Animal sacrifice in Ancient Greece : proceedings of the First International Workshops in Kraków (12-14.11.2015) 9788365886026

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Workshops in Krakow (12-14.11.2015)

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Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greece

Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greece

Proceedings of

the

First International

Workshops in Krakow (12-14.11.2015)

Edited by Krzysztof Bielawski

Warszawa 2017

Review

prof dr hab. Wtodzimierz Lengauer Editor

Weronika Sygowska-Pietrzyk Proofreading

Halina Stykowska Greek Text Proofreading

Katarzyna Pietruczuk Graphic design and page layout

PanDawer Cover

PanDawer, www.pandawer.pl Cover Photo Sacrifice of a young boar, Epidromos Painter, ca. 510 BC

® Wikimedia, Marie-Lan Nguyen

© 2017 by the Authors © 2017 by Global Scientific Platform sp. z o.o.

ISBN: 978-83-65886-02-6

The project financed by National Science Centre decision number DEC-2013/09/B/HS2/01208

Table of Contents

Robert Parker (University of Oxford) Introductory Remarks

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Scott Scullion (University of Oxford) Penal Sacrifice

13

Wlodzimierz Lengauer (University of Warsaw) Piety and Sacrifice in Greek Religion

27

Gunnel Ekroth (Uppsala University) Holocaustic sacrifices in ancient Greek religion:

Some comments on practice and theory

45

Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge (University of Liege) Pure and Impure Ancestors at Selinous: a note on Greek theology

67

Richard Seaford (University of Exeter) On Vedic Sacrifice, and its Differences from Greek Sacrifice

87

Krzysztof Bielawski (Jagiellonian University) Animal Sacrifice in Eleusinian Inscriptions of the Classical Period 107

Barttomiej Bednarek (University of Warsaw) Whole and ground: krithai and alphita. Prolegomena

145

Przemyslaw Biernat (Jagiellonian University) Sacrificial bricolage in Plato's Critias

183

Lech Trzcionkowski (Jagiellonian University) Sacrificial Terminology and the Question of Tradition

and Innovation in Greek Animal Sacrifice

205

Robert Parker (University of Oxford)

Introductory Remarks

First, let us begin with a central problem.1 What is sacrifice? What are we talking about? Jean-Louis Durand writes 'Le "sacrifice" est un mot, une illusion lexicale. Ce qui existe c'est la thusia.'2 He is right that sacrifice is a problematic concept. A few years I participated in an interdisciplinary study of sacrifice organised by a theologian; many different issues and theories came up, but I was particularly surprised one afternoon to find myself listening to a discussion by a theologian of whether, for instance, according to Christian ethics a woman should sacrifice herself for the good of her husband's career or that of her fa­ mily. Not the kind of problem we students of Greek sacrifice find our­ selves debating! The Judeo-Christian adoption and transformation of the vocabulary of sacrifice, its application to the saving self-sacrifice of Christ,3 has given it completely new content, but the word conti­ nues to be used both in its pre-Christian and in its Christian sense. The English sentence 'he made a great sacrifice' will in different contexts mean either 'he killed a large number of animals for the gods' or 'for the good of others he gave up something that was very dear to him­ self'; there is always a danger of confusion arising from this strange semantic history.

1 Religion 2 3

These brief introductory remarks summarize what I argued in On Greek (Parker 2011:124-170). Detienne, Vernant 1979: 136. Young 1979.

