In the ordinary ritual of the taking of oaths, the oath-taker actually stood upon the pieces of the slaughtered animal. Pausanias[157], on the road between Sparta and Arcadia, came to a place called ‘Horse’s Tomb.’ There Tyndareus sacrificed a horse and made Helen’s suitors take an oath, causing them to stand on the cut-up pieces of the horse,—having made them take the oath, he buried the horse. At Stenyclerum[158] in Messenia was another monument, called ‘Boar’s Monument,’ where it was said Herakles had given an oath to the sons of Neleus on the cut pieces of a boar. Nor is the custom of swearing on the cut pieces recorded only by mythology. In the Bouleuterion at Elis was an image of Zeus, ‘of all others,’ says Pausanias[159], ‘best fitted to strike terror into evildoers.’ Its surname was Horkios, He of the Oath. Near this image the athletes, their fathers, brothers, and trainers had to swear on the cut pieces of a boar that they would be guilty of no foul play as regarded the Olympian games. Pausanias regrets that he ‘forgot to ask what they did with the boar after the oath had been taken by the athletes.’ He adds, ‘With the men of old days the rule was as regards a sacrificial animal on which an oath had been taken that it should be no more accounted as eatable for men. Homer,’ he says, ‘shows this clearly, for the boar on the cut pieces of which Agamemnon swore that Briseis had not been partner of his bed is represented as being cast by the herald into the sea: “He spake and with the pitiless bronze he cut The boar’s throat, and the boar Talthybios whirled And in the great wash of the hoary sea He cast it to the fish for food[160].” This in ancient days was their custom about such matters.’ The custom of standing on the fragments of the victim points clearly to the identification of oath-taker and sacrifice. The victim was hewn in bits; so if the oath-taker perjure himself will he be hewn in bits: the victim is not eaten but made away with, utterly destroyed, _devoted_; a like fate awaits the oath-breaker: the oath becomes in deadly earnest a form of self-imprecation. Still less obvious is it why sacrifices to the winds should uniformly have taken the form of σφάγια rather than ἱερεῖα. At first sight the winds if anything would appear to be Ouranian powers of the upper air, yet it would appear that sacrifices to the winds were buried, not burnt.