or may not have been put to death, probably not, in historic Greece: but that he was no sacrifice to a god, and merely a human scapegoat bearing the pollutions of the city on his head, Miss Harrison and Mr. Murray seem to have proved.[1] Miss Harrison thinks that the two human scapegoats were criminals already condemned, and that they were done to death. Certainly a writer of 230 B.C., with another rather silly gossip of 1150 A.D. (Tzetzes), and a scholiast on Aristophanes, leave the impression that the men were killed, to prevent them from returning. But scapemen are one thing, and altars of the Olympians stained with human blood are another.
As to pre-Homeric times, Miss Harrison says, (p. 109),—"It may indeed be doubted whether we have any certain evidence of 'human sacrifice ' . . . among the Greeks even of mythological days." Iphigenia and Polyxena, she thinks, were slain, (of course not in Homer), to placate a ghost. Polyxena, in the Ionian epics of 750 to 600 B.C., was slain over the grave of Achilles, but the same poets tell us that Achilles was not buried in Troyland, he was carried by Thetis to the Isle of Leuke in the Euxine, where he was worshipped, and, says Pausanias, married happily, his wife being Helen of Troy!
The post-Homeric legends, whether in Ionian epics, historians, the tragic poets, or scraps preserved by antiquaries down to 1150 A.D., are all at odds, and only prove that such or such a writer or chapel-sacristan thought such or such a sacrifice feasible in prehistoric times. As a matter of method, all such evidence is suspicious, and we ought to use it with the utmost critical care; especially we must not select scraps which suit our theory and ignore others which contradict it. When the Achaean traditions in Homer backed by Hesiod take one view of a legendary personage, such as Minos, while the Attic traditions, really
- ↑ Harrison, op. cit., pp. 95-110; Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic, pp. 253-258.
