Fillets of wool became as it were the attributes of the sacrificial victim. In the curious vase-painting[138] in fig. 8 Salmoneus, himself the victim, is wreathed, decorated all over with fillets, which of course, as there was no animal slain, are merely symbolic[139]. Animal victims in like fashion are adorned for sacrifice with these merely routine fillets. The animal sacrifice is to the ghost the surrogate of the human victim, the fillet in its turn the surrogate of the animal. The dread ceremonial of ἐναγισμός in its crudest, most barbarous form, is very clearly shown on the vase-painting in fig. 9, from a ‘Tyrrhenian’ amphora now in the British Museum[140]. The scene depicted is the sacrifice of Polyxena on the tomb of Achilles. In the _Hecuba_ of Euripides[141], Neoptolemos takes Polyxena by the hand and leads her to the top of the mound, pours libations to his father, praying him to accept the ‘soothing draughts,’ and then cries ‘Come thou and drink the maiden’s blood Black and unmixed.’ In the centre of the design in fig. 9 is the omphalos-shaped grave[142], which is in fact the altar. Right over it the sacrifice takes place. Neoptolemos, as next of kin to the slain man, is the sacrificer; Polyxena, as next of kin to the slayer, is the sacrifice. The ghost of the slain man drinks her blood and is appeased, and thereby the army is purged. The blood only is offered to the ghost—the blood is the life, and it is vengeance, not food, the ghost cries for. It is so with the Erinyes, who are but angry ghosts[143]; when they hunt Orestes they cry[144], ‘The smell of human blood smiles wooingly.’ Earth polluted has drunk a mother’s blood, and they in turn ‘Will gulp the living gore red from his limbs[145].’ When the ghost of Achilles has drunk the fresh blood of the maiden her body will be burnt, not that it may rise as a sweet savour to the gods above, but as a holocaust; it is a θυσία ἄδαιτος, a sacrifice without feast. It will be burnt on the low-lying _eschara_ or portable hearth that stands on the grave. The _eschara_ was by the ancients clearly distinguished from the altar proper, the βωμός. The _eschara_, says the scholiast on the _Phoenissae_[146] of Euripides, is ‘accurately speaking the trench in the earth where they offer ἐναγισμοί to those who are gone below; the altar is that on which they sacrifice to the heavenly gods.’ Porphyry[147], who is learned in ritual matters, draws the same distinction. ‘To the Olympian gods they set up temples and images and altars, but to the Earth-gods and to heroes, escharas, while for those below the earth there are trenches and megara.’ It is on an _eschara_ that Clytaemnestra does her infernal service to the Erinyes[148]. She cries to them in bitter reproach: ‘How oft have ye from out my hands licked up Wineless libations, sober offerings, And on the hearth of fire banquets grim By night, an hour unshared of any god!’