If tragedy consists in the conflict of deep emotions, and religion in obeying the divine rather than the human, few deeds have been more tragic, none more religious than this. In that scene at Aulis when the warrior-king gave up his child at the prophet’s bidding to stay the wrath of Artemis against his host, the tragedy was indeed intensified by the strength of the human tie between the sacrificer and the victim; but blind and awe-struck submission to a prophet’s decree is less grandly religious than clear-sighted recognition and courageous application of the belief that the dead pass immediately into the very presence of the gods. Here are the two given conditions: first, the urgency of the present or the peril of the future requires that a request for help be safely conveyed at all costs to that god or saint in whose province the control of the danger lies; secondly, the safest way of sending a message to that god or saint is by the mouth of a human messenger whose road is over the pass of death. There is only one solution of that problem. And if it is true that only some eighty years ago the problem was solved at so cruel a cost, then the faith of this people in their communion with those on whose knees the future lies is more intense, more vital, more courageous than that of more Western nations whose religion has long been subordinated or at least allied to morality, and whose acts of worship are all well-regulated and eminently decorous.
Human sacrifice is known to have been practised in ancient Greece and the custom probably continued well into the Christian era. What was the motive which prompted the continuance of so cruel a rite? Was it the same as that which the old peasant of Santorini assigned for the performance of a like act in his own experience—that conception of the victim as a messenger with which he can have been familiar only from native and oral tradition? Assuredly some strong religious motive must have compelled the ancients to a rite which in the absence of such motive would have been an indelible stigma upon their civilisation, refuting all their claims to emancipation of thought and freedom of intellect, and branding them the very bond-slaves of grossest superstition. Even though they lived on the marches of the East where human life is of small account, the horror of the rite is in too vivid a contrast with Hellenic enlightenment for us to see in it a mere callous retention of an unmeaning and savage custom;but that horror is at least mitigated if underlying the practice there was some deep religious motive, if a genuine faith in the possibility of direct intercourse with heaven exalted above the sacredness of human life the sacred privilege of sending a messenger to present the whole people’s petition before their god.
But while it is easy to perceive that such a motive is in harmony with that belief in the possibility of the communion of man with God which is so pronounced a feature in the religion of the ancient Greeks no less than in that of their descendants, it is a far harder task actually, to prove that this motive was the one acknowledged justification for human sacrifice. Ancient literature is extremely reticent on the whole subject; the very fact of the existence of the rite is known chiefly from late writers, Plutarch[918], Porphyry[919], and Tzetzes[920]; and anything like a discussion of the motives which underlay it is nowhere to be found. This reticence however was prompted, we may suppose, simply and solely by the patent barbarity of the act; it in no way impugns the latent beauty of the motive. Rather the persistence in a rite which did violence to men’s humaner feelings and moral sense proves the strength of the appeal which the motive for it must have addressed to their religious convictions. There was no place for shame in the belief that death was the road by which alone a human messenger could gain immediate access to the gods; but if a messenger were required to go at regular intervals, the regular occurrence of deaths required murder. This, I think, was the cause of shame and reticence.
Now if this very simple analysis of the feelings which almost barred the discussion or even mention of human sacrifice by ancient authors is correct, we should expect to find that, where death occurred naturally and not by human intervention, the conception of the dying or the dead as messengers to the unseen world would find ready and unembarrassed expression. And especially is this to be expected among the Greeks with whom grief has never imposed a check upon garrulity, but rather the loudness of the lamentation has always been the test of the poignancy of the sorrow. It is therefore in funeral-dirges and such-like that we must look for the expression of this idea.
