Magic done for the good of the crops, as in the Eleusinian and other mysteries, does not appear in the Epics. A good king has good luck, under him all things prosper; but the idea of sacrificing an unlucky king, or any other human being, would have surprised the poet. In all such matters he is on another plane than the authors of the Ionian epics, whose tales of constant human sacrifices are perhaps adapted from _Märchen_ (where cannibalism is the horror) rather than inspired by veridical traditions. The great rite which Homer ignores, and which the pre-Achaean population probably, and certainly all post-Homeric Greece from the eighth century to the arrival of Christianity held in most regard, was the purification of manslayers by the blood of beasts. Achilles in the Cyclic poems is purified by Odysseus after the slaying of Thersites; Apollo is purified after the slaying of the dragon of Delphi. But "the whole idea of pollution as a consequence of wrong-doing is foreign to Homer," says Mr. Monro.[20] When the house of Odysseus is cleansed of the blood of the slain Wooers, and when, on restoring Chryseis, Agamemnon "bade the folk purify themselves, so they purified themselves, and cast the defilements into the sea, and did sacrifice to Apollo,"[21] the pollution is mere physical filth of house and camp. There is no idea of magical riddance from either sin or danger at the hands of a pursuing ghost. Eustathius, bishop of Thessalonica, remarks, in his Homeric commentary, "on the cardinal difference between the religion of Homer and that of later (and earlier) Greece...."[22] It would have been safer to discriminate between Homeric religion on one hand, and Ionian, Attic, and historic Greek religion on the other. The idea at the root of the purification of a man-slayer by a bath of blood is not, I think, that his sin is being removed by the "sympathetic magic" of new blood, but that the swine's blood poured over him throws the avenging ghost of his victim off his scent, confusing the trail; or that the angry ghost accepts the pig's blood washed from the slayer as atonement. Plato says that the myth held that the ghost of the victim communicates its own uneasy emotions to the slayer, telepathically.[23] Scores of savage and one or two Hellenic practices aim at actually disarming or mutilating the avenging ghost, by binding or dismembering the corpse which he tenanted. Homer believes that, a man once burned and buried, his ghost is confined, powerless, to Hades. Hence his Achaeans neither worship the dead nor practise purification to avoid avenging ghosts. These rites are Ionic, Attic, and, in historic Greece, are Hellenic, also Asiatic. They make an insuperable barrier between Homeric and Ionian religion.