SACRIFICES OF THE GREEKS. 447 
the dappaxoi were offered up every year at the Thargelia; others that they were 
offered up only when calamities prevailed ; others that they were not sacrificed 
at all. K.O. MULLER imagines that they were hurled into the sea, but that 
means were taken to save their lives, and they were sent out of the country. 
ScHOMANN adopts the story of TzErzes, and thinks that the men were really 
offered as sacrifices at an early period, but that a milder custom was afterwards 
introduced (“‘Griechische Alterthiimer,” ii.p.485). And Aucust Mommsen thinks 
that the ceremony consisted in this, that the god Apollo demanded a human 
sacrifice, that blood was drawn from the victim, but that in most cases the god 
then showed mercy, and the victim was spared; but when there was a calamity 
prevailing, the victim may have been really sacrificed (“ Heortologie,” p. 420). 
But even if we assume that the sacrifices actually took place, they could 
only be explained on the principle that it was believed that the god savagely 
delighted in the slaughter of men. The first victim, a mythical one indeed, was 
a sacrilegious thief, and deserved his death. The subsequent victims were 
worthless individuals whom it would be no sacrifice in a state to lose. 
The sacrifices of the mythical era have a general likeness, with the excep- 
tion of one. This one is recorded by Herodotus (ii. 119). He says that 
Menelaus sacrificed two Egyptian children to obtain a favourable wind for 
sailing. The rest have the following characteristics. ‘They are offered to 
prevent a calamity or procure a victory. No explanation is given why a human 
sacrifice should be chosen except that the human being is more valuable than a 
brute. The sacrifice is offered up by the direct injunction of the oracle; and 
the persons offered up belong to those from whom the calamity is averted or 
to whom the victory is granted. The victims are therefore offered up, not as 
expressive of the consciousness of sin, or of the belief that sin can be expiated 
only by death, nor are the victims, strictly speaking, substitutionary, but repre- 
sentative. The most remarkable of these victims is Iphigenia, the first human 
sacrifice, as NAGELSBACH remarks, mentioned in Greek writers; and we have full 
light thrown on this subject by the circumstance that her fate is partly the sub- 
ject of tragedies of Aischylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, still extant. The Chorus 
in Atschylus pronounces the state of mind in which Agamemnon offered up 
Iphigenia impious, impure, and unholy,* bringing a curse upon the race of the 
Atride, and thinks that Agamemnon yielded to the base ambition of a warrior 
in offering up the sacrifice, when he should have listened to the promptings of 
a father’s heart. Clytemnestra also justifies her conduct in murdering her 
husband by saying that she was avenging his polluted deed in butchering her 
daughter.t Sophocles likewise makes Clytemnestra excuse her murder of her 
husband by his cruel treatment of her daughter, and then Electra explains how 
* Agam, v. 220. + Ibid. v. 1420. 
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