An organised ceremony of lamentation is at the present day an essential part of every Greek funeral, and many dirges sung on such occasions have been collected and published. In these the conception of the departed as a messenger, or even as a carrier of goods, abounds[921]. A Laconian dirge runs thus: ‘A prudent lady, a virtuous wife, willed and resolved to go down to Hades. “Whoso has words” (she cried) “let him say them, and messages, let him send them; whoso has a son there unarmed, let him send his arms; whoso has son there a scribe, let him send his papers; whoso has daughter undowered, let him send her dowry; whoso has a little child, let him send his swaddling clothes.”’[922]
The same thought inspires a dirge in Passow’s collection[923], in which the thoughts of a dead man, round whose body the women are sitting and weeping, are thus expressed: ‘Why stand ye round about me, all ye sorrowing women? Have I come forth from Hades, forth from the world below? Nay, now am I making ready, now am I at the point to go. Whoso hath word, let him speak it, and message, let him tell it; whoso hath long complaint, let him write and send it.’ And again in another funeral-song a dead man is described as a ‘trusty courier bound for the world below[924].’
This sentiment, so frequently and so clearly expressed in the modern dirges, is of ancient descent. Polyxena, about to be sacrificed at Achilles’ tomb, is made by Euripides to address to her mother the question, ‘What am I to say from thee to Hector or to thy aged husband?’, and Hecuba answers, ‘My message is that I am of all women most miserable[925].’ And it is the same genuinely Hellenic thought which Vergil attributes to Neoptolemus when he answers Priam’s taunts of degeneracy with the words, ‘These tidings then thou shalt carry, and shalt go as messenger to my sire, the son of Peleus; forget not to tell him of my sorry deeds and that Neoptolemus is no true son. Now die[926].’
And it is not only in the poetry of ancient and modern Greece but also in the actual customs of the people that this idea has foundexpression. At the present day funerals are constantly treated by the peasants as real opportunities of communicating with their dead friends and relatives. Whether the custom is ever carried out exactly as it once was by the Galatae, who used to write letters to the departed and to lay them on the pyre of each new courier to the lower world[927], I cannot definitely say; but a proverbial expression used of a person dangerously ill,μαζεύει γράμματα γιὰ τοὺς πεθαμμένους, ‘he is collecting letters for the dead,’ lends colour to the supposition that either now or in earlier days this form of the custom is or has been in vogue. But in general now certainly the messages are not written but verbal. It is a common custom, noticed by many writers on Greek folklore[928], for the women who assist in the ceremonial lamentation which precedes the interment to insert in the dirges, which they each in turn contribute, messages which they require the newly-dead to deliver to some departed person whom they name, or, according to a slightly different usage, to whisper such messages secretly in the ear of the dead either immediately before the body is borne away to the church[929], or, where women are allowed to attend the actual interment, at the moment of ‘the last kiss’ (ὁ τελευταῖος ἀσπασμός), which forms an essential and very painful part of the Eastern rite.
The antiquity of this custom appears to me to be as certain as anything which is not explicitly stated in ancient literature can be. For in every detail of ancient funeral usage known to us there is so complete a coincidence with modern usage that it would be absurd not to supplement records of the past by observation of the present. Actually to establish that identity in every particular is beyond the scope of the present chapter and must be reserved until later; but my assertion may be justified here by reference to three points in Solon’s legislation on the subject of funerals. That legislation was directed against three practices to which mourners were addicted in this ceremonial lamentation of which I have been speaking—laceration of the cheeks and breast, the use of set and premeditated dirges, and lamentationfor any other than him whose funeral was in progress[930]—customs which all still flourish.
The laceration is quite a common feature of such occasions. Indeed in some districts the women nearest of kin to the deceased are almost thought to fail in their duty to him if they do not work themselves up into an hysterical mood and testify to the wildness of their grief by tearing out their hair and scratching their cheeks till the blood flows. Such a display of agony, it must be remembered, comes easy to the Greeks: for their temperament is such that, even when the fact of the bereavement has moved them little, therôleof the bereaved excites them to the most dramatic excesses. Men rarely if ever now take part in this scene, and are certainly not guilty of such transports; for their usual method of mourning is to let their hair grow instead of tearing it out, and to avoid laceration by forswearing the razor.
