschen_), and as soon as he had done so, there followed as if by accident this very freedom from perturbation in the region of opinion. For if a man opines anything to be good or bad in its essential nature, he is always in perturbation.

When he has not the things that appear to him to be good, he considers himself tortured by the things evil by nature, and he pursues the good (as he supposes them to be); but, as soon as he has them, he falls into even more perturbations, through being uplifted out of all reason and measure, and from fear of change he does everything not to lose the things that seem to him to be good. But the man, who makes no definitions as to what is good or bad by {217} nature, neither avoids nor pursues anything with eagerness, and is therefore unperturbed.

What is related of Apelles the painter has in fact befallen the Sceptic. The story goes that he was painting a horse and wished to represent the foam of its mouth in his picture; but he was so unsuccessful that he gave it up, and took the sponge, on which he used to wipe the colours from his brush, and threw it at the picture. The sponge hit the picture and produced a likeness of the horse's foam.

The Sceptics then hoped to gain ataraxia by forming some decision on the lack of correspondence between things as they appear to the eye and to the mind; they were unable to do it, and so suspended judgment (_epeschen_); and then as if by accident the ataraxia followed---just as a shadow follows a body. We do not say that the Sceptic is untroubled in every way, but we own he is troubled by things that are quite inevitable. For we admit that the Sceptic is cold sometimes, and thirsty, and so forth. But even in these matters the uneducated are caught in two ways at once, viz.: by the actual feelings and (not less) by supposing these conditions to be bad by nature. The Sceptic does away with the opinion that any one of these things is evil in its nature, and so he gets off more lightly even in these circ.u.mstances."[49]

A view of this kind was hardly likely to appeal to the temper of the age, and the influence of Scepticism was practically none. Still it is interesting to find so vigorous and clear an exponent of the system flourishing in a period given over to the beliefs that Lucian parodied and Apuleius accepted. s.e.xtus, it may be added, is the sole representative of ancient Scepticism whose works have come down to us in any complete form.

One very obscure person of this period remains to be noticed, who in his small sphere gave his views to mankind in a way of his own.

In 1884 two French scholars, MM. Holleaux and Paris were exploring the ruins of Oinoanda, a Greek city in Lycia, and they came upon a number of inscribed stones, most of them built in a wall. What was unusual was that these were neither fragments of munic.i.p.al decrees nor of private monuments, but all formed part of one great inscription which dealt apparently with some philosophic subject. In June 1895 two Austrian {218} scholars, MM. Heberdey and Kalinka, re-collated the inscription and found some further fragments, and now the story is tolerably clear, and a curious one it is.[50]

It appears that the fragments originally belonged to an inscription carved on the side of a colonnade, and they fall into three series according to their place on the wall--one above another. The middle series consists of columns of fourteen lines, the letters 1- to 2 centimetres high, fifteen or sixteen in a line,--each column forming a page, as it were; and it extends over some twenty-one or two yards.

The lowest series is in the same style. On top is a series of columns added later (as the inscription shows) and cut in letters of 2--3 centimetres, generally ten lines to the column--the larger size to compensate for the greater height above the ground, for it was all meant to be read. The inscription begins:--

"Diogenes to kinsmen, household and friends, this is my charge. Being so ill that it is critical whether I yet live or live no longer--for an affection of the heart is carrying me off--if I survive, I will gladly accept the life yet given to me; if I do not survive, _DO_..."

[Sidenote: Diogenes of Oinoanda]

There ends a column, and a line or two has been lost at the top of what seems to be the next, after which come the words "a kindly feeling for strangers also who may be staying here," and the incomplete statement which begins "knowing a.s.suredly, that by knowledge of the matters relating to Nature and feelings, which I have set forth in the s.p.a.ces below...." It is evident that Diogenes had something to say which he considered it a duty to make known. This proves to have been the Epicurean theory of life; and here he had carved up for all to read a simple exposition of the philosophy of his choice.

The uppermost row contains his account of his purpose and something upon old age--very fragmentary. There follow a letter of Epicurus to his mother, and another letter from some one unidentified to one Menneas, and then a series of apophthegms and sentences. Thus fragment 27 is a column of ten lines to this effect: "Nothing is so contributive to good spirits, as not to do many things, nor take in hand tiresome matters, nor force oneself in any way beyond one's own strength, for all these things perturb nature." Another column proclaims: "Acute {219} pains cannot be long; for either they quickly destroy life and are themselves destroyed with it, or they receive some abatement of their acuteness." These plat.i.tudes are, as we may guess, an afterthought.

