In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the names and settings may be remote but the stories of war and the return home continue to resonate. There’s a timelessness to these epics: even all this time later, modern readers can still relate to the themes of friendship, honor, and love.
There is one thing, however, that’s hard to fathom. The ancient Greeks—and others in the ancient eastern Mediterranean—sacrificed animals to their gods, rendering the animals to meat offered to the gods and the worshippers themselves. They did this in both quotidian and extraordinary rituals, explains archeologist Gunnel Ekroth, to “honor the gods and thank them for their help, to divine the outcome of war, to purify a sanctuary.”
Ekroth writes that “[t]he Greek attitudes to animal sacrifice and the handling of the meat are vastly more complex than anything we encounter in our contemporary Western society. […] Animal sacrifice served to separate gods and human beings and to define who is who.”
A typical offering included a thigh bone from cattle, sheep, goats, or pigs wrapped in fat and set ablaze. The worshipers got the rest. But in other rituals, choice cuts were left raw for the gods, a display that proved to the gods where the meat originated. And sometimes the entire animal was burnt, which was the original meaning of the word “holocaust.”
“Sacrifice in ancient Greece was not one ritual but many,” Ekroth writes, so many that the
modern term “sacrifice” is in this sense misleading, since it is both too wide and too narrow. […] When sacrificing, a number of different items could be used, not only animals but also fruit, vegetables, grain, flowers, as well as cheese, cakes, and bread, and different kinds of libations, such as wine, water, milk, oil, honey, and blood.
Ekroth explains that “even if the entire animal was dedicated to the gods, their actual share was quite small.” The primary gift to the gods was the “fragrant and fatty smoke” of the burnt offerings. As immortals, Zeus and company subsisted on nectar and ambrosia, and they didn’t need to eat like humans did. The “inequality” of this division of the animal between gods and humans was “actually commented upon already in antiquity,” but the point was that the smoke marked the gods as separate and divine. The eating of cooked meat, meanwhile, defined humanness.
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Thighs were set ablaze, but so too were the sacrum bone and tail vertebrae. That thighs and tails were the preferred parts to burn has been confirmed by “calcined bone material” from a number of sanctuaries. When burnt, the tail would contract, curving and rising in the flames: this was read as a sign of the gods’ approval. This action was portrayed in sixth- and fifth-century BCE vase painting. Modern experiments have shown that cattle, sheep, and pig tails actually do behave this way when burnt.
Typically, the heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, and spleen of the animal were roasted over the altar fire and consumed by participants then and there. The rest of the animal was butchered and the resulting cuts of meat distributed. Some went as payment to the priests and priestesses. Citizens were entitled to meat from state or communal sacrifices. In fifth- and fourth-century BCE Athens, this could mean free meat as often as every nine days. Women weren’t given as much meat as men; some cults banned women entirely. Foreigners and slaves were generally excluded from the bounty, although there were exceptions.
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“The essential element was the handling of the victim and, in particular, to what extent the body was eaten or not,” Ekroth writes. “Consumption of meat lies at the center of understanding Greek ritual practices and how they served to define the divine and to structure the world by establishing hierarchies and expressing status.”
The sacrificial rituals separated gods and humans but also united them by incorporating the gods into the human system of meat distribution. A “chain of honor” awarding visitors and heroes with choice cuts was extended to the divinities.
“Presenting the meat on the sacred tables, raw or grilled, would bring the gods a little closer,” Ekroth explains, “though at the same time marking them as different and superior, since they no longer ate meat.”
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