(M86) At Carthage, the greatest of the Tyrian colonies, a reminiscence of the custom of burning a deity in effigy seems to linger in the story that Dido or Elissa, the foundress and queen of the city, stabbed herself to death upon a pyre, or leaped from her palace into the blazing pile, to escape the fond importunities of one lover or in despair at the cruel desertion of another.(367) We are told that Dido was worshipped as a goddess at Carthage so long as the country maintained its independence.(368) Her temple stood in the centre of the city shaded by a grove of solemn yews and firs.(369) The two apparently contradictory views of her character as a queen and a goddess may be reconciled if we suppose that she was both the one and the other; that in fact the queen of Carthage in early days, like the queen of Egypt down to historical times, was regarded as divine, and had, like human deities elsewhere, to die a violent death either at the end of a fixed period or whenever her bodily and mental powers began to fail. In later ages the stern old custom might be softened down into a pretence by substituting an effigy for the queen or by allowing her to pass through the fire unscathed. A similar modification of the ancient rule appears to have been allowed at Tyre itself, the mother-city of Carthage. We have seen reason to think that the kings of Tyre, from whom Dido was descended, claimed to personate the god Melcarth, and that the deity was burned either in effigy or in the person of a man at an annual festival.(370) Now in the same chapter in which Ezekiel charges the king of Tyre with claiming to be a god, the prophet describes him as walking “up and down amidst the stones of fire.”(371) The description becomes at once intelligible if we suppose that in later times the king of Tyre compounded for being burnt in the fire by walking up and down on hot stones, thereby saving his life at the expense perhaps of a few blisters on his feet. It is possible that when all went well with the commonwealth, children whom strict law doomed to the furnace of Moloch may also have been mercifully allowed to escape on condition of running the fiery gauntlet. At all events, a religious rite of this sort has been and is still practised in many parts of the world: the performers solemnly pace through a furnace of heated stones or glowing wood-ashes in the presence of a multitude of spectators. Examples of the custom have been adduced in another part of this work.(372) Here I will cite only one. At Castabala, in Southern Cappadocia, there was worshipped an Asiatic goddess whom the Greeks called the Perasian Artemis. Her priestesses used to walk barefoot over a fire of charcoal without sustaining any injury. That this rite was a substitute for burning human beings alive or dead is suggested by the tradition which placed the adventure of Orestes and the Tauric Artemis at Castabala;(373) for the men or women sacrificed to the Tauric