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Robert Parker

To revert to Durand's remark, an obvious riposte is that thusia too is a word. Durand's point must be that sacrifice is disastrously vague, as we have seen, whereas thusia has a clearly defined referent. But this is not the case. What Durand means by thusia is the killing of an animal followed by a banquet: of course that is the commonest form of sacri­ fice and of course it is in classical Greek usage a thusia, but in Homer words from the thu- root are not yet used of such rites, and in classical Greek are not confined to that rite: you can use 0vco of burning a cake, or in myths of cutting the throat of a human victim. The Greek vocabu­ lary of ritual killing is a fairly long list of words of overlapping mean­ ings, such as EvayiCo), oqaLa), leqevco as well as 0ucu: one cannot iso­ late a clearly defined object of study by looking at vocabulary alone.4 The title of our conference speaks of 'animal sacrifice'. That is useful in a way in clarifying what we are talking about: it means that vegetable offerings are excluded, as is human sacrifice. But it also means that we are confining ourselves to just part, admittedly the central part, of the full range of offerings to which words based on the thu- root could be applied. We are also, I take it, going to be looking at practices that are not described by the verb 0ugj, such as the pre-battle slaughter offer­ ing, acpdyiov, from the verb cKpaCco: a ocpdyiov certainly entails the killing of an animal, but is it a sacrifice? My own preference is to avoid the word sacrifice completely and substitute for it 'ritual killing': this brings in the actions covered by EvaytCco, G(paCco, ieqevco as well as 0ucu, even if, as already mentioned, it does not cover all the things that 0ucj covers. So much for the problem of definition. I turn now to what I will call, very tendentiously, the failure of grand theory and the need to replace it by what I shall call the sacrificial triangle. As most of you know, discussion of sacrifice in the late twentieth century was dominated by the rival theories of Jean-Pierre Vernant cum suis and Walter Burkert on his own (though I suppose one might call Rene Girard a kind of ally). Their different approaches were summed up by Vernant in a famous

4

Casabona 1966.

Introductory remarks

9

face-to-face discussion with Burkert at the Fondation Hardt: 'To sac­ rifice is fundamentally to kill in order to eat. But, within this formu­ lation, you put the accent on the killing, I put it on the eating.'5 But should one be forced to make that choice? To understand the full range of Greek ritual killings of animals, I think one needs to appeal both to killing and to eating: killing is inescapable where there is no eating, but a host wishing to entertain guests with meat at a wedding, say, would perform sacrifice to provide the meat - it may not be invariably true that meat-eating was preceded by sacrifice, this is controversial,6 but it was the cultural norm. So, killing and eating are both crucial. Still more important is a striking omission in Vernant's formula 'to sacrifice is fundamentally to kill in order to eat': what about the gods? Have they no place? Of course they do; that is manifest when a sacrifice is performed for a defined goal, to propitiate a particular god, to avert a particular danger. It may on those occasions be followed by eating, but that is not what it is for. So to killing and eating we need to add 'communicating with the gods', and these are the three corners of what I am calling the sacrificial triangle. This is why any simple formula to give the supposed 'meaning of sacrifice' is bound to fail. The forms of behaviour we group as sacrifice relate to three fundamental human concerns: the confrontation with death, eating together as a basic form of sociability, a sense of dependence on the divine. These concerns are more or less inextricably intertwined, though in a particular rite one or another may be more prominent. I take it that this is what Paul Veyne meant when he urged us to abandon the quest for a theory of sacrifice: Sacrifice is a good example of a particular category of sociological ob­ jects: those which, by the chance of their constitution, can combine

in themselves a great number of possible meanings (even if these are mutually contradictory) and provide a great number of diverse

satisfactions: this richness makes them popular and assures them an

almost universal success, while obscuring for the conscious mind

6

Vernant, Rudhardt, Reverdin 1981: 26. Naiden 2013: chapter 6.

