The season of the year when the ceremony was performed,
namely the time of the corn harvest, tallies well with the theory
that the rite had an agricultural significance. Further, that it was
above all intended to fertilise the fig-trees is strongly suggested
by the strings of black and white figs which were hung round the
necks of the victims, as well as by the blows which were given their
genital organs with the branches of a wild fig-tree; since this
procedure closely resembles the procedure which ancient and modern
husbandmen in Greek lands have regularly resorted to for the purpose
of actually fertilising their fig-trees. When we remember what an
important part the artificial fertilisation of the date palm-tree
appears to have played of old not only in the husbandry but in the
religion of Mesopotamia, there seems no reason to doubt that the
artificial fertilisation of the fig-tree may in like manner have
vindicated for itself a place in the solemn ritual of Greek
religion.
If these considerations are just, we must apparently conclude that
while the human victims at the Thargelia certainly appear in later
classical times to have figured chiefly as public scapegoats, who
carried away with them the sins, misfortunes, and sorrows of the
whole people, at an earlier time they may have been looked on as
embodiments of vegetation, perhaps of the corn but particularly of
the fig-trees; and that the beating which they received and the
death which they died were intended primarily to brace and refresh
the powers of vegetation then beginning to droop and languish under
the torrid heat of the Greek summer.
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