Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

An inscription from the Areopagus recently published by Meritt in Hesperia (XI, 1942, 282 ff.) has thrown new light on the structure of the type of association of which the members were called orgeones. The occasion thus presents itself to bring together what we now know about this obscure Athenian institution.

The text discussed p. 73 ff. is a measure to ensure equitable and uncontentious distribution of the flesh of the two ‘fullgrown victims,’ and presumably of the young pig also. There is no mention of the burning of portions in honor of the heroines or of the hero, and outside Greece we know of sacrifices in which the worshippers took all. Such detail would be irrelevant to the purpose of our inscription, which is not a lex sacra; and the use of θύειν and the presence of an altar (for the restoration in line 6 is almost certain) strongly suggest that conventional symbolic offerings were made by fire.

The last few decades of research concerning Luther have been clearly characterized by the close attention paid to his early development. Aided by some remarkable discoveries of hitherto unknown early Luther material, scholars have investigated particularly the important period from roughly 1513 to 1517/18, during which the ‘new’ religion of Luther evolved and reached its first flowering. The largely uncharted years before 1513, however, still remain in comparative darkness, despite Otto Scheel's notable work which, for all its completeness, is peripheral rather than central so far as the figure of Luther himself is concerned. While Scheel has succeeded in recreating the environment, physical as well as intellectual, in which the boy and youth lived and moved, he has been able to tell us but little of Luther's early spiritual development. The sources available to us unfortunately do not permit our going much beyond what Scheel has so competently presented. A few early letters and the marginal notes of 1509/10 constitute practically the whole body of direct Luther records before 1513. This situation is most regrettable indeed since we do not really know, aside from the general religious background in which Luther grew up, the all-important specific and personal elements characteristic of his early religion. In other words, we do not actually know the individual and intimate features of the religion from which Luther developed into the ‘new’ religion so wholly and unmistakably his own.