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Robert Parker their raison d'etre (so they seem to emerge from mysterious human

depths). It is like this with sacrifices, with pilgrimages or, in the pro­ fane sphere, with the importance of sitting at the same table, of eat­

ing together. These 'black holes' are a kind of social trap: the most varied individuals fall into them, have fallen into them or will fall into

them, because all or almost the reasons for falling are good; therefore learned discussions on 'the' true meaning of sacrifice will continue without an end and without a purpose. Its misleading impression of profundity will lead to the temptation of finding ethological or even 'abyssal' explanations. The riddle is, however, easy to solve: sacrifice is widely distributed across centuries and across societies because this practice is sufficiently ambiguous for everyone to find in it their own particular satisfaction.7

My only objection to that analysis is that it is a little vague. What are these 'particular satisfactions' that everyone finds? My theory of the sacrificial triangle is an attempt to specify a little more precisely the most important among 'the great number of possible meanings' of which Veyne speaks. If then, according to me, there is nothing to be achieved by way of big theory', what is there to be done? We must turn to specifics, to details, to the logic of the concrete. In a sense this will be a turning 'back' to specifics. In the last years of the 19th and first decades of the 20th c. much good work was done on trying to imagine in detail how sacrifice was performed and what its sub-forms and varieties were. We still consult the old books from that period of Stengel on forms of sacrifice and of Puttkammer on the division of meat,8 but the evidence available has increased and keeps increasing. For me a landmark was the discovery of the sacred calendar from Erchia in Attica:9 this was full of precise ritual detail, above all perhaps the revelation that a sac­ rifice could be 'wineless until the entrails': we knew separately about

7 Veyne 2000: 21-22. 8 Stengel 1910; Puttkammer 1912. An English translation and updating of the latter by J.M. Carbon is promised. 9 Sokolowski 1969:18.

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Introductory remarks

wineless offerings and about the distribution of the entrails, but the discovery that a sacrifice could switch from wineless to vinous in mid­ course at the entrail stage was a revelation of the nuances that could be involved; and every detailed new ritual text that is published adds new nuances, disturbs the existing picture further. Another landmark was Gunnel Ekroth's demolition, in the wake of A.D. Nock, of the tra­ ditional distinction between divine and heroic sacrifice.10 An approach that did not exist until very recently is the analysis of sacrificial remains to establish what animals in fact were sacrificed and what was done with the different parts of those animals. The growing attention and increasing sophistication with which these matters are being studied is transforming the evidence base and the questions that can be asked.11 The Krakow project itself is a study of specifics in a dif­ ferent sense; it is an attempt to look at each sacrificial text in its own literary and historical context, to understand the particular emphasis and concerns of each author in treating of sacrifice. A final form of specificity I would like to mention is the comparative. The new text that Scullion is about to discuss contains the remarkable phrase 'but if you want to sacrifice in the Greek manner, then do the following'.12 That is a reminder that the ancient Mediterranean was a world of nu­ merous interacting cultures that all sacrificed according to somewhat divergent norms. How these norms differed, the cultural significance of these differences, how they may have been influenced by one anoth­ er is a topic that has been strangely little investigated - I count myself very much among the neglectful - but surely of great interest and po­ tential. So, away with the meaning of sacrifice; in with the rich variety and fine discriminations and nuances of this fascinating and multiform

phenomenon. Robert Parker, New College, Oxford robert.parker new.ox.ac.uk

10 ” 12

Ekroth 2002. See e.g. Ekroth, Wallenstein 2013, and many studies by G. Ekroth. Decourt, Tziaphalias 2015.

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Robert Parker

Bibliography: Casabona, J., (1966): Recherches sur le vocabulaire des sacrifices en Grec des origi-

nes a la fin de lepoque Classique, "Publication des Annales de la Faculte des Lettres" 56, Aix-en-Provence Decourt, J.C., Tziaphalias, A., (2015): Un reglemeiit religieux de la region de Laris­

sa: cultes grecs el 'orientaux', "Kemos" 28,13-54 Detienne, M., Vemant, J.P. (ed.) (1979): La cuisine du sacrifice, Paris

Ekroth, G., (2002): The sacrificial rituals of Greek hero-cults in the Archaic to the early Hellenistic periods, Liege

Ekroth, G., Wallenstein, J. (ed.), (2013): Bones, behaviour and belief: the zooarchaeological evidence as a source for ritual practice in ancient Greece and beyond, Stockholm

