Download PDF | Sarah Hitch_ Ian Rutherford - Animal Sacrifice in the Ancient Greek World-Cambridge University Press (2017).
351 Pages
This volume brings together studies on Greek animal sacrifice by foremost experts in Greek language, literature and material culture. Readers will benefit from the synthesis of new evidence and approaches with a re-evaluation of twentieth-century theories on sacrifice. The chapters range across the whole of antiquity and go beyond the Greek world to consider possible influences in Hittite Anatolia and Egypt, while an introduction to the burgeoning science of osteo-archaeology is provided. The twentieth-century emphasis on sacrifice as part of the Classical Greek polis system is challenged through consideration of various ancient perspectives on sacrifice as distinct from specific political or even Greek contexts. Many previously unexplored topics are covered, particularly the type of animals sacrificed and the spectrum of sacrificial ritual, from libations to lasting memorials of the ritual in art.
sarah hitch has held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, where she is now the Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity. She has researched and published widely on various aspects of Greek religion.
ian rutherford is Professor of Greek at the University of Reading. He is one of the foremost experts on ancient religion and has published widely on the topic, including his recent monograph State Pilgrims and Sacred Observers in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2013).
Introduction
Animal sacrifice was not the most common ritual in the ancient world. That distinction surely goes to prayer and also to the broad category of offerings, which are the best-attested practice in the archaeological record. Nevertheless, animal sacrifice was uniquely complex and prestigious, important not only within the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Western Asia,1 but as far afield as India and China.2 It is still practised all over the world; for example it has been documented in many parts of Africa.3 When it develops in human history is still uncertain, but it seems likely to go back at least as far as the Neolithic, when animals are first domesticated, and it could be much earlier.4 Nowhere does it seem to have been more important than in Greece, where to ‘perform the sacred things’ often meant to sacrifice animals. It is found in all periods of Greek history, from the Bronze Age right down to the late Roman Empire. It begins to disappear only under pressure from Christianity, which nevertheless preserved sacrifice as a religious symbol.5 The Greeks seem to have regarded their form of sacrifice as distinct from those of other peoples, and the surviving evidence – literary texts, inscriptions, iconography and zooarchaeological data – does indeed suggest a high degree of uniformity, albeit with local variations.
At the same time, it was a complex system comprising several sacrificial scripts.7 In the best-known script, the killing of an animal is preceded by vegetal offerings and prayers, and followed by the burning of symbolic parts of it on the altar, libations, and the consumption of the rest by an assembled group of worshippers. Here the gods were not imagined as taking part in the human feast, but in another script, the so-called theoxenia ritual, they supposedly ate both meat and other foods.8 In a third common script the animal was burned whole and there were no vegetal offerings or libations. If the remains were buried in a pit, the ritual was directed to a special class of divinities usually called chthonic.9 Sacrifice also occurred frequently as part of other rituals, such as purification, oath-taking and divination,10 or as part of longer sequences, such as a vow followed by a later sacrifice. No less important was the practice of using substitutes for sacrifice: early in antiquity, models of sacrificial animals supplemented, anticipated, or replaced acts of sacrifice; later, payment of fees gave worshippers access to sacrificial altars, and some sacrifices were commuted into cash payments. Common to all its forms is the idea of some kind of reciprocal communication with the divine realm by offering of a gift meant to secure divine good will or avert divine anger.11
Until Christians and some pagan philosophers began to make concerted criticisms of it early in the Common Era, the Greeks did not frequently talk about the meaning of sacrifice as opposed to the ways and means of successfully performing the ritual.12 (Hesiod’s view that sacrifice originated in Prometheus’ attempt to deceive Zeus was never authoritative.)13 The modern taste, on the other hand, tends to have been to go in for grand theories about the significance of sacrifice:14 according to one influential theory, it is all about the person making the offering, who achieves a moment of intense, status-transforming communication with the deity, and, since such contact is dangerous, the sacrificial victim is destroyed in the process as a substitute for the communicant and other worshippers.15 Another theory influential among Hellenists emphasises communal dining, which has the effect of creating and reinforcing group solidarity and/or internal hierarchy;16 a recent formulation of this theory sees it as a device used by male kinship groups to assert control over human reproduction;17 a related theory developed by Walter Burkert envisions communal solidarity generated by directing aggression onto the sacrificial victim.18 These big theories have recently met with criticism,19 but their chief drawback is not what they may get wrong, but what they omit. On the one hand, sacrifice let worshippers honour and communicate with the gods, and on the other hand, it let them increase their individual or collective prestige. It had, so to speak, a vertical and a horizontal dimension. Each of these two dimensions needs to be understood in connection with the other. The theology and the sociology of sacrifice need to be analysed together. Though the grand theories are in retreat, interest in animal sacrifice seems to have intensified in recent years.20 Often, case-studies deal with traditions of sacrifice from certain phases of Greco-Roman religion, from certain periods, or from neighbouring cultures. Other research deals with the representation of sacrifice in a specific medium. Scholars aim not to confirm the correctness of one particular model, but to explore differences. We also see a focus on the idiosyncrasies of the evidence: epigraphical sources, such as sacred laws, sacred calendars and other regulations set up by the polis or other bodies;21 representations of sacrifice in poetry which may have something to tell scholars about both the theology and the sociology behind sacrifice;22 or iconography on vase-paintings and votive stelai.23 Currently, the most important new material is coming from archaeology in the form of osteological evidence, which promises to revolutionalise our understanding of sacrificial victims and the way they were treated after death.24 This volume aims to foster the process of close analysis of the evidence and representation of animal sacrifice. We present twelve papers, which we group into four categories: victims, procedure, representations and margins.
