appointed to reign in his turn a year, and suffer death at the end of it. At least this is the conclusion to which the following evidence points. According to the historian Berosus, who as a Babylonian priest spoke with ample knowledge, there was annually celebrated in Babylon a festival called the Sacaea. It began on the 16th day of the month Lous, and lasted for five days. During these five days masters and servants changed places, the servants giving orders and the masters obeying them. A prisoner condemned to death was dressed in the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, and to lie with the king’s concubines. But at the end of the five days he was stripped of his royal robes, scourged, and crucified.[1] This custom might perhaps have been explained as merely a grim jest perpetrated in a season of jollity at the expense of an unhappy criminal. But one circumstance—the leave given to the mock king to enjoy the king’s concubines—is decisive against this interpretation. Considering the jealous seclusion of
- ↑ Athenaeus, xiv. p. 639 C; Dio Chrysostom, Orat. iv. p. 69 sq. (vol. i. p. 76, ed. Dindorf). Dio Chrysostom does not mention his authority, but it was probably either Berosus or Ctesias. Though the execution of the mock king is not mentioned in the passage of Berosus cited by Athenaeus, the omission is probably due to the fact that the mention of it was not germane to Athenaeus’s purpose, which was simply to give a list of festivals at which masters waited on their servants. That the ζωγάνης was put to death is further shown by Macrobius, Sat. iii. 7, 6, “Animas vero sacratorum homnimim quos † zanas Graeci vacant, dis debitas aestimabant,” where for zanas we should probably read ζωγάνας with Liebrecht, in Philologus, xxii. 710, Bachofen, Die Sage von Tanaqnil, p. 52, note 16. The custom, so far as appears from our authorities, does not date from before the Persian domination in Babylon; but probably it was much older. In the passage of Dio Chrysostom ἐκρέμασαν should be translated “crucified” (or “impaled”), not “hung.” It is strange that this, the regular, sense of κρεμάννυμι, as applied to executions, should not be noticed even in the latest edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon. Hanging, though a mode of suicide, was not a mode of execution in antiquity either in the east or west. In one of the passages cited by L. and S. for the sense “to hang” (Plutarch, Caes. 2), the context proves that the meaning is and “to crucify.”
