of
the mice gnawing the bowstrings occurs frequently as an explanation
of mouse-worship. One of the Trojan 'mouse-stories' ran--that
emigrants had set out in prehistoric times from Crete. The oracle
advised them to settle 'wherever they were attacked by the children of
the soil.' At Hamaxitus in the Troad, they were assailed in the night
by mice, which ate all that was edible of their armour and bowstrings.
The colonists made up their mind that these mice were 'the children of
the soil,' settled there, and adored the mouse Apollo.[131] A myth of
this sort may either be a story invented to explain the mouse-name; or
a Mouse tribe, like the Red Indian Wolves, or Crows, may actually have
been settled on the spot, and may even have resisted invasion.[132]
Another myth of the Troad accounted for the worship of the mouse
Apollo on the hypothesis that he had once freed the land from mice,
like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whose pipe (still serviceable) is said
to have been found in his grave by men who were digging a mine.[133]

Stories like these, stories attributing some great deliverance to the
mouse, or some deliverance from mice to the god, would naturally
spring up among people puzzled by their own worship of the mouse-god
or of the mouse. We have explained the religious character of mice as
the relics of a past age in which the mouse had been a totem and mouse
family names had been widely diffused. That there are, and have been,
mice totems and mouse family names among Semitic stocks round the
Mediterranean is proved by Prof. Robertson Smith:[134] 'Achbor, the
mouse, is an Edomite name, apparently a stock name, as the jerboa and
another mouse-name are among the Arabs. The same name occurs in
Judah.' Where totemism exists, the members of each stock either do not
eat the ancestral animal at all, or only eat him on rare sacrificial
occasions. The totem of a hostile stock may be eaten by way of insult.
In the case of the mouse, Isaiah seems to refer to one or other of
these practices (lxvi.): 'They that sanctify themselves, and purify
themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine's
flesh, and the abomination, and the _mouse_, shall be consumed
together, saith the Lord.' This is like the Egyptian prohibition to
eat 'the abominable' (that is, tabooed or forbidden) 'Rat of Ra.' If
the unclean animals of Israel were originally the totems of each clan,
then the mouse was a totem,[135] for the chosen people