In very many cases, especially in the rhetorical schools, “inhospitality,” “hatred of strangers,” was a mere abusive tag, available without any excessive consideration of the facts. And when intense enmity was to be exhibited, the extreme form of “inhospitality” was naturally enough both implicitly and expressly charged against the objects of the writer’s dislike. [Illustration: GREEK INSCRIPTION, FOUND ON SITE OF TEMPLE AREA, FORBIDDING GENTILES TO PASS BEYOND THE INNER TEMPLE WALLS AT JERUSALEM (Now In the Imperial Ottoman Museum Constantinople)] There are many instances in which the hereditary enemy was credited with human sacrifice or cannibalism. Indeed it was currently believed that cannibalism had universally prevailed at one time, and with advancing civilization was gradually superseded.[201] As far as human sacrifice was concerned, many highly civilized states knew of vestiges or actual recurrences of it in their own practice. Rome is a striking example. But in Rome such things were rare exceptions, employed in times of unusual straits to meet a quite unusual emergency.[202] In Greece there were many traces frankly admitted to be such—if not actual instances of such sacrifices. But here, as at Rome, the act was admittedly something out of the ordinary, a survival of primitive savagery.[203] Accordingly when Greeks and Romans spoke of human sacrifices, it was not of an inconceivable form of barbarity, which placed those who took part in it quite out of the human pale, but as a relic of a condition from which they had themselves happily grown, and to which they reverted only in extremities. Its presence among other tribes was a demonstration that they were still in the barbarous stage, and especially was it deemed to be so when all strangers who chanced to come upon the foreign shore were the selected victims of the god. That charge, as we know, was made against many Scythian and Thracian tribes. The story of Iphigenia in Tauris is an example of it. It was made against the Carthaginians, at least in the early stages of their history. The Gauls, according to both Greek and Roman writers, had made of it a very common institution.[204] We do not know very much of the evidence in the case of the Thracians, Scythians, and Gauls. It is not impossible that customs like certain symbolic rites found in many places were misinterpreted. Or it is highly likely that, if human sacrifices existed, they were, as among Greeks and Romans, a rare form of expiation. For the Carthaginians the story is almost certainly a by-product of national hatred, and rests upon the same foundations as the “cruelty” and “perfidy” of Hannibal.