THE RELIGIONS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD.
HI
possible, offered himself as a victim on the entire defeat of his army by Gelo.* Tyre found itself unable to resist the assault of Alexander the Great, the proposition was made, but overruled, to sacrifice a boy to Saturn. f Every year, at Carthage, there was at least one occasion, on which human victims, chosen by lot, where publicly offered to expiate the sins of the nation. $
When
The
private sacrifices of this sort went
hand
in
hand
with public ones. Diodorus tell us, that in the temple of Saturn at Carthage, the brazen image of the god stood with outstretched hands to receive the bodies of children offered to it. Mothers brought their infants in their arms ;
reluctance would have made the sacrifice unacceptable to the god, stilled them by their caresses till the moment when they were handed over to the image, which was so contrived as to consign whatever it received to a glowing furnace underneath it. Inscriptions found at Carthage record the offering of such 8acrifices.|| They continued even after the Roman conquest ; and at length the proconsul Tiberius, in order to put down the practice, hanged the priests of these bloody rites on the trees of their own sacred grove. H The public exhibitions of the sacrifice thenceforth ceased, but in secret they still continued down to the time of Tertullian.** The Phoenicians were not idolaters, in the ordinary sense of the word ; that is to say, they did not worship images of their deities. In the temple of Melkarth at Gades there was no material emblem of the god at all, with the exception of an ever-burning fire. ft Elsewhere, conical stones, called bcetyli, were dedicated to the various deities,t J and received and,
as
any
manifestation
of
i
* See the story in Herodotus (vii. 167). " Vit. Alex. t Quint. Curt. Magn." iv. 15. t Sillius Ital. iv.
Diod. Sic. xx.
765-768. 14.
Geseuius " Script. Phten. Mon.," pp. 448, 449. given by Dr. Davis (" Carthage and her Remains," pp. to the public annual sacrifice. TTTertull. "Apologia." c. ix. I!
An
inscription
296, 297) refers
~lbul
tt Silius Ital.
ii. 45. " Bibliothec." tt Philo Bybl. c. iv. p. 1065; 2; Damasc. ap. Phot. ad. voc. ftairvAof. it has been proposed to explain the word Hesych. b&tulus as equivalent to Beth-el. " House of God. "and to regard the Phoanicians as believing that a deity dwelt in the stoiie. (Kenrick,
"Ptuenicia,"
p. 323,
note
4.)