ANIMAL SACRIFICE IN GREEK RELIGION

The Prominent Character of Animal Sacrifice in Greek Religion

As I have stated, I am dealing with religious acts involving the use of animals, and not other kinds of material. The limitation of my research to animal sacrifice means that, in the case of Greek religion, I shall not deal systematically with libations or vegetable offerings, so I first have to justify the marginal treatment of these two areas of non-animal offerings. Libation, that is the ritual pouring of a liquid (usually wine), seems to be the most problematic of Greek non-animal offerings, for the following reasons:
* A self-evident, but quite important, point is that libation was an act not covered by any of the Greek terms denoting ‘sacrifice’,but was designated by a distinct term.
* Both literary and epigraphic evidence shows that animal sacrifice offered on an altar was always accompanied by a libation, but not always by other non-animal offerings.
* Libations could be also offered alone, independently of animal sacrifices, on special occasions: truces, banquets, and the cult of the dead (where they took the special form that is, libations not exclusively of wine, but of other liquids as well, like honey).
* Relevant to the latter characteristic is the fact that a libation did not require the existence of an altar, but could be offered anywhere.
* As regards Greek iconography, the evidence comes from the Classical period, but it shows the particularity of libations: namely, vase paintings show gods pouring libations but not sacrificing animals.

In other words, whereas Greek ritual killing was inextricably bound up with the offering of a libation, the latter was also considered a quite distinct and autonomous sort of offering. Despite admitting the importance of libations in Greek religion, I have decided to deal with them only marginally, because of two characteristic features: (a) they were a complementary ritual element to animal sacrifice; and (b) even if they were offered alone, as an alternative, they never came as a general rule to substitute for the practice of killing an animal.
The latter characteristics apply even more to the rest of the non-animal offerings (e.g. incense, cakes etc.), since these were not as autonomous as libations. Even Lucian, in his ironical treatment of sacrifice, contained in his treatise mainly aims at animal sacrifice, whose procedure he presents in detail. So, for instance, in the aforementioned treatise (On Sacrifices 12), immediately after citing on a par of an ox, a lamb, a goat, incense, and a cake, Lucian goes on to ridicule those who sacrifice by ironically describing in detail only the procedure for an animal, not vegetable, sacrifice.
To me, this passage suggests that, at the religious level, animal offerings were at the centre of discussions and criticisms of sacrifice, as, at the linguistic level, the verb mainly alluded to animal offerings. Generally, the examples which Lucian chooses in order to ridicule sacrificial practice in the aforementioned treatise all derive from scenes of animal offerings. For the aforementioned reasons, in this book, I shall deal only marginally with examples of non-animal offerings apart from libations. Some scholars of Graeco-Roman religion have come to regard libations and other sorts of non-animal offerings as having an equal status to animal sacrifice. Yet, it is possible to cite some further reasons proving that animal sacrifice occupied the pre-eminent position in Greek religion. If we are to look for some fixed element which persists through the diverse components of Greek sacrificial practice, I would suggest that this is most convincingly identified as the conceptual category of the animal’s body.
This proposition makes animal sacrifice the primary offering in Greek religion. Indeed, Greek sacred laws show that the body parts of the sacrificial victim (independently of the species concerned) had a more or less standardized correspondence to those partaking of the victim’s body: gods, priests, worshippers, and, among the latter, men and women. This was not the case with other sorts of offerings, where not only would a single unit (e.g. a plant, a cake) remain undivided, but also a great variety of plants and ingredients was involved.
Apart from its character as an offering, animal sacrifice served further ritual purposes, such as purification and divination. Vegetables, cakes, or libations did not have functional roles of this sort, except in Pythagorean circles, where divination based on vegetables was adopted as a deliberate reaction to common practice.
In Greece, animal sacrifice did not cease to be practised until at least the second century ad. The argument from cheapness in interpreting the occasional preference for libations over animal sacrifice is contradicted by evidence for the persistence of animal offerings in many Greek locations (including poor ones), a phenomenon constituting the focus of this chapter. This cultic persistence is indicative of the character of Greek ritual, and should not be underestimated.
From a macroscopic point of view, this willingness on the part of the Greeks to expend financial resources on sacrificial animals proves the importance that animal sacrifice had for Greek cities. As I shall show in this chapter, the richer a Greek community was, the moresplendidly it tried to celebrate its festivals by increasing its expenditure on sacrificial animals. The limits to the definition of sacrifice presented above have determined my use of the sources: I have given priority to references to animal sacrifice.

A Typical Description of Greek Animal Sacrifice from Our Period

An important gap in our evidence for the period 100 bc–ad 200 is that nowhere are we provided with a detailed description of the sacrificial procedure, similar to the Homeric descriptions. The only passage referring to the order followed in the sacrificial procedure comes from a critic of animal sacrifices, namely Lucian. This passage has concerned us earlier, but in a different context. To make his sarcasm at the sacrificial scene more acute, Lucian made use of a colourful realism. In the passage below (On Sacrifices 12–13),I have highlighted the terms corresponding to stages in the sacrificial ritual:
When they have established altars and formulae and lustral rites, they present their sacrifices, the farmer an ox from the plough, the shepherd a lamb, the goatherd a goat, someone else incense or a cake;[...] But those who oVer victims—to come back to them—deck the animal with garlands, after finding out far in advance whether it is perfect or not, in order that they may not kill something that is of no use to them; then they bring it to the altar and slaughter it under the god’s eyes, while it bellows plaintively—making, we must suppose, auspicious sounds, and fluting low music to accompany the sacrifice! Who would not suppose that the gods like to see all this?
And although the notice says that no one is to be allowed within the holy-water who has not clean hands, the priest himself stands there all bloody, just like the Cyclops of old, cutting up the victim, removing the entrails, plucking out the heart, pouring the blood about the altar, and doing everything possible in the way of piety. To crown it all, he lights a fire and puts upon it the goat, skin and all, and the sheep, wool and all; and the smoke, divine and holy, mounts upward and gradually dissipates into Heaven itself. (Loeb tr.).
In Lucian’s description, the victim’s skin is supposedly burnt on the altar. This is the only element which does not agree with earlier epigraphic evidence, where the skin is a perquisite for the priest; otherwise, the ‘setting’ of an animal sacrifice, according to the description above, is the following:

1. An altar and a victim are necessary before the ritual starts; in particular the victim must have been chosen as being unblemished.
2. Prayers are said and lustral rites are performed, presumably for the offerer (and the priest?).
3. The victim is garlanded and escorted to the altar.
4. The victim is slaughtered (probably by the priest), and the priest pours the blood around the altar, and carves up the victim so as to extract its entrails. (We are not told that the entrails are extracted in order to be eaten in situ, but there does not seem to be any other reason for the priest to distinguish the entrails from the rest of the victim.)
5. The rest of the victim is burnt on the altar-fire.
Unfortunately, no information about meat-sharing is given by Lucian or any other Greek writer in the period we are studying. Even with the limitations which are evident in this passage, though, Lucian’s unique description of an animal sacrifice is the closest to completeness. So far as it goes, it shows no differences from the Homeric descriptions.

By Maria-Zoe Petropoulou in the book "Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism, and Christianity, 100 BC to AD 200", Oxford University Press, New Work, 2008, excerpts p.37-42. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.