age.' Thus the analogy of the Olympian Cronia, probably one of the oldest of Greek festivals, to the Italian Saturnalia would be very close if originally, as I conjecture, the Saturnalia fell in spring and Saturn was personated at it, as we have good reason to believe, by a man dressed as a king. May we go a step further and suppose that, just as the man who acted King Saturn at the Saturnalia was formerly slain in that character, so one of the kings who celebrated the Cronia at Olympia not only played the part of Cronus, but was sacrificed, as god and victim in one, on the top of the hill? Cronus certainly bore a sinister reputation in antiquity. He passed for an unnatural parent who had devoured his own offspring, and he was regularly identified by the Greeks with the cruel Semitic Baals who delighted in the sacrifice of human victims, especially of children.2 A legend which savours strongly of infant sacrifice is reported of a shrine that stood at the very foot of the god's own hill at Olympia; and a quite unambiguous story was told of the sacrifice of a babe to Lycaean Zeus on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia, where the worship of Zeus was probably nothing but a continuation, under a new name, of the old worship of Cronus, and where human victims appear to have been regularly offered down to the Christian era. The Rhodians annually sacrificed a man to Cronus in the month Metageitnion; at a later time they kept a condemned criminal in prison till the festival of the Cronia was come, then led him forth outside the gates, made him drunk with wine, and cut his throat." With the parallel of the Saturnalia before our eyes, we may surmise that the victim who thus ended his life in a state of intoxication at the Cronia may perhaps have personated King Cronus himself, the god who reigned in the happy days of old when men had nothing to do but 3 Pausanias, vi. 20. 4 sq.

3

1 Hesiod, Works and Days, 111, 169 : Plato, Politicus, p. 269 a; Diodorus, iii. 61, v. 66; Julian, Convivium, p. 317 BD (pp. 407, 408 ed. Hertlein); "Anonymi Chronologica,” printed in the Bonn edition of Malalas, P. 17. See further M. Mayer's article

"Kronos," Roscher's Lexikon der griech, und rom. Mythologie, ii. 1458.

2 See M. Mayer, op. cit. ii. 1501 $49.

to eat and drink and make merry. At least the Rhodian custom lends some countenance to the conjecture that formerly a human victim may have figured at the sacrifice which the so-called kings offered to Cronus on his hill at Olympia. In this connection it is to be remembered that we have already found well-attested examples of a custom of sacrificing the scions of royal houses in ancient Greece.1 If the god to whom, or perhaps rather in whose character, the princes were sacrificed, was Cronus, it would be natural that the Greeks of a later age should identify him with Baal or Moloch, to whom in like manner Semitic kings offered up their children. The Laphystian Zeus of Thessaly and Boeotia, like the Lycaean Zeus of Arcadia, was probably nothing but the aboriginal deity, commonly known as Cronus, whose gloomy rites the Greek invaders suffered the priests of the vanquished race to continue after the ancient manner, while they quieted their scruples of conscience or satisfied their pride as conquerors by investing the bloodthirsty old savage with the name, if not with the character, of their own milder deity, the humane and gracious Zeus.

When we pass from Europe to Asia Minor, from ancient Greece to ancient Babylon and the regions where Babylonian influence penetrated, we are still met with festivals which bear the closest resemblance to the oldest form of the Italian Saturnalia. The reader may remember the festival of the Sacaea, on which I had occasion to touch in an earlier part of this chapter.2 It was held at Babylon during five days of the month Lous, beginning with the sixteenth day of the month. During its continuance, just as at the Saturnalia, masters and servants changed places, the servants issuing orders and the masters obeying them; and in each house one of the servants, dressed as a king and bearing the title of Zoganes, bore rule over the household. Further, just as at the Saturnalia in its original form a man was dressed as King Saturn in royal robes, allowed to indulge his passions and caprices to the full, and then put to death, so at the Sacaea a condemned prisoner, who probably also bore for the time being the title of Zoganes, was arrayed in the king's attire and suffered to play the despot, 1 Above, vol. ii. p. 34 sqq. 2 Vol. ii. p. 24 sqq.

to use the king's concubines, and to give himself up to feasting and debauchery without restraint, only however in the end to be stript of his borrowed finery, scourged, and hanged or crucified.1 From Strabo we learn that this Asiatic counterpart of the Saturnalia was celebrated in Asia Minor wherever the worship of the Persian goddess Anaitis had established itself. He describes it as a Bacchic orgy, at which the revellers were disguised as Scythians, and men and women drank and dallied together by day and night.2

