in Grecian Antiquity, a solemnity performed at Sparta at the festival of Diana Orthia. It is said to have had its origin in the following circumstance:—Two Spartans had discovered under a tree the wooden statue of that goddess which had been brought by Orestes from Tauris, and immediately lost their reason. To propitiate the angry goddess, the inhabitants of the Spartan suburbs immediately offered sacrifices at her altar. During the ceremony, however, a quarrel arose, in the course of which some persons were killed. It was necessary to atone for this pollution without delay; and human victims chosen by lot were annually sacrificed, until Lycurgus introduced the less inhuman rite of the diamastigosis, which consisted in scourging a certain number of young men with stripes until the blood flowed down their bodies upon the altar. Besides merely preventing a waste of valuable life, Lycurgus designed by the introduction of the diamastigosis to inure the Spartan youth to bodily pains and hardships of the severest kind; and many legends are to be found in the ancient classics of young men who bore these tortures with such unflinching firmness, that though they sometimes proved fatal, the sufferers exhibited no signs of pain even in the agonies of death. Death thus manfully encountered, was considered among the Spartans as no less honourable than death on the field of battle.