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ANCIENT RELIGION OF INDIA.
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the causes assigned by the Greek writers to the detention of the feet at Aulis, and consequent sacrifice of Iphigenia, was Agamemnon's violation of the vow which he had made to offer to Diana the most lovely thing which the year in which his daughter was born should produce: Iphigenia was that thing, and the sacrifice was insisted on in satisfaction of the vow. The offering of children to Moloch, subsequently borrowed by the Jews from their idolatrous neighbours, originated probably in a similar feeling, which it is evident exercised a very extentive influence over the nations of Western Asia in remote antiquity, and, as appears from the story of Sunahśepha, was not confined to that quarter, but had reached the opposite limits of Asia at a period at least prior by ten or twelve centuries to the Christian era.
Further, we find a like community of ideas in the institution of vicarious sacrifices. In the story of Sunahấepha, one human victim is substituted for another, whilst in the parallel cases of antiquity the substitutes were animals. It is not unlikely that this was also a primitive notion of the Hindus, and at any rate it had become so by the time of the Brahmanas; for Sunahsepha is made to say, “They will put me to death as if I were not a man"—that is, according to Sáyana's commentary, founded upon a text of the Veda which he cites, but which is not easily verified, when the assistants had circunambulated the person bound to the stake, they set liim free without any detriment, and substituted an animal (a goat) in his
