previous next
38.

They believe that bulls belong to Epaphus,1 and for this reason scrutinize them as follows; if they see even one black hair on them, the bull is considered impure. [2] One of the priests, appointed to the task, examines the beast, making it stand and lie, and drawing out its tongue, to determine whether it is clean of the stated signs which I shall indicate hereafter.2 He looks also to the hairs of the tail, to see if they grow naturally. [3] If it is clean in all these respects, the priest marks it by wrapping papyrus around the horns, then smears it with sealing-earth and stamps it with his ring; and after this they lead the bull away. But the penalty is death for sacrificing a bull that the priest has not marked. Such is the manner of approving the beast; I will now describe how it is sacrificed.

1 Epaphus is the Greek form of Apis or Hapi, the bull-god of Memphis; for bulls cf. Mair's Oppian (L.C.L.) Cyn. II. 86, note.

2 Hdt. 3.28

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Notes (W. W. How, J. Wells)
load focus Greek (1920)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Memphis (Egypt) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (30 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: