We know from the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Jephthah and his daughter, and Iphigenia, as well as from historical records, that children were offered as human sacrifices and that the body of the victim was often eaten; hence there is a connection between human sacrifice and cannibalism. J. A. MacCullouch in his scholarly article on cannibalism in the _Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics_, ventures the opinion that human sacrifice rose through an earlier cannibalism, on the principle that as men liked human flesh the Gods would also relish it. The worshippers later shared in the human feasts, with the Gods. Westermarck says that the sacrificial form of cannibalism springs from the idea that a victim offered to a God participates in his sanctity and the worshipper by eating the human flesh transfers to himself something of the divine virtue. There were many cases of orgastic cannibalism in ancient Greece. There is a vase showing a Thracian tearing a child with his teeth in the presence of a god. Pausanias relates that a child was torn and eaten in a sacrifice to the Gods in Bœotia. In Plato's _Republic_, VIII 566, we have an account of a survival of an earlier cannibal sacrificial feast. It is related there that a piece of human flesh was placed among the animals sacrificed to Zeus Lycaeus and that in the feasts that followed the eater of the fragments became a were-wolf. Other people like the Fijis who partook in a human feast offered first part of the slain to the gods. The custom of human sacrifices and cannibalism died out among the Greeks, and in Æschylus's trilogy we have the horror reaction of the educated Greek against these institutions. The playwright shows the terrible retaliation visited on the man who indulges in cannibalism or makes another do so. Punishment for Atreus's deed is visited upon his son, Agamemnon, in many ways, one of which is being forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon is also punished by the infidelity of his wife with Ægisthus, and by being murdered by them. The tale of Iphigenia thus sheds some light on the subject. She figures considerably in the _Agamemnon_. Æschylus tells us that Clytemnestra felt justified for being untrue to her husband Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. The latter's name is closely associated with human sacrifice in Greek legend. In the Saturnalia of Rome a human victim was slain as late as the fourth century A. D. The theory then resolves itself to this: In very ancient times before Greek civilisation made its appearance children were sacrificed to ward off evil and the flesh of those children was eaten by the parents. There rose a reaction to this which we see in the Atreus legend. CHAPTER XIII SOME PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERARY CRITICISM I