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proaching the altars (as is the custom of the Greeks) for the purpose of confirming it with an oath, when all the judges exclaimed with one voice, forbidding him to swear *" The name of one so distinguished for integrity should not be lost. Cicero does not mention him in this passage; but in one of his epistles, speaking with natural exultation, of the marked respect shown to himself by the judges, when the advocates of Clodius refused to admit his evidence, he gives the name of this honest Athenian. "I regard it as a far more honourable testimony than even that which was borne to Xenocratest." Diogenes Laertius also and Valerius Maximus speak of him by name. By Cicero's parenthetical remark, when addressing Romans, that such was the custom in Greece, we are led to conclude that it was not in his time the practice in Rome. Many passages, however, are found in the poets, especially in Juvenal, which would imply the contrary, or, at least, that this, with many other innovations (as that poet especially complains), had been imported from Greece in his own degenerate days. Indeed, in an Oration of Cicero himself, (pro Flacco, 36) a passage occurs, which would lead us to suppose, that the custom was then prevalent

* It is evident, then, that in Greece a discretionary power to dispense with an oath was lodged with the judges. -Valer. Max. ii. 10.

Epist. Attic. lib. 1. 16.

at Rome. Be this as it may, the custom was by no means confined to Greece. Livy records (as is generally known,) that after the termination of the African war, when Hannibal, then only nine years of age, with boyish coaxing, begged his father, whilst he was offering a sacrifice for a propitious expedition, to take him over with him into Spain; his father took him to the altar, and compelled him, laying his hand on the sacred things*, to swear that he would become, as soon as he should be able, the enemy of Romet. This custom was, at an early period, introduced into Christian countries. Whether the sacred things on which the hand was laid, in the case of a pagan altar, were the wood or stone of which the altar was built, or the victim, the Church of Christian Rome presents to us, on either supposition, a corresponding practice. Sometimes the juror laid his hand upon the altar itself, sometimes upon the case which contained the consecrated host, sometimes upon the relics of a saint, sometimes upon the cross, the cross, sometimes upon the missal or mass-book. Indeed, not only in this ceremony of laying the hand upon the altar, but in innumerable others we find Christians, with too little scruple, adopting the practices of their pagan predecessors or neighbours.

*"Tactis sacris."

The very expression now used in the University of Oxford, is tactis sacrosanctis Christi Evan

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One usual, and I should conceive an imposing form of oath among the early Greeks, as we learn from Homer, was to mingle wine to typify the union and concord which then prevailed between the parties, and then to offer a prayer and to pour the wine on the ground, with an imprecation, that whoever should first break the oath might have his brains and blood scattered in the same manner, as that wine was poured. The words of Homer, literally rendered, run thus *:.

"And from the pitcher they drew the wine, and poured it into cups, and offered their prayers to the eternal Gods. And thus would each one of the Greeks and Trojans say, 'Thou Jove, most glorious, most great, and ye other immortal Gods, -whichever party shall first violate these oaths, thus may their brains, their own and their children's, be scattered upon the ground, as this wine now, &c.""

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Plutarch in his life of Dion details the ceremonies of an oath, which he calls "The great oath." Callippus had determined to get rid of Dion, by whatever means; and being suspected, and finding a very strict inquiry instituted under the auspices of the female relatives of Dion, came forward, and with tears denying the charge, offered to bind himself by any pledge which they might

*Iliad. iii. 297.

require. They required him "to swear the great oath” (ὀμόσαι τὸν μέγαν ὅρκον.) The form of that oath obliged the individual who bound himself by it, to go down into the consecrated fane of Ceres and Proserpine; and there, after the performance of certain religious rites, to clothe himself in the purple robe of the Goddess, and taking a burning torch in his hand, "to swear the great oath." Callippus having done all this, and having on that oath denied all guilty intention, treated the divinities with such ridicule, that he waited for the execution of his purpose till the feast of the Goddess by whom he had sworn came round, and then committed the murder on the very holiday.

In our examination of the oaths of Joseph and of Elijah, I have already referred to the practice of swearing by a human being. This was evidently very usual among the Greeks, but rather, I think, in the full unrestrained flow of oratory, or in the licence of private intercourse, than in judicial proceedings, or solemnly and under the awful sense of religious obligation. The custom was of very early origin, as we learn from Homer. Sometimes they swore by the souls of the departed -sometimes by their contemporaries—sometimes again they called the ashes of their fathers to witness, and sometimes they swore by their tombs; on other occasions they would pledge them

selves to the truth by the head or arms or life of themselves, or of their friends. It would be endless to enumerate the things mortal, or supposed to be immortal, rational or brute, animate or lifeless, by which the nations of pagan antiquity swore*. But it is very humiliating to find Christendom, in the corrupt ages of the church, following them in all these particulars. And it is, I think, quite clear, that though oaths sworn by such things as these, and by whatever chanced to strike the mind of the individual, owed their continuance to what involves one of the most miserable of all subterfuges a desire of being believed without

I have lately met with a treatise recited last year by C. Putschins, of Jena—a sort of philological essay, in which the author seems to regard the ancient expressions usually considered as oaths by inanimate things, to be nothing more than instances of strong language implying only comparison. Thus in the Odyssey, when Ulysses in disguise calls on the "Hospitable Board and Hearth of Ulysses to witness the truth," this author teaches us to suppose that Homer means his hero merely to say, as surely as I am a poor wanderer at the Board and Hearth of Ulysses, so surely, &c." But can this be admitted, when in this very passage he calls his assertion "an oath," and we find mingled with such an appeal to inanimate things, the direct attestation "by Jove?" I cannot help regarding the translation of Pope, far more natural :

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"Thou first be witness! Hospitable Jove!
And every God inspiring social love!

And witness every Household Power, that waits,
Guard of these fires, and Angel of these gates!"

Odyss: xiv. 160.

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