Chapter II: The Anthesteria (2)

First it is necessary to establish the fact that in usage the terms θύειν and ἐναγίζειν are clearly distinguished. A passage in Pausanias is for this purpose of capital importance. Pausanias is visiting a sanctuary of Heracles at Sicyon. He makes the following observations[131]: ‘In the matter of sacrifice they are accustomed to do as follows. They say that Phaestos, when he came to Sicyon, found the Sicyonians devoting offerings to Heracles as to a hero. But Phaestos would do nothing of the kind, but would sacrifice to him as to a god. And even now the Sicyonians, when they slay a lamb and burn the thighs upon the altar, eat a portion of the flesh as though it were a sacrificial victim, and another part of the flesh they make over as to a hero.’ The passage is not easy to translate, because we have no English equivalent for ἐναγίζειν. I have translated the word by ‘devote’ because it connotes entire dedication—part of the sacrifice is shared, eaten by the worshipper in common with Heracles regarded as a _god_, the other part is utterly consecrated to Heracles as a hero; it is dead men’s food. Pausanias, who is often careless in his use of θύειν, here carefully marks the distinction. The victim is an animal: part of it is offered to an Olympian—that portion is shared; part of it is offered, like the offerings at the _Chytroi_, to no Olympian, but to a ghost, and of that portion no man eats.

A second passage from Pausanias adds a further element of differentiation. At Megalopolis, Pausanias visited a sanctuary of the Eumenides. Of their ritual he speaks as follows[132]: ‘They say that when these goddesses would drive Orestes mad they appeared to him black, but that after he had bitten off his finger they seemed to him white, and his senses returned to him, and therefore he made over an offering to the black goddesses to turn away their wrath, but to the white ones he did sacrifice.’

Language and ritual could scarcely speak more plainly: θύειν is to the Olympians, a joyous thanksgiving to gods who are all white and bright, beneficent, of the upper air; ἐναγίζειν is to those below who are black and bad and malignant: θύειν is for θεραπεία, tendance; ἐναγίζειν for ἀποτροπή, riddance.

* * * * *

The distinction between the two forms of ritual having been thus definitely established, it remains to examine more closely the word ἐναγίζειν and the ritual it expresses, that of the dead—a ritual which, it must at this point be remembered, is also concerned with purification.

The word ἐναγίζειν can only mean the making of or dealing with something that is of the nature of an ἄγος, or, as the word sometimes appears, a ἅγος. It did not escape that acute observer of man and his language, Archbishop Eustathius[133], that this word and its cognate ἅγιος, holy, had in ancient days a double significance, that holy was not only pure but also polluted; this, he says, ‘is on account of the double meaning of ἅγος.’ To put the matter into modern phraseology, ἅγος is the thing that is _taboo_, the thing consecrated to the gods, and hence forbidden to man, the thing ‘devoted.’ The word lies deep down in the ritual of ancient sacrifice and of ancient religious thought; it is the very antithesis of communion; it is tinged with, though not quite the equivalent of, expiation.

Fortunately we are not left to conjecture as to what was the precise nature of the ceremonies covered by the word ἐναγίζειν. We know what was done, though we have no English word fully to express that doing. This fact may well remind us that we have lost not only the word but the thought, and must be at some pains to recover it. In the discussion that follows no translation of ἐναγίζειν will be attempted: I shall frankly use the Greek word and thereby avoid all danger from misleading modern connotations[134].