The middle row, the first to be inscribed, deals with the Epicurean theory of atoms--not by apophthegm or aphorism, but with something of the fulness and technicality of a treatise. "Herakleitos of Ephesus, then, said fire was the element; Thales of Miletus water; Diogenes of Apollonia and Anaximenes air; Empedocles of Agrigentum both fire and air and water and earth; Anaxagoras of Clazomenae the h.o.m.oeomeries of each thing in particular; those of the Stoa matter and G.o.d. But Democritus of Abdera said atomic natures--and he did well; but since he made some mistakes about them, these will be set right in our opinions.

So now we will accuse the persons mentioned, not from any feeling of illwill against them, but wishing the truth to be saved (_sothenai_)."

So he takes them in turn and argues at leisure. The large fragment 45 discusses astronomy in its four columns--in particular, the sun and its apparent distance and its nature. Fr. 48 (four columns) goes on to treat of civilization,--of the development of dress from leaves to skins and woven garments, without the intervention "of any other G.o.d or of Athena either." Need and time did all. Hermes did not invent language. In fr. 50, we read that Protagoras "said he did not know if there are G.o.ds. That is the same thing as saying he knew there are not." Fr. 51 deals with death--"thou hast even persuaded me to laugh at it. For I am not a whit afraid because of the t.i.tyos-es and Tantalus-es, whom some people paint in Hades, nor do I dread decay, reflecting that the [something] of the body ... [three broken lines]

... nor anything else." At the end of the row another letter begins (fr. 56) "[Diogen]es to Anti[pater] greeting." He writes from Rhodes, he says, just before winter begins, to friends in Athens and elsewhere, whom he would like to see. Though away from his country, he knows he can do more for it in this way than by taking part in political life.

He wishes to show that "that which is convenient to Nature, viz.

Ataraxia is the same for all." He is now "at the sunset of life," and all but departing; so, since most men, as in a pestilence, are diseased with false opinion, which is very infectious, he wishes {220} "to help those that shall be after us; for they too are ours, even if they are not yet born"; and strangers too. "I wished to make use of this colonnade and to set forth in public the medicine of salvation" (_ta tes soterias protheinai pharmaka_, fr. 58). The idle fears that oppressed him, he has shaken off; as to pains--empty ones he has abolished utterly, and the rest are reduced to the smallest compa.s.s.

He bewails the life of men, wasted as it is, and weeps for it; and he has "counted it a good man's part" to help men as far as he can. That is why he has thought of this inscription which may enable men to obtain "joy with good spirits" (_te_[_s met' euthu_]_mias chara_[_s_]), rather than of a theatre or a bath or anything else of the kind, such as rich men would often build for their fellow-citizens (fr. 59).

The discussion which follows in the third series of columns need not here detain us. Diogenes appeals for its consideration--that it may not merely be glanced at in pa.s.sing (fr. 61, col. 3); but it will suffice us at present to note his statement that his object is "that life may become pleasant to us" (fr. 63, col. 1), and his protest--"I will swear, both now and always, crying aloud to all, Greeks and barbarians, that pleasure is the objective of the best mode of life, while the virtues, which these people now unseasonably meddle with (for they shift them from the region of the contributive to that of the objective) are by no means an objective, but contributive to the objective" (fr. 67, col. 2, 3). Lastly we may notice his reference to the improvement made in the theory of Democritus by the discovery of Epicurus of the swerve inherent in the atoms (fr. 81).

Altogether the inscription is as singular a monument of antiquity as we are likely to find. What the fellow-citizens of Diogenes thought of it, we do not know. Perhaps they might have preferred the bath or other commonplace gift of the ordinary rich man. It is a pity that Lucian did not see the colonnade.

Side by side with Lucian, s.e.xtus and Diogenes it is interesting to consider their contemporaries who were not of their opinion.

Perhaps, while the stone-masons were day by day carving up the long inscription at Oinoanda, others of their trade were {221} busy across the aegaean with one of another character. At any rate, the inscription which M. Julius Apellas set up in the temple of Asklepios in Epidauros, belongs to this period. Like Diogenes, he is not afraid of detail.

