The custom of taking or sending offerings to a cave haunted by the Fates, of which we have just seen two examples, is widely extended among the women of Greece. In Athens, besides the ‘hollow hill,’ two or three of the old rock-dwellings round about the Hill of the Muses were formerly a common resort for the same purpose, and the practice though rarer now is not yet extinct[272]. Among the best-known of these resorts is the so-called Prison of Socrates. Dodwell, in his account of his travels in Greece at the beginning of last century, states that he found there ‘in the inner chamber, a small feast consisting of a cup of honey and white almonds, a cake on a little napkin, and a vase of aromatic herbs burning and exhaling an agreeable perfume[273]’; and the observance of the custom is known to have continued in that place down to recent years[274]. The same practice, I was informed at Sparta, is known at the present day to the peasant-women of the surrounding plain, who will undertake even a long and wearisome journey to lay a honey-cake in a certain cave on one of the eastern spurs of Taÿgetus. Other places in which to my own knowledge the custom still continues are Agrinion in Aetolia and neighbouring districts, the villages of Mt Pelion in Thessaly, and the island of Scyros; and from the testimony of many other observers I conclude that it is, or was till recently, universal in Greek lands.
Nor does there seem to be much variety in the subjects on which the peasant-women consult the Fates: with the girls matrimony, with the married women maternity, is the perpetually recurring theme. Everywhere also honey in some form is an essential part of the offering by which the Fates’ favour is to be won. The acceptance of this offering, and therefore also the success of the prayers which accompany it, are occasionally, as in the cave near Sparta which I have mentioned, inferred from omens provided by the dripping of water from the roof of the cave; but more usually the realisation of the conjugal aspirations is not assured, unless a second visit to the sanctuary, three days or a month later, proves that the sweetmeats have been accepted by the Fates and are gone. This, I am told, occurs with some frequency. Dodwell mentions that his donkey ate some[275]; and considering the character of the offerings--cakes and honey for the most part, for only in the ‘hollow hill’ at Athens was salt added thereto--it is not surprising if the Fates find many willing proxies, human and canine as well as asinine.