Quite accidentally, in the middle of a discourse on the various sorts of soap and washing basins, Athenaeus[135] has preserved for us a record of the exact ritual of ἐναγισμοί. After stating that the word ἀπόνιπτρον, washing off, is applied alike to the water in which either feet or hands are washed, he goes on to note that the word ἀπόνιμμα, ‘offscouring,’ slightly different in form but substantially the same in meaning, has among the Athenians a technical ritual usage. ‘The term ἀπόνιμμα is specially applied _to the ceremonies in honour of the dead_ and to _those that take place in the purification of the polluted_.’ The word translated ‘polluted’ is ἐναγεῖς, i.e. under or in a state of ἄγος. He then proceeds to quote from a lost treatise on ceremonies of ἐναγισμός, the exact details of the ritual. ‘Kleidemos, in his treatise called _Exegeticus_, writes on the subject of ἐναγισμοί as follows: “Dig a trench to the west of the tomb. Then, look along the trench towards the west, pour down water, saying these words: A purification for you to whom it is meet and right. Next pour down a second time myrrh.” Dorotheos adds these particulars, alleging that the following prescription is written also in the ancestral rites of the Eupatridae concerning the purification of suppliants: “Next having washed himself, and the others who had disembowelled the victim having done the same, let him take water and make purification and wash off the blood from the suppliant who is being purified, and afterwards, having stirred up the washing, pour it into the same place.”’

The conjoint testimony of the two writers is abundantly clear: either alone would have left us in doubt as to the real gist of the ceremony. Kleidemos tells us that it was addressed to the dead; the trench near the tomb, the western aspect of the setting sun, the cautious formulary, ‘To you to whom it is meet and right,’ all tell the same tale. It is safest not even to name the dead, lest you stir their swift wrath. But Kleidemos leaves us in the dark as to why they want an ἀπόνιμμα, ‘an offscouring,’ water defiled: why will not pure water or water and myrrh suffice? Dorotheos supplies the clue—those who have slain the victim wash the blood from their hands and _wash it off him who has been purified_, and then stirring it all up pour it into the trench. The ghost below demands the _blood of the victim washed off from the polluted suppliant_: when the ghost has drunk of this, then, and not till then, there is placation and purification.

That the ghost should demand the blood of the victim is natural enough; the ghosts in the Nekuia of the _Odyssey_ ‘drink the black blood’ and thereby renew their life; but in ceremonies of purification they demand polluted water, the ‘offscourings,’ and why? The reason is clear. The victim is a surrogate for the polluted suppliant, the blood is put upon him that he may be identified with the victim, the ghost is deceived and placated. The ghost demands blood, not to satisfy a physical but so to speak a spiritual thirst, the thirst for vengeance. This thirst can only be quenched by the water polluted, the ‘offscourings’[136] of the suppliant.

The suppliant for purification in the ritual just described was identified with the victim, or rather perhaps we should say the victim with the suppliant, by pouring over the suppliant the victim’s blood. There were other means of identification. It has already been seen (p. 27) that the suppliant sometimes put on the whole skin of the victim, sometimes merely stood with his foot on the fleece. Another and more attenuated form of identification was the wearing of fillets, i.e. strands of wool confined at intervals by knots to make them stronger. Such fillets were normally worn by suppliants and by seers: the symbolism for suppliants is obvious, for seers evident on a closer inspection. The seer himself was powerless, but he could by the offering of a sacrifice to ghosts or heroes invoke the mantic dead; he wears the symbols of this sacrifice, the wreath and the fillets. Later their significance was forgotten, and they became mere symbols of office. The omphalos at Delphi, itself a mantic tomb, was covered with a net-work of wool-fillets, renewed no doubt at first with the offering of each new victim, later copied in stone[137], but always the symbol of recurring sacrifice.

Fillets of wool became as it were the attributes of the sacrificial victim. In the curious vase-painting[138] in fig. 8 Salmoneus, himself the victim, is wreathed, decorated all over with fillets, which of course, as there was no animal slain, are merely symbolic[139]. Animal victims in like fashion are adorned for sacrifice with these merely routine fillets. The animal sacrifice is to the ghost the surrogate of the human victim, the fillet in its turn the surrogate of the animal.

