The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks (review)

This is an informative and mostly well-executed volume of essays. There are ten separate entries:

M. Detienne, "Culinary Practices and the Spirit of Sacrifice;"

J.-P. Vernant, "At Man's Table: Hesiods Foundation Myth of Sacrifice;"

J.-L. Durand, "Greek Animals: Toward a Topology of Edible Bodies;" and "Ritual as Instrumentality;"

M. Detienne, "The Violence of Wellborn Ladies: Women in the Thesmophoria;"

M. Detienne and J. Svenbro, "The Feast of Wolves, or the Impossible City;"

J.-P. Vernant, "Food in the Countries of the Sun;"

F. Hartog, "Self-Cooking Beef and the Drinks of Ares;"

S. Georgourdi, "Sanctified Slaughter in Modern Greece: The 'Kourbánia' of the Saints;" and, finally,

J. Svenbro, "A Bibliography of Greek Sacrifice."

The last item (pp. 204-17) is admittedly a valuable part of the whole, but it would have meant a great deal more to non-specialists if it had been annotated. The book has forty-seven pages of endnotes, a good subject index, four photographic plates (mediocre to poor in quality) and nineteen plates illustrating line drawings (competently executed by F. Lassarrague). The plates show aspects of Greek sacrifice based on the evidence of ceramic iconography. The translation is mostly successful, although in her rendering of the French, Wissing occasionally gives unidiomatic solutions. She also invents English words, e.g., (on p. 3) "incarceral" space. This should have been "place of confinement, imprisonment or detention;" "incarceral" n'existe pas.

The nine analytical essays (originally published in 1979 in Paris) cover the full range of subject matter: diet, politics, religion, social order and the relationship between myth and cult. The approach of all the authors is anthropological and sociological—there is some unwelcome structuralist jargon and some useful functionalist analysis (especially conspicuous in Durand's excellent second essay). With the exception of Georgourdi, who is concerned with modern (i.e., Christian) subject matter, all these writers presume that there is a relationship and continuity between Greek myth and Greek cult. This presumption is, of course, a major crux; interested readers should also look at the intelligent and sobering caveat of Dirk Obbink, "Dionysus Poured Out: Ancient and Modern Theories of Sacrifice and Cultural Formation" (in Masks of Dionysus, ed. T. H. Carpenter and C. A. Faraone [Ithaca, 1993] 65-86). If it is true (as I believe it is) that blood sacrifice constitutes an important part of the world into which Christianity was born, then it follows that this volume could and should be read with profit by persons interested in Patristics and early church history.

Animal sacrifice was a hallmark of Greek civilization in the first millennium B.C.E. It was one of the main cultural lynchpins securing the axles that permitted Greek culture to roll forward (only by tiny increments at first) from Helladic obscurity to Classical and Hellenistic radiance. The Greek sacrificial system was complex. It involved the husbandry of animals, their consecration, and even their grant of consent to be sacrificed (typically identified by shaking or a nod of the victim's head), libations, first fruits (often hair or a piece of the ear), the securing of fire, the slitting of the victim's throat and the blood letting, the skinning and preparation of the victim, the roasting and boiling of the victim, the distribution of the viscera and other body parts (e.g., mēria μηρια: thigh bones in their fat) to the gods and to the various human participants (according to their station). The realia of sacrifice included the precinct, the temple, the sacred image (or images), the altar, the knife, the cauldron, the skewer (for roasting splagkhna [σπλάγχνα], and the spit. All of these features were integral and essential. One of the most visible boundaries separating Greeks from barbarians (Scythians, for example, as discussed by Hartog) was sacrificial cult. By Greek standards (pace Herodotus), Scythian cult was inferior because it lacked the full complement of Hellenic sacrificial signs. For example, as nomads...