To this early pastoral and agricultural period belongs the rite of human sacrifice which survived here and there in the worship of Apollo, and which was probably more frequent in the earlier period when it was common to all Aryan and to less pro- gressive races. In Cyprus those who touched the altar of Apollo were thrown from a rock; from the famous Leucadian promontory in Acarnania a victim was hurled once a year ‘as a piacular offer- ing’ to Apollo; and in the Attic @apy/\a, an early harvest-festival consecrated to Apollo, where most of the ritual was harmless vegetation-magic, the cruel rite may have prevailed, even in the civilized age, of leading forth two human scapegoats and putting them to death by stoning or burning. The human oblation, which Greek civilization tended to abolish or modify, is a practice—what- ever its true meaning—that is rooted in savagery. Yet it sometimes contains the germ of the idea of
iacular and vicarious atonement that can bear ruit in a higher religion.
So far it has only been the primitive character of Apollo that we have attempted to outline. His real significance for the Greek mdé\us touches higher issues. He becomes, or already at the dawn of Greek history he was, one of a special group of deities that presided over the communion of the family, the clan, the village, and finally of the mods, the last development of these. His cone- shaped pillar stood in the street before the door of the citizen; and Apollo ’Ayuevs becomes Apollo IIpoorarjpios, the god ‘who stands before the door’ and shields the household from terrors of the seen and unseen world. To the Ionic communities he stood in the special relation of ancestor, and the Dorian cities honoured him as the leader of their colonies, and sometimes as the founder and organ- izer of their social institutions.
Two instances may be selected from the many that might be quoted, to show the importance of his cult for social and political progress. At Athens the court called ém) AcAdwiy was founded to try cases of homicide where justifiable circum- stances were pleaded. When criminal law becomes able to consider such pleas, it is advancing from the barbaric to the civilized stage. It is of import- ance, therefore, to note that this great advance was associated at Athens, in part at least, with the name and cult of Apollo. Again, at Delphi the worship of the Pythian Apollo played a very useful part in the emancipation of slaves. The slave who saved money could not, of course, be sure of buying his freedom from his master, for the latter might lay hands on the money and retain the slave ; but he could, and from a vast number of Delphic inscriptions we have evidence that he
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very frequently did, deposit the money with the god, who then purchased him from his master, and let him go free with a religious guarantee, that was legally effective, against further violence or constraint. This excellent system prevailed in other worships elsewhere, but was specially in vogue at Delphi.
To the development of ethical thought the Apolline cult contributed one vital conception, that of purification from sin, an idea that belongs to other cults also, but is most prominent in this.
e must not interpret this conception as having at the outset any essential relation to inward or moral purity, or as even enforcing any austere ideal of sexual abstinence. Purification in the Apolline and other Hellenic cults must be under- stood in a ritualistic sense; the process of puri- fication aimed at washing away certain stains from a man’s person that rendered him ritualistically unclean, that is, unable to approach the altars and temples of the gods, or to mix with his fellows without spreading a deadly miasma around him: such stains would be contracted by harmless physical acts, but specially by contact with blood. It is therefore the shedder of blood who stood in special need of the Delphic ritual of purification, in which the use of the laurel and the lustration with swine’s blood are combined. Now, these kathartic practices are not proved to have been very ancient in Greece; the poet Arctinus of the Sth cent. B.C. is the first who records them, and he associates them with Apollo and Artemis. There is reason for believing that they were introduced into Delphi from Crete, the land whence the Athenians summoned Epimenides to purge the city from the stain of the Cylonian massacre, and whither Apollo himself repaired to be purified from the blood of Python. The Athenian Oapy/\a was partly a feast of purification; and the idea was still more peomiiene in the Delphic feast of the Zrenripia, held every eight years in the early summer, when, after a dramatic representation of
‘the slaughter of Pytho, the Delphians selected a
beautiful and high-born boy, who was temporarily an incarnation of the god, and who proceeded to Tempe, and, after purification, returned by the ‘Sacred Way,’ bearing the pure laurel through many an old seat of Apollo’s worship in Thessaly, Oeta, and Malis. This ritualistic idea of cleanli- ness, so prominent in the Apolline cult, at first a non-ethical idea, is of the greatest importance for the history of ethics, for from it has grown the advanced conception of moral purity and the civi- lized horror of bloodshed.