The dread ceremonial of ἐναγισμός in its crudest, most barbarous form, is very clearly shown on the vase-painting in fig. 9, from a ‘Tyrrhenian’ amphora now in the British Museum[140]. The scene depicted is the sacrifice of Polyxena on the tomb of Achilles. In the _Hecuba_ of Euripides[141], Neoptolemos takes Polyxena by the hand and leads her to the top of the mound, pours libations to his father, praying him to accept the ‘soothing draughts,’ and then cries

‘Come thou and drink the maiden’s blood
Black and unmixed.’

In the centre of the design in fig. 9 is the omphalos-shaped grave[142], which is in fact the altar. Right over it the sacrifice takes place. Neoptolemos, as next of kin to the slain man, is the sacrificer; Polyxena, as next of kin to the slayer, is the sacrifice. The ghost of the slain man drinks her blood and is appeased, and thereby the army is purged.

The blood only is offered to the ghost—the blood is the life, and it is vengeance, not food, the ghost cries for. It is so with the Erinyes, who are but angry ghosts[143]; when they hunt Orestes they cry[144],

‘The smell of human blood smiles wooingly.’

Earth polluted has drunk a mother’s blood, and they in turn

‘Will gulp the living gore red from his limbs[145].’

When the ghost of Achilles has drunk the fresh blood of the maiden her body will be burnt, not that it may rise as a sweet savour to the gods above, but as a holocaust; it is a θυσία ἄδαιτος, a sacrifice without feast. It will be burnt on the low-lying _eschara_ or portable hearth that stands on the grave. The _eschara_ was by the ancients clearly distinguished from the altar proper, the βωμός. The _eschara_, says the scholiast on the _Phoenissae_[146] of Euripides, is ‘accurately speaking the trench in the earth where they offer ἐναγισμοί to those who are gone below; the altar is that on which they sacrifice to the heavenly gods.’

Porphyry[147], who is learned in ritual matters, draws the same distinction. ‘To the Olympian gods they set up temples and images and altars, but to the Earth-gods and to heroes, escharas, while for those below the earth there are trenches and megara.’

It is on an _eschara_ that Clytaemnestra does her infernal service to the Erinyes[148]. She cries to them in bitter reproach:

‘How oft have ye from out my hands licked up
Wineless libations, sober offerings,
And on the hearth of fire banquets grim
By night, an hour unshared of any god!’

Her ritual was the ritual of the underworld abhorred of the Olympians.

The eschara on which the holocaust to the underworld gods is burnt lies low upon the ground; the βωμός, the altar of the Olympians, rises higher and higher heavenwards. There is the like symbolism in the actual manner of the slaying of the victim. Eustathius[149], in commenting on the sacrifice of Chryses to Phoebus Apollo, when they ‘drew back the victims’ heads,’ says ‘according to the custom of the Greeks, for if they are sacrificing to those above they bend back the neck of the sacrificial animal so that it may look away towards the sky, but if to heroes or to the dead in general the victim is sacrificed looking downwards.’ Eustathius[150] again says of the prayer of Achilles, ‘by looking heavenwards he expresses vividly whither the prayer is directed, for Achilles is not praying to Zeus of the underworld, but to Zeus of the sky.’ The Christian of to-day, though he believes his God is everywhere, yet uplifts his hands to pray. For the like reason the victim for the dead was black and that for the Olympians frequently white; that for the dead sacrificed at the setting of the sun, that for the Ouranians at the dawn[151]. Upon certain holocausts, as has already been seen, the sun might not look.

The ritual of the ἐναγισμοί is then of _purgation by placation of the spirits of the underworld_. The extreme need of primitive man for placation is from the stain of bloodshed; purgation from this stain is at first only obtained by the offering of the blood of the murderer himself, then by the blood of a surrogate victim applied to him.

It is, I think, probable that at the back of many a mythological legend that seems to us to contain what we call ‘human sacrifice’ there lies, not the slaying of a victim for the pleasure of a Moloch-like god, but simply the appeasement of an angry ghost. So long as primitive man preserves the custom of the blood-feud, so long will he credit his dead kinsman with passions like his own.

