Although Nietzsche was referring to slavery in this early essay of his, and not to animal sacrifice, he might well have included sacrifice as a ‘cruel trait', for it involved literally tens of millions of animal victims, many of which did not provide any food.

In this respect, Greek sacrifice is harder to justify than ancient or modern butchery.^{[955] [956]} The Romans resembled the Greeks. Because the population practising Roman sacrifice was larger, the total number of victims reached hundreds of millions.

This massive slaughter inspired the oldest extensive vegetarian literature, beginning with Pre-Socratic philosophers and extending down to Greek and Latin philosophers and other writers of the early Common Era. The ancient vegetarians' critique of sacrifice finds an echo in the treatment given to animals in Greek and Roman law, for under the law the status of animals was problematic. Should human beings treat animals justly, and did that mean abandoning animal sacrifice? Since both ancient law and literature take

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the pagan gods for granted, more questions arose. Did the gods require sacrifice? Which gods, how, and when?

Some of these questions anticipate today's controversies about animal rights.^[957] Mary Douglas is perhaps the only writer to warn that ancient vegetarianism and modern advocacy of animal rights arose under very different circumstances, and that we should be sceptical about whether the one sheds light on the other. She is right, and might have added that we should not equate vegetarianism and rejection of animal sacrifice. The two phenomena overlap without being identical.^[958]

This chapter begins with remarks about what the concepts of ‘violence' and ‘sacrifice' meant to the Greeks and Romans, and then turns to the subject of the suffering of animals during sacrifices and how the ancients understood this suffering in the light of both legal and literary texts.