Again, the use of set dirges, composed or adapted beforehand to suit the estate and circumstances of the deceased, is almost universal; and so essential to the funeral-rite is the formal lamentation that there are actually women whose profession it is to intone dirges and who are hired for the occasion. These professional mourners (μυρολογήτριαιςorμυρολογίστριαις) take their seats round the corpse in order of seniority and assist the wife, mother, sisters, cousins, and aunts, who also take their seats according to degree of kinship (the head of the bier being of course the place of honour), to keep up an incessant flow of lamentation. The scene differs in no detail, save that the hired mourners now are always women, from that which was enacted round the body of Hector. There too ‘they set singers to lead the lamentation,’ and of the women present it was Andromache, the wife, who began the wailing, Hecuba, the mother, who followed next, and Helen whose voice was heard third and last[931]. The singers who led the lamentation were probably then as now hired, for Plato speaks of paid minstrels at funerals using a particular style of music known as Carian[932]—a custom suggestive of antiquity; and in all probability the singing of set dirges, which Solon tried to suppress, was the recognised business of professionaland paid mourners; for dirges premeditated by the relatives would have been less objectionable, one may suppose, than their hysterical improvisations. What success his legislation obtained in Athens cannot now be ascertained; but the custom was undoubtedly universal in Greece, and with the exception of the Ionian islands, where the Venetians imitated Solon in sternly repressing what they regarded as a scandal and a grave offence against public decency[933], all parts of Greece still to some extent retain it; and it is likely long to survive for the simple reason that lamentation has always been held by the Greeks to be as essential to the repose of the dead as burial. There is more than hazard in the repeated collocation ofἄκλαυτος, ἄταφος, ‘unwept, unburied,’ in the tragedians[934]; there is the religious idea that the dead need a twofold rite, both mourning and interment.
The third point in the funeral customs to which Solon demurred was that mourners attending the ceremony of lamentation misused the occasion by wailing again for their own dead and neglecting him whose death had brought them together. This practice was known to the Homeric age; for while Briseïs ‘tore with her hands her breast and smooth neck and fair face’ and with shrill wailing and tears made lament over Patroclus, ‘the women joined their groans to hers, for Patroclus in form, but each really for their own losses[935].’ There is no intention of satire here; it is simply a naïve touch in the picture of a familiar and pathetic scene. Patroclus’ death furnished the excuse and the occasion for tears, but most of those tears—pent up till they might flow freely and without shame—were shed for nearer sorrows, dearer losses. To-day the manner is the same. In some districts, as in Chios[936], a woman’s desire to lament again over her own dead is recognised as so legitimate that etiquette merely prescribes that she first must make mention of the present dead and afterwards she is free to mourn for whom she will; and indeed throughout Greece the opportunity for rehearsing former sorrows is rarely neglected.
Now when in these details that have been enumerated (as well as in many others such as the washing, arraying, and crowning of the dead body, the antiquity of which will be treated in another chapter[937]) that portion of ancient usage which is known from literary sources is found surviving, point for point identical, as a portion of modern usage, then the defect of ancient literary sources is best and most reasonably supplemented from present observations. Thus we know from theIliadthat the women of the Homeric age used Patroclus’ funeral as an occasion for renewing their wailing over their own losses; we know too from Plutarch that in Solon’s age the same practice had attained such excessive proportions that legislation intervened to check it; the only detail which we are not told is whether the mourners in commemorating thus their own dead friends were wont to entrust messages for them to him about whose bier they were assembled. But when the ancient picture of funeral-usage corresponds thus in every distinguishable trait with the living scenes of to-day, clearly the right way of restoring that which is obscured or obliterated in the picture is to go and to see still enacted in all its traditional fulness that very scene which the remnants of ancient literature imperfectly pourtray. And by going and seeing we learn this—that one strongly marked characteristic of funeral-rites is the belief, both expressed in words and evidenced in acts, that he whose death has brought the mourners together is a messenger who can and will carry tidings to those who have preceded him to the world below. Then on looking back we may feel confident that that aspect of death, which prompted Polyxena to ask what message she should bear from Hecuba to Hector and to Priam, was no mere poetic conceit imagined by Euripides, but a common feature of the popular religion. The belief that the passing spirit is a sure and unerring messenger to another world has ever been the property of the Hellenic people.
