A scarce copy of an unusual investigation, reprinting and commenting on the 1847-1848 correspondence between Macaulay, Peel, and Stanhope printed in London in 1860 under the title, WERE HUMAN SACRIFICES IN USE AMONG THE ROMANS? Stanhope had introduced the topic to Macaulay and Peel after reading a passage in Johann Karl Ludwig Gieseler's recently published COMPENDIUM OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. Gieseler had cited Lactantius to argue that, as late as the third century C.E., an annual human sacrifice to Jupiter Latialis was made in Rome. Macaulay disagreed with Gieseler's translation (particularly of the particle, "siquidem") and dismissed the notion as being as "absurd" as Father John MacHale's recent assertion that the "English Government starved two millions of [the Irish] last year." Peel, while skeptical of Gieseler's assertion, took issue with Macaulay's specific arguments against him. 

The Rev. Thatcher Thayer (1811-1894), a Congregationalist minister Newport, Rhode Island, revisits the conversation in the present work with the thoughtful, detailed scholarship for which he was celebrated by his peers. He concludes that propitiatory human sacrifice among Romans indeed persisted into the early Christian era and notes its importance in understanding the origins of the Church and the brutality that saturated its world. His exasperation with Macaulay's pompous historicism is palpable: "we are more ready to believe the rhetorician Lacantius than the rhetorician Macaulay, and listen more complacently to the jingle of the latter's lays than to his judgment of the morals of ancient Rome"

[Providence]: Printed, not published [for] Sidney S. Rider, 1878. 90 pp. Original printed wrappers. Institutional blindstamp and withdrawal inkstamp of American Antiquarian Society in title page. Wrappers moderately rubbed and worn, lightly chipped along yapped edges, rear wrapper unevenly sunned. Contents clean. Very good.

W. C. Baker Rare Books & Ephemera is a Brooklyn, New York-based firm specializing in printed and manuscript materials relating to avant-garde literature, social movements, and unusual currents in science, religion, and the performing arts.

Please note: Shipping fee includes packaging and handling costs