Philological Dissertation on Honored, Learned, Adored, and Fruitful Virginity

But she also serves as an example that Virgins were acceptable sacrifices to the gods. Whence Virgil said in the 2nd Aeneid:

By blood you appeased the winds, and by the slaughter of a Virgin
You sought your return.

Let Polyxena also be an example:

Strong and unhappy and more than a woman, a Virgin,
who was sacrificed to appease the shades of Achilles. Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.
Hence the same poet said in the 12th book of the Metamorphoses:
By virgin blood the anger of the Virgin
Goddess must be appeased.

The two elder daughters of Eryctheus, namely Protogenia and Pandora, gave themselves to be sacrificed to the gods for their fatherland, as Phanodemus narrates in Suidas. His words are: It is said of these, Protogenia and Pandora, that they gave themselves to be slaughtered for the sake of the country. And you have another example in Jerome, book 1, Against Jovinian, chapter 26.

Let a passage from Tzetzes on Lycophron finish this paragraph. Because of the crime committed by Ajax against Cassandra, the god decreed that they should appease Athena in Ilium for a thousand years by sending two virgins chosen by lot. When they were sent, if the Trojans encountered them, they would seize them, burn their bones with barren and wild wood, and cast the ashes from the mountain of Treron in Troy into the sea; and the Locrians would send others again. But if any escaped, by going up secretly to the temple of Athena, they became priestesses. For they swept it and sprinkled it. They did not approach the goddess, nor did they leave the temple except at night. They were shorn, wore a single tunic, and were barefoot.