ABSTRACT

By distinguishing thus between mythical and historical human sacrifices I begin with the presupposition that the 'myths' of human sacrifice are indeed mythical and not historical. This, of course, is impossible to prove, and many scholars, while rejecting the historicity of individual human sacrifices in myths of my first category, nevertheless have felt that the legends preserve a memory of a practice of human sacrifice in earlier times. Wachsmuth's statement, for example - 'wenn auch kein einzelner Fall Probe halt, bleibt dennoch in der gemeinschaftlichen Quelle dieser mythischen Erzahlungen, der aus uralter Zeit fortgepftanzten Sage von dem Brauche, Menschen zu opfern, Grund genug zum

Similar sacrifices are known from locales other than Athens. An oracle promises success to Heracles and the Thebans in their campaign against Orchomenos if the noblest citizen among them should die willingly by his own hand; when Antipoenus demurs, his daughters, Androcleia and Alcis, readily volunteer themselves as victims. 8 And another pair of Boeotian maids, the daughters of

Orion (Metioche and Menippe), willingly offer themselves to deliver their city from pestilence. 9 Nor was the theme of virgin sacrifice confmed to wars of the heroic past: among the stories from the Messenian Wars (eighth and seventh centuries), whose 'history' was concocted after Messenian independence in 370 and preserved chiefly by Pausanias, is a long and involved tale according to which the Delphic oracle requires the Messenians to sacrifice a virgin to the gods of the Underworld; a series of reversals leads to Aristodemus' murder of his own daughter, and in the end it is decided that the oracle has been fulfilled by her death (Paus. 4.9.3-10).10 Parthenius (Amat. Narr. 35) preserves a very similar story from Hellenistic romance (here the location is Crete and the victim Cydon's daughter Eulime) - so similar in fact that there must be some connection between the two stories. In both tales an oracle is consulted and enjoins the sacrifice of a virgin, to be selected by lot; the allotted victim's lover comes forward to claim that she is with child, and in the end her womb is cut open; but in one case (parth.) the lover's claim proves true, in the other (Paus.) false. If nothing else the similarity between the two tales indicates how fine was the line in this period between historical writing and romance, and how readily it could be overstepped.