ABSTRACT
T he connection of the hare with Easter, and throughthis with the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, and in latertimes in Europe with witches, leads on to the last lap in this summary of the hare's mythical attributes, namely, to the beliefs held concerning this animal and to its symbolic use in classical times in Greece and Rome. l
A fe,v references have already been made in passing to the use made by the Romans of the hare as an omen and in various other symbolic ways. 2
Perhaps the best-known reference to the hare in classical Greek writing is, however, the famous passage in Aeschylus's Agamemnon (lines 104-39) in which the chorus reports an omen that appeared outside the palace as the army assembled under the leadersllip of Agamemnon and Menelaus before setting out for the siege of Troy. The chorus tells how two eagles, one black and one white, were seen feeding on a hare 'richly pregnant with young which had missed the last laps of its race' (see Fig. 15). Calchas interpreted the two eagles as representing the two princes Agamemnon and Menelaus, and declared
1 It is worth mentioning that, though in late classical times the ancients sometimes confused the hare with the rabbit and the Greeks called the rabbit by a variety of names formed from dIminutives of the word A.ayfu~ meaning a hare, such as 'half-hare', 'little hare', etc., no such confusion can have occurred earlier than the first century B.C. before which rabbits were unknown in classical lands, having been introduced, probably from Spain, for the first time about this date. As all the most important references cited in this section date from before the time when the rabbit was introduced, there is no doubt whatever that the animal referred to in them is definitely a hare.