Part I: Victims In this section we present three papers relating to different aspects of victims. Chapter One, Gunnel Ekroth’s ‘Bare Bones: Zooarchaeology and Greek Sacrifice’, is a penetrating study of how bone deposits in sanctuaries shed light on the variety of animals sacrificed and methods of cooking. She looks particularly at the sanctuary of Poseidon at the Isthmos and the Kommos sanctuary on Crete, analysing three aspects of thusia sacrifice in particular: activity at the altar, debris from consumption and refuse from butchering. Among her suggestions are that, whereas the practice of burning the thighbones on the altar is an ancient practice that goes back to the Mycenaeans, the burning of the tail could be an innovation, perhaps introduced from the Near East. She also draws attention to bones from unexpected types of animals, such as dogs and horses, suggesting that these were consumed along with those of sacrificial animals, but not incorporated into the rituals. Ekroth’s investigation sets the stage for more specific studies in the following chapters, beginning with Chapter Two, Jennifer Larson’s ‘Venison for Artemis? The Problem of Deer Sacrifice’. In the first part of the chapter, Larson surveys the evidence for deer in ancient religion and society. Deer-bones are found in large numbers at Greek sanctuaries from the Mycenaean period onwards (more than other wild animals), and herds of deer may have been maintained in special parks. Nevertheless, as she shows, explicit evidence for the sacrifice of deer is meagre – two votive stelai, in fact; thus, it may seem attractive to attribute the osteological evidence not to sacrifice but to the consumption of animals which were hunted and killed in the wild or in parks. Even if that is right, she nonetheless asks whether it makes sense to draw an absolute distinction between animals killed at the sanctuary and ones killed elsewhere and subsequently brought to the sanctuary to be presented to the god and consumed. The further question thus arises whether the circumstances of killing are more important than the system of food production, the ‘alimentary system’ as a whole. This question applies not just to offerings of deer, but to all kinds of offerings. Several passages in Aristophanes confirm the practice of having mixed meats – some sacrificial and some not – at the same meal. In the second part of the chapter, Larson offers a new theory about how deer came to have the role they did in the ancient alimentary system, suggesting that what we see here is an echo of a system established by hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic period. The invocation of huntergatherers reminds us of Walter Burkert’s theory about the origins of sacrifice in Homo Necans, but whereas Burkert put the emphasis on violence, guilt and reparation, for Larson the point is ecological: a religious framework allows for the successful long-term management of the food supply. The tendency for hunters to give Artemis first fruits, rather than honour the goddess through thusiai, confirms Larson’s view of Greek hunting ritual as distributive rather than destructive.25 In Chapter Three, ‘Don’t Kill the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg? Some Thoughts on Bird Sacrifices in Ancient Greece’, Alexandra Villing discusses the much neglected topic of the role of birds in Greek sacrifice. She focuses on three cases: first, sacrifice of the cockerel and chicken, attested from about 400 bc, which seem to have occurred particularly in the cult of Asclepius and that of heroes; secondly, the dove and the partridge, which, though widely associated with Aphrodite, do not seem to have been sacrificed, though they were used in purification offerings; and, thirdly, the goose, which was widely sacrificed to Aphrodite and Isis in the Hellenistic period. This has sometimes been thought to be the result of Egyptian influence, but Villing sees evidence for an earlier practice of goose sacrifice in a fifth-century votive relief from Aegina which seems to depict a goose being led in procession for sacrifice to Hecate or Artemis. More broadly, she argues that the use of geese and chickens for sacrifice makes sense insofar as just like the other types of domestic animal commonly sacrificed, they are by the fifth century bc an integral part of the alimentary system of Greek society.
