The Cults of the Greek States Volume 1 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 edition. Excerpt: ... respect the sanctity of the altar and slew them upon it. The same scholiast gives us another and fuller account of the tragedy as recorded by Parmeniscus. The Corinthians disliking the rule of the barbarian queen plotted against her and her children, who numbered fourteen, and who took refuge in the temple of Hera Acraea and were slain at her altar: a plague fell upon the land and the oracle bade them atone for the pollution; the Corinthians in consequence instituted a rite which survived till the fall of Corinth: each year seven girls and seven boys of the highest families were selected to serve a year in the temple in a sort of bondage to the goddess, and to appease the wrath of the dead with sacrifice. The 'feast of mourning, ' as the scholiast of Euripides calls the Corinthian Heraea, must refer to these rites, since we gather from Pausanias that the hair of the consecrated children was shorn and they wore black raiment. In another passage, the latter writer tells us that Medea concealed each of her children at their birth in Hera's temple, wishing to make them immortal, and a stranger story is preserved by the scholiast on Pindar, to the effect that Hera promised her children immortality, and the promise was fulfilled in the sense that the citizens immortalized them after their death with divine honours. We have also ancient and direct testimony to the divinity of Medea herself, given by Alcman, Hesiod and a later Musaeus. The conclusion to which these facts inevitably lead is that which O. Miiller and Schomann have drawn," namely, that Medea is a divinity closely connected with Hera and that the sacrifice of children was part of her primitive sacrifice. We can understand thus why in some legends the people, and in others the...