 These authors make it clear that such practices were from a much more uncivilized time in the past, far removed.It is thought that many ritualistic celebrations and dedications to gods used to involve human sacrifice, but have now been replaced with symbolic offerings.Dionysius of Halicarnassus says that the ritual of the Argei, in which straw figures were tossed into the Tiber river, may have been a substitute for an original offering of elderly men.