Xenophon in returning from his Asiatic expedition was hindered, we are told[30], by lack of funds. He piously consulted a religious specialist and was informed that ‘Zeus Meilichios’ stood in his way and that he must sacrifice to the god as he was wont to do at home. Accordingly on the following day Xenophon ‘sacrificed and offered a holocaust of pigs in accordance with ancestral custom and the omens were favourable.’ The regular ancestral ritual to Zeus Meilichios was a holocaust of pigs, and the god himself was regarded as a source of wealth, a sort of Ploutos. Taken by itself this last point could not be pressed, as probably by Xenophon’s time men would pray to Zeus pure and simple for anything and everything; taken in conjunction with the holocaust and the title Meilichios, the fact, it will presently be seen, is significant. There is of course nothing to prove that Xenophon sacrificed at the time of the Diasia, though this is possible; we are concerned now with the cult of Zeus Meilichios in general, not with the particular festival of the Diasia. It may be noted that the Scholiast, on the passage of Thucydides already discussed, says that the ‘animal sacrifices’ at the Diasia were πρόβατα, a word usually rendered ‘sheep’; but if he is basing his statement on any earlier authority πρόβατα may quite well have meant pig or any four-legged household animal; the meaning of the word was only gradually narrowed down to ‘sheep.’ It may be said once for all that the exact animal sacrificed is not of the first importance in determining the nature of the god. Pigs came to be associated with Demeter and the underworld divinities, but that is because these divinities belong to a primitive stratum, and the pig then as now was cheap to rear and a standby to the poor. The animal sacrificed is significant of the status of the worshipper rather than of the content of the god. The argument from the pig must not be pressed, though undoubtedly the cheap pig as a sacrifice to Zeus is exceptional.