Many a man who receives his rations and his share of the travellers' hut has held high revels when his pile was in the mine that must turn out a Bonanza, but did not, and so he fell from part proprietor of something that should have been a "Broken Hill" to mere pedestrianism.

The student of human nature finds much to interest him in the personnel of this curiously recruited army; much to sadden him when he recognises those of life's broken wings; much to amuse him in the saucy independence of the sundowner, who is to the manner born, and who, if he were a minstrel as well as a wanderer, would ever sing a lay of idleness. As it is, he is the modern "knight of the road," asking, fortunately, not for your money or your life, but for rations and a bed. We remember one in a confidential moment saying he supposed "at home" we called such fellows as he tramps ; we deprecated the harshness of the expression, but felt that it might contain some truth. We also endeavoured to show that Australia in the past has been much indebted to her explorers.

Truly those who spend a few months on a station see wondrous specimens of mankind, that drifting mankind which is full of waifs and strays, but which teaches the lesson of a broader, easier view of unsuccessful humanity.

HUGH HENRY.

THE

Sweet Cytherea, sitting by a brook,

With young Adonis, lovely, fresh, and green.

The Passionate Pilgrim.

HE ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia, the cradle of the Semitic nations, which lies between the great rivers Euphrates and Tigris, used to worship a divinity named Ishtar. She was the goddess of fertility, the productive power of nature, and was identified by their astrologers with the planet Venus, the morning and evening star. Her temple stood at Uruk or Erech, a city on the Euphrates, whose foundation is ascribed in the book of Genesis to Nimrod, "the mighty hunter." The old Chaldæan records, inscribed with cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters on tablets of burnt clay, relate how Ishtar, daughter of the Moon-god, fell in love with the shepherd Dumuzi, son of Ea, "the lord of the waters," and Damkina, "the lady of the soil," as he fed his flocks beneath the mystic tree of Eridu, which covered the earth with its shade; how Dumuzi was wounded by a wild boar and died, and how Ishtar, distracted with grief, descended to the lower regions, and endeavoured to rescue her lover from the queen of the dead, and how she was instructed by the supreme God Ea to bathe him in pure water, anoint him with the most precious perfumes, clothe him in a robe of mourning, play to him sad airs on a crystal flute, while his priestesses intoned their doleful chants and tore their breasts in sorrow, and so he should obtain new life (Maspero's "Dawn of Civilisation," p. 693).

Dumuzi, for whom the goddess of fertility conceived this great passion, was originally a personification of the ground in springtime, whose coat of many colours quickly fades beneath the scorching glare of the summer sun, and later, by a natural transition of ideas, he became identified with the brilliant but transient spring sunshine, the young sun, which causes nature to bud and clothes the earth with green, until the ruthless heat of summer comes to mar his work. In southern Chaldæa, Ishtar was sometimes addressed as Nana, the supreme mistress," and reappears as Nanea in the

Second Book of Maccabees. Herodotus, writing four centuries and a half before Christ, tells us that the Babylonians of his day had a goddess, resembling the Greek Aphrodite, whom they styled Mylitta, and there can be no doubt that she was identical with the Ishtar of the cuneiform inscriptions. He also mentions in connection with her worship a singular propitiatory rite, of which we find traces in the subsequent development of the same cult (Lucian, "De Dea Syria," 6) and he remarks that an analogous custom prevailed in some parts of Cyprus (Herodotus, i. 199).

Amongst the Semitic nations of the West, the propitiatory rite usually consisted of an offering by the girls of their hair, as a kind of first-fruits to the goddess of nature, and this custom explains the epithet "Venus Calva" or "the bald Venus," applied by the Romans to their own archaic goddess of love. To her likewise both men and women before marriage offered either the whole or at least a lock of their hair.

The language and religion of the people of Syria, Phoenicia, and Canaan betrayed their Mesopotamian origin. They too adored the great goddess Ishtar under the name of Ashtoreth. Solomon, we are told in the First Book of Kings, "went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians," and the Septuagint, or Greek version compiled at Alexandria about 277 B.C., translates the name "Astarte." Ashtoreth or Astarte continued to represent the productive power of nature, and she was the counterpart of Moloch, the generative power of nature. This pair of deities were usually addressed by the titles Baal and Baaltis, "lord and lady." Baal was identified with the sun, and his symbol was the bull. Ashtoreth, by analogy, was identified with the moon, and her symbol was the dove (Rawlinson's "History of Phoenicia," p. 326). If we bear these simple facts in mind, they will, I think, furnish us with a key to the difficult enigma. "Who was the Syrian Goddess?" In the mythology of Phoenicia, the ancient legend of Ishtar and Dumuzi again crops up. Dumuzi is resuscitated under the thinly disguised name of Tammuz, which in the language of the country appears to have signified "the vanquished one." The scene of his death was localised in the Lebanon, and the annual season of mourning was duly observed year by year. The daughters of Israel could not resist the attractions of the popular festival, and were infected with the general enthusiasm of their neighbours. "He brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house which was toward the north," says Ezekiel, "and behold there sat women weeping for Tammuz." The beloved of Ashtoreth was addressed by the title of Adonai, "my lord." Hence his Greek

name Adonis, which was also applied to the mountain torrent of the Lebanon, now called Nahr-Ibrahim.

