Modern versus Ancient Concepts

In contemporary English the words ‘violence' and ‘sacrifice' form a likely pair, but in ancient Greek and Latin there are no comparable words. The Greek word sometimes translated as ‘violence', bia, means both ‘violence' and ‘force', and so it can refer to harmful, illegitimate aggression or to the necessary, legitimate use of coercion.

The common Greek and Latin words for ‘sacrifice' also present difficulties. The most common Greek word, thusia, means ‘burnt offering', and does not necessarily refer to killing animals, even though it is the most common word for a sacrifice followed by a meal of meat taken from the victim. The second most common word, sphagna, refers to slitting the throat of an animal victim, but never refers to a meal. The most common Latin word, sacrificium, designates putting something in the possession of a god, but need not mean killing a victim. Another common word, immolatio, means ‘a sprinkling of meal', an act that occurred before a sacrificial victim was dispatched.^[961] Neither language concentrated on the act of putting an animal to death during an act of worship. As a consequence, Greek sources for sacrifice avoid saying that killing animal victims is an act of bia or violence. These sources also avoid saying that killing victims is an act of hubris, and only some vegetarian sources say that killing victims is an act of murder, or phonos.

To understand ‘violent sacrifice' among the Greeks and Romans we must ask how these two societies reconfigured this concept. Two very different sources come to our aid. One is civic regulations (confirmed by vase paint­ings) that dictate how animal sacrifice occurred. The other source is legal, too. It is the small body of ancient law that treats animals as criminals.

The vegetarian writers are a third source to consider. They offer several accounts of the history of human mistreatment of sacrificial animals, and these accounts include some legal history, in particular, a history of the injustices done to animals along with alleged injustices done by animals to human beings. Without having any notion of speciesism, or of universal rights putting animals on a par with humans, the ancient vegetarians have some notion of justice towards animals. Like its modern counterpart, ancient vegetarianism had legal and moral elements.

Sacrifice and vegetarianism are long-studied subjects, but they have gen­erally been kept separate from one another. Historians of religion have concentrated on a single kind of thusia or sacrificium, the violent death of an animal in an act of ‘sacrifice'. The best-known scholar of this kind, Walter Burkert, held that the killing of an animal was the climax of sacrificial ritual, which was the central act in ancient Greek religion, and, by extension, in ancient Roman religion. Burkert also held that worshippers felt guilty about killing animals, and assuaged their guilt by supposing that the animal gave its consent to being slaughtered. The title of one of Burkert's books, Homo Necans, or ‘Man the Killer', conveys the essence of his view.^[962]

Another group of scholars, mostly intellectual historians, have ignored Greek and Roman sacrificial rites in favour of studying the polemics of the ancient vegetarians. Whole schools of ancient philosophy were vegetarian, anti-vegetarian, or divided by this question, and the arguments they advanced drew upon ancient notions of zoology, biology and economic history, especially the development of pastoralism and agriculture.^[963] Just as Religionshistoriker like Burkert are sociological and anthropological, with a touch of biology, writers of this second kind are philosophical and analy­tical.

For the ‘what', in other words, for the experience of sacrificial victims, we turn to sacrificial regulations. The regulations, however, are inconvenient to cite, because they take existing law and custom for granted, and so we prefer evidence from vase paintings that represent (even if they do not duplicate) sacrifices performed according to written or unwritten rules. Van Straten addressed this subject in his Hiera Kala: Images of Animal Sacrifice in Archaic and Classical Greece. He grouped his selection of some 700 images under three headings: ‘Pre-kill', meaning pictures of animals being led to altars, or waiting beside altars during preliminary rituals; ‘The Killing', including pictures of animal slaughter and also a few similar pictures of human sacrifice; and ‘Post­kill', including not only butchering but two other important topics, first, the inspection of entrails, and second, holocaustic sacrifices in which animals were burnt whole rather than butchered. By far the largest number of pictures are in the pre-kill category. They often show processions in which the animals are adorned with garlands, the same as the worshippers. All animals look fit, as temple regulations often required they should. Some even look like what they were, which was the winners of beauty contests to select only the best specimens for sacrifice. Contrary to Van Straten's own expectations, and also contrary to the views of previous scholars, pictures of animals being killed were few. Burkert's view that the Greeks felt guilty about killing animals could only be right if this feeling led them to avoid this subject. Post-kill pictures do not even hint at gloom or guilt.

