d, she says, "having lived a princess to die a
slave." A better known example is Iphigenia, so beloved by her father,
King Agamemnon, and yet given up by him a victim for purposes of state
and religion.

[Illustration: Teocalli, Aztec Temple for Human Sacrifices.]

From the Greek drama, human sacrifices frequently passed to the Roman;
nor does such a refined critic as Horace object to it, but only suggests
that the bloodshed ought to be perpetrated behind the scenes. In
Seneca's play, Medea (quoted in our Introduction), that rule was grossly
violated, since the children have their throats cut by their heroic
mother in full view of the audience. In the same passage (Ars Poet.,
185, 186) Horace forbids a banquet of human flesh being prepared before
the eyes of the public, as had been done in a play written by Ennius,
the Roman poet. The religious sacrifice of human victims by the "Druids"
or priests of ancient Gaul and Britain seems exactly parallel to the
wholesale executions on the Mexican _teocallis_, since the wretched
victims whom our Celtic ancestors packed for burning into those huge
wicker images, were captives taken in battle, like those stretched for
slaughter upon the Mexican stone of sacrifice.

Human sacrifice was so common in civilized Rome that it was not till the
first century B. C. that a law was passed expressly forbidding
it--(Pliny, Hist. Nat., xxx, 3, 4).

CHAPTER VI

ARRIVAL OF THE SPANIARDS

The "New Birth" of the world, which characterized the end of the
fifteenth century, had an enormous influence upon Spain. Her queen, the
"great Catholic Isabella," had, by assisting Columbus, done much in the
great discovery of the Western World. Spain speedily had substantial
reward in the boundless wealth poured into her lap, and the rich
colonies added to her dominion. Thus in the beginning of the sixteenth
century the new consolidated Spain, formed by the union of the two
kingdoms, Castile and Aragon, became the richest and greatest of all the
European states.

The Spanish governors in the West Indies being ambitious of planting new
colonies in the name of the Spanish King, conquest and annexation were
stimulated in all directions. When Cuba and Hayti were overrun and
annexed to Spain, not without much unjust treatment of the simple
natives, as we have seen, they became centers of operation, whence
expeditions could be sent to Trinidad or any other island, to Panama, to
Yucatan, or Florida,