Since then this belief existed in ancient times and the practice of human sacrifice also existed, it remains to enquire whether the two were correlated as cause and effect, as in my story from Santorini. In this enquiry the reticence of ancient literature on the subject precludes, as I have pointed out, actual certainty; but a passage from Herodotus offers a clue which is worth following up.
In speaking of the Getae, a Thracian people, he remarks that they believe in their own immortality. ‘They hold that they themselves do not die, but the departed go to dwell with a god named Zalmoxis.... And every four years they choose one of their own number by lot and despatch him as messenger to Zalmoxis, enjoining upon him the delivery of their various requests. The manner of sending him is this. Some of them are set to hold up three spears, while others take their emissary by his arms and by his legs and swinging him up into the air let him fall upon the spear-points. If he be pierced by them mortally, they consider that their god is favourable to them; but if death do not result, they lay the blame on the messenger himself and give him a bad name; but having censured him they despatch another man instead. Their injunctions are given to the messenger before he is killed[938].’
Now no one can fail to notice that Herodotus’ own interest in this custom centres not in the idea which prompted it but in the manner of carrying it out. His account of it reads as if he knew his Greek readers to be familiar enough with the conception of human sacrifice as a means of sending a messenger to some god; but he seems to be contrasting the method adopted with some rite of which they were cognisant. Tacit comparisons of foreign customs with those of Greece occur all through Herodotus’ work. The points which he here seems to emphasize are, first, that the messenger of the Getae was one of themselves, not a prisoner of war or a slave; secondly, that impaling was the ritual mode of death—a mode which the Greeks held in abhorrence and would never have employed; and, thirdly, that the messages were committed to the victim’s charge before and not after death. The inference therefore is that Herodotus and the Greeks for whom he was writing were accustomed to some rite which was inspired by the same motive but was differently executed, the messenger being other than a citizen, the method of sacrifice less barbarous to their minds than impaling, and the messages being whispered, as at funerals, in the dead victim’s ear; for of course, if the newly-dead could carry tidings to men in the other world, they could equally well carry petitions to gods.
Moreover my contention that Herodotus had in mind some Greek rite, with which he was contrasting that of the Getae, is borne out by the passage immediately following, in which the idea of comparison comes to the surface. This Zalmoxis, he continues, according to the Greeks of the Hellespont and the Euxine, was in origin not a god but a man. He served for a time as a slave to Pythagoras in Samos, but having gained his liberty and considerable wealth returned to Thrace and tried to reclaim his countrymen from savagery and ignorance. The ways of life and the doctrines which he inculcated were such as he had derived from intercourse with Greeks and above all with Pythagoras, whose teachings concerning immortality and a future life in a happier land he both preached and (by the trick of hiding himself for three years in a subterranean chamber and then re-appearing to those who had believed him dead) illustrated in his own person. This story is neither accepted nor rejected by Herodotus, but, estimating Zalmoxis to have been of much earlier date than Pythagoras, he inclines slightly to the view that Zalmoxis was really a native god of the Getae.
If we may assume this view to be correct, what significance is to be attached to the story of Zalmoxis’ relations with Pythagoras? Evidently it is one of those fictions by which the ancient Greeks loved to bring the great figures of history into contact and personal acquaintance. Pythagoras and Zalmoxis were two names with which was associated the doctrine of immortality; some story therefore of their meeting was desirable. And since Pythagoras was Greek, Zalmoxis barbarian, the legend that the slave Zalmoxis was instructed by his master Pythagoras was more flattering to Hellenic pride than the idea that Pythagoras in his travels should have borrowed so important a doctrine from a foreign religion; and if chronology did not concur—well, imagination always had precedence of accuracy. To the Greeks who invented the tale fitness was of more account than fact; and for us who dismiss the actual story as mere fiction their sense of its fitness remains instructive. It shows that the Greeks recognised the existence of specially close relations between the religion of the Getae and their own—relations attested probably not only by their common acceptance of the doctrine of immortality, for that was the property of other peoples too, but also by some resemblancebetween the rites of the Getae which were based upon that doctrine and similar rites practised, as Herodotus hints, by themselves.
