Votive Armour and Arms

Extract

The custom of dedicating or of specially setting apart articles of use or ornament to divine beings has been common to many peoples, and has come down from a remote antiquity to the present day. Nor is the motive which prompts the action one in any way foreign to the impulses by which men are moved. A danger escaped, a victory achieved, is not unnaturally believed to be due, at all events in some measure, to powers not of the lower world, who can control and even overrule the designs of mortal men. In the temples, therefore, of the gods, and in other places hallowed by the more immediate presence of the divinity, it has been the habit to offer various things in recognition of benefits already bestowed, or in the hope of favours to be granted in the future. The pot of manna and Aaron's rod which budded laid up in the Tabernacle, are as trite as are the models which the same pious feeling still deposits in Christian churches, in remembrance of shipwrecks escaped from or of diseases cured. In no country was the custom more observed than in Hellas, where it was usual to dedicate a tenth of the spoil taken in war, and where at the great shrines so large were the offerings, that many of the states had θησαυροί, in which were preserved the almost innumerable votive objects dedicated to the Gods. In Greece itself there was no place, not excepting Delphi and Dodona, where more evidence of the observance of the custom was to be found than at Olympia, and in the temple where dwelt the cloud-compelling wielder of the lightning, the mighty dispenser of victory, Zeus, the King of Gods and men.