(M84) If a custom of putting a king or his son to death in the character
of a god has left small traces of itself in Cyprus, an island where the
fierce zeal of Semitic religion was early tempered by Greek humanity, the
vestiges of that gloomy rite are clearer in Phoenicia itself and in the
Phoenician colonies, which lay more remote from the highways of Grecian
commerce. We know that the Semites were in the habit of sacrificing some
of their children, generally the first-born, either as a tribute regularly
due to the deity or to appease his anger in seasons of public danger and
calamity.(346) If commoners did so, is it likely that kings, with all
their heavy responsibilities, could exempt themselves from this dreadful
sacrifice for the fatherland? In point of fact, history informs us that
kings steeled themselves to do as others did.(347) It deserves to be
noticed that if Mesha, king of Moab, who sacrificed his eldest son by
fire, claimed to be a son of his god,(348) he would no doubt transmit his
divinity to his offspring; and further, that the same sacrifice is said to
have been performed in the same way by the divine founder of Byblus, the
great seat of the worship of Adonis.(349) This suggests that the human
representatives of Adonis formerly perished in the flames. At all events,
a custom of periodically burning the chief god of the city in effigy
appears to have prevailed at Tyre and in the Tyrian colonies down to a
late time, and the effigy may well have been a later substitute for a man.
For Melcarth, the great god of Tyre, was identified by the Greeks with
Hercules,(350) who is said to have burned himself to death on a great
pyre, ascending up to heaven in a cloud and a peal of thunder.(351) The
common Greek legend, immortalized by Sophocles, laid the scene of the
fiery tragedy on the top of Mount Oeta, but another version transferred it
significantly to Tyre itself.(352) Combined with the other evidence which
I shall adduce, this latter tradition raises a strong presumption that an
effigy of Hercules, or rather of Melcarth, was regularly burned at a great
festival in Tyre. That festival may have been the one known as “the
awakening of Hercules,” which was held in the month of Peritius, answering
nearly to January.(353) The name of the festival suggests that the
dramatic representation of the death of the god on the pyre was followed
by a semblance of his resurrection. The mode in which the resurrection was
supposed to be effected is perhaps indicated by the statement of a Greek
writer that the Phoenicians used to sacrifice quails to Hercules, because
Hercules on his journey to Libya had been slain by Typhon and brought to
life again by Iolaus, who held a quail under his nose: the dead god
snuffed at the bird and revived.(354) According to another account Iolaus
burnt a quail alive, and the dead hero, who loved quails, came to life
again through the savoury smell of the roasted bird.(355) This latter
tradition seems to point to a custom of burning the quails alive in the
Phoenician sacrifices to Melcarth.(356) A festival of the god’s
resurrection might appropriately be held in spring, when the quails
migrate northwards across the Mediterranean in great bands, and immense
numbers of them are netted for the market.(357) In the month of March the
birds return to Palestine by myriads in a single night, and remain to
breed in all the open plains, marshes, and cornfields.(358) Certainly a
close connexion seems to have subsisted between quails and Melcarth; for
legend ran that Asteria, the mother of the Tyrian Hercules, that is, of
Melcarth, was transformed into a quail.(359) It was probably to this
annual festival of the death and resurrection of Melcarth that the
Carthaginians were wont to send ambassadors every year to Tyre, their
mother-city.(360)
(M85) In Gades, the modern Cadiz, an early colony of Tyre on the Atlantic
coast of Spain,(361) there was an ancient, famous, and wealthy sanctuary
of Hercules, the Tyrian Melcarth. Indeed the god was said to be buried on
the spot. No image stood in his temple, but a perpetual fire burned on the
altar, and incense was offered by white-robed priests, with bare feet and
shorn heads, who were bound to chastity. Neither women nor pigs might
pollute the holy place by their presence. In later times many
distinguished Romans went on pilgrimage to this remote shrine on the
Atlantic shore when they were about to embark on some perilous enterprise,
and they returned to it to pay their vows when their petitions had been
granted.(362) One of the last things Hannibal himself did before he
marched on Italy was to repair to Gades and offer up to Melcarth prayers
which were never to be answered. Soon after he dreamed an ominous
dream.(363) Now it would appear that at Gades, as at Tyre, though no image
of Melcarth stood in the temple, an effigy of him was made up and burned
at a yearly festival. For a certain Cleon of Magnesia related how,
visiting Gades, he was obliged to sail away from the island with the rest
of the multitude in obedience to the command of Hercules, that is, of
Melcarth, and how on their return they found a monstrous man of the sea
stranded on the beach and burning; for the god, they were told, had struck
him with a thunderbolt.(364) We may conjecture that at the annual festival
of Melcarth strangers were obliged to quit the city, and that in their
absence the mystery of burning the god was consummated. What Cleon and the
rest saw on their return to Gades would, on this hypothesis, be the
smouldering remains of a gigantic effigy of Melcarth in the likeness of a
man riding on a sea-horse, just as he is represented on coins of
Tyre.(365) In like manner the Greeks portrayed the sea-god Melicertes,
whose name is only a slightly altered form of Melcarth, riding on a
dolphin or stretched on the beast’s back.(366)
(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
Artemis were first put to the sword and then burned in a pit of sacred
fire.(374) Among the Carthaginians another trace of such a practice may
perhaps be detected in the story that at the desperate battle of Himera,
fought from dawn of day till late in the evening, the Carthaginian king
Hamilcar remained in the camp and kept sacrificing holocausts of victims
on a huge pyre; but when he saw his army giving way before the Greeks, he
flung himself into the flames and was burned to death. Afterwards his
countrymen sacrificed to him and erected a great monument in his honour at
Carthage, while lesser monuments were reared to his memory in all the
Punic colonies.(375) In public emergencies which called for extraordinary
measures a king of Carthage may well have felt bound in honour to
sacrifice himself in the old way for the good of his country. That the
Carthaginians regarded the death of Hamilcar as an act of heroism and not
as a mere suicide of despair, is proved by the posthumous honours they
paid him.
(M87) The foregoing evidence, taken altogether, raises a strong
presumption, though it cannot be said to amount to a proof, that a
practice of burning a deity, and especially Melcarth, in effigy or in the
person of a human representative, was observed at an annual festival in
Tyre and its colonies. We can thus understand how Hercules, in so far as
he represented the Tyrian god, was believed to have perished by a
voluntary death on a pyre. For on many a beach and headland of the Aegean,
where the Phoenicians had their trading factories, the Greeks may have
watched the bale-fires of Melcarth blazing in the darkness of night, and
have learned with wonder that the strange foreign folk were burning their
god. In this way the legend of the voyages of Hercules and his death in
the flames may be supposed to have originated. Yet with the legend the
Greeks borrowed the custom of burning the god; for at the festivals of
Hercules a pyre used to be kindled in memory of the hero’s fiery death on
Mount Oeta.(376) We may surmise, though we are not expressly told, that an
effigy of Hercules was regularly burned on the pyre.