* * * * *

In this connection it is interesting to note some further details of the ritual terminology of ἐναγισμοί as contrasted with that of the service of the Olympians.

The sacrifice burnt that the Olympians may eat of it is θῦμα, the thing burned to smoke; the sacrificial victim slain to be eaten by the worshipper is ἱερεῖον; the victim slain for placation and purification is by correct authors called by another name, it is a σφάγιον, a thing slaughtered. The word explains itself: it is not the sacrifice burnt, not the sacred thing killed and carved for a meal, but simply the victim hacked and hewn to pieces. Such a victim was not even necessarily skinned. Of what use to carefully flay a thing doomed to utter destruction? In the _Electra_ of Euripides[152] the old man describes such a σφάγιον:

‘I saw upon the pyre with its black fleece
A sheep the victim, and fresh blood outpoured.’

It is interesting to note in this connection that the word σφάγιον is always used of human victims, and of such animals as were in use as surrogates. The term is applied to all the famous maiden sacrifices of mythology. Ion[153] asks Creousa:

‘And did thy father sacrifice thy sisters?’

And Creousa with greater ritual precision makes answer:

‘He dared to slay them as _sphagia_ for the land.’

As a σφάγιον Polyxena[154] is slain on the tomb of Achilles; she dies as an atonement, a propitiation, as ‘medicine of salvation.’

The normal and most frequent use of σφάγια was, as in the case of ἐναγισμοί in general, for purification by placation. In stress of great emergency, of pestilence, of famine, and throughout historical times at the moment before a battle, σφάγια were regularly offered. They seem to have been carried round or through the person or object to be purified. Athenaeus[155] records an instructive instance. The inhabitants of Kynaetho, a village in Arcadia, neglected the civilizing influences of dancing and feasting, and became so savage and impious that they never met except for the purpose of quarrelling. They perpetrated at one time a great massacre, and after this, whenever their emissaries came to any other of the Arcadian cities, the citizens by public proclamation bade them depart, and the Mantineans after their departure made a purification of the city, leading the slaughtered victims round the whole circuit of the district.

As purifications the use of σφάγια needs no further comment. It is less obvious at first why σφάγια were always employed in the taking of oaths. The expression τέμνειν σφάγια is the equivalent of the familiar τέμνειν ὅρκια. In the _Suppliants_ of Euripides[156] Athene says to Theseus:

‘Hearken whereinto thou must cut the _sphagia_.’

She then bids him write the oaths in the hollow of a tripod-cauldron and then cut the throats of the victims into the cauldron, thus clearly identifying the oaths and the blood.

In the ordinary ritual of the taking of oaths, the oath-taker actually stood upon the pieces of the slaughtered animal. Pausanias[157], on the road between Sparta and Arcadia, came to a place called ‘Horse’s Tomb.’ There Tyndareus sacrificed a horse and made Helen’s suitors take an oath, causing them to stand on the cut-up pieces of the horse,—having made them take the oath, he buried the horse. At Stenyclerum[158] in Messenia was another monument, called ‘Boar’s Monument,’ where it was said Herakles had given an oath to the sons of Neleus on the cut pieces of a boar. Nor is the custom of swearing on the cut pieces recorded only by mythology. In the Bouleuterion at Elis was an image of Zeus, ‘of all others,’ says Pausanias[159], ‘best fitted to strike terror into evildoers.’ Its surname was Horkios, He of the Oath. Near this image the athletes, their fathers, brothers, and trainers had to swear on the cut pieces of a boar that they would be guilty of no foul play as regarded the Olympian games. Pausanias regrets that he ‘forgot to ask what they did with the boar after the oath had been taken by the athletes.’ He adds, ‘With the men of old days the rule was as regards a sacrificial animal on which an oath had been taken that it should be no more accounted as eatable for men. Homer,’ he says, ‘shows this clearly, for the boar on the cut pieces of which Agamemnon swore that Briseis had not been partner of his bed is represented as being cast by the herald into the sea:

“He spake and with the pitiless bronze he cut
The boar’s throat, and the boar Talthybios whirled
And in the great wash of the hoary sea
He cast it to the fish for food[160].”

