My guess, unlike Mr. Frazer's hypothesis, colligates all the facts. It explains the stripping, which Mr. Frazer does not, I think, explain. It explains the scourging and hanging, which Mr. Frazer is obliged to account for as a mitigation of burning. It does not require us to believe (what is incredible) that of old the Persian kings were sacrificed annually. It accounts for the occurrence of the execution at a season of secular licence just as in Ashanti. It involves us in no double, and, to my thinking, contradictory theory, that the sufferer is both king's proxy and also a representative of Tammuz, or Marduk, or Humman, or Gilgamesh, or Eabani.
But my guess is only a guess, and is offered chiefly to prove that guessing is easy. We cannot be certain about any explanation of a custom so remote, so unparalleled, and reported on evidence so late and so dubious as that of Dio Chrysostom.
Some student may point out that, though I boast of my theory as colligating all the facts, I have left out the sacred harlot. But she was only the child of an hypothesis of Mr. Frazer's. A scientific hypothesis is not required to colligate more than the known facts in each case. And I am by no means certain that the facts given by our only authority, Dio, were facts of history.
[1] See Appendix B, 'Martyrdom of Dasius.'
[2] G. B. iii. 76, 78, 84, 85, 86, 138, 119, note I; ii. 326; iii. 139; iii. 141, 143; iii. 145; iii. 147.
[3] G. B. iii. 139; Horace, Sat. ii. 7, 4; Macrobius, i. 7, 26; Justin, xliii. i. 4; Plutarch, Sulla, 18; Lucian, Sat. 5, 7.
[4] G. B. iii. 145.
[5] G. B. iii. 84.
[6] G. B. iii. 119, note 1.