ABSTRACT
But for the historical Greeks human sacrifice was largely a thing of the remote past. Plato and Theophrastus view existing human sacrifices as survivals; 7 and the custom is particularly associated with non-Greeks, an unholy and unlawful practice explicitly contrasted by the author of the Minos with Hellenic customs, although he knows two exceptions from Greece. 8 But most human sacrifices have long been abolished by various civilizers, divine and human: Lycurgus at Sparta (p. 79), Dionysus at Potniae (p. 82), Eurypylus at Patrae (p. 87), and Diphilus in Cyprus (p. 126). Gods and heroes have put an end to the practice among non-Greeks also: the descendants of Orestes upon arrival in Tenedos (p. 134); Aphrodite, who turns the Cypriot Cerastae into bulls for sacrificing humans to Zeus (Ov. Met. 10.219-37); and Heracles, who, led to the altar as a victim by the Egyptian king Bousiris, kills Bousiris and his followers, thus putting an end to the savage custom. The scene was popular with vase painters,
direct connection between animal sacrifice and the prominence of sacrificial themes and imagery in Classical tragedy, for he traces the tragic genre to performances accompanying goat sacrifices in the cult of Dionysus. 21 Human sacrifice will again be put to good use by the novelists, but when their heroes and heroines are threatened with gruesome sacrificial deaths at the hands of pirates and outlaws, the scenes (though perhaps reflecting dimly initiatory origins) are exploited for obvious melodramatic effects, which do not depend upon the historical accuracy of the descriptions of ritual. 22
If the practice of human sacrifice gradually decreased and died out under the salutary influence of new religious beliefs and a higher moral sense, over the centuries the evidence for it was gradually accumulating: no human sacrifices in the Homeric poems (if the slaughter of the Trojan captives in the Iliad may be excepted), a few then in other early epic; in the fifth century, a sudden burgeoning of human sacrifices on the tragic stage; then, beginning in the fourth, the creation of new human sacrifices by historical writers and the scholarly collection of human sacrifices in local cults - or cult myths - from throughout Greece; and fmally, human sacrifice (now little more than the ancient equivalent of tying the heroine to the railroad tracks)23 as a convenient narrative device in the novel. If anything, the extant literature gives an impression of an increase in human sacrifices in Classical and Hellenistic times; and by the time Plutarch, Pausanias, Clement, Porphyry, and various scholiasts and lexicographers can preserve the testimony for posterity, it is little wonder that the belief that the 'ancients' practised human sacrifice is now firmly entrenched, and that non-fatal (if not quite harmless) scapegoat rituals can now be readily misconstrued. But for these later writers the 'ancients' are as far removed as the Age of Heroes was for the Classical Greeks, and again a distant and largely imaginary past can serve as a backdrop against which present customs and concepts (both pagan and Christian) may be meaningfully contrasted.