This in ancient days was their custom about such matters.’

The custom of standing on the fragments of the victim points clearly to the identification of oath-taker and sacrifice. The victim was hewn in bits; so if the oath-taker perjure himself will he be hewn in bits: the victim is not eaten but made away with, utterly destroyed, _devoted_; a like fate awaits the oath-breaker: the oath becomes in deadly earnest a form of self-imprecation.

Still less obvious is it why sacrifices to the winds should uniformly have taken the form of σφάγια rather than ἱερεῖα. At first sight the winds if anything would appear to be Ouranian powers of the upper air, yet it would appear that sacrifices to the winds were buried, not burnt.

What astonished Pausanias[161] more than anything else he saw at Methana in Troezen was a ceremony for averting the winds. ‘A wind called Lips, which rushes down from the Saronic gulf, dries up the tender shoots of the vine. When the squall is upon them two men take a cock, which must have all its feathers white, tear it in two, and run round the vines in opposite directions, each of them carrying one half of the cock. When they come back to the place they start from they bury the cock there. This is the device they have invented for counteracting Lips. I myself,’ he adds, ‘have seen the people keeping off hail by sacrifices and incantations.’ The Methanian cock is a typical σφάγιον: it is carried round for purification, the evil influences of the wind are somehow caught by it, in rather proleptic fashion, and then buried away. It is really of the order of pharmakos ceremonies, to be considered later, rather than a sacrifice proper. For a σφάγιον we should expect the cock to be black, but on the principle of sympathetic magic it is in this case white. The normal sacrifice to a wind was a black animal. When in the _Frogs_[162] a storm is brewing between Aeschylus and Euripides, and threatens to burst, Dionysos calls out:

‘Bring out a ewe, boys, bring a black-fleeced ewe,
Here’s a typhoon that’s just about to burst.’

Winds were underworld gods, but when propitious they had a strong and natural tendency to become Ouranian, and the white sacrifices with intent to compel their beneficence would help this out. They are an exact parallel to the black and white Eumenides already noted. Virgil[163] says:

‘To Storm a black sheep, white to the favouring West.’

Equally instructive is the account given by Pausanias[164] of the ceremonies performed at Titane to soothe the winds, though with his customary vagueness Pausanias describes them by the word θύειν when they are really ἐναγισμοί. They are performed on one _night_ in each year, and Pausanias adds, the priest also ‘does secret ceremonies into four pits,’ soothing the fury of the winds, and he chants over them as they say Medea’s charms. Each of the four winds dwelt, it is clear, as a chthonic power in a pit; his sacrifice was after the fashion of heroes and ghosts. It is possible, indeed probable, that the pits were in connection with the tomb of some hero or heroine. The sacrifice of Iphigeneia was παυσάνεμος[165], with power to stay the winds; that of Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles had the like virtue. Be that as it may, it will be seen when we come to demonology that the winds were regarded as ghosts, as breaths: as such their cult was necessarily chthonic.

Another of their functions σφάγια share with the ordinary animal-sacrifices, the ἱερεῖα. Like the ἱερεῖα they could be used for purposes of divination. Used as they were for purification in any great emergency, mere economy may have suggested that they should be further utilized for oracular purposes. The greater solemnity of σφάγια would lend to the omens taken from them a specially portentous virtue[166]. It is amusing to find that even Porphyry[167], averse though he is to human sacrifice, still seems to feel a dim possibility that for mantic purposes human entrails may have special virtue. ‘But it will be urged,’ he says, as though stating a possible and reasonable argument, ‘that the future may be more clearly divined from the vitals of a man.’

