Potter, John; Anthon, Charles [Editor]: Archaeologia Graeca or the antiquities of Greece (New York, 1825)

(IF THK RELIGION OF ORtfECK.

•ihey were used at feasts, and then it was no wonder if they were also
sacrificed to the gods; and that they were so, Lucian(l) assures us.
Nay, to eat and sacrifice oxen, came at length to be so common, that /3s-
SvtsTv was used as a general term in the place of 3-weiv, mactarc. Thus in
Aristophanes (2) :

The person who first ventured to kill a labouring ox, was Cecrops, ac-
cording to Eusebius, as was observed in the beginning of this chapter,
Aratus charges it upon the men of the brazen age (3) ;

But Theon, in his commentary upon that passage, affirms the killing of
labouring oxen, to have been held unlawful in the time of the Trojan war,
and that the company of Ulysses, who are reported by Homer to have
suffered very much for their impiety in killing the sacred oxen of the sun,
were only guilty of killing the ploughing and labouring oxen, by whose
assistance we are nourished and see the sun. He farther adds, that the
Athenians were the first who fed upon the flesh of such oxen.

Neither was it lawful to sacrifice oxen only, but also men. Examples
of this sort of inhumanity were very common in most of the barbarous na-
tions. Concerning those who bordered upon the Jews, as also concern-
ing the Jews themselves, when they began to imitate their neighbours, we
find several testimonies in the sacred scriptures. Cajsar witnesseth the
same of the Gauls: Lucan, in particular, of that part of Gallia where
Massilia stands ; Tacitus, of the Germans and Britons. And the first
christian writers do in many places charge ft upon the heathens in gene -
ral. Nevertheless, it was not so common in Greece, and other civilized
nations, as in those which were barbarous. Among the primitive Gre-
cians, it was accounted an act of so uncommon cruelty and impiety, that
Lycaon, king of Arcadia, was feigned by the poets to have been turned
into a wolf, because he offered an human sacrifice to Jupiter (4). In
later ages it was undoubtedly more common and familiar : Aristomanes
the Messenian sacrificed three hundred men, among whom was Theo-
pompus one of the kings of Sparta, to Jupiter of Ithome. Themistocles,
in order to procure the assistance of the gods against the Persians, sacri-
ficed some captives of that nation, as we find it related in Plutarch (5).
Bacchus had an altar in Arcadia, upon which young damsels were beaten
to death with bundles of rods ; something like to which was practised by
the Lacedaemonians, who scourged their children (sometimes to death) in
honour of Diana Orthia. To the manes, and infernal god3, such sacri-
fices were very often offered : hence we read of Polyxena's being sacri-
ficed to Achilles : and Homer relates how that hero butchered twelve
Trojan captives at the funeral of Patroclus. Jilneas whom Virgil cele-
brates for his piety, is an example of the same practice (6) :

--Sulrnone creatos

Quatuor hic juvenes, totidem quos educat Ufens,

(1) Dialog, tie Sacrific.

(2) Pluti act. iv. seen. i.

(3) Pas:. 19. edit, Oxon.

(4) Pausanias Arcadicis, p, 457. edit. Hanov

(5) Plutarch, in Tbemist.

(6) 5Slneid, lib. x. ver. 517,