Chinese clay figures. Pt. 1, Prolegomena on the history of defensive armor / by Berthold Laufer.

  • Berthold Laufer
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chinese clay figures. Pt. 1, Prolegomena on the history of defensive armor / by Berthold Laufer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    hi literature, justly points out that all our mediaeval versions of the story,1 as a last resort, go back to the Greek Physiologus, and that the last clause of the Greek text contains a visible trace of the old Indian legend of the king’s daughter who carries away the penitent into the palace of her father. Luders rises also against the view of Lauchert, who inter¬ prets the story in Physiologus from a misunderstood passage of Aelian (XVI, 20); and I am in full accord with the criticism of Luders, to which the argument should be added that this alleged influence of Aelian on the Physiologus is out of the question, as Aelian is in time posterior to the latter.2 F. W. K. Muller studied the same question in connection with a Japanese No play, the plot of which is the legend of Ekagringa.3 Muller likewise thinks Lauchert’s explanation to be hardly plausible, and admits, with excellent arguments, the dependence of the Physiologus story on the tradition of India. There is but one point in which my opinion differs from the one expressed by Muller. Muller, at the close of his highly interesting study, advances the theory that the real unicorn, as already recognized by Marco Polo, may always have been the 1 Of the mediaeval versions, that of John Tzetzes, the Byzantine poet and gram¬ marian, who flourished during the twelfth century, in his Chiliades (v, 398), deserves special mention: “The monoceros carries a horn on the middle of its forehead. This animal is passionately fond of perfumes. It is hunted in this manner. A young man disguised as a woman exhaling the odor of the most exquisite perfumes takes his position in the places frequented by this quadruped. The hunters lie in ambush at a short distance. The odor of the perfumes soon attracts the monoceros toward the young man; it caresses him, and he covers its eyes with perfumed woman’s gloves. The hunters hasten to the spot, seize the animal which does not offer resistance, cut off its horn, which is an excellent antidote to poison, and send it back, without in¬ flicting on it further harm.” 2 Claudius Aelianus flourished under Septimius Severus, and probably outlived Elagabalus (218-222 a.d.). His writings come down from the beginning of the third century (Baumgarten, Poland, and Wagner, Die hellenistisch-romische Kultur, p. 615, Leipzig, 1913), while the Physiologus was written in Alexandria as early as the second century (ibid., p. 622). Little is known about Aelian’s life; only Philostratus and Suidas have some brief notes regarding him. He availed himself of the writings of Athenaeus, who wrote at the time of Elagabalus, or in the first years of Alexander Severus](222-235); Philostratus mentions his death in his Lives of Sophists composed between 222 and 244. As regards the Physiologus, it is necessary to discriminate between the final Greek recension clothed in a Christian-theological garb, as we have it now, and the primeval source or sources of animal stories without the allegories, from which the former was extracted. Lauchert (/. c., p. 42) certainly is quite right in rejecting the hypothesis of an “ Ur physiologus in the sense that it was a literary production serving as model to our Physiologus; but a primeval Physiologus must be presupposed for about the beginning of the first century, in the sense that it simply was an assemblage of verbal stories current in Alexandria, and some of which were imported from India (compare T'oung Pao, 1913, pp. 361-4). 3 Ikkaku sennin, eine mittelalterliche japanische Oper (Bastian Festschrift, PP- 5i3~538, Berlin, 1896). Luders, whose work appeared in 1897, did not take note of Muller’s investigation; it seems that the treatises of both scholars originated about the same time, and independently of each other. Compare also J. Takakusu, The Story of the Rsi Ekasrnga (Hansei Zasshi, Vol. XIII, 1898, pp. 10-18); and K. Wadagaki, Monoceros, The Rishi (ibid., pp. 19-24).