Alopecus (the ass and the fox), sons of Agis, are said to have found the idol in a bush, and to have been struck mad at the sight of it. Those who sacrificed to the goddess fell to blows and slew each other; a pestilence followed, and it became clear that the goddess demanded human victims. "Her altar must be drenched in the blood of men," the victim being chosen by lot. Lycurgus got the credit of substituting the rite in which boys were flogged before the goddess to the effusion of blood for the older human sacrifices.[1] The Taurian Artemis, adored with human sacrifice, and her priestess, Iphigenia, perhaps a form of the goddess, are familiar examples of this sanguinary ritual.[2] Suchier is probably correct in denying that these sacrifices are of foreign origin. They are closely interwoven with the oldest idols and oldest myths of the districts least open to foreign influence. An Achaean example is given by Pausanias.[3] Artemis was adored with the offering of a beautiful girl and boy. Not far from Brauron, at Halæ, was a very ancient temple of Artemis Tauropolos, in which blood was drawn from a man's throat by the edge of the sword, clearly a modified survival of human sacrifice. The whole connection of Artemis with Taurian rites has been examined by Müller,[4] in his Orchomenos.[5]
- ↑ Paus., iii. 8, 16. Cf. Müller, Dorians, book ii. chap. 9, 6. Pausanias, viii. 23, i, mentions a similar custom, ordained by the Delphian oracle, the flogging of women at the feast of Dionysus in Alea of Arcadia.
- ↑ Cf. Müller, Dorians, ii. 9, 6, and Glaus, op. cit., cap. v.
- ↑ Paus., vii. 19.
- ↑ Op. cit., ii. 9, 6.
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 311. Cf. Euripides, Iph. Taur., 1424, and Roscher, Lexikon, p. 568.
