nature should bring him to his end, that he should submit to die. He observed, moreover, that no reasonable being, much less a monarch, ought to anticipate the scythe of time; and, abrogating this mortal law, he ordained that all his successors, if sane, should follow the precedent he gave, and the new law established by him.”[1]
This King of Sofala was, therefore, a bold reformer like Ergamenes, King of Ethiopia. We may conjecture that the ground for putting the Ethiopian kings to death was, as in the case of the Zulu and Sofala kings, the appearance on their person of any bodily defect or sign of decay; and that the oracle which the priests alleged as the authority for the royal execution was to the effect that great calamities would result from the reign of a king who had any blemish on his body; just as an oracle warned Sparta against a “lame reign,” that is, the reign of a lame king.[2] This conjecture is confirmed by the fact that the kings of Ethiopia were chosen for their size, strength, and beauty long before the custom of killing them was abolished.[3] To this day the Sultan of Wadâi must have no obvious bodily defect, and a king of Angoy cannot be crowned if he has a single blemish, such as a broken or filed tooth or the scar of an old wound.[4] It is only natural, therefore, to suppose, especially
- ↑ Dos Santos, “History of Eastern Ethiopia” (published at Paris in 1684), in Pinkerton’s Voyages and Travels, xvi. 684.
- ↑ Plutarch, Agesilans, 3.
- ↑ Herodotus, iii. 20; Aristotle, Politics, iv. 4, 4; Athenaeus, xiii. p. 566. According to Nicolaus Damascenus (Fr. 142, in Fragm. Historic. Graecor. ed. C. Müller, iii. p. 463), the handsomest and bravest man was only raised to the throne when the king had no heirs, the heirs being the sons of his sisters. But this limitation is not mentioned by the other authorities. Among the Gordioi the fattest man was chosen king; among the Syrakoi, the tallest, or the man with the longest head. Zenobius, v. 25.
- ↑ G. Nachtigal, Saharâ, und Sûdân (Leipzig, 1889), iii. 225; Bastian, Die deutsche Expedition an der Loango-Küste, i. 220.
