Mr. Murray suspects that stories of sacrifices of maidens "would have been rejected from the Iliad, not only because human sacrifice was a barbarity, but also because the stories involved too intense an interest in women."[19] As I am intensely interested in Helen, Hecuba and Andromache, in the Iliad, the argument seems to me strange. As to Mr. Murray's theory that the Cretan king was done to death at stated intervals,[20] the topic cannot be treated satisfactorily here. I do not believe that anything of the sort described occurred anywhere, and I am surprised at the remark, "We have no tradition of Minos's death."[21]
The Minyan story of the intended sacrifice of Phryxus and Helle is a world-wide Märchen, with sacrifice substituted for endophagous cannibalism.
Finally, I do not suppose that the ferocities of Achilles towards Hector, and at the funeral of Patroclus, are an expurgated version of a lay in which they were narrated with pride and pleasure.[22] It was customary, in Homeric warfare, to maltreat the dead; but Achilles went too far, and persevered too long. He is, as Mr. Murray says, "a man mad with grief, a man starving and sleepless," a man who knows that Hector intended to mutilate his friend and give his body to the dogs. But these excuses do not palliate the perseverance of Achilles in outrage, or his slaying of the twelve Trojan captives. Sacrificed they were not. There was no ritual for such a slaughter, 'and, as a matter of fact, it is crowded into a shamefaced line and a half.' You would expect this sacrifice to have at the very least twenty."[23]
You might expect that, if you believed that the Achaeans had a ritual for human sacrifice! If they had, which I deem inconceivable, we may readily believe that the spirit of historic Hellas would have expurgated eighteen and a half of the twenty lines.
Much of this theory of expurgation of the Iliad and Odyssey seems to me to rest on the assumption of εὐφημία. This means abstention from ill-omened words in poems recited at a great public festival. It is impossible for me to understand why words referring, for example, to the habitual and legal purification of homicides, or to the established cult of heroes, should be deemed "ill-omened" at the recitations, in no way religious, at a public holiday, and yet be deemed "well-omened" in the performances of Athenian tragedy.
If the superstitions of the conquered races were not those of the conquerors, they could not be in the epics of the conquerors. If they were not there, les intellectuels of Athens could not expurgate them.
[1] R. G. E. p. 134.
[2] Iliad, xi. 145-147.
[3] xiii. 202-204.