Human sacrifices are offered with a view to averting perils arising from the sea or from rivers.
When the Greeks were afflicted by stress of weather at Aulis, they were bidden to sacrifice Iphigenia, in order to lull the winds.[131] Menelaus was persecuted by the Egyptians for sacrificing two children when he was desirous of sailing away and contrary winds detained him.[132] According to an Athenian writer, the colonists who first went to Lesbos were directed by an oracle to throw a virgin into the sea, as an offering to Poseidon.[133] Sextus Pompeius cast men into the sea as an offering to Neptune.[134] Hamilcar, also, following a custom of his country, threw a company of priests into the sea, as a sacrifice to the sea god.[135] The Saxons, when they were about to leave the coast of Gaul and sail home, sacrificed the tenth part of their captives.[136] The Vikings of Scandinavia, when launching a new ship, seemed to have bound a victim to the rollers on which the vessel slipped into the sea, thus reddening the keel with sacrificial blood.[137] In 1784, at the launching of one of the Bey of Tripoli’s cruisers, a black slave was led forward and fastened at the prow of the vessel.[138] The Fijians launched their canoes over the living bodies of slaves as rollers,[139] or, according to another account, when a large canoe was launched, they laid hold of the first person, man or woman, whom they encountered, and carried the victim home for a feast.[140] On the deck of a new boat belonging to the most powerful chief in the group, ten or more men were slaughtered, in order that it might be washed with human blood.[141]
[131] Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 215 sq.
[132] Herodotus, ii. 119.
[133] Athenæus, Deipnosophistæ, xi. 15.
[134] Dio Cassius, Historia Romana, xlviii. 48.
[135] Diodorus Siculus, xiii. 86.
[136] Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistulæ, viii. 6. 15.
[137] Vigfusson and Powell, op. cit. i. 410; ii. 349.
[138] Simpson, quoted by Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, p. 263.