‘It is said that when the Arcadians had once invaded Elis, and the Eleans lay encamped opposite to them, a woman came to the generals of the Eleans, with a child at her breast, and said that, though she was the mother of the child, she offered it, bidden thereto by dreams, to fight on the side of the Eleans. And those in command, trusting the woman’s tale, put the child in the forefront of the army naked. Then the Arcadians came to the attack, and lo! straightway the child was changed into a serpent. And the Arcadians, dismayed at the sight, turned to flight, and were pressed by the Eleans, who won a signal victory and gave to the god the name of Sosipolis (“saviour of the state”). And at the place where the serpent disappeared in the ground after the battle they set up the sanctuary; and along with him they took to worshipping Ilithyia, because she was the goddess who had brought the boy into the world.’ Is this story complete, or did Pausanias’ informants suppress one material point out of shame? How came a mortal infant to assume the form of a serpent which is proper only to apparitions from the lower world? The missing episode is, I believe, the sacrifice of the child, which having been offered willingly became after death a _daemon_ friendly to the Eleans and fought, in the form of a serpent, on their side. Human sacrifice before a battle was not unknown in ancient Greece[718], but by Pausanias’ time the inhabitants of Elis might well have hesitated to impute to their forefathers so barbarous a custom, and have modified the story by omitting even that incident which alone could make it harmonise with ancient religious ideas[719]. A similar view has been taken of another story of Pausanias[720], also from Elis. ‘Oxylus (the king of Elis), they say, had two sons Aetolus and Laias. Aetolus died before his parents and was buried by them in a tomb which they caused to be made exactly in the gate of the road to Olympia and the sanctuary of Zeus. The cause of their burying him thus was an oracle which forbade the corpse to be either within or without the city. And up to my time the governor of the gymnasium still makes annual offerings to Aetolus as a hero.’ Commenting on this passage Dr Frazer[721] says, ‘The spirit of the dead man was probably expected to guard the gate against foes.... It is possible that in this story of the burial of Aetolus in the gate we have a faded tradition of an actual human sacrifice offered when the gate was built.’ Certainly the facts that Aetolus was young and that he was not head of the royal house make his elevation to the rank of tutelary hero after death difficult to understand on any other hypothesis; and it should be noted too that the oracle, in obedience to which his tomb was made in the gateway, probably came, as the preceding context suggests, from Delphi, that same shrine which was responsible for the sacrifice of Aristodemus’ daughter in the Messenian war.