Precise authors who know about ritual always distinguish between the omens taken from ordinary animal sacrifice and those from σφάγια. Thus Xenophon[168] in the _Anabasis_ says, ‘The sacrifices (ἱερεῖα) are propitious to us, the omens favourable, the σφάγια most propitious.’ The practice of using σφάγια for omens before a battle would seem to have been uniform. When women, says Eteocles[169], are wailing and making a commotion, it is the part of men

‘To slay the victims, take therefrom the omens
Before the gods, at the onset of the foe.’

It is probably to this oracular function of σφάγια that we owe the very frequent use of the middle σφαγιάζεσθαι, as in the parallel case of θύειν, the sacrifice by fire. For θύειν and θύεσθαι the distinction is familiar, and expressly stated by Ammonius[170]: ‘of those who simply sacrifice (active) the victims the word θύουσι is used, of those who take omens from the entrails θύονται.’ The active is of the nature of thanksgiving, the middle partakes of prayer and impulsion. In the case of σφάγια the active is very rarely in use, and naturally, for the sacrifice of σφάγια has in it no element of thanksgiving[171].

The ritual then of σφάγια and of ἐναγισμοί, of slaughter and of purification, is based on the fear of ghosts, of ghosts and their action on men alive, whether as evil winds, or for dread portents, or for vengeance on the broken oath, or, first and foremost, for the guilt of shed blood. Its essence is of ἀποτροπή, _aversion_.

Nowhere perhaps is this instinct of aversion so clearly seen, seen in a form where the instinct has not yet chilled and crystallized into definite ritual, as in the account of the murder of Absyrtos by Jason and Medea as given by Apollonius Rhodius[172]. The murder was by a treacherous ambuscade set for Absyrtos at the threshold of the temple of Artemis; Jason smites him like a bull for sacrifice, while Medea stands by.

‘So by that portal old kneeling he fell,
And while the last of life yet sobbed and passed,
Craving, clasped both hands to the wound, to hold
The dark blood back. But the blood reached, and sprang,
And, where the veilèd woman shuddered from him,
Lay red on the white robe and the white veil.
Then swift a sidelong eye, a pitiless eye,
The Erinys all subduing, that knoweth Sin,
Awoke, and saw what manner of deed was there.
And Aeson’s son smote from that sacrifice
Red ravine, and three times ravined with his mouth
Amid the blood, and three times from him spewed
That horror of sin; as men that slay by guile
Use, to make still the raging of the dead.’

Apollonius tries to make a ritual of the awful instinct of physical fear. The body is mangled that the angry ghost may be maimed, the blood actually licked up that the murderer may spit it forth and rid himself of the fell pollution. Only then can the corpse be safely buried[173]. But it is too late, for Absyrtos has put the blood upon Medea.

Clytaemnestra, when she murdered Agamemnon, followed the same horrid practice of ‘aversion.’ Sophocles[174] makes Electra say:

‘She lopped his limbs as though he were a foe
And for libations wiped upon his head
The blood stains.’

By the time of Apollonius the Erinys is no longer the actual ghost but a separate spirit of vengeance, and even the primitive ritual of _aversion_ is explained as a sort of tendance; the lopped limbs are ἐξάργματα, first beginnings, a sort of hideous sacrifice to the murdered man rather than mainly the means of maiming him[175]. But the scholiast[176] on the _Electra_ clearly explains the gist of the ceremonial. He says these things were done ‘as taking away the force of the dead so that later they may suffer nothing fearful from them.’

It may perhaps be felt that such instances are purely mythological, and that fear of the ghost had wholly waned in historical times. The horrid practice of mutilation no doubt fell into abeyance, but the fear of the ghost and the sense that purification from guilt could only be obtained by direct appeal to the ghost itself lived on.

The case of Pausanias gives curious evidence as to the procedure of an educated murderer of the fifth century B.C. Pausanias[177] the traveller tells how his namesake sought protection from the Goddess of the Brazen House, but failed because he was defiled by blood. This pollution he tried by every possible means to expiate: he had recourse to purifications of all kinds, he made supplication to Zeus Phyxios, a being obviously akin to Meilichios—and he resorted to the Psychagogi, the Ghost-Compellers of Phigalia. They seem to have failed, for Plutarch[178] tells us he sent to Italy for experts, and they, after they had done sacrifice, _wrenched the ghost out of the sanctuary_.

