The Attic customs, then, do not suit Mr. Frazer's argument. But he has another Greek instance. Sacrificers called 'kings' offered to Cronos, at Olympia, in spring, and why should they not once have been sacrificed like Dasius, only in spring, not in November? This evidence is an inference from a presumed survival of human sacrifice to Cronos, who certainly received many such offerings.
We are not told, we do not know why the Athenian Cronia were shifted from March to July, or when, but let no arbitrary proceedings of the kind prevent them from being equated with the Saturnalia, only known to us, in fact, as a December festival, not as a vernal rejoicing. It is singularly unlucky that the July date of the Athenian Cronia does tally with the June-July date of the Persian Sacæa, as given by Mr. Frazer (and probably given correctly) in his second volume.[74] But in his third volume he awakes to the desirableness of placing the Sacæa æabout Eastertide, not in July, and so loses any benefit which his argument might have acquired from the coincidence in date of the Attic harvest feast (Cronia) and the Persian that date is originally established.[75]
How deeply this is to be regretted we shall see later, for periods of licence like the Sacæa usually occur just after harvest, the real time of the Cronia. Liberty to slaves of feasting with their masters was a feature of the harvest Cronia, as of many other harvest rejoicings.[76] But the conjecture that the Cronia originally were a vernal feast removes them from such merrymakings of harvest licence as the Sacæa in June-July. On the other hand, the conjecture that the Sacæa were vernal brings them into touch with Eastertide, and with the other conjecture that kings were once sacrificed at the conjecturally vernal Cronia, and so has its value for Mr. Frazer's argument.
VII. THE SACÆA
We are still trying to find an historical case of a man who is sacrificed in the character of a god and a king. The argument next introduces us to the Sacæa at Babylon, when the mock-king was hanged, the Persian feast, which, as we saw, M. Parmentier, following Herr Meissner, is inclined to identify with the ancient Babylonian Zagmuk, or Zakmuk, and with the Jewish Purim.
This identification, this theory that Zakmuk, Sacæa, and the Jewish Purim are all the same feast, is essential to Mr. Frazer's theory. But, before his theory was published, Meyer, in the new volume of his 'History of Antiquity,' had declared that the identification is impossible, philologically and as a matter of fact (Geschichte des Alterthums). It would be interesting to know the meaning of the word Sacæa, or Sacea, or Sakia, which Hyde translates 'convivial drinking, drinking healths' (compotatio, propinatio).[77] We remember the Persian butler, called a Sáki, in Omar Khayyam:
The eternal Sáki from the bowl has poured
Myriads of other bubbles, and will pour.
If the wine-pourer, the Sáki, of Omar is etymologically connected with the Sakæa, or Sacæa, then the feast means a wine-party. The Greeks, however, connected the Sacæa with the Sacæ, an Oriental tribe of the great race stretching from the Black Sea to Dacia. Indeed, in Strabo's time, the feasters at the Sacæa dressed as Scythians (Sacæ) and drank, as Horace tells us that the Scythians were used to drink. This occurred at Zela, a town of Pontus, where a love goddess, in Persian Anaitis, of the type of the Babylonian Ishtar, was adored. Mr. Frazer even conjectures that her high priest, or a substitute, 'who played the King of the Sacæa,' was yearly sacrificed here, perhaps as Tammuz.[78] No record of the fact has reached us.
The interesting point about this derivation of Sacæa from the tribe of the Sacæ is that the festival was believed, says Strabo, to commemorate a great victory of the Persians over the Sacæ. In precisely the same way the Persian feast of the Magophonia was supposed to commemorate a victory over and massacre of the Magi.[79] Purim, again, was held to commemorate a triumph of the Jews over the Persians and a massacre of the Persians. In three cases, then, Sacæa, Magophonia, and Purim, a feast which was a secular drinking bout, preserve the memory of a bloody victory. I do not observe that Mr. Frazer notices this coincidence.
But manifestly this kind of feast is not a feast of the death of a mock-king, still less, if possible, a religious festival of the death and resurrection of a vernal god.[80] Yet there really was (if we accept rather poor evidence) not a sacrifice but an execution of a mock-king, a criminal, at the Sacæa, as held in Babylon. I quote our authorities. First comes Athenæus, who is writing about feasts of unreason, at which, in various regions, the slaves are waited upon by their masters.[81] He says nothing of the execution of a mock-king. He remarks: 'Berosus, in the first book of his "History of Babylon," says that on the sixteenth day of the month Lous there is a great festival celebrated at Babylon, which is called Sakeas, and it lasts five days; and during these days it is the custom for the masters to be under the orders of their slaves, and one of the slaves puts on a robe like the king's, being called Zoganes, and is master of the house. And Ctesias also mentions this festival in the second book of his "History of Persia."' (Ctesias nourished rather earlier than Berosus, who is about 200 B.C.)