Dozens (twenty-six) of pictures show animals resisting those in charge of them, tossing their heads and tugging at the ropes. Written sources confirm Van Straten's vivid evidence. The travel writer Pausanias says that if an animal is unused to the halter it dislikes being led, and the poet Propertius says, with the air of retailing a commonplace, that bulls move as desired only when roped.^{[964] [965]}

Some of these animals would have suspected their fate, but to my knowl­edge only one Greek or Roman source explores this aspect of sacrifice.

The notion that animals could communicate, even if they could not speak, informs two aspects of animal sacrifice. The first, the inspection of entrails or other parts of the animal occurred during both thusia and sphagia. In vase painting, the inspection of entrails mostly occurs in some military context - before going on campaign, before battle or before making some important military decision.^[966] The liver was inspected most often, but other innards were, too. Although the inspection of livers followed Babylonian precedents, it is far older than Greek contact with Babylonian hepatoscopy. In addition, the Greeks watched to see whether the tail of a sacrificial animal curled up as parts of the carcass were burned (as it very commonly would, as shown by recent experiments duplicating this procedure).^[967] The Romans did not check tails, but they did inspect livers. Like the Greeks, they eventually made use of Babylonian hepatological experts and texts.

To say that the animal communicated in these ways is not to say that, like the oxen in the couplet, it spoke for itself. The Greeks and Romans supposed that the god of the sacrifice spoke through the animal.

This episode illustrates a striking feature of Greek and Roman animal sacrifice: even though the remains of the victims were commonly eaten, the ostensible purpose of the sacrifice was never to provide food. The victim largely provided honour or pleasure to the god, who delighted in the smoke and savour of the burning flesh, or enjoyed the sight of the handsome victims on parade, or the sight and sound of worshippers celebrating after a feast. It remains true that meat resulting from sacrifice was an important source of protein, and valued for that reason, but it is no less true that sacrifice and meat eating were far from synonymous. In alimentary terms, sacrifice was important but not indispensable.¹⁶ What was indispensable was communi­cating with gods, heroes and ghosts through animal sacrifice.

Because animal sacrifice was vital, the Greeks and Romans very seldom exempted from sacrifice any large category of domesticated animals. Even young and pregnant animals could be sacrificed. The broadest-known exemption was for working oxen, and it appears only in late sources, all of them literary.

The importance of the victim as a channel of communication explains another wasteful Greek practice, sacrificial holocausts. Pausanias describes how the Peloponnesian city of Patrae prescribed an annual bonfire to Artemis atop the town's acropolis. The worshippers threw into the flames not only the usual domesticated victims but also wild pigs, deer and even bears. Pausanias reports that he himself saw a bear trying to escape the flames. The worshippers hauled down the animal and threw it back into the fire. Unwritten law obliged them to. Pausanias insists that fleeing animals never harmed the worshippers. 1⁸

As a goddess of hunting, Artemis welcomed the sacrifice of the forest creatures. More important than giving her an appropriate offering, however, was creating a massive fire and stoking it with helpless, desperate animals in a spectacle of destruction worthy of an Olympian. Worshippers, priests and officials who did not do their duty on occasions like this one might be fined or removed from office.1⁹ Far from being voluntary or haphazard, Greek vio­lence against animals was lawful and orderly.

In sum, most Greek sources pay little attention to animal slaughter, and they express no guilt about it. They regard animals as an occasionally recalcitrant medium of communication. In the same spirit, Greek law pena­lised violence by animals rather than violence against them, and Roman law did likewise. Both bodies of law describe crimes of violence committed by animals and they also compare animals and slaves, as in the Greek couplet.

16 Ibid., ch. 6. For the Romans see M. Corbier, ‘The Ambiguous Status ofMeat in Ancient Rome', Food and Foodways 3.3 (1989), 223-64. For the consumption of meat and Greek civic bonding see J.-P. Vernant and M. Detienne, La Cuisine du sacrifice en Pays Grec (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1979). For meat consumption and Roman social hierarchy see J. Scheid, ‘Roman Animal Sacrifice and the System of Being', in Faraone and Naiden, Animal Sacrifice, pp. 84-99.

