Spartan cults, took the view that the central theme of the Karneia was not military –
that is only Demetrius’ arbitrary judgment – but agricultural. Pointing to a European
harvest custom of chasing (and sometimes killing) an animal or a man representing an
animal and to the clusters of grapes in the namestaphylodromoihe concluded that the
single runner stood for the Vegetation Daemon, whose pursuit and capture was an
act of analogical harvest magic. Farnell (1896–1909:4.261–3) accepts Wide’s basic
interpretation, but revises it in the spirit of the ‘‘Cambridge School’’ anthropology of
James Frazer and Jane Harrison. On this view the power of the god resides in the
runner as counterpart of Apollo’s ram, the ‘‘theanthropic animal’’; his pursuers will
touch him with the grape clusters ‘‘so that these being impregnated with his virtue,
the whole of the vintage may prosper.’’ Farnell also allows, however, on the basis of a
hoplite dance attested for the Karneia at Cyrene and the title ‘‘Leader of the Host’’
(Hage ̄to ̄r) shared by god and priest in the Argive Karneia, that the military theme
identified by Demetrius must have been present. Nilsson (1906:118–24) too treats
the Karneia as a primarily agricultural festival, but on the basis of the myth of Karnos
he also regards it as expiatory. These interpretations have in common a narrow focus
on the chase and one of the myths to the almost complete exclusion of the other
components of the festival, and it is easy to see now that this has everything to do with
the dominance of the then fashionable interpretative model.
For Burkert there is at the heart of Greek religion a complex of guilt and atonement
for killing that goes back to the earliest human hunters, and his account of Karneia
(1985:234–6) is just as clearly driven by his leading interpretative idea as earlier
scholars’ interpretations were by theirs. By claiming that the wool fillets will have
‘‘handicapped’’ the single runner – and by ignoring the grape clusters apparently
carried by the pursuers, surely a much greater handicap – Burkert makes of him a
‘‘victim’’ who ‘‘displays willing acquiescence.’’ In this way the runner is assimilated to
the willing animal victims, such as cattle that ‘‘offer themselves’’ for sacrifice by eating
grain on an altar, which on Burkert’s theory play a role in a ‘‘comedy of innocence’’
that displaces responsibility for their destruction from their human sacrificers to
themselves. Burkert then equates the runner with the ram sacrificed at the festival –
as in Farnell’s interpretation, but on an entirely different conceptual basis. The
equation is based on an analogy with a story in Herodotus of the sacrifice of a man
‘‘covered in fillets of wool’’ to Zeus Laphystios in Thessaly; the man was a descendant
of Phrixos, who had once been saved from sacrifice through the appearance of the
golden ram, to which his complete covering in wool assimilates the human victim.
Thus ‘‘the fillet-draped runner at the Karneia and the ram represent each other, as is
hinted in the Phrixos myth’’ (Burkert 1985:235). This is all rather arbitrary: the
runner at the Karneia is not ‘‘completely covered’’ in wool fillets, which anyway have
a variety of ritual functions in the Greek world, and neither Herodotus’ tale of a
human sacrifice in Thessaly nor the myth of Phrixos have any connection with the
Karneia. Burkert goes on to consider the Karnos myth and other etiological stories
representing the foundation of the Karneia as a form of atonement for some crime
preceding a military victory. ‘‘Ancient guilt,’’ Burkert concludes, ‘‘is associated
with the festival, and is made present in the race and the ram sacrifice, but at the
same time the ritual atones for the guilt; and therefore the warriors can march out to
conquer all the more freely; the violence and bloodshed of the conquest can no
longer be charged to their account. For this reason no war may be waged during the
194 Scott Scullion