Bibliographic Essay

The study of violent sacrifice among the Greeks and Romans began once the scholarly subjects of ‘ritual' and ‘sacrifice' emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

For many centuries the first of these two subjects, ‘ritual', was not studied as such. The term ‘ritual' meant only ‘training manual', as it had in Classical Latin. In the late nineteenth century there was a profound change whereby it became understood as a process of worship that influenced social life, on the one hand, and myth, on the other. This new definition informed the work of Robertson Smith, Durkheim and Hubert and Mauss. These writers all regarded sacrifice as the most important ritual, not only in Greek and Roman religion but in religion in general, and in justifying this opinion built on notions of sacrifice found in Hegel and de Maistre. Bruce Lincoln's chapter ‘From Bergaigne to Meuli: How Animal Sacrifice became a Hot Topic', in C. A. Faraone and F.

It remained to connect the ritual of sacrifice with violence, which was at most a minor theme in a few writers, notably Robertson Smith. The Swiss scholar Karl Meuli forged this link by associating sacrifice with hunting, especially among Neolithic peoples of northern Europe. Next, one of Meuli's pupils, Walter Burkert, strengthened the link by associating sacrifice with the inborn violent tendencies posited by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz. Thus emerged the view that the Greeks and the Romans felt guilty about animal slaughter, and that the ritual of sacrifice redirected or discharged this guilt in socially beneficial fashion. A contemporary of Burkert's, Rene Girard, focused on sacrifice of a peculiar kind, the expulsion and death of a scapegoat, and in works such as La Violence et le sacre (Paris: Grasset, 1972), translated as Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). He made this sort of sacrifice an interpretive model for analysing many social practices. Outside of classics, Girard's views became well known, but within the discipline Burkert's views were far more influential, partly because he drew a comparison between Greek attitudes towards sacrifice and ancient vegetarian literature, condemning meat-eating in his Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

A rival theory of sacrifice allowed that this ritual was quintessentially violent, and also allowed that the Greeks felt guilty about slaughtering animals, but differed from Burkert on the question of how the ritual of sacrifice redirected or displaced violence. The two proponents of this theory, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, argued in The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) that the ancient worshipper ignored the violence around him for the sake of achieving social and political unity through communal acts of animal sacrifice.

Opposition to these two views began with arguments against the proposition that the Greeks commonly believed that sacrificial animals went to their deaths willingly and thus relieved worshippers of feelings of guilt. Next came criticism of the broad assumption that sacrifice was a typically or inherently violent ritual, for example by Kathryn McClymond in Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) and of the related assumption that sacrificial violence was the only, or at least the most important, source of meat (see chapter 6 of Naiden's Smoke Signals for the Gods). The effect of these criticisms was to reduce Burkert's fundamental notion of guilty worshippers and victimised animals to its narrow literary and intellectual basis — vegetarian sympathy for victimised animals in Greek and Latin literature from Empedocles to Porphyry. Since this literature is mostly philosophical, ancient feelings of guilt about animal sacrifice proves to be mostly a topic in intellectual history.