As an illustration of the confusion which may thus arise, we will cite the legend of the Boeotian Athamas which is given by Herodotus[116] and by Pausanias.[117] Pausanias says that Athamas, King of Orchomenus, slew his son Learchus after having made an abortive attempt to sacrifice his son Phrixus to Zeus Laphistius on a neighbouring mountain. Herodotus, however, says that Phrixus was slain by Athamas, and that, as a punishment for this act, an oracle decreed that the Achaeans of Thessaly, to whom Athamas had fled, should purge their country by slaying Athamas in sacrifice. When they were on the point of offering up Athamas, as a ‘scapegoat’ for _their_ sins, Cytissorus, son of Phrixus, arrived from Colchis and saved him! The natural avenger of Phrixus became the deliverer of his slayer, even in defiance of the oracle! The gods, now seriously annoyed, forbade the descendants of Cytissorus to enter the Prytaneum of the city, and a mock human sacrifice was regularly offered to make amends to the gods for their loss. We believe that this legend is merely an attempt to explain two mock human sacrifices which survived, in Boeotia and in Thessaly, in historical times, and that the fact of their contiguity led to the association of Athamas with Phrixus in the legend. Stories of this kind have suggested the theory that the rites of homicide-purgation originated in human sacrifice: but they are merely aetiological. Moreover the survival, in historical times, in barbarous countries on the outskirts of Greece, of actual human sacrifice, and the mock sacrifices of human beings which were offered at certain festivals in various places, helped to confirm what stories of actual human sacrifice in post-Homeric legend, and stories of bloodshed which could be interpreted as human sacrifices in the Homeric poems, all seemed to suggest, namely, the opinion that all the Greeks of pre-Draconian days practised human sacrifice and were only induced to cease from the practice by the device of a surrogate victim. But there is no trace of real human sacrifice in Homer, certainly no trace of the sacrifice of a murderer’s life to gods who demanded it.