Then again if the motive which we have found operating in Herodotus’ time among the Getae and operating also less than a century ago among the peasants of Santorini was not the motive which prompted the ancient Greeks to human sacrifice, how can we account for the long perpetuation of the practice? It is practically certain that it was tolerated in Athens during the period of her ascendency and highest enlightenment[939]; but the repugnance which it inspired is proved by the reticence which almost concealed the fact from posterity. It was practised apparently in honour of Lycaean Zeus in the time of Pausanias[940]; but the horror of it closed his lips concerning this ‘secret sacrifice.’ Suppose then that the motive for this sacrifice had been the sating of a wolf-like god—for so Pausanias seems to have understood the epithetΛυκαῖος[941]—with human flesh; could such a rite have continued in any part of Greece for some six centuries after it had become repugnant at least in Athens? Was the supposed motive so sublime that it was held to hallow or even to mitigate the barbarity of the act? Or did the custom live on without motive when an anthropomorphic Zeus had superseded the old wolf-like deity? Custom, it is true, often outlives its parent belief; but custom itself is not invulnerable nor deathless if it has to battle against sentiments irreconcilably opposed to that original belief. If the purpose of propitiating a wolf-god with human flesh was rendered null and void by the modifications which the conception of Lycaean Zeus had undergone, how could the crude and savage rite have still flourished in the uncongenial soil of an humaner civilisation—unless of course some new stream of religious thought, instead of the original motive, had watered and revived it? The very fact that so hideous a custom was so long maintained in civilised Greece argues that, whatever the original motive of it may have been, only some strong religious belief in the necessity of it could have saved it from extinction in the historical age. Surely it was some convincing plea of justification, and not mereacquiescence in the inveteracy of custom, which caused Pausanias, though he could not bring himself to describe or to discuss the horrid sacrifice, yet to conclude his brief allusion to it with the words, ‘as it was in the beginning and is now, so let it be[942].’
My reasons then for suggesting that one motive which led to human sacrifice in ancient Greece was the belief that the victim could carry a petition in person to the gods are threefold. First, that motive was recognised as sufficient by a peasant of Santorini, who can only have inherited the idea, just as all the ideas of divination have been inherited, from the ancient world. Secondly, Herodotus appears to contrast the method of such sacrifice among the Getae with the method of some similar rite familiar to his audience and to imply that the motive in each case was the same. Thirdly, without an adequate motive—and it is hard to see what other motive could have been adequate in the case which I have taken—it is almost inconceivable that human sacrifice should have continued, in spite of the repugnance which it certainly excited, for so long a time. For these reasons I submit that the known belief of the ancients that the dead could serve as messengers to the other world and their known custom of making human sacrifice were correlated in the minds of thinking men in the more civilised ages as cause and effect.
The reservation, ‘in the minds of thinking men in the more civilised ages,’ is necessary; for I am at a loss how to determine whether the belief in question was the original motive of the custom or a later justification of the custom when its original motive had been forgotten. Either the belief was coeval with the custom, and both were inherited together from ancestors belonging to that ‘lower barbaric stage’ of culture in which ‘men do not stop short at the persuasion that death releases the soul to a free and active existence, but they quite logically proceed to assist nature by slaying men in order to liberate their souls for ghostly uses[943]’; or on the other hand the custom of human sacrifice originated in some other motive (such as satisfying the appetite of a beast-like god) and remaining itself unchanged, while the conception of the god was gradually humanised until his beast-form and therewith the original purpose of the sacrifice were lost tomemory, embarrassed a more enlightened and humaner age until a new justification for it was found in the messenger-functions of the dead.