Part II: Procedure Here we present three papers dealing with sacrificial procedure, and with the place of sacrifice within the realms of religious ritual and polis law.Chapter Four, ‘Reflections on Sacrifice and Purification in the Greek World’ by Stella Georgoudi is a masterful and theoretically informed study of the relationship between animal sacrifice and purificatory rites designed to eliminate miasma. Focusing particularly on the issue of whether there is such a thing as a purificatory sacrifice, she admits that evidence for these ritual categories is so complex that a precise understanding of them will always elude us. However, she makes a persuasive case for the view that although purification and animal sacrifice may sometimes occur in close sequence in the same context, they are generally distinct; in fact, the animal sacrifice may signify that the purification has come to a satisfactory conclusion. Confusion arises partly because many rites of purification involve the killing of a young animal and/or the shedding of its blood (very young animals are preferred in these contexts, as she shows, because they are regarded as pure). These acts of cleansing differ from the acts of burning and offering characteristic of thusia, the most common general term for ‘sacrifice’. In Chapter Five, ‘“Polis Religion” and Sacrificial Regulation’, Fred Naiden challenges the emphasis of earlier scholars on sacrifice as a mechanism of the democratic polis. Taking Sourvinou-Inwood’s much discussed conceptualisation of Greek religious practice as dictated by the polis as his starting point, he lays out the evidence for a reciprocal arrangement between the subdivisions and the overarching polis structure in late Classical Athens. Rather than a hierarchy, he charts a nexus between smaller and bigger groups. He expands this discussion through consideration of the extant aetiologies of sacrifice, which credit individuals sacrificing on behalf of small groups with original sacrifices, rather than the polis or the gods themselves. His conclusions reveal an Athenian notion of sacrificial regulations that lies outside of the monopoly of the polis, and they confirm that Hesiod’s aetiology of sacrifice was not universally accepted by the Greeks. In Chapter Six, which concludes this section, ‘Meaty Perks: Epichoric and Topological Trends’, Mathieu Carbon studies the division of the animal’s body after killing, particularly which parts were given to priests and which consecrated to the gods. (His chapter is the most systematic investigation of this subject since Friedrich Puttkammer’s dissertation of 1912.) Carbon looks closely at a number of aspects: the priests’ share, which, as he shows, is usually ‘the extended rear leg’ (since the thighbones were offered to the god, this links the priest with the divine sphere); the parts reserved for the gods, especially the so-called ἱερὰ μοῖρα (‘sacred portion’); and the relative values given to the parts drawn from the left and right sides 6 sarah hitch, fred naiden and ian rutherford of the animal. As Carbon demonstrates, the evidence from different parts of Greece shows striking homogeneity, but also a degree of local variation.
Part III: Representations This section presents some overlooked examples of how Greeks represented sacrificial rituals in poetry and art. All three papers discuss artistic representations that would have themselves formed part of the religious landscape through either performance in festivals or dedication in sanctuaries: a hymn, votive reliefs and a tragic play. In Chapter Seven, ‘Sacrifice and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes 112–41’, Oliver Thomas looks at the scene in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes where Hermes slaughters and roasts two cows and divides the meat into twelve shares. Thomas argues that this scene does not describe a proto-sacrifice (as other scholars have assumed), but, while evoking aspects of sacrifice, provides an aetion for local topography and for heraldic customs. The Hymn says that the cow-hides left by Hermes remain to this day (125–6), and Thomas argues that in other respects as well the function of the narrative is aetiological, explaining topographical features in the region of the River Alpheios, just as Hermes himself is a model for the sacred heralds who, unlike the god, carry out sacrifice. The Hymn can thus be understood as a sort of ‘precursor’ to a cult of the Twelve Gods at Olympia. In his conclusion, he decisively confirms Walter Burkert’s hypothesis that Olympia was where the Hymn was first performed. Anja Klöckner in Chapter Eight, ‘Visualising Veneration: Images of Animal Sacrifice on Greek Votive Reliefs’, looks at the portrayal of sacrificial animals on votive reliefs, a type of iconography which (unlike vases) always presupposes a ritual act, that of dedication by private individuals. The main subject of the reliefs is always the dedicants themselves (women as well as men), often depicted in the act of praying. However, about a quarter of them depict sacrificial animals, almost always in the context of a procession; others show the altar instead. As a source for ritual performance their value is thus limited; they tell us nothing about ritual itself, and although they provide some useful information about cultic reality, for example what animals were sacrificed on these occasions, that information is