
SACRIFICES OF THE GREEKS. 461 
flesh of each other, then entreating the demonion with many prayers, they first 
gaye a portion of themselves to the gods, not only sacrificing to them what was 
most beautiful among them, but going beyond the most beautiful, and taking 
also some of the race ; from which time till now, not only do all in common sacri- 
fice human victims at the Lyczean festival in Arcadia, and to Kronos in Carthage, 
but periodically, in remembrance of the custom, they sprinkle kindred blood on 
the altars, although the holy rite with them drives away from the sacrifices, by 
a proclamation at the lustral water, any one who has any share in the guilt of 
human blood” (ii. 27). This whole passage is one of wild exaggeration. 
When we pass to the Christian writers, we find them animated by a different 
purpose. They denounce sacrifices as entirely wrong, and they denounce 
human sacrifices as utterly barbarous. “ Well, now,” says Clemens Alexan- 
drinus (Protrept. c. ii. 42, p. 36 P), “let us say in addition, what inhuman 
demons, and hostile to the human race, your gods were, not only delighting in 
the insanity of men, but gloating over human slaughter—now in the armed 
contests for superiority in the stadia, and now in the numberless contests for 
renown in the wars, providing for themselves the means of pleasure, that they 
might be able abundantly to satiate themselves with the murder of human 
beings, and now, like plagues invading cities and nations, they demanded cruel 
oblations.”* 
To prove this savage character of the demons, Clemens adduces various 
instances of human sacrifice. Most of them are foreign. Sacrifices are men- 
tioned as having been offered in the Tauric Chersonese, in Pella in Thessaly, by 
the Lyctii in Crete, by the Lesbians, by the Phoceans, by Erechtheus of Attica, 
and by Marius the Roman. The only genuine Greek sacrifice which he men- 
tions besides that of Erechtheus is one by Aristomenes the Messenian. 
« Aristomenes,” he says, “slew three hundred human beings in honour of 
Ithometan Zeus, among whom was Theopompus, king of the Lacedemonians.” 
No one supposes that Clemens had the slightest historical evidence for this 
sacrifice. 
Eusebius is animated by the same spirit. He devotes nearly the whole of the 
fourth book of his “ Preeparatio Evangelica” to the subject of sacrifices. He 
says if the sacrifice through irrational animals was declared by philosophers 
accursed and an evil sacrifice, polluting, and unjust and unholy, and not with- 
out harm to the sacrificer, and for all these reasons unworthy of the gods, what 
must we think of the slaughter of men? Would not this be the most impious 
and the most unholy of all? (c. 15.) He thinks that even pagans must see that 
it is only an evil demon to whom savage and inhuman, and lawless and base 
deeds are pleasing (c. 16). And he adduces instances of human sacrifices to 
* Translation in Ante-Nicene Library. 
