The remarks of the Unjust Logos are amply justified. That a mummery so absurd, with all its leisurely House-that-Jack-built hocus-pocus, should be regularly carried on in the centre of civilized Athens was enough to make the most careless and the most conventional reflect on the nature and strength of religious conservatism. But the rite was once of real and solemn import, and, taken as such, the heart of a terror-stricken service of Aversion. The ox had to be killed, man imperatively demanded his feast of flesh-meat, but it was a dreadful ἄγος, an abomination, to kill it, as bad as, perhaps worse than killing a man, and the ghost of the ox and the spirits of vengeance generally must at all costs be tricked or appeased. So great is the terror that no one device is enough. You pretend that the ox is not really dead, or at least that he has come to life: if that is not enough you pretend that he was himself an offender: he ate the sacred cakes, not by compulsion, but of his own free, wicked will. Last you pretend that you did not do it yourself, it was some one else. No, not some one else, but some_thing_ else. Finally that thing is got rid of; the ἄγος, the pollution, is thrown into the sea. The important point for the moment is that the ox, though no surrogate for human sacrifice, is as good as human, is a man. His murdered ghost, or at least the pollution of his murder, cries for placation and purification. It is satisfactory to note that if you had to be purified yourself for murdering an ox, an ox, even a bronze ox, had to be purified for murdering you. Pausanias[285] was told the following story about a bronze ox, dedicated at Olympia by the Corcyreans. A little boy was sitting playing under the ox, and suddenly he lifted up his head and broke it against the bronze, and a few days after he died of the wounds. The Eleans consulted as to whether they should remove the ox out of the Altis, as being guilty of blood, but the Delphic oracle, always conservative in the matter of valuable property, ordained ‘that they were to leave it and perform the same ceremonies as were customary among the Greeks in the case of involuntary homicide.’ To return to the Bouphonia, the confused notion that a thing must be done, and yet that its doing involves an ἄγος, a pollution, comes out in all the rituals known as Flight-ceremonies. The gist of them is very clear in the account given by Diodorus[286] of the ceremonies of embalming among the Egyptians. He tells us ‘the man called He-who-slits-asunder (παρασχίστης) takes an Aethiopian stone, and, making a slit in the prescribed way, instantly makes off with a run, and they pursue him and pelt him with stones, and heap curses on him, _as though transferring the pollution of the thing on to him_.’