Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/372

 memory, embarrassed a more enlightened and humaner age until a new justification for it was found in the messenger-functions of the dead.

In support of the former supposition it may be mentioned that tribes far more barbarous than the Getae (who may have benefited from Greek civilisation) have evolved the particular ghostly use of dead men's souls which we are considering. In Dahome, according to Captain Burton, not only are a large number of wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, and soldiers slaughtered at the king's funeral, that they may wait on him in another world, but 'whatever action, however trivial, is performed by the (new) king, it must dutifully be reported to his sire in the shadowy realm. A victim, almost always a war-captive, is chosen; the message is delivered to him, an intoxicating draught of rum follows it, and he is dispatched to Hades in the best of humours .' There is therefore no objection to the supposition that the Hellenic people too from the days of prehistoric savagery were constantly actuated by this motive.

On the other hand it is equally admissible to think that some cruder motive first led the population of Greece to adopt the custom of human sacrifice, and that it was only comparatively late in their history, in an age when men's humaner instincts were offended by the atrocity of the rite and religious speculation on the subject of the soul's immortality was rife, that the old custom was invested with a new meaning. Herodotus clearly recognised the connexion between the rite of the Getae and the doctrine of immortality which was bound up with the names of Zalmoxis and Pythagoras; and it is possible that in Greece too the later justification of human sacrifice was founded on the same doctrine. It would have been an irony of fate truly if a doctrine not indeed founded, I think, but largely expounded by Pythagoras, who forbade his followers to kill even animals for the purposes of food, should have been so construed as to furnish a plea for the immolation of men; but it is quite clear that a belief in the activity of the soul after death, superimposed upon the desire for close communion between men and gods, might have had that issue.

But, as I have said, I see no means of deciding at what date the correlation of the conception of the dead as messengers and