Myrmidons, claimed descent from the ant and revered
ants. The religious respect paid to mice in the temple of Apollo
Smintheus, in the Troad, Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos and Crete is well known,
and a local tribe were alluded to as Mice by an oracle. The god himself,
like the Japanese harvest-god, was represented in art with a mouse at
his foot, and mice, as has been said, were fed at his shrine.(3) The
Syrians, says Clemens Alexandrinus, worship doves and fishes, as the
Elians worship Zeus.(4) The people of Delphi adored the wolf,(5) and the
Samians the sheep. The Athenians had a hero whom they worshipped in the
shape of a wolf.(6) A remarkable testimony is that of the scholiast on
Apollonius Rhodius, ii. 124. "The wolf," he says, "was a beast held in
honour by the Athenians, and whosoever slays a wolf collects what
is needful for its burial." The burial of sacred animals in Egypt
is familiar. An Arab tribe mourns over and solemnly buries all dead
gazelles.(7) Nay, flies were adored with the sacrifice of an ox near
the temple of Apollo in Leucas.(8) Pausanias (iii. 22) mentions certain
colonists who were guided by a hare to a site where the animal hid in a
myrtle-bush. They therefore adore the myrtle, (Greek text omitted). In
the same way a Carian stock, the Ioxidae, revered the asparagus.(9) A
remarkable example of descent mythically claimed from one of the lower
animals is noted by Otfried Muller.(10) Speaking of the swan of Apollo,
he says, "That deity was worshipped, according to the testimony of the
Iliad, in the Trojan island of Tenedos. There, too, was Tennes honoured
as the (Greek text omitted) of the island. Now his father was called
Cycnus (the swan) in an oft-told and romantic legend.(11)... The swan,
therefore, as father to the chief hero on the Apolline island, stands
in distinct relation to the god, who is made to come forward still more
prominently from the fact that Apollo himself is also called father of
Tennes. I think we can scarcely fail to recognise a mythus which was
local at Tenedos.... The fact, too, of calling the swan, instead of
Apollo, the father of a hero, demands altogether a simplicity and
boldness of fancy which are far more ancient than the poems of Homer."

(1) Op. cit., i. 34.

(2) Scholiast on Iliad, xix. 119.

(3) Aelian, H. A., xii. 5; Strabo, xiii. 604. Compare "Apollo and the
Mouse, Custom and Myth, pp. 103-120.

(4) Lucian, De Dea Syria.

(5) Aelian, H. A., xii. 40.

(6) Harp