The historical case of Pausanias is exactly parallel to that of the mythological Orestes. Man expects that the dead man will behave as he would behave were he yet living—pursue him for vengeance; the ghost is an actual, almost physical reality. It needed a Euripides to see that this ghost was a purely subjective horror, a disordered conscience. He makes Menelaos ask the mad Orestes[179]:

‘What dost thou suffer? What disease undoes thee?’

and Orestes makes answer:

‘Conscience, for I am conscious of fell deeds.’

Anthropomorphism is usually regarded as a humane trait in Greek religion; it is noted as a thing distinguishing their cultus from the animal worship of less civilized nations. But anthropomorphism, as is clearly seen in ghost-worship, looks both ways. To be human is not necessarily to be humane. Man is cruel and implacable, and he makes the ghost after his own image. Man is also foolish and easily tricked, so he plays tricks upon the vengeful ghost, cheating him of his real meed of the murderer’s or kinsman’s blood. Hence the surrogate victims, hence the frequent substitution stories. Another element enters in. The gods, and specially the ghost-gods, are conservative; man gets in advance of the gods he has made, and is ashamed of the rites he once performed with complete confidence in their rightness. Then he tries by a cheat to reconcile his new view and his old custom. Religion, which once inspired the best in him, lags behind, expressing the worst.

Suidas[180] tells a story which curiously expresses this state of transition, this cheating of the god to save the conscience of the worshipper. The Greeks had a proverb, Ἔμβαρός εἰμι, ‘I am Embaros,’ which they used, according to Suidas, of a ‘sharp man with his wits about him,’ and, according to one of the collectors of proverbs, of those who ‘gave a false impression, i.e. were out of their minds.’ The origin of the proverb was as follows: There was a sanctuary of Artemis at Munychia. A bear came into it and was killed by the Athenians. A famine followed, and the god gave an oracle that the famine should cease if some one would sacrifice his daughter to the goddess. Embaros was the only man who promised to do it, on condition that he and his family should have the priesthood for life. He disguised his daughter and hid her in the sanctuary, and ‘dressed a goat in a garment and sacrificed it as his daughter.’ The story is manifestly aetiological, based on a ritual with a hereditary priesthood, and the sacrifice of a surrogate goat dressed as a woman.

It is probable, though not certain, that behind the figure of the Olympian Artemis, of the goddess who was kindly to lions’ cubs and ‘suckling whelps,’ there lay the cult of some vindictive ghost or heroine who cried for human blood. In moments of great peril this belief in the vindictiveness of ghosts, a belief kept in check by reason in the day-time, might surge up in a man’s mind and haunt his dreams by night. Plutarch[181] tells an instructive story about a dream that came to Pelopidas before the battle of Leuctra. Near the field of battle was a field where were the tombs of the daughters of Scedasos, a local hero. The maidens, who were obviously local nymphs, were called from the place Leuctrides. The night before the battle, as Pelopidas was sleeping in his tent, he had a vision which ‘caused him no small disturbance.’ He thought he saw the maidens crying at their tombs and cursing the Spartans, and he saw Scedasos their father bidding him sacrifice to his daughters a maiden with auburn hair if he wished to overcome his enemies on the morrow. Being a humane as well as a pious man, the order seemed to him a strange and lawless one, but none the less he told the soothsayers and the generals about it. Some of them thought that it ought not to be neglected, and brought forward as precedents the ancient instances of Menoiceus, son of Creon, and Macaria, daughter of Heracles, and, in more recent times, the case of Pherecydes the philosopher, who was put to death by the Spartans and whose skin was preserved (no doubt as ‘medicine’) by their kings in accordance with an oracle; also the case of Leonidas, who sacrificed himself for Greece; and, lastly, the human victims sacrificed to Dionysos Omestes before the battle of Salamis, all which cases had the sanction of success. Moreover, they pointed out, Agesilaus, when he was about to set sail from Aulis itself, had the same vision as Agamemnon, and disregarding it through misplaced tenderness, came to grief in consequence. The more advanced section of the army used the argument of the fatherhood of God and the superior nature of the supreme deities; such sacrifices were only fit for Typhons and Giants and inferior and impotent demons. Pelopidas, while they were discussing the question in the abstract, only got more and more uncomfortable, when on a sudden a she-colt got loose from the herd and ran through the camp; the laymen present only admired her shining red coat, her proud paces and shrill neighing, but Theocritus the soothsayer saw the thing in his heart, and cried aloud to Pelopidas, ‘Happy man, here is the sacred victim, wait for no other maiden, use the one the god has given thee.’ And they took the colt and led her to the tombs of the maidens, and prayed and wreathed her head and cut her throat and rejoiced and published the vision of Pelopidas and the sacrifice to the army. Whether Plutarch’s story is matter of fact or not is of little moment; it was felt to be _probable_, or else it would never have been narrated.