17 M. Detienne, Les Jardins d'Adonis: la mythologie des aromates en Grece (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1972), pp. 52-6, citing schol. Od. 12.353, Ael. NA 12.43, schol. Arat. 132.

18 Paus. 8.18.12-13.

19 On impiety or asebeia, the general term for misconduct used by worshippers and priests, see H. Bowden, ‘Asebeia', in E. Eidinow and J. Kindt (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to Greek Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 325-39.

The least important crime committed by animals was damaging agricultural property. The first text on this subject is from Plato's Laws, a work that sets forth a law code for a proposed colony, not an actual code, but which commonly reflects the law of the fourth century bce, especially the law of Athens. Plato proposes: ‘If some animal - a horse, a dog, or any other - does harm to the property of a neighbour (of the animal's owner), the owner will pay damages in the same way.' The last phrase, ‘in the same way', refers to the preceding sentences, which concern slaves: ‘If a slave or slave woman damages property belonging to someone other than his or her master... the owner of the slave at fault will pay compensation'. So far, the slave, and also the animal, is not to blame. Instead the owners are. Next, Plato imputes some blame to the slave and, by extension, the animal: ‘Or the owner may choose to transfer a culpable slave to the injured party. If the owner alleges that the injured party and the slave have connived against him, and brought a false charge, he must complain of being deceived.'^[970] As the legal historian Jospeh Modrzejewski observed, ‘a culpable slave' is partly responsible for his misdeed, and so a culpable animal would be too. Otherwise it would not make sense for this slave's or animal's owner to have the choice of transferring the offending man or beast. By the same token, the slave or animal's being partly responsible explains why the owner may complain of being deceived. The other party may have offered a bribe or some other inducement to the slave or animal.

The Roman jurist Ulpian, writing in the Digest, supplies another example cited by Modrzejewski: ‘If an animal causes damage, there is an action available that comes from the Twelve Tables. This provided that the master had to transfer the offending animal to the injured party unless he preferred to pay the animal's asking price. This action was called noxia. It applied to all quadrupeds.'^[971] Ulpian's citing the Twelve Tables of the early Roman Republic shows that Roman law on this subject goes back to the time of Plato, if not before.

The Greeks and Romans agree: domesticated animals, the very species mostly likely to be sacrificed, were capable of wrongdoing, and thus had some notion of justice, or at least were punished as though they did. The law treated them as it did slaves, another kind of animate, mammalian property that was conceded some of the traits of human beings but remained less than fully human.^[972] The same holds true of an animal that harmed a human. Solon provided the Athenian law on this subject: if a dog did harm by biting, a collar had to be put around its neck before its owner transferred it.^[973] Plato proposed a law on the subject, too, but went farther, saying that the relatives of any one killed by an animal should put the creature on trial for murder.^[974] Here, as elsewhere, Plato reflects common practice. Classical Athenian murder law provided for the trial of culpable animals at the Prytaneion, one of the city's homicide courts.^[975] Aristotle describes these four-legged defendants as being part of a category of ‘lifeless things and living creatures [other than humans]'. As in previous passages, animals are somewhere between being objects and being persons, but they resemble humans enough to be capable of murder.^[976]

The evidence for routinely killing animals in regulated, civic rituals and the evidence for executing animals after a murder trial seem difficult to reconcile with one another. On the one hand, animals are put to death because they are fit and valuable; on the other hand, they are put to death because they are heedless and aggressive. On the one hand, animals are channels through which gods communicate with humankind; on the other hand, they are capable of the worst crimes. Animals are at men's disposal, yet they are also at the gods' disposal, and they are sometimes free agents. Violence against animals does not derive merely from a selfish or obtuse attitude on the part of humans; it derives also from the belief that animals may be especially close to the gods, and from the fear that even domesticated animals may be a threat.

To explain these contradictions, we might guess that the Greeks and Romans, two urban peoples, did not know animals well. They knew them better than we do. In the wild, animals were prey. In husbandry, they were livestock. At home, they were pets. In transport, they were beasts of burden. In shrines, they were victims by the millions. The Greeks wrote the world's first extensive literature about hunting as well as about vegetarianism, and the Romans contributed the oldest extant literature on animal husbandry.