It may be said that we have not here a genuine instance of homicide-purgation. There is no animal sacrifice, no ‘cleansing’ by a bath of blood. Water and honey were regular offerings to the dead, and the express prohibition of wine-libations reminds us very forcibly of the sacrifice to the Erinnyes made by Clytaemnestra in the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus.[118] Has Sophocles in mind, then, a local rite of placation to the Erinnys of Oedipus at Colonus, which he interprets as a commemoration of purgation rites? We have seen how easily such rites may be confused. Or are we to assume that the purgation rite for involuntary or extenuated homicide was different from the rites by which a wilful murderer could be purged ‘abroad’ or from those by which a justifiable slayer was purged at home? Was the sacrifice which was offered to the Erinnyes or the Semnai Theai[119] by involuntary slayers after their return from exile, and by accused persons who were acquitted by the Areopagus, a regular purgation rite? These questions we find it difficult to answer either in the affirmative or in the negative. Plato’s references[120] to greater and lesser ‘cleansings’ according to different degrees of guilt imply that the average Greek did not understand the exact nature or purpose of ‘purgation’ and that the secrets of this magic art of reconciliation were the exclusive privilege of theocratic nobles whose interest it was to obscure rather than to clarify the details of the system. The passage we have quoted from the _Oedipus Coloneus_ possibly points to variations in the ‘purgation’ ritual according to degrees of guilt—variations which suggest moreover the ambition and the power of local deities and priesthoods to retain their distinctive peculiarities in the execution of a central Apolline doctrine.[121] In the _Iphigenia Taurica_ of Euripides[122] we find a mock purgation ceremony arranged by Iphigeneia to save the lives of Orestes and of Pylades. The image of Artemis is said (it was a fiction invented by a loving sister) to have turned in its seat and to have closed its eyes when the blood-stained Argive cousins entered the temple! Iphigeneia proposes to ‘cleanse’ the pollution by the blood of young lambs shed in solitude by the sea and such other things as she has ordered as purifications. King Thoas, not being himself appealed to, leaves the whole question of purgation entirely in the hands of the priestess of Artemis. From the legend that Bellerophon was cleansed by his host Proetus,[123] the king of Tiryns, we might be inclined to argue that the purgation rites for certain forms of kin-slaying were performed by private non-sacerdotal individuals. But every king was a High Priest in primitive religion; and, further, we have already seen that Proetus could not have performed the post-Homeric ceremony which is attributed to him. It is however possible that Croesus personally ‘purged’ the Phrygian homicide mentioned by Herodotus.[124]