was gorged in this distressing fashion.

The evidence of human sacrifice (especially when it seems not piacular,
but a relic of cannibalism) raises a presumption that Greeks had once
been barbarians. The presumption is confirmed by the evidence of early
Greek religious art.

When his curiosity about human sacrifices was satisfied, the pilgrim in
Greece might turn his attention to the statues and other representations
of the gods. He would find that the modern statues by famous artists
were beautiful anthropomorphic works in marble or in gold and ivory.
It is true that the faces of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth
were smudged all over with cinnabar, like fetish-stones in India or
Africa.(1) As a rule, however, the statues of historic times were
beautiful representations of kindly and gracious beings. The older works
were stiff and rigid images, with the lips screwed into an unmeaning
smile. Older yet were the bronze gods, made before the art of soldering
was invented, and formed of beaten plates joined by small nails. Still
more ancient were the wooden images, which probably bore but a slight
resemblance to the human frame, and which were often mere "stocks".(2)
Perhaps once a year were shown the very early gods, the Demeter with the
horse's head, the Artemis with the fish's tails, the cuckoo Hera, whose
image was of pear-wood, the Zeus with three eyes, the Hermes, made
after the fashion of the pictures on the walls of sacred caves among
the Bushmen. But the oldest gods of all, says Pausanias repeatedly, were
rude stones in the temple or the temple precinct. In Achaean Pharae he
found some thirty squared stones, named each after a god. "Among all
the Greeks in the oldest times rude stones were worshipped in place of
statues." The superstitious man in Theophrastus's Characters used to
anoint the sacred stones with oil. The stone which Cronus swallowed
in mistake for Zeus was honoured at Delphi, and kept warm with wool
wrappings. There was another sacred stone among the Troezenians, and
the Megarians worshipped as Apollo a stone cut roughly into a pyramidal
form. The Argives had a big stone called Zeus Kappotas. The Thespians
worshipped a stone which they called Eros; "their oldest idol is a rude
stone".(3) It is well known that the original fetish-stone has been
found in situ below the feet of the statue of Apollo in Delos. On this
showing, then, the religion of very early Greeks in Greece was not
unlike that of mo