370 ON THE PEOPLE OF THE LONG-BARROW PERIOD. 



ancients, that even in the time of Homer they were looked upon 

 as repugnant to the moral sense of mankind 1 , but that they re- 

 tained vitality enough to give birth to the even worse atrocity of 

 gladiatorial shows, we have evidence in abundance to prove. But 

 we have no evidence to show that the bones of the slaughtered 

 victims were allowed a place in the same cist, chamber, or urn, 

 with those of the great man in whose honour they had been 

 massacred. Achilles, indeed, gives precise injunctions 2 as to keep- 

 ing the bones of Patroclus separate and apart from those of the 

 twelve Trojan youths, the two dogs, and the four horses, slain and 

 burnt with his body. Sometimes we find human bones scattered 

 here and there, not only on the surface, but deep down in the mass 

 of barrows, and I have thought that such bones, when this presence 

 cannot be accounted for by any secondary or shallower interment, 

 or any disturbance of a primary one, might perhaps have been 

 parts of the skeletons of such victims. There is, however, a wide 

 difference between leaving the remains of slaughtered victims lying 

 about on the surface of the ground, and placing them inside a 

 sepulchre, and the former of these modes of treatment is, I submit, 

 the more natural one, and the more likely to have been adopted, 

 for many reasons. The bones of a wife or concubine, who may 

 voluntarily or half voluntarily 3 have given up her life at her 

 master's funeral, may have been allowed to lie with his ; but this 

 supposition would not explain the facts of the numbers, and of the 

 presence of both men and women in varying proportions in these 

 interments. 



Dr. Thurnam, however, based his support of the human sacrifice 

 theory, not merely upon literary evidence, but also upon the appear- 

 ances which the bones themselves from those barrows presented. 

 Some of these bones are in the Oxford University Museum, viz. 

 those from Ebberston 4 , referred to as being calculated to ■ convince 

 the most incredulous;' and others in the Cambridge University 



1 See Iliad xxiii. 1 76. 



2 'Ocrria TlarpoitXoio MevoiTiaZao \4yctifiev, 

 ES SiayiyvuHTKOvres, dpicppadea 5e rkrvKjac 

 'Ei/ fiecrcy yap eKciro irvpf), tol 8' aWoi avevQev 

 'Eax aTl V taiovr* kmpl£, "i-n-noi tc /cal dvdpes' 

 Kal to, fikv ev xpvairi (piakr} ical SiirXaKi dt]fi& 

 ©etofiev. — Iliad xxiii. 239 sqq. 



3 See Anderson, 'Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot.,' May 13, 1872, p. 524. 



4 ' Mem. Soc. Anth. London,' 1. c. 