In support of the former supposition it may be mentioned that tribes far more barbarous than the Getae (who may have benefited from Greek civilisation) have evolved the particular ghostly use of dead men’s souls which we are considering. In Dahome, according to Captain Burton, not only are a large number of wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, and soldiers slaughtered at the king’s funeral, that they may wait on him in another world, but ‘whatever action, however trivial, is performed by the (new) king, it must dutifully be reported to his sire in the shadowy realm. A victim, almost always a war-captive, is chosen; the message is delivered to him, an intoxicating draught of rum follows it, and he is dispatched to Hades in the best of humours[944].’ There is therefore no objection to the supposition that the Hellenic people too from the days of prehistoric savagery were constantly actuated by this motive.
On the other hand it is equally admissible to think that some cruder motive first led the population of Greece to adopt the custom of human sacrifice, and that it was only comparatively late in their history, in an age when men’s humaner instincts were offended by the atrocity of the rite and religious speculation on the subject of the soul’s immortality was rife, that the old custom was invested with a new meaning. Herodotus clearly recognised the connexion between the rite of the Getae and the doctrine of immortality which was bound up with the names of Zalmoxis and Pythagoras; and it is possible that in Greece too the later justification of human sacrifice was founded on the same doctrine. It would have been an irony of fate truly if a doctrine not indeed founded, I think, but largely expounded by Pythagoras, who forbade his followers to kill even animals for the purposes of food, should have been so construed as to furnish a plea for the immolation of men; but it is quite clear that a belief in the activity of the soul after death, superimposed upon the desire for close communion between men and gods, might have had that issue.
But, as I have said, I see no means of deciding at what date the correlation of the conception of the dead as messengers andthe custom of human sacrifice as cause and effect first entered men’s minds; but that in the historical age that correlation was acknowledged seems to me highly probable. Such a view would certainly have militated against the substitution of animal for human victims; for only a man would have been felt to be capable of understanding the message and of delivering it to the god to whom he was sent. This perhaps is the reason why the use of a surrogate animal—though early introduced, as one version of the story of Iphigenia proves—never met with universal acceptance, and why also at the present day there remains a vague but real feeling that for the proper laying of foundations a human victim is preferable to beast or bird[945].
To single out particular instances of ancient sacrifice in which this motive may have operated is, owing to the general absence of data concerning the ritual, well-nigh impossible. The sacrifice to Lycaean Zeus was performed upon an altar before which, according to Pausanias[946], there stood two columns and upon them two gilded eagles; and we may surmise that as the eagles represented to his mind the messengers sent by Zeus to men, so did the human victim represent the messenger of men to Zeus. But this can be only a conjecture, for Pausanias’ silence admits of no more.
Of the ceremony connected with thepharmakos, or human scape-goat, at Athens and elsewhere somewhat more is known. Certain persons ungainly in appearance and debased in character were maintained at the public expense, in order that, if any calamity such as a pestilence should befall the city, they might be sacrificed to purify the city from pollution. These persons were calledφαρμακοί, ‘scape-goats,’ orκαθάρματα, ‘purifications[947].’ ‘If calamity overtook a city through divine wrath, whether it were famine or pestilence or any other bane,’ apharmakoswas led out to an appointed place for sacrifice. Cheese, barley-cake, and dried figs were given to him. He was smitten seven times on the privy parts with squills and wild figs and other wild plants; and finally he was burnt with fire upon fuel collected from wild trees, and the ashes were scattered to the winds and the sea[948]. At Athens, it appears, this rite was performed, not under the stress of occasional calamity, but annually as part of theThargelia, and was therefore associated with Apollo[949].
