Animal Sacrifice - Ancient Greco-Roman World

One topic that I think people often overlook when studying ancient religion is the centrality of animal sacrifice to almost all of the faiths of antiquity. A lot of what I’ve written in these posts so far has been focused on the history of Christianity, and even though Christianity lacks animal sacrifice, it developed in relation to two religious traditions that did - Second Temple Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism. I want to spend a few posts digging in to the mechanics and meaning of animal sacrifice. This first post will look at animal sacrifice in the Greco-Roman world, and I’ll follow it up in a few days with one that looks at animal sacrifice in Second Temple Judaism.

First, for the Greeks and Romans, animal sacrifice was the one of, if not the, primary form of religious worship. Greeks and Romans also prayed to their gods, offered sacrifices of food and wine, left votives at temples and practiced other forms of religiosity as well. But the regular, public worship of the gods took the form of animal sacrifice.

I think it’s useful to look at the mechanics of animal sacrifice in the Greco-Roman world. I’ll start with a quote from the Iliad Book 1, describing a sacrifice of cattle to the god Apollo:

As you can see in this passage, the process of sacrifice had a number of distinct steps:

• Barley is thrown on the animal’s head.

• The animal’s throat is slit.

• They are skinned.

• Some of the meat is wrapped in fat and burned along with the bones.

• The men leading the sacrifice taste some of the organs.

• The rest of the meat is roasted and shared in a feast.

The way it was explained to me when I was in college was that the barley was thrown at the animal to get it to shake its head, seen as a sign of its consenting to the sacrifice. During the Classical period, the barley would be carried by a girl, and the sacrificial knife would be concealed under the barley and only revealed after it has been thrown.

The Greeks commented on the fact that the gods got the worse end of the sacrifice, only getting a small amount of meat, some fat, bones and maybe some of the organs. These would be burned, and it was believed that the gods would enjoy or possibly gain sustenance from the smell of the smoke. But the meat from the sacrificed animal was turned into a feast for all of the participants.

In fact, my understanding is that public animal sacrifices probably served as a leading source of meat-based food for many poorer citizens in Greek city-states.

One of the side-effects of sacrifice was haruspicy, the art of divination by examining the entrails, particularly the livers, of sacrificed animals. It was believed that trained fortune tellers, known as haruspexes, could read omens on the livers of sacrificed animals to reveal the will of the gods.

Bronze replica of a liver used to train diviners

There are many theories to explain the meaning of animal sacrifice in Greek religion and in the history of religion in general. One theory that has many supporters is found in the book Homo Necans by Walter Burkert. Burkert wrote in the 1970s, and argued that ritual animal sacrifice developed out of paleolithic hunting rituals designed to lessen the guilt of early hunters at killing animals they saw as equals or kin. I won’t do Burkert’s theory justice (it’s been a long time since I read the book), but he basically argues that stone age hunters did not inherit a predator’s instincts from their omnivorous great ape ancestors, but that they definitely engaged in intra-species violence and murder on a large scale (this last bit, at least, is somewhat confirmed by anthropologists, though I’m not sure if the lack of a predator’s instinct is terribly convincing). Burkert theorizes that archaic humans harnessed their intra-species violence in the hunt by imagining the animals they were hunting as equals or relatives. But then they acquired guilt from this hunting of kinfolk-animals, and pushed the blame onto the gods, to allow them to eat meat while cleansing them of the guilt of their sacred crime. Burkert backs up his theory with tons of ethnographic evidence and details of Greek sacrificial rituals. (I’m inspired by writing this post to check out Homo Necans again after reading it 20 years ago in graduate school. I ordered a copy through Interlibrary Loan along with a more recent critique, so maybe I’ll write more about this theory after I reread it.)

If you have any questions about animal sacrifice, please let me know in the comments section of this post!