In speaking of the Getae, a Thracian people, he remarks that they believe in their own immortality. 'They hold that they themselves do not die, but the departed go to dwell with a god named Zalmoxis. . . . And every four years they choose one of their own number by lot and despatch him as messenger to Zalmoxis, enjoining upon him the delivery of their various requests. The manner of sending him is this. Some of them are set to hold up three spears, while others take their emissary by his arms and by his legs and swinging him up into the air let him fall upon the spear-points. If he be pierced by them mortally, they consider that their god is favourable to them; but if death do not result, they lay the blame on the messenger himself and give him a bad name; but having censured him they despatch another man instead. Their injunctions are given to the messenger before he is killed[1].'
Now no one can fail to notice that Herodotus' own interest in this custom centres not in the idea which prompted it but in the manner of carrying it out. His account of it reads as if he knew his Greek readers to be familiar enough with the conception of human sacrifice as a means of sending a messenger to some god; but he seems to be contrasting the method adopted with some rite of which they were cognisant. Tacit comparisons of foreign customs with those of Greece occur all through Herodotus' work. The points which he here seems to emphasize are, first, that the messenger of the Getae was one of themselves, not a prisoner of war or a slave; secondly, that impaling was the ritual mode of death—a mode which the Greeks held in abhorrence and would never have employed; and, thirdly, that the messages were committed to the victim's charge before and not after death. The inference therefore is that Herodotus and the Greeks for whom he was writing were accustomed to some rite which was inspired by the same motive but was differently executed, the messenger being other than a citizen, the method of sacrifice less barbarous to their minds than impaling, and the messages being whispered, as at funerals, in the dead victim's ear; for of course, if the newly-dead could carry tidings to men in the other world, they could equally well carry petitions to gods.
- ↑ Herodot. IV. 94.
