in the city down to historical times savours rather of Oriental barbarity than of Greek humanity. Led or driven by the youths, a man ran thrice round the altar; then the priest stabbed him in the throat with a spear and burned his body whole on a heaped-up pyre. The sacrifice was offered in the month of Aphrodite to Diomede, who along with Agraulus, daughter of Cecrops, had a temple at Salamis. A temple of Athena stood within the same sacred enclosure. It is said that in olden times the sacrifice was offered to Agraulus, and not to Diomede. According to another account it was instituted by Teucer in honour of Zeus. However that may have been, the barbarous custom lasted down to the reign of Hadrian, when Diphilus, king of Cyprus, abolished or rather mitigated it by substituting the sacrifice of an ox for that of a man.(440) On the hypothesis here suggested we must suppose that these Greek names of divine or heroic figures at the Cyprian Salamis covered more or less similar figures of the Asiatic pantheon. And in the Salaminian burnt-sacrifice of a man we may perhaps detect the original form of the ceremony which in historical times appears to have been performed upon an image of Sandan or Hercules at Tarsus. When an ox was sacrificed instead of a man, the old sacrificial rites would naturally continue to be observed in all other respects exactly as before: the animal would be led thrice round the altar, stabbed with a spear, and burned on a pyre. Now at the Syrian Hierapolis the greatest festival of the year bore the name of the Pyre or the Torch. It was held at the beginning of spring. Great trees were then cut down and planted in the court of the temple: sheep, goats, birds, and other creatures were hung upon them: sacrificial victims were led round: then fire was set to the whole, and everything was consumed in the flames.(441) Perhaps here also the burning of animals was a substitute for the burning of men. When the practice of human sacrifice becomes too revolting to humanity to be tolerated, its abolition is commonly effected by substituting either animals or images for living men or women. At Salamis certainly, and perhaps at Hierapolis, the substitutes were animals: at Tarsus, if I am right, they were images. In this connexion the statement of a Greek writer as to the worship of Adonis in Cyprus deserves attention. He says that as Adonis had been honoured by Aphrodite, the Cyprians after his death cast live doves on a pyre to him, and that the birds, flying away from the flames, fell into another pyre and were consumed.(442) The statement seems to be a description of an actual custom of burning doves in sacrifice to Adonis. Such a mode of honouring him would be very remarkable, since doves were commonly sacred to his divine mistress Aphrodite or Astarte. For example, at the Syrian Hierapolis, one of the chief seats of her worship, these birds were so holy that they might not even be touched. If a man