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name was Wild Roe¹-Greek* type of dawn with its pure visions. And Lydda “was nigh unto Joppa,”† where was let down from heaven the mystic sheet, full of every kind of living creature (this, centuries before, a symbol familiar to the farthest east‡), for lasting witness to the faithful that through His travailing creation God has appointed all things to be helpful and holy to man, has made nothing common or unclean.

217. There is a large body of further evidence proving the origin of the story of St. George and the Dragon from that of Perseus. The names of certain of the persons concerned in both coincide. Secondary, or later variations in the place of the fight appear alike in both legends. For example, the scene of both is sometimes laid in Phœnicia, north of Joppa. But concerning this we may note that a mythologist of the age of Augustus, § recounting this legend, is careful to explain that the name of Joppa has since been changed to Phœnice. The instance of most value, however-because connected with a singular identity of local names-is that account which takes both Perseus and St. George to the Nile delta. The Greek name of Lydda was Diospolis. Now St. Jerome speaks strangely of Alexandria as also called Dispolis, and there certainly was a Diospolis (later Lydda) near Alexandria, where “alone in Egypt,” Strabo tells us,² “men did not venerate the crocodile, but held it in dishonour as most hateful of living things.” One of the “Crocodile towns” of Egypt was close by this. Curiously enough, considering the locality, there

* The Hebrew poets, too, knew “the Hind of the glow of dawn.”

† Near Joppa the Moslem (who also reverences St. George) sees the fields of some great final contest between the Evil and the Good, upon whom the ends of the world shall have come-a contest surely that will require the presence of our warrior-marshal.

‡ Compare the illustrations on p. 44 of Didron’s Iconographie Chrétienne (English translation, p. 41).

§ Conon, Narrationes, XL.

¹ [Dorcas. “Hind of the glow of dawn” is Aijeleth Shahar: see heading to Psalm xxii.]

² [Lib. xvii. cap. i.]

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