But whatever the original relation of
Apis to Osiris may have been, there is one fact about the former
which ought not to be passed over in a disquisition on the custom of
killing a god. Although the bull Apis was worshipped as a god with
much pomp and profound reverence, he was not suffered to live beyond
a certain length of time which was prescribed by the sacred books,
and on the expiry of which he was drowned in a holy spring. The
limit, according to Plutarch, was twenty-five years; but it cannot
always have been enforced, for the tombs of the Apis bulls have been
discovered in modern times, and from the inscriptions on them it
appears that in the twenty-second dynasty two of the holy steers
lived more than twenty-six years.
5. Virbius and the Horse
WE are now in a position to hazard a conjecture as to the meaning of
the tradition that Virbius, the first of the divine Kings of the
Wood at Aricia, had been killed in the character of Hippolytus by
horses. Having found, first, that spirits of the corn are not
infrequently represented in the form of horses; and, second, that
the animal which in later legends is said to have injured the god
was sometimes originally the god himself, we may conjecture that the
horses by which Virbius or Hippolytus was said to have been slain
were really embodiments of him as a deity of vegetation.
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