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197.
When Xerxes had come to Alus in Achaea, his guides, desiring to inform him of all they knew, told him the story which is related in that country concerning the worship of Laphystian Zeus, namely how Athamas son of Aeolus plotted Phrixus' death with Ino, and further, how the Achaeans by an oracle's bidding compel Phrixus descendants to certain tasks.
[2]
They order the eldest of that family not to enter their town-hall (which the Achaeans call the People's House）1 and themselves keep watch there. If he should enter, he may not come out, save only to be sacrificed. They say as well that many of those who were to be sacrificed had fled in fear to another country, and that if they returned at a later day and were taken, they were brought into the town-hall. The guides showed Xerxes how the man is sacrificed, namely with fillets covering him all over and a procession to lead him forth.
[3]
It is the descendants of Phrixus' son Cytissorus who are treated in this way, because when the Achaeans by an oracle's bidding made Athamas son of Aeolus a scapegoat for their country and were about to sacrifice him, this Cytissorus came from Aea in Colchis and delivered him, thereby bringing the god's wrath on his own descendants.
[4]
Hearing all this, Xerxes, when he came to the temple grove, refrained from entering it himself and bade all his army do likewise, holding the house and the precinct of Athamas' descendants alike in reverence.2
2 The legend, in its main features, originates in the cult of “Zeus Laphystius,” a tribal god who, like the Jehovah of the O. T. and the Moloch and Melqart of the Phoenicians, has a right to all first-born, especially of the priestly house. In time human sacrifice is avoided by the substitution of a ram; but even then the first-born child must leave the country.
Herodotus, with an English translation by A. D. Godley. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1920.
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- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), ACHA´IA
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- Apollodorus, Library, Apollod. 1.9
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