Tammuz came next behind,

Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate

In amorous ditties all a summer's day,
While smooth Adonis, from his native rock,
Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood
Of Tammuz yearly wounded.

Ashtoreth had a temple at Byblos in Phoenicia, near the mouth of the Adonis River. Byblos is mentioned in Assyrian inscriptions under the name of Gubal (now Jebeil) eight and a half centuries B.C. It was the royal seat of Cinyras (Strabo, xvi. 2) the reputed father of Adonis, and the founder of several shrines of Ashtoreth. A second temple stood at Aphaca, nearer the source of the same river. These two places were naturally the great centres of the cult of Adonis, until it was suppressed by Constantine the Great (Eusebius, "Vit. Const.," iii. 55). We are indebted to Lucian for the following account of the Syrian festival :—

I saw, too, at Byblos a great temple of the Byblian Aphrodite, where they perform the orgies in honour of Adonis, and I learnt what these orgies were. For the people of Byblos allege that the wounding of Adonis by the boar took place in their own territory, and, as a memorial of that calamity, they every year beat their breasts, utter lamentations, perform the orgies, and hold a great mourning throughout the land. And when they have done beating their breasts and lamenting, they first of all make offerings to (an image of) Adonis as though it were a corpse, and on the next day they pretend that he is alive again, and carry him into the open air. And they shave their heads, just as the Egyptians do when an Apis (sacred bull) is dead. ("De Dea Syria," 6.)

"In the territory of Byblos," continues Lucian, "a river flows from Mount Libanus (Lebanon) into the sea. It bears the name Adonis. Every year this river turns blood-red, and parting with its colour as it flows into the sea, turns a great part of the sea the colour of blood, and announces to the people of Byblos the season of mourning. They pretend that on these occasions Adonis is wounded on Libanus, and that his blood, flowing into the water, changes the colour of the river, and gives the stream its name. That is what the people say. But a certain Byblian, who seemed to be telling the truth, explained to me another cause of the phenomenon. And this is what he said: "The River Adonis, stranger, flows through Libanus, and Libanus has a very reddish-coloured soil, and as the winds are usually rough at that particular season, they carry soil of a very red colour into the river, and the soil makes it blood-red. And so it is

the soil, and not blood, as people affirm, that is the cause of this phenomenon.'" (Ibid. 8.)

Lucian gives a long description of another temple at Hierapolis, the innermost shrine of which contained two seated figures, made of gold, and representing a god and goddess, the former drawn by bulls, the latter by lions. They were evidently statues of Baal and Ashtoreth, though Lucian mistook the male figure for that of Zeus, while the female figure, he says, partook somewhat of the character of Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Selene, Rhea, Artemis, Nemesis, and the Fates! In one hand she held a sceptre, in the other a spindle (or arrow). Her head was surrounded with rays, and she wore a mural crown and the girdle peculiar to Urania, the "celestial " Aphrodite. ("De Dea Syria,” 31.)

He then goes on to tell us how, on certain specified days, the multitude assembled in the sacred inclosure, and a crowd of "Galli" and other holy persons performed the orgies, gashed their arms, and flogged one another's backs, while others stood by and accompanied them on the flute, beat drums, or sang frenzied hymns (Ibid. 50). All of which irresistibly reminds us of the orgies of Baal, described in the First Book of Kings. We have indications of the fact that the goddess was Ashtoreth in the offerings of hair which the boys and girls made at her shrine (Ibid. 60), in the sacred doves which were kept there (Ibid. 54), and the tame fish, which came to be fed when they were called (Ibid. 45). A fable written by Hyginus, the friend of Ovid, explains why doves and fish were sacred to this goddess. "An egg of extraordinary size fell from heaven into the Euphrates. The fishes rolled it ashore, the doves hatched it, and out of the shell came Venus, who was afterwards called the Syrian Goddess." ("Fab." 197.)

Some people believed that the great temple of Hierapolis, or Bambyce, which stood at no great distance from the Euphrates, had been originally erected to Derkěto, described by Lucian as half woman and half fish. ("De Dea Syria," 14.) Diodorus says that Derkěto was worshipped at Ascalon, and had the face of a woman and the body of a fish (2, 4), and Pliny too refers to Hierapolis, otherwise Bambyce, called by the Syrians Mabog, where the monster Atargatis, named Derketo by the Greeks, was worshipped. ("Nat. Hist.," 5, 19; Strabo, xvi. 1.) This divine mermaid was apparently symbolical of Ashtoreth rising from the waves, and it is significant that the Greeks pictured their own goddess of love, Aphrodite, as springing from the salt sea foam (appós) near the island of Cythera (Cerigo), which was, as we shall presently see, one