460 DR DONALDSON ON THE EXPIATORY AND SUBSTITUTIONARY 
whether human or animal, are offered. The gods require no such sacrifice ; 
they stand in need of nothing from men. They look to the pious aspirations of 
the worshipper, and the truest and best sacrifice is a true conception of the 
character and deeds of the gods. 
In regard to human sacrifices, he thinks that man was misled into them 
through some necessity. He adduces a considerable number of instances to 
prove that though human sacrifices were offered, yet that is no reason for eating 
human flesh, in order that he may apply the same arguments to animal sacrifice 
and animal food. Most of the examples are taken from foreign lands. He 
relates that human sacrifices were offered up at Heliopolis in Egypt, by the 
Pheenicians, by the Carthaginians, by the Dumatheni in Arabia, by the Thra- 
cians and Scythians, and by the Romans. He mentions one place in Asia 
Minor, Laodicea, where a virgin was sacrificed. And he mentions a consider- 
able number of the islands of the A’gean and Mediterranean where, he affirms, 
human sacrifices were offered up (56, 57). There is good reason for affirming 
that all these islands derived their rites from Phoenicia. They are Cyprus, 
Crete, Rhodes, Chios, and Tenedos ; Laodicea was Persian.* 
There are only three statements which he makes in regard to the Greeks 
proper. He states that Phylarchus (219 B.c.) related that all the Greeks in 
common killed a man before going forth against the enemy. Phylarchus does 
not say that the man was offered up as a sacrifice ; but whether this was the 
case or not is not worth inquiring, for the statement is utterly incredible. 
Phylarchus was given to the fabrication of fictions, and we may apply to this 
one the words which Plutarch applies to another. It is such, “ that not even 
any ordinary person could be ignorant that it has been fabricated.”+t The 
second assertion is this—‘ Apollodorus says that the Lacedzmonians sacrifice 
a man to Ares.” We have no means of testing this statement of Porphyry. 
We do not know who the Apollodorus here mentioned was. He may have 
been the one to whom the authorship of the “ Bibliotheca ” is falsely ascribed { 
(140 B.c.) Certainly it is very strange if this custom existed, that it should 
have escaped the notice of all historians. Most probably we have here an 
exaggerated statement, based on the practice of scourging the youths, 
and on the legend connected therewith. The third instance is that the 
Athenians slew the daughter of Erechtheus and Praxithea, one of those 
mythical sacrifices which we have already discussed. In a different part of the 
book he notices the human sacrifices on Mount Lyceus. ‘For from the 
beginning the fruits formed the sacrifices to the gods; but when, in the lapse 
of time, men became utterly careless of piety, and there was also a scarcity of 
fruits, and through want of legitimate nourishment they set about eating the 
* See Gmrwarn’s “Griech. Mythologie,” p. 353. + Them. c. 32 (see Cuinton, iii. p. 520). 
+ See Dirzs in the Rheinisches Museum, 1876, p. 8. 


