Greece -- History -- To 146 B.C.; History, Ancient
61. Thus it is done here; and how they celebrate the festival in honour
of Isis at the city of Busiris has been told by me before: 60 for, as I
said, they beat themselves in mourning after the sacrifice, all of them
both men and women, very many myriads of people; but for whom they beat
themselves it is not permitted to me by religion to say: and so many as
there are of the Carians dwelling in Egypt do this even more than the
Egyptians themselves, inasmuch as they cut their foreheads also with
knives; and by this it is manifested that they are strangers and not
Egyptians.
62. At the times when they gather together at the city of Saïs for their
sacrifices, on a certain night 61 they all kindle lamps many in number
in the open air round about the houses; now the lamps are saucers full
of salt and oil mixed, and the wick floats by itself on the surface, and
this burns during the whole night; and to the festival is given the name
Lychnocaia (the lighting of the lamps). Moreover those of the Egyptians
who have not come to this solemn assembly observe the night of the
festival and themselves also light lamps all of them, and thus not in
Saïs alone are they lighted, but over all Egypt: and as to the reason
why light and honour are allotted to this night, 62 about this there is
a sacred story told.
63. To Heliopolis and Buto they go year by year and do sacrifice only:
but at Papremis they do sacrifice and worship as elsewhere, and besides
that, when the sun begins to go down, while some few of the priests are
occupied with the image of the god, the greater number of them stand in
the entrance of the temple with wooden clubs, and other persons to the
number of more than a thousand men with purpose to perform a vow, these
also having all of them staves of wood, stand in a body opposite to
those: and the image, which is in a small shrine of wood covered over
with gold, they take out on the day before to another sacred building.
The few then who have been left about the image, draw a wain with four
wheels, which bears the shrine and the image that is within the shrine,
and the other priests standing in the gateway try to prevent it from
entering, and the men who are under a vow come to the assistance of the
god and strike them, while the others defend themselves. 63 Then there
comes to be a hard fight with staves, and they break one another's
heads, and I am of opinion that many even die of the wounds they
receive; the Egyptians however told me that no one died. This solemn
assembly the people of the place say that they established for the
following reason:—the mother of Ares, they say, used to dwell in this
temple, and Ares, having been brought up away from her, when he grew
up came thither desiring to visit his mother, and the attendants of his
mother's temple, not having seen him before, did not permit him to pass
in, but kept him away; and he brought men to help him from another city
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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