* * * * *

I have purposely dwelt on the dark side of ἐναγισμοί, of the service of the placation of ghosts, because in the vengeance of the ghost exacted for bloodshed lies the kernel of the doctrine of purification. But since man’s whole activity is not bounded by revenge, ghosts have other and simpler needs than that of vengeance. The service of the underworld is not all _aversion_, there is also some element of _tendance_.

In the vase-painting in fig. 10, a design from a rather late red-figured krater in the Bibliothèque Nationale[182] in Paris, we have a representation of a familiar scene, the raising of the ghost of Teiresias by Odysseus, as described in the _Nekuia_. Vase-paintings of this date tend to be rather illustrations than independent conceptions, but they sometimes serve the purpose of vivid presentation. Odysseus[183] has dug the trench, he has poured the drink-offering of mead and sweet wine and water, and sprinkled the white meal, and he has slain the sheep; the head and feet of one of them, seemingly a black ram, are visible above the trench. He has sat him down sword in hand to keep off the throng of lesser ghosts, and he and his comrades wait the up-rising of Teiresias. Out of the very trench is seen emerging the bald ghost-like head of the seer. This is a clear case, not of deprecation but of invocation. Teiresias by the strength of the black blood returns to life. There is a clear reminiscence of the ghost-raising[184] that went on at many a hero’s tomb, for, as will later be seen in the discussion of hero-worship, every hero was apt to be credited with mantic powers. The victims slain are in a sense, as Homer calls them, ἱερήια; they are sacrificed and eaten, but eaten by a ghost. As such they have been accompanied by offerings that could only be intended for drink-offerings, not the ἀπόνιμμα, the offscourings, but libations of mead and wine and pure water. Here again the ghost is made in the image of man: the Homeric hero drinks wine in his life and demands it after his death. The service of the dead is here very near akin to that of the Olympians; it is no grim atonement, but at worst a bloody banquet, at best a human feast, too human, too universal to need detailed elucidation. It is a ritual founded on a belief deep-rooted and long-lived; with the Greeks it was alive in Lucian’s[185] days. Charon asks Hermes why men dig a trench, and burn expensive feasts, and pour wine and honey into a trench. Hermes answers that he cannot think what good it can do to those in Hades, but ‘anyhow people believe that the dead are summoned up from below to the feast, and that they flutter round the smoke and fat and drink the honey draught from the trench.’ Here the ghosts invade the late and popular burnt sacrifice of the Olympians, but the principle is the same.

* * * * *

The Anthesteria was a festival of ghosts, and so far the _riddance_ of ghosts by means of placation has been shown to be an important element in ancient sacrifice and in the ancient notion of purification. But placation of ghosts does not exhaust the content even of ancient sacrifice: another element will appear in the festival of early summer that has next to be considered, the _Thargelia_.