But on one day in
the year a ram was killed, and its skin was placed on the statue of
the god Ammon. Now, if we knew the ritual of the Arician grove
better, we might find that the rule of excluding horses from it,
like the rule of excluding goats from the Acropolis at Athens, was
subject to an annual exception, a horse being once a year taken into
the grove and sacrificed as an embodiment of the god Virbius. By the
usual misunderstanding the horse thus killed would come in time to
be regarded as an enemy offered up in sacrifice to the god whom he
had injured, like the pig which was sacrificed to Demeter and Osiris
or the goat which was sacrificed to Dionysus, and possibly to
Athena. It is so easy for a writer to record a rule without noticing
an exception that we need not wonder at finding the rule of the
Arician grove recorded without any mention of an exception such as I
suppose. If we had had only the statements of Athenaeus and Pliny,
we should have known only the rule which forbade the sacrifice of
goats to Athena and excluded them from the Acropolis, without being
aware of the important exception which the fortunate preservation of
Varro's work has revealed to us.
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