[Sidenote: Marcus Julius Apellas]

"In the priesthood of Poplius aelius Antiochus.

"I, Marcus Julius Apellas of Idrias and Mylasa, was sent for by the G.o.d, for I was a chronic invalid and suffered from dyspepsia. In the course of my journey the G.o.d told me in aegina not to be so irritable.

When I reached the Temple, he directed me to keep my head covered for two days; and for these two days it rained. I was to eat bread and cheese, parsley with lettuce, to wash myself without help, to practise running, to drink citron-lemonade, to rub my body on the sides of the bath in the bath-room, to take walks in the upper portico, to use the trapeze, to rub myself over with sand, to go with bare feet in the bath-room, to pour wine into the hot water before I got in, to wash myself without help, and to give an Attic drachma to the bath-attendant, to offer in public sacrifices to Asklepios, Epione and the Eleusinian G.o.ddesses, and to take milk with honey. When for one day I had drunk milk alone, the G.o.d said to put honey in the milk to make it digestible.

"When I called upon the G.o.d to cure me more quickly, I thought it was as if I had anointed my whole body with mustard and salt, and had come out of the sacred hall and gone in the direction of the bath-house, while a small child was going before holding a smoking censer. The priest said to me: 'Now you are cured, but you must pay up the fees for your treatment.' I acted according to the vision, and when I rubbed myself with salt and moistened mustard, I felt the pain still, but when I had bathed, I suffered no longer. These events took place in the first nine days after I had come to the Temple. The G.o.d also touched my right hand and my breast.

"The following day as I was offering sacrifice, a flame leapt up and caught my hand, so as to cause blisters. Yet after a little my hand was healed.

"As I prolonged my stay in the Temple, the G.o.d told me to use dill along with olive-oil for my head-aches. Formerly I had not suffered from head-aches, but my studies had brought {222} on congestion. After I used the olive-oil, I was cured of head-aches. For swollen glands the G.o.d told me to use a cold gargle, when I consulted him about it, and he ordered the same treatment for inflamed tonsils.

"He bade me inscribe this treatment, and I left the Temple in good health and full of grat.i.tude to the G.o.d."[51]

[Sidenote: Pausanias]

Pausanias speaks of "the buildings erected in our time by Antoninus a man of the Conscript Senate"--a Roman Senator in fact,[52]--in honour of Asklepios at Epidauros, a bath, three temples, a colonnade, and "a house where a man may die, and a woman lie in, without sin," for these actions were not "holy" within the sanctuary precincts, and had had to be done in the open air hitherto.

A more conspicuous patient of Asklepios is aelius Aristides, the rhetorician. This brilliant and hypochondriacal person spent years in watching his symptoms and consulting the G.o.d about them. Early in his illness the G.o.d instructed him to record its details, and he obeyed with zest, though in after years he was not always able to record the minuter points with complete clearness. He was bidden to make speeches, to rub himself over with mud, to plunge into icy water, to ride, and, once, to be bled to the amount of 120 litres. As the human body does not contain anything like that amount of blood, and as the temple servants knew of no one ever having been "cut" to that extent--"at least except Ischyron, and his was one of the most remarkable cases," the G.o.d was not taken literally.[53] The regular plan was to sleep in the Temple, as already mentioned, and the G.o.d came. "The impression was that one could touch him, and perceive that he came in person; as if one were between asleep and awake, and wished to look out and were in an agony lest he should depart too soon,--as if one held one's ear and listened--sometimes as in a dream, and then as in a waking vision--one's hair was on end, and tears of joy were shed, and one felt light-hearted. And who among {223} men could set this forth in words? Yet if there is one of the initiated, he knows and recognises [what I say]."[54]

None of the cases yet quoted can compare with the miracles of ancient days to be read in the inscriptions about the place--stories of women with child for three and five years, of the extraordinary surgery of the G.o.d, cutting off the head of a dropsical patient, holding him upside down to let the water run out and putting the head on again,--a ma.s.s of absurdities hardly to be matched outside _The Glories of Mary_.

They make Lucian's _Philopseudes_ seem tame.

There were other G.o.ds, beside Asklepios, who gave oracles in shrine and dream. Pausanias the traveller has left a book on Greece and its antiquities, temples, G.o.ds and legends of extraordinary value. "A man made of common stuff and cast in a common mould," as Dr Frazer characterizes him,--and therefore the more representative--he went through Greece with curious eyes and he saw much that no one else has recorded. At Sparta stood the only temple he knew of which had an upper story. In this upper story was an image of Aphrodite Morpho fettered[55]--a silly thing he thought it to fetter a cedar-wood doll.

