It is probable, though not certain, that behind the figure of the Olympian Artemis, of the goddess who was kindly to lions’ cubs and ‘suckling whelps,’ there lay the cult of some vindictive ghost or heroine who cried for human blood. In moments of great peril this belief in the vindictiveness of ghosts, a belief kept in check by reason in the day-time, might surge up in a man’s mind and haunt his dreams by night. Plutarch[181] tells an instructive story about a dream that came to Pelopidas before the battle of Leuctra. Near the field of battle was a field where were the tombs of the daughters of Scedasos, a local hero. The maidens, who were obviously local nymphs, were called from the place Leuctrides. The night before the battle, as Pelopidas was sleeping in his tent, he had a vision which ‘caused him no small disturbance.’ He thought he saw the maidens crying at their tombs and cursing the Spartans, and he saw Scedasos their father bidding him sacrifice to his daughters a maiden with auburn hair if he wished to overcome his enemies on the morrow. Being a humane as well as a pious man, the order seemed to him a strange and lawless one, but none the less he told the soothsayers and the generals about it. Some of them thought that it ought not to be neglected, and brought forward as precedents the ancient instances of Menoiceus, son of Creon, and Macaria, daughter of Heracles, and, in more recent times, the case of Pherecydes the philosopher, who was put to death by the Spartans and whose skin was preserved (no doubt as ‘medicine’) by their kings in accordance with an oracle; also the case of Leonidas, who sacrificed himself for Greece; and, lastly, the human victims sacrificed to Dionysos Omestes before the battle of Salamis, all which cases had the sanction of success. Moreover, they pointed out, Agesilaus, when he was about to set sail from Aulis itself, had the same vision as Agamemnon, and disregarding it through misplaced tenderness, came to grief in consequence. The more advanced section of the army used the argument of the fatherhood of God and the superior nature of the supreme deities; such sacrifices were only fit for Typhons and Giants and inferior and impotent demons. Pelopidas, while they were discussing the question in the abstract, only got more and more uncomfortable, when on a sudden a she-colt got loose from the herd and ran through the camp; the laymen present only admired her shining red coat, her proud paces and shrill neighing, but Theocritus the soothsayer saw the thing in his heart, and cried aloud to Pelopidas, ‘Happy man, here is the sacred victim, wait for no other maiden, use the one the god has given thee.’ And they took the colt and led her to the tombs of the maidens, and prayed and wreathed her head and cut her throat and rejoiced and published the vision of Pelopidas and the sacrifice to the army. Whether Plutarch’s story is matter of fact or not is of little moment; it was