Which of the following may be inferred from the passage?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question.

On the grassy slope below me was god’s precinct, a sacred spot, entered on pain of death. Indeed, worshippers of old believed that, once there, neither man nor beast could cast a shadow. In times past they had processed up this mountain in the night to reenact a ritual human sacrifice to their god — or so ancient sources tell us. At the festive meal, a person who chanced to eat human flesh mixed with the flesh of sacrificed animals would transform into a werewolf. In fact, Lykaion signifies wolf.
These enigmatic rites were celebrated not by an uncivilised people in a forgotten land but rather in the heart of classical Greece during its so - called Golden Age. The practitioners of these rites were respected Greek citizens, not fringe cultists, who worshiped Zeus, the king of the Gods. In a way, these rites were no more bizarre than countless mainstream festivals of the time: During the Athenian Thesmophoria, women retrieved the decayed bodies of piglets from pits into which they had tossed the dead animals months earlier, and in the rites of the goddess Artemis that took place at Brauron little girls impersonated bears. Like all periods of history, the Classical Age of Greece, which lasted from about 500 B.C. until the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C., was complex and contradictory, a mix of superstition and rationality that blended revolutionary concepts and age - old traditions. Classical Greece is rightly regarded as a high - water mark of civilisation. Yet the living, breathing people who created this culture did not exist merely to turn out masterpiece after masterpiece for the later Western world to study, though it may seem that way to students of the humanities reluctant to embrace the less enchanting aspects of the culture. Because so much of Western culture has its roots in classical Greece, it is easy to overlook the living context from which this heritage arose. We focus on what we know, ignoring the features that strike us as bizarre or even repugnant. The great masterpieces of ancient Greece are our heritage, but it is doubtful that any modern Western person can fully comprehend their background. How can we, in the 21st century, envision the magic spells of the sorceress Medea? Or the magic behind the routine spilling of animal blood as sacrifice? Or the use of curse objects to summon ghosts from the underworld to harm one’s enemies? Yet these practices and beliefs, as much as the spirit of democracy and the value of aesthetic beauty, formed the nerves and sinews of ancient Greek culture. To professional classicists this is old news, but to the layman these unfamiliar aspects of Classical Greece are shocking. Unfamiliar as well, to the layman, are the centuries of earlier Greek life that laid the foundation for the famous “Golden Age” we study in school. For these reasons, I determined that when I travelled to Greece, I would visit all these different eras and rituals. I would pay tribute to the Parthenon — but also examine the “voodoo dolls” in the Kerameikos Museum in Athens. On the island of Euboea, north of Athens, an unusual site demonstrates that the Golden Age did not spring into existence fully formed but instead was centuries in the making. On a nondescript hillock overlooking the sea near the town of Lefkandi, a tenth - century B.C., a grave was revealed when ground was dug up for a house. The work unearthed the remains of an elaborate cremation and burial, uncannily similar to the burials of heroes described in Homer’s Iliad. In addition to the deceased’s bones, carefully wrapped in a piece of fabric and placed in an heirloom bronze urn, excavators found evidence of a building nearly 160 feet in length that had once covered the burial site. Dating from the era traditionally known as Greece’s Dark Age — some three and a half centuries that began with the collapse of the Mycenaean world — the Lefkandi finds were a reminder that however murky or “dark” this historical period may be to us, to the people of the time it was life. The Dark Age was an age of many things: oral bards continued the tradition of transmitting the Homeric masterpieces, the Iliad and Odyssey; distinctive pottery with geometric patterns was made throughout Greece; and as the Lefkandi site indicated, people built impressive structures to bury their dead in a manner befitting heroes. Like the carefully preserved bronze urn, two centuries older than the bones it contained, ideas — and culture — were passed on from generation to generation of the Greek people.