He particularly visited Phigalea, because of the "Black Demeter"--a curious enough image she had been, though by then destroyed.[56] He was initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries.[57] He tells us that the stony remnants of the lump of clay from which Prometheus fashioned the first man were still preserved,[58] and that the sceptre which Hephaistos made for Agamemnon received a daily sacrifice in Chaeronea, Plutarch's city--"a table is set beside it covered with all sorts of flesh and cakes."[59] He has many such stories. He tells us too about a great many oracles of his day, of which that of Amphilochus at Mallus in Cilicia" is the most infallible"[60]--a curiously "suggestive superlative (_apseudestation_). He is greatly {224} interested in Asklepios, but for our present purpose a few sentences from his elaborate account of the ceremony with which Trophonius is consulted at Lebadea must suffice.

After due rites the inquirer comes to the oracle, in a linen tunic with ribbons, and boots of the country. Inside bronze railings is a pit of masonry, some four ells across and eight deep, and he goes down into it by means of a light ladder brought for the occasion. At the bottom he finds a hole, a very narrow one. "So he lays himself on his back on the ground, and holding in his hand barley cakes kneaded with honey, he thrusts his feet first into the hole, and follows himself endeavouring to get his knees through the hole. When they are through, the rest of his body is immediately dragged after them and shoots in, just as a man might be caught and dragged down by the swirl of a mighty and rapid river. Once they are inside the shrine the future is not revealed to all in one and the same way, but to one it is given to see and to another to hear. They return through the same aperture feet foremost.... When a man has come up from Trophonius, the priests take him in hand again, and set him on what is called the chair of Memory, which stands not far from the shrine; and, being seated there, he is questioned by them as to all he saw and heard. On being informed, they hand him over to his friends who carry him, still overpowered with fear, and quite unconscious of himself and his surroundings, to the building where he lodged before, the house of Good Fortune and the Good Daemon. Afterwards, however, he will have all his wits as before, and the power of laughter will come back to him. I write not from mere hearsay: I have myself consulted Trophonius and have seen others who have done so. All who have gone down to Trophonius are obliged to set up a tablet containing a record of all they heard and saw."[61]

A man who has been through such an experience may be excused for believing much. While Pausanias kept his Greek habit of criticism and employs it on occasional myths and traditions, and particularly on stories of h.e.l.l--though the fact of punishment after death he seems to accept--yet his travels and his inquiries made an impression on him.

"When I began this work, I used to look on these Greek stories as little better {225} than foolishness; but now that I have got as far as Arcadia, my opinion about them is this: I believe that the Greeks who were accounted wise spoke of old in riddles, and not straight out; and, accordingly, I conjecture that this story about Cronos [swallowing a foal instead of his child] is a bit of Greek philosophy. In matters of religion I will follow tradition."[62]

[Sidenote: Artemidorus of Daldia]

Pausanias mentions several oracles and temples of Apollo in Greece and Asia Minor--one obscure local manifestation of the G.o.d he naturally enough omitted, but a fellow-citizen of the G.o.d preserves it. "It was in obedience to him, the G.o.d of my land, that I undertook this treatise. He often urged me to it, and in particular appeared visibly to me (_enargos epiotanti_),[63] since I knew thee, and all but ordered me to write all this. No wonder that the Daldian Apollo, whom we call by the ancestral name of Mystes, urged me to this, in care for thy worth and wisdom, for there is an old friendship between Lydians and Phoenicians, as they tell us who set forth the legends of the land."[64] So writes Artemidorus to his friend Ca.s.sius Maximus of his treatise on the scientific interpretation of dreams--a work of which he is very proud. "Wonder not," he says, "at the t.i.tle, that the name stands Artemidorus Daldia.n.u.s, and not 'of Ephesus,' as on many of the books I have already written on other subjects. For Ephesus, it happens, is famous on her own account, and she has many men of note to proclaim her. But Daldia is a town of Lydia of no great renown, and, as she has had no such men, she has remained unknown till my day. So I dedicate this to her, my native-place on the mother's side, as a parent's due _threpteria_."[65]