The union of a royal title with priestly duties was common in ancient Italy and Greece. At Rome and in other cities of Latium there was a priest called the Sacrificial King or King of the Sacred Rites, and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites.​[157] In republican Athens the second annual magistrate of the state was called the King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of both were religious. For example, the king superintended the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries, the Lenaean festival of Dionysus, and the torch-races, which were held at several of {p45} the great Athenian festivals. Moreover, he presided at the curious trials of animals and inanimate objects, which had caused the death of a human being. To him in short were assigned, in the words of Plato, “the most solemn and most truly ancestral rites of the ancient sacrifices.”​[158] Many other Greek democracies had titular kings, whose duties, so far as they are known, seem to have been priestly, and to have centred round the Common Hearth of the state.​[159] For example, in Cos the King sacrificed to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, the equivalent of the Italian Vesta; and he received the hide and one leg of the victim as his perquisite.​[160] In Mytilene the kings, of whom there were several, invited to banquets at the Common Hearth those guests whom the state delighted to honour.​[161] In Chios, if any herdsman or shepherd drove his cows, his sheep, or his swine to pasture in a sacred grove, the first person who witnessed the transgression was bound to denounce the transgressor to the kings, under pain of incurring the wrath of the god and, what was perhaps even worse, of having to pay a fine to the offended deity.​[162] In the same island the king was charged with the duty of pronouncing the public curses,​[163] a spiritual weapon of which much use was made by the ancients.​[164] Every eighth year the King at Delphi took part in a quaint {p46} ceremony. He sat in public distributing barley-meal and pulse to all who chose to apply for the bounty, whether citizens or strangers. Then an image of a girl was brought to him, and he slapped it with his shoe. After that the president of the Thyiads, a college of women devoted to the orgiastic worship of Bacchus, carried away the image to a ravine and there buried it with a rope round its neck. The ceremony was said to be an expiation for the death of a girl who in a time of famine had been publicly buffeted by the king and, smarting under the insult, had hanged herself.​[165] In some cities, such as Megara, Aegosthena, and Pagae, the kingship was an annual office and the years were dated by the kings’ names.​[166] The people of Priene appointed a young man king for the purpose of sacrificing a bull to Poseidon at the Panionian festival.​[167] Some Greek states had several of these titular kings, who held office simultaneously.​[168] At Rome the tradition was that