Naiden, F.S., (2013): Smoke Signals for the Gods, Oxford

Parker, R. (2011): On Greek Religion, Ithaca, NY-London Puttkammer, F., (1912): Quo modo Graeci victimarum carnes distribuerint, diss. Konigsberg

Sokolowski, F., (1969): Lois sacrees des cites grecques, "Travaux et memoires des anciens membres etrangers de 1'Ecole et de divers savants", fasc. 18., Paris Stengel, P., (1910): Opferbrauche der Griechen, Berlin Vemant, J.P., Rudhardt, J., Reverdin, O. (1981): Le sacrifice dans T antiquite: huit

exposes suivis de discussions. Entretiens Hardt 27, Vandoeuvres-Geneve

Veyne, P., (2000): Inviter les dieux, sacrifier, banqueter, "Annales" 55: 3-42

Young, F.M., (1979): The use of sacrificial ideas in Greek Christian writers from the New Testament to John Chrysostom, Cambridge, Mass.

Scott Scullion (University of Oxford)

Penal Sacrifice

Monetary penalties for contravention of cultic rules are a well-estab­ lished feature of Greek religion; already in an early fifth-century BC inscription from Delphi, for example, we encounter the provision Capia • obcAoc;, 'penalty: one obol.'1 In a few cases, however, it is a sac­ rifice that is imposed as a penalty for a cultic offence, and the question how such sacrifices were performed calls for attention. I venture some tentative suggestions about penal sacrifice here, prompted by further reflection on a long and important new inscription dealing with cult of 'the goddess' in second-century BC Marmarini in Thessaly.2 The new text is rich in compounds of the verb 0uelv, and Robert Parker and I have suggested that the prepositional prefixes in the com­ pounds 67H0VELV (B 31) and pETa0UEiv (B 2-3,14) closely associate the sacrifices they prescribe with the purifications of cultic offences which, in every case, immediately precede them:3

Rougemont 1977: no. 2.4-5 = LSS 37.6-7. For the terms Cqpicx and Cqpida) cf. e.g. ibid. no. 9.B.44, C.17, and the indices s.vv. of Sokolowski 1962, Sokolowski 1969 and Lupu 2004. I use the following abbreviations: LSS: Sokolowski 1962; LSCG: Sokolowski 1969; Rhodes & Osborne: Rhodes, Osborne 2003. Decourt, Tziaphalias 2015; references to this inscription in what follows are to the numeration of Decourt & Tziaphalias. On 'the goddess' rather than Ar­ temis Phylake as primary divinity see Parker 2016. 3 Parker, Scullion 2016: 238-241.

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Scott Scullion B.l-4:

Ek tov vadv Tfjc 0eov dpuqTOV pq Eia7iOQEVEO0a[L]Edv 6e EioEA0qi, KaGaipEiv aAEKTOQibi Kai pExa-

Oveiv aAAov aAEKTopa teAeov etu tov xqc Moioac; [kupov, ktA. An uninitiated person shall not go into the temple of the goddess. If any goes in, purify with a hen and sacrifice in accompaniment another

full-grown fowl on the altar of Moira, etc. B.13-15: Ek to 7iq60uoov Edv Tis EiaEA0qi tojv apuqTfcov], Ka0aioEiv AAektool dooEvi f] BqAsiai, pETaOvEiv

b£ oxeAoc ou dp pouAqTai nAqv xoiqeou, ktA.

If any of the uninitiated enters the prothyron, purify with a cock or hen, sacrifice in accompaniment a leg of whatever he pleases, except of pork, etc.

B.29-33: Edv &e Tis EioEA0qi pq ayvEvoac; twv ttqo-

yEyoappcvcuv, Ka0aoaT(o tov$ pcopoix; voaacui aAEKTOooc, Kai ETiiOuaaTO eh'l tov Tqc;