selective and approximate. A better approach, as Klöckner shows, is to start from the assumption that the reliefs were meant as a form of ritual communication between dedicants and gods. By looking at this body of evidence as a cultural form, and not as a social document, Klöckner reorients a field of Introduction 7 scholarship still dominated by Folkert Van Straten’s Hiera Kala, which regarded votive reliefs as illustrative of ritual practice. Richard Seaford’s starting point in Chapter Nine, ‘Sacrifice in Drama: The Flow of Liquids’, is the spectacular pre-battle sacrifice described in the proem of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes where the seven warriors touch the blood of a sacrificed bull poured into a shield. Seaford analyses this as combining features of an ordinary pre-battle sacrifice and an oath sacrifice, in which the participants symbolically partake in the blood of an animal. For Seaford, the emotional impact of the communal participation in blood in Aeschylus’ narrative should be understood as consolidatory, along the lines of the sprinkling of khernips-water in ordinary sacrifice; conversely, the shedding of tears immediately afterwards by the seven warriors as they anticipate their fate seems to echo the pouring of libations of wine in the closing stages of an ordinary sacrifice. First, blood replaces water, and then water replaces wine. The paper closes with a provocative analysis of the oath sacrifice in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, clearly modelled on the Seven, which, as Seaford shows, contains clear sexual imagery.
Part IV: Margins Nearly all work on Greek sacrifice has dealt with Greece alone, overlooking the intercultural connections presented in this section. In Chapter Ten, ‘Animal Sacrifice in Hittite Anatolia’, Alice Mouton gives a systematic overview of animal sacrifice in the different regions of the Hittite Empire (late second millennium bc), dealing with the three main issues of what animals are sacrificed, how they are divided and in what contexts sacrifice takes place. In a final section she discusses the meaning of animal sacrifice in the Hittite world, suggesting that the most important idea is that of a regular gift to the gods, through which they become linked or indebted to humans. It has long been suspected that Hittite religion is related to early Greek religion, and one similarity has long been known between Hittite and Greek sacrificial practice, namely that the Hittite word for make an offering, spant-, is manifestly related to the Greek spendein (‘pour a libation’). Significantly, Mouton uncovers one other significant parallel, namely that the vital organs (the heart and liver) are roasted and the rest of the animal stewed. There are also, of course, many differences between the two systems, for example the fact that in Hittite religion victims are frequently identified as substitutes. In Chapter Eleven, ‘The Reception of Egyptian Animal Sacrifice in Greek Writers: Ethnic Stereotyping or Transcultural Discourse?’, Ian 8 sarah hitch, fred naiden and ian rutherford Rutherford looks at accounts of Egyptian animal sacrifice by Greek writers from the fifth century bc till the Roman era. He considers first the idea attested in Plutarch and Diodorus (apparently going back to Manetho) that the victim represents the god Seth; secondly he looks at Herodotus’ detailed accounts of the Egyptian way of sacrificing bulls and pigs; and thirdly at the idea found from the fourth century bc, and apparently inconsistent with the other two, that Egyptians, far from sacrificing animals, did not eat meat at all. Rutherford shows that there are different ways of looking at these accounts: on the one hand, they may well reflect the cultural bias of the Greek writers, who emphasise the strange and extraordinary in foreign religion; on the other hand, most of what they say seems to correspond at least roughly to Egyptian sacrificial practice or to Egyptian discourse about animal sacrifice. The final chapter moves from the edges of the Greco-Roman world to the end of Greco-Roman paganism. In ‘A Quiet Slaughter? Julian and the Etiquette of Public Sacrifice’, Sergio Knipe looks at the religious policy of Julian the Apostate, whose edict of ad 362 temporarily moved the Empire away from Christianity and back to paganism. Julian placed great importance on sacrifice, as is shown by his personal attitude as well as by his official policy, and his ancient biographers stressed this aspect of his rule. However, he expresses a less enthusiastic attitude in a letter he wrote in ad 363. Here he seems to criticise a sacrifice he had observed at Batnae in Syria because it was not ‘away from the beaten path and performed in peace and quiet’. Knipe interprets Julian’s concern for the traditional standard of euphemia (‘ritual silence’) as being influenced by the theurgy of the Neoplatonist Iamblichus, for whom animal sacrifice enabled communication with the gods and also purification of the soul. More generally, Knipe suggests that this emphasis on sacrifice being performed in the correct way should be seen in the context of Julian’s official religious policy directed in the first instance towards priests in different parts of the Empire: thus, under Julian, animal sacrifice regains its place in Roman state religion, but it has a new form, shaped by the theurgy that he so admired. If we take