[143] Ovid, Fasti, iv. 211, about the festivals of Apollo:—
“Priscique imitamina facti Æra Deæ comites raucaque terga movent.”
And Lactantius, v. 19, 15. “Ipsos ritus ex rebus gestis (deorum) vel ex casibus vel etiam ex mortibus, natos:” to the same purpose Augustin. De Civ. D. vii. 18; Diodôr. iii. 56. Plutarch’s Quæstiones Græcæ et Romaicæ are full of similar tales, professing to account for existing customs, many of them religious and liturgic. See Lobeck, Orphica, p. 675.
It was the practice to offer to the gods in sacrifice the bones of the victim only, inclosed in fat: how did this practice arise? The author of the Hesiodic Theogony has a story which explains it: Promêtheus tricked Zeus into an imprudent choice, at the period when the gods and mortal men first came to an arrangement about privileges and duties (in Mekônê). Promêtheus, the tutelary representative of man, divided a large steer into two portions: on the one side he placed the flesh and guts, folded up in the omentum and covered over with the skin: on the other, he put the bones enveloped in fat. He then invited Zeus to determine which of the two portions the gods would prefer to receive from mankind. Zeus “with both hands” decided for and took the white fat, but was highly incensed on finding that he had got nothing at the bottom except the bones.[144] Nevertheless the choice of the gods was now irrevocably made: they were not entitled to any portion of the sacrificed animal beyond the bones and the white fat; and the standing practice is thus plausibly explained.[145] I select this as one amongst a thousand instances to illustrate the genesis of legend out of religious practices. In the belief of the people, the event narrated in the legend was the real producing cause of the practice: but when we come to apply a sound criticism, we are compelled to treat the event as existing only in its narrative legend, and the legend itself as having been, in the greater number of cases, engendered by the practice,—thus reversing the supposed order of production.
Φῆ ῥα δολοφρονέων· Ζεὺς δ᾽ ἄφθιτα μήδεα εἰδὼς Γνῶ ῥ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἠγνοίησε δόλον· κακὰ δ᾽ ὄσσετο θυμῷ Θνητοῖς ἀνθρώποισι, τὰ καὶ τελέεσθαι ἔμελλεν. Χερσὶ δ᾽ ὅγ᾽ ἀμφοτέρῃσιν ἀνείλετο λευκὸν ἄλειφαρ· Χώσατο δὲ φρένας, ἀμφὶ χόλος δέ μιν ἵκετο θυμὸν, Ὡς ἴδεν ὀστέα λευκὰ βοὸς δολίῃ ἐπὶ τέχνῃ.