Bullockbefriending Bards: The Ambivalent Role of Cattle in the Odyssey and Ulysses

From Prometheus’s first tricking of Zeus in the Theogony, when he foregrounds that the gods only receive the bones and hide of the sacrifice, while the humans eat the meat, cattle have an amazingly equivocal role in Greek culture. Unlike horses, which were not used for work, for food, or for sacrifice, cattle spanned all these realms—a partner in the growing of grain (the quintessential human work, as Hesiod sees it) and also as both a bridge to the divine on the one side, and an element of our purely animal, carnivorous nature on the other. The scene in the Odyssey in which the meat of the slaughtered cattle of the Sun still bellows on the spit exemplifies the latter divide, while Odysseus’s (rather unkingly) challenge to the suitor, Eurymachus, wishing they might compete in plowing with “oxen to be driven, those of the best/large and ruddy, well fed with grass, and equal in age and power, and no ways contemptible in strength” (Odyssey18.371–73) returns him firmly to the non-magic world of Ithaca, dayto-day humanity, change, and dependence.