Moreover my contention that Herodotus had in mind some Greek rite, with which he was contrasting that of the Getae, is borne out by the passage immediately following, in which the idea of comparison comes to the surface. This Zalmoxis, he continues, according to the Greeks of the Hellespont and the Euxine, was in origin not a god but a man. He served for a time as a slave to Pythagoras in Samos, but having gained his liberty and considerable wealth returned to Thrace and tried to reclaim his countrymen from savagery and ignorance. The ways of life and the doctrines which he inculcated were such as he had derived from intercourse with Greeks and above all with Pythagoras, whose teachings concerning immortality and a future life in a happier land he both preached and (by the trick of hiding himself for three years in a subterranean chamber and then re-appearing to those who had believed him dead) illustrated in his own person. This story is neither accepted nor rejected by Herodotus, but, estimating Zalmoxis to have been of much earlier date than Pythagoras, he inclines slightly to the view that Zalmoxis was really a native god of the Getae.
If we may assume this view to be correct, what significance is to be attached to the story of Zalmoxis’ relations with Pythagoras? Evidently it is one of those fictions by which the ancient Greeks loved to bring the great figures of history into contact and personal acquaintance. Pythagoras and Zalmoxis were two names with which was associated the doctrine of immortality; some story therefore of their meeting was desirable. And since Pythagoras was Greek, Zalmoxis barbarian, the legend that the slave Zalmoxis was instructed by his master Pythagoras was more flattering to Hellenic pride than the idea that Pythagoras in his travels should have borrowed so important a doctrine from a foreign religion; and if chronology did not concur—well, imagination always had precedence of accuracy. To the Greeks who invented the tale fitness was of more account than fact; and for us who dismiss the actual story as mere fiction their sense of its fitness remains instructive. It shows that the Greeks recognised the existence of specially close relations between the religion of the Getae and their own—relations attested probably not only by their common acceptance of the doctrine of immortality, for that was the property of other peoples too, but also by some resemblance between the rites of the Getae which were based upon that doctrine and similar rites practised, as Herodotus hints, by themselves.
Then again if the motive which we have found operating in Herodotus’ time among the Getae and operating also less than a century ago among the peasants of Santorini was not the motive which prompted the ancient Greeks to human sacrifice, how can we account for the long perpetuation of the practice? It is practically certain that it was tolerated in Athens during the period of her ascendency and highest enlightenment[939]; but the repugnance which it inspired is proved by the reticence which almost concealed the fact from posterity. It was practised apparently in honour of Lycaean Zeus in the time of Pausanias[940]; but the horror of it closed his lips concerning this ‘secret sacrifice.’ Suppose then that the motive for this sacrifice had been the sating of a wolf-like god—for so Pausanias seems to have understood the epithet Λυκαῖος[941]—with human flesh; could such a rite have continued in any part of Greece for some six centuries after it had become repugnant at least in Athens? Was the supposed motive so sublime that it was held to hallow or even to mitigate the barbarity of the act? Or did the custom live on without motive when an anthropomorphic Zeus had superseded the old wolf-like deity? Custom, it is true, often outlives its parent belief; but custom itself is not invulnerable nor deathless if it has to battle against sentiments irreconcilably opposed to that original belief. If the purpose of propitiating a wolf-god with human flesh was rendered null and void by the modifications which the conception of Lycaean Zeus had undergone, how could the crude and savage rite have still flourished in the uncongenial soil of an humaner civilisation—unless of course some new stream of religious thought, instead of the original motive, had watered and revived it? The very fact that so hideous a custom was so long maintained in civilised Greece argues that, whatever the original motive of it may have been, only some strong religious belief in the necessity of it could have saved it from extinction in the historical age. Surely it was some convincing plea of justification, and not mere acquiescence in the inveteracy of custom, which caused Pausanias, though he could not bring himself to describe or to discuss the horrid sacrifice, yet to conclude his brief allusion to it with the words, ‘as it was in the beginning and is now, so let it be[942].’
My reasons then for suggesting that one motive which led to human sacrifice in ancient Greece was the belief that the victim could carry a petition in person to the gods are threefold. First, that motive was recognised as sufficient by a peasant of Santorini, who can only have inherited the idea, just as all the ideas of divination have been inherited, from the ancient world. Secondly, Herodotus appears to contrast the method of such sacrifice among the Getae with the method of some similar rite familiar to his audience and to imply that the motive in each case was the same. Thirdly, without an adequate motive—and it is hard to see what other motive could have been adequate in the case which I have taken—it is almost inconceivable that human sacrifice should have continued, in spite of the repugnance which it certainly excited, for so long a time. For these reasons I submit that the known belief of the ancients that the dead could serve as messengers to the other world and their known custom of making human sacrifice were correlated in the minds of thinking men in the more civilised ages as cause and effect.