4

As the worship of Anaitis, though of Persian origin, appears to have been deeply leavened with coarse elements which it derived from the sensual religion of Babylon, we may perhaps regard Mesopotamia as the original home from which the Sacaean festival spread westward into other parts of Asia Minor. Now the Sacaean festival, described by the Babylonian priest Berosus in the first book of his history of Babylon, has been plausibly identified with the great Babylonian festival of the New Year called Zakmuk or Zagmuku which has become known to us in recent times through inscriptions. The Babylonian year began with the spring month of Nisan, which seems to have covered the second half of March and the first half of April. Thus the New Year festival, which occupied at least the first eleven days of Nisan, probably included the spring equinox. It was held in honour of Marduk or Merodach, the chief god of Babylon, whose great temple in the city formed the religious centre of the solemnity. For here, in a splendid chamber of the vast edifice, all the gods were believed to assemble at this season under the presidency of Marduk for the purpose of determining the fates for the new year, especially the fate of the king's life. The festival was of hoar antiquity, for it was known to Gudea, an old king of Southern Babylonia who flourished about three thousand years before the beginning of our era, and

1 Athenaeus, xiv. p. 639c; Dio Chrysostom, Or. iv. 69 sq. (vol. i. p. 76 ed. Dindorf). From Athenaeus we learn that the festival was described or mentioned by Berosus in his first book and by Ctesias in his second.

2 Strabo, xi. 8. 5.

3 See Ed. Meyer's article " Anaitis," in Roscher's Lexikon der griech. und röm. Mythologie, i. 330 sqq.

By Bruno Meissner, "Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Purimfestes," Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlan dischen Gesellschaft, 1. (1896), pp. 296301.

At

it is mentioned in an early account of the Great Flood. a much later period it is repeatedly referred to by King Nebuchadnezzar and his successors. Nebuchadnezzar records how he built of bricks and bitumen a chapel or altar, "a thing of joy and rejoicing," for the great festival of Marduk, the lord of the gods; and we read of the rich and abundant offerings which were made by the high priest at this time.1 Unfortunately the notices of this Babylonian festival of the New Year which have come down to us deal chiefly with its mythical aspect and throw little or no light on the mode of its celebration. Hence its identity with the Sacaea must remain for the present a more or less probable hypothesis. In favour of the hypothesis may be alleged in the first place the resemblance of the names Sacaea and Zoganes to Zakmuk or Zagmuku, and in the second place the very significant statement that the fate of the king's life was supposed to be determined by the gods, under the presidency of Marduk, at the Zakmuk or New Year's festival.2 When we remember that the central feature of the Sacaea appears to have been the saving of the king's life for another year by the vicarious sacrifice of a criminal on the cross or the gallows, we can understand that the season was a critical one for the king, and may well have been regarded as determining his fate for the ensuing twelve months. A difficulty, however, in the way of identifying the Sacaea with the Zakmuk arises from the statement of Berosus that the Sacaca fell on the sixteenth day of Lous, which was the tenth month of the Syro-Macedonian calendar, and appears to have nearly coincided with July. Thus if the Sacaea occurred in July and the Zakmuk in March, the theory of their identity could not be maintained. But the identification of the months of the Syro-Macedonian calendar is a matter of some uncertainty; as to the month Lous in

1 Jensen, Kosmologie der Babylonier, p. 84 sqq.; H. Zimmern, “Zur Frage nach dem Ursprunge des l'urimfestes," Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, xi. (1891), p. 159 sqq.; A. Jeremias, 5.7. "Marduk," Roscher's Lexikon der griech. und rom. Myth ologie, ii. 2347 sq.; M. Jastrow, Re

ligion of Babylonia and Assyria, pp. 186, 677 sqq. According to Jensen's transcription the name of the festival was Zakmuk; the other authorities referred to spell it Zagmuku.

2 The statement occurs in an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar. See Jensen, Kosmologie der Babylonier, p. 85.

particular the evidence of ancient writers appears to be conflicting, and until we have ascertained beyond the reach of doubt when Lous fell at Babylon in the time of Berosus, it would be premature to allow much weight to the seeming discrepancy in the dates of the two festivals.

3

A fresh and powerful argument in favour of the identity of the two festivals is furnished by the connection which has been traced between both of them and the Jewish feast of Purim. There are good grounds for believing that Purim was unknown to the Jews until after the exile and that they learned to observe it during their captivity in the East. The festival is first mentioned in the book of Esther, which, by the majority of critics is assigned to the fourth or third century B.C., and which certainly cannot be older than the Persian period, since the scene of the narrative is laid in Susa at the court of a Persian king Ahasuerus, whose name appears to be the Hebrew equivalent of Xerxes. The next reference to Purim occurs in the second book of Maccabees, a work written probably about the beginning of our era.* Thus from the absence of all notice of Purim in the older books of the Bible, we may fairly conclude that the festival was instituted or imported at a comparatively late date among the Jews. The same conclusion is supported by the book of Esther itself, which was manifestly written to explain the origin of the feast and to suggest motives for its observance. For, according to the author of the book, the festival was established to commemorate the deliverance of the Jews from a great danger which threatened them in Persia under the reign of King Xerxes. Thus the opinion of modern scholars that the feast of Purim, as celebrated by the Jews, was of late date and oriental origin, is borne out by the tradition of the Jews themselves.

An examination of that