All this evidence, with corroboration from other sources than those to which I have referred, has recently been set forth by Miss Harrison, who certainly has made out a strong case for the view which she thus summarises: ‘The leading out of thepharmakosis then a purely magical ceremony based on ignorance and fear; it is not a human sacrifice to Apollo or to any other divinity or even ghost, it is a ceremony of physical expulsion[950].’ In other words, thepharmakoswas treated as an incarnation of the polluting influence from which the city was suffering; and his expulsion (which only incidentally involved his death) was the means of purification.
But there are certain points in the practice which incline me to put forward another view of thepharmakos. His mission undoubtedly was to purify the city; but the question to my mind is whether he was expelled as a personification of the pollution or was led out and despatched to the other world as a messenger on the city’s behalf to petition Apollo or some other deity for purification from the defilement.
It might, I think, have been this Greek rite which was present to Herodotus’ mind when he was describing human sacrifice among the Getae. He was apparently familiar, we saw, with the conception of the human victim as a messenger; and the contrasts in method which seem to have struck him most would certainly have been provided by the ceremony of thepharmakos. The Getae chose the victim by lot from among themselves; the Athenians apparently selected some deformed or criminal slave—one of the very scum of the population. The Getae impaled their messenger upon the spears of warriors; the Athenians treated thepharmakosas a burnt-sacrifice. The Getae entrusted their messages to the victim before he was slain; did the Athenians perchance whisper their petitions for purification in the ear of the deadpharmakosas he lay on the pyre? Was he the messenger whose treatment Herodotus had in mind?
There are certain points in the ritual itself which make for that view. Thepharmakoswas maintained for a time at the publiccost. Why so? A kindred custom of Marseilles in ancient times supplies the answer. ‘Whenever the inhabitants of Marseilles suffer from a pestilence, one of the poorer class offers himself to be kept at the public expense and fed on specially pure foods. After this has been done he is decorated with sacred boughs and clad in holy garments, and led about through the whole city to the accompaniment of curses, in order that upon him may fall all the ills of the whole city, and thus he is cast headlong down[951].’ Thepharmakoswas therefore publicly maintained in order that he might be purified by diet. Again, we know, thepharmakoswas provided before the sacrifice with cheese, barley-cake, and dried figs—pure food, it would seem, with which to sustain himself on his journey to the other world. Again, he was smitten seven times on the privy parts with squills and branches of wild fig and other wild plants. Why with squill and wild fig? Because plants of this kind were purgative, as Miss Harrison[952]very clearly points out. Among other evidences of the existence of this idea, Lucian[953]makes Menippus relate how before he was allowed to consult the oracle of the dead he was “purged and wiped clean and consecrated with squill and torches.” And why on the privy parts? Because sexual purity was required. When Creon was bidden to sacrifice a son for the salvation of his city in a time of calamity such as commonly called for the sacrifice of apharmakos, Haemon was refused because of his marriage[954], and Menoeceus was the only pure victim. And why beaten at all? Because again, as Miss Harrison shows[955], the act of beating was expulsive of evil and pollution. So then the chief part of the ritual was devoted to purifying thepharmakoshimself.
But if thepharmakoswas thus himself made pure, how could his expulsion purify the city? How could a man deliberately cleansed by every religious or magical device serve as the embodiment of that pollution of which the city sought to be rid? Miss Harrison[956]seeks to explain this difficulty on the grounds of that combination of the notions ‘sacred’ and ‘accursed,’ ‘pure’ and ‘impure,’ which the savage describes in the word ‘taboo.’ But the notion of ‘taboo,’ though complex, is not illogical; anythingsupernatural, which when properly used or respected is holy, is logically enough believed to be fraught with a curse for those who misuse or disregard it. But deliberately to purify that which is to be the embodiment of defilement is not the outcome of a complex but logical primitive notion; it is simply illogical.
