FISH, VICE HUMAN SACRIFICES—VARRO = 217 
and interrupting the god. “ Living,’ said Jupiter—-“ Pil- 
chards,”’ broke in Numa. 
Whether fish were but rarely sacrificed or not, Festus! 
at any rate makes clear that at the Ludi on June 7th, and 
possibly the Volcanalia in September (although at the latter 
the oblations were mostly animal), Roman fishermen did offer 
up fish, ‘‘ quod id genus pisciculorum vivorum datur ei Deo 
pro animis humanis.”’ 
Offerings of fish may be (as O. Keller suggests) a relic 
of Totemism resting on the belief that the spirits of men after 
death pass into fish. 
The suggestion gains force when we remember that 
Anaximander 2 and others taught that men lived once as 
fishes, but later came on land and threw off their scales; and 
that the early religious conceptions of Latium were so debased 
as readily to engender or harbour such a conception. On the 
other hand, it must be admitted that not a single clear and 
convincing case of Totemism has hitherto been adduced from 
the Greco-Italic area. 
In these oblations and in Varro’s ‘‘ Populus fro se in ignem 
animalia mittit,’’ 3—an animal in place of a man be it remarked 
—can be detected a mitigated survival of the widespread custom 
of human sacrifice in propitiation of a deity.4 On much the 
same lines grew up the custom, as civilisation progressed, of 
burning the weapons of, instead of killing, the captured foe, 
after a battle. The immolation of prisoners formed a sacrifice 
not so much of revenge, as one in honour of the slain on the 
side of the victors: such at least is the conclusion suggested 
to me by the words of Festus, ‘‘ humanum sacrificium dicebant, 
quod mortui causa fiebat.’’ 5 
As offerings at Rome had dwindled from men down to 
animals, or small fish, or eventually even salt or pickled fish, 
1 Festus, p. 274, 35 ff. W. Lindsay. 
? Plutarch, Symp., VIII. 8. 4. 
8 De Lingua Latina, 6. 20 (in his description of the Volcanalia). 
‘ F. Boehm, De symbolis Pythagoveis (Berlin, 1905), p. 19, would connect 
the fish-offering of the Volcanalia with the belief that the soul took the form 
of afish. G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus dey Romer,* (Minchen, 1912), p. 229, 
m, 13. 
5 Cf., however, Keller, op. cit., 348. 
