Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/370

 between the rites of the Getae which were based upon that doctrine and similar rites practised, as Herodotus hints, by themselves.

Then again if the motive which we have found operating in Herodotus' time among the Getae and operating also less than a century ago among the peasants of Santorini was not the motive which prompted the ancient Greeks to human sacrifice, how can we account for the long perpetuation of the practice? It is practically certain that it was tolerated in Athens during the period of her ascendency and highest enlightenment ; but the repugnance which it inspired is proved by the reticence which almost concealed the fact from posterity. It was practised apparently in honour of Lycaean Zeus in the time of Pausanias ; but the horror of it closed his lips concerning this 'secret sacrifice.' Suppose then that the motive for this sacrifice had been the sating of a wolf-like god—for so Pausanias seems to have understood the epithet [Greek: Lykaios] —with human flesh; could such a rite have continued in any part of Greece for some six centuries after it had become repugnant at least in Athens? Was the supposed motive so sublime that it was held to hallow or even to mitigate the barbarity of the act? Or did the custom live on without motive when an anthropomorphic Zeus had superseded the old wolf-like deity? Custom, it is true, often outlives its parent belief; but custom itself is not invulnerable nor deathless if it has to battle against sentiments irreconcilably opposed to that original belief. If the purpose of propitiating a wolf-god with human flesh was rendered null and void by the modifications which the conception of Lycaean Zeus had undergone, how could the crude and savage rite have still flourished in the uncongenial soil of an humaner civilisation—unless of course some new stream of religious thought, instead of the original motive, had watered and revived it? The very fact that so hideous a custom was so long maintained in civilised Greece argues that, whatever the original motive of it may have been, only some strong religious belief in the necessity of it could have saved it from extinction in the historical age. Surely it was some convincing plea of justification, and not mere