The reservation, ‘in the minds of thinking men in the more civilised ages,’ is necessary; for I am at a loss how to determine whether the belief in question was the original motive of the custom or a later justification of the custom when its original motive had been forgotten. Either the belief was coeval with the custom, and both were inherited together from ancestors belonging to that ‘lower barbaric stage’ of culture in which ‘men do not stop short at the persuasion that death releases the soul to a free and active existence, but they quite logically proceed to assist nature by slaying men in order to liberate their souls for ghostly uses[943]’; or on the other hand the custom of human sacrifice originated in some other motive (such as satisfying the appetite of a beast-like god) and remaining itself unchanged, while the conception of the god was gradually humanised until his beast-form and therewith the original purpose of the sacrifice were lost to memory, embarrassed a more enlightened and humaner age until a new justification for it was found in the messenger-functions of the dead.
In support of the former supposition it may be mentioned that tribes far more barbarous than the Getae (who may have benefited from Greek civilisation) have evolved the particular ghostly use of dead men’s souls which we are considering. In Dahome, according to Captain Burton, not only are a large number of wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, and soldiers slaughtered at the king’s funeral, that they may wait on him in another world, but ‘whatever action, however trivial, is performed by the (new) king, it must dutifully be reported to his sire in the shadowy realm. A victim, almost always a war-captive, is chosen; the message is delivered to him, an intoxicating draught of rum follows it, and he is dispatched to Hades in the best of humours[944].’ There is therefore no objection to the supposition that the Hellenic people too from the days of prehistoric savagery were constantly actuated by this motive.
On the other hand it is equally admissible to think that some cruder motive first led the population of Greece to adopt the custom of human sacrifice, and that it was only comparatively late in their history, in an age when men’s humaner instincts were offended by the atrocity of the rite and religious speculation on the subject of the soul’s immortality was rife, that the old custom was invested with a new meaning. Herodotus clearly recognised the connexion between the rite of the Getae and the doctrine of immortality which was bound up with the names of Zalmoxis and Pythagoras; and it is possible that in Greece too the later justification of human sacrifice was founded on the same doctrine. It would have been an irony of fate truly if a doctrine not indeed founded, I think, but largely expounded by Pythagoras, who forbade his followers to kill even animals for the purposes of food, should have been so construed as to furnish a plea for the immolation of men; but it is quite clear that a belief in the activity of the soul after death, superimposed upon the desire for close communion between men and gods, might have had that issue.
But, as I have said, I see no means of deciding at what date the correlation of the conception of the dead as messengers and the custom of human sacrifice as cause and effect first entered men’s minds; but that in the historical age that correlation was acknowledged seems to me highly probable. Such a view would certainly have militated against the substitution of animal for human victims; for only a man would have been felt to be capable of understanding the message and of delivering it to the god to whom he was sent. This perhaps is the reason why the use of a surrogate animal—though early introduced, as one version of the story of Iphigenia proves—never met with universal acceptance, and why also at the present day there remains a vague but real feeling that for the proper laying of foundations a human victim is preferable to beast or bird[945].
To single out particular instances of ancient sacrifice in which this motive may have operated is, owing to the general absence of data concerning the ritual, well-nigh impossible. The sacrifice to Lycaean Zeus was performed upon an altar before which, according to Pausanias[946], there stood two columns and upon them two gilded eagles; and we may surmise that as the eagles represented to his mind the messengers sent by Zeus to men, so did the human victim represent the messenger of men to Zeus. But this can be only a conjecture, for Pausanias’ silence admits of no more.
Of the ceremony connected with the pharmakos, or human scape-goat, at Athens and elsewhere somewhat more is known. Certain persons ungainly in appearance and debased in character were maintained at the public expense, in order that, if any calamity such as a pestilence should befall the city, they might be sacrificed to purify the city from pollution. These persons were called φαρμακοί, ‘scape-goats,’ or καθάρματα, ‘purifications[947].’ ‘If calamity overtook a city through divine wrath, whether it were famine or pestilence or any other bane,’ a pharmakos was led out to an appointed place for sacrifice. Cheese, barley-cake, and dried figs were given to him. He was smitten seven times on the privy parts with squills and wild figs and other wild plants; and finally he was burnt with fire upon fuel collected from wild trees, and the ashes were scattered to the winds and the sea[948]. At Athens, it appears, this rite was performed, not under the stress of occasional calamity, but annually as part of the Thargelia, and was therefore associated with Apollo[949].