The view of the rite then which I propose is briefly this. Thepharmakoswas originally a messenger, representative of a whole people, carrying to some god their petition for deliverance from any great calamity; and, that he might be fitted to enter the presence of the god, he was purified, like Menippus before he was allowed to approach even an oracle, by every known means. But the office ofpharmakosdid not always remain a post of honour. It was naturally not coveted by those who found any pleasure in life; and gradually the duty devolved upon the lowest of the low. Instead of an Iphigenia or a Menoeceus the people’s chosen representative was some criminal or slave, and the personality of the messenger overshadowed the character of his office. The original purport of the rite was forgotten. Instead of being honoured as the people’s ambassador, specially purified for his mission of intercession with the gods, he was deemed an outcast by whose removal the people could rid themselves of pollution. Thus the religious rite lost its true motive and degenerated into a magical ceremony of riddance.
That this debased idea was the vulgar interpretation of the rite in historical Athens is absolutely proved by a passage from Lysias’ speech against Andocides: ‘We needs must hold that in avenging ourselves and ridding ourselves of Andocides we purify the city and perform apotropaic ceremonies and solemnly expel apharmakosand rid ourselves of a criminal; for of this sort the fellow is[957].’ But the whole ritual forms a protest against that idea. Its keynote was the sanctification, not the degradation, of thepharmakos. In Marseilles indeed the people’s change of attitude towards the messenger whom they so scrupulously purified had gone so far that imprecations upon him were substituted for the prayers which he should have been bidden to carry; but in Athens and in Ionia the ritual itself, so far as we know, contained no suggestion of contempt or hatred of the victim. It was onlythe appearance and the character of those who were selected aspharmakoiwhich made of the word a term of vulgar abuse such as we find it to be in Aristophanes[958]; for the scattering of the victim’s ashes to the winds and waves must not be interpreted as an act denoting any abhorrence of the dead man. Its significance is rather this. Religious motives had involved an act of bloodshed, and the people who had performed it as a religious duty were, like Orestes, none the less guilty of blood. In any case of blood-guilt it was held prudent for the guilty party to take precautions against his victim’s vengeance; and one means to this end was, as we shall see later, to burn the body and scatter its ashes. In the modern story from Santorini there is a precaution mentioned which has precisely the same object; the victim’s hands, as well as his head, were cut off. This, as I shall show later, is a survival of the oldμασχαλισμόςor mutilation of murdered men, by which they were rendered innocuous, if they should return from the grave, and incapable of vengeance upon their murderers. There is then, I repeat, nothing in the ritual itself which suggests any contempt or hatred of the victim, as there assuredly would have been if from the first he had been the incarnation of the city’s defilement.
Possibly then thepharmakoswas originally a messenger from men to gods, sent in any time of great calamity and peril; possibly too this significance of the rite had not in Herodotus’ time been wholly supplanted by the lower view to which Lysias gave utterance. Lysias was addressing a jury and abusing an opponent; a vulgar and base presentment of thepharmakossuited the occasion. But sober and reflective men may still have read in the ritual its early meaning and have recognised in thepharmakos, for all his sorry appearance, the purified representative of a people sent by them to lay their prayers before some god.
This, I am aware, is a suggestion and no more. To prove the existence of this motive underlying any given case of human sacrifice in ancient times is, owing to the meagre character of the data, impossible. But since at any rate the conception of the dead as messengers was known to the ancients—for that much, I think, I have proved—the suggestion deserves consideration. If it be right, it shows that even the most ugly and repulsiveceremonies of Greek worship need not be regarded as damning refutation of the beauty of Greek religion. Though the act of human sacrifice is horrible, the motive for it may have been sublime. Where else in the civilised world is the faith which whispers messages in a dead ear? Who shall cast the first stone at those who in this faith dared to speed their messenger upon the road of death? Surely such a deed is the crowning act of a faith which by dreams and oracles, by auspices and sacrificial omens, has ever sought after communion with the gods.
Yet no, that faith aspired even higher; another chapter will treat of a sacrament which foreshadowed not merely the colloquy of men with gods as of servants with masters, but a closer communion between them, the communion of love; for, as Plato says in the text which heads this chapter, ‘all sacrifices and all the arts of divination, wherein consists the mutual communion of gods and men, are for nought else but the guarding and tending of Love.’