the twelve chapters together, a number of common themes emerge. One is the definition of sacrifice itself. What is it? How do we distinguish it from other ritual actions? Are such distinctions always valid or useful? These problems arise in the case of the deer offerings discussed by Larson, where the killing probably happened during the hunt and not at the altar. They also arise for the ritual discussed by Seaford, which involves the blood of a bull, but not the meat itself. Some of the papers show how recent scholarship has tended to be imprecise in its use of the term sacrifice, allowing it to be applied to phenomena that are connected to it, but differ from it. One example is the purificatory rites accompanied by sacrifice studied by Georgoudi in her chapter. Thomas’s chapter reveals the uncertainty felt by scholars about whether Hermes’ acts of killing the cattle, and roasting and dividing the meat, should be seen as a sacrifice or something else. Another issue thrown up by several of the chapters is the problem of reconciling different types of evidence. For example, the new osteological data sometimes point in different directions to the epigraphical and other sources (see Ekroth, Carbon): the latter usually dictate part of an official script, whereas faunal remains reveal the chaos of actual practice. Similarly, accounts of sacrifice in Greek poetry, which classicists have traditionally tended to privilege as sources,26 sometimes turn out to have only a tangential relationship to actual practice (see Thomas, Seaford); thus, prose and poetry tend to suggest that acts of sacrifice may go awry, whereas epigraphical and visual sources present normative sacrifice. The relationship between iconography and other types of sources raises the same issues (Klöckner). Thirdly, several of the papers address in different ways the issue of the authority for ritual practice. Who mandates that sacrifice be performed in a certain way? In traditional societies we might ascribe authority to an anonymous oral tradition of ritual of uncertain age. Thus, Thomas’s analysis of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes traces a sacrificial practice in honour of the Twelve Gods at Olympia back to an aetion, to which the Hymn itself gives voice. In Classical Greece the authority is these days most often thought to be the polis, which used the medium of sacred regulations (cf. Carbon in this volume (Chapter 6)) to enforce its will; against that, Naiden argues that frequently an independent group organises sacrifice within the polis and may ascribe the authority for it to an external source. Finally, an entirely different model appears in Knipe who shows that when Julian revives sacrificial practice in the fourth century ad, the authority is partly his own as emperor, but also that of Neoplatonic philosophy. A fourth theme is the importance of studying sacrifice cross-culturally: the papers make it clear that understanding Greek sacrifice means understanding sacrifice beyond the borders of the Greek world, particularly as regards the neighbouring Mediterranean cultures of Asia Minor, the ancient Near East including Israel and Egypt. This may be because Greek sacrificial practice may actually have been influenced by foreign cultures (cf. Villing on Near East sacrifice, Mouton on Hittite sacrifice); or it may be because understanding other cultures gives us insights into early Greek practice (cf. Larson on the use of deer in Assyria); alternatively, Greek accounts of animal sacrifice in other parts of the Mediterranean reveal general concepts about supposedly universal and local aspects of sacrifice (Rutherford). As more work is done on the religions of the cultures of the ancient Near East, we can expect rapid progress in this area.27 Are there any other hints in the chapter about where the study of ancient sacrifice may go in the future? One suggestion is given by Larson, who argues in her piece that animal sacrifice in any particular culture cannot be understood without also understanding how food production was managed; and since configurations of ritual may tend to be conservative, it may be necessary to understand what forms the alimentary, economic and ecological system might have taken in the remote past. A systematic investigation of the relationship between food production and society is surely a desideratum, and by the same token, so is investigation into the symbiotic relation between sacrifice and ancient economic development as a whole, as opposed to past interest in sacrifice and the Classical democratic polis. There is perhaps also scope for applying recent advances made by scholars articulating evolutionary approaches to religion and cognitive science. For example, the theory of ‘costly signalling’, which explains spectacular religious actions as conspicuous social displays, could elucidate many of the forms of sacrifice discussed in this volume, and also many representations of sacrifice, such as the votive stelai discussed by Klöckner.28 The study of Greek sacrifice, which began in the Victorian era, and reached a peak of theoretical development about forty years ago, has an expanding but unpredictable future before it, in which the Greek will consort with the non-Greek, and sacrifice, no longer regarded as monolith, will become a crossroads of religious and cultural forms.
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