What then have we learned about the history and function of Greek sacrifice? Sacrifice does not occur among ‘‘primitive’’ hunting peoples, but it seems to have originated with the domestication of animals. Consequently, Aegean sacrifice cannot be much older than the seventh or eighth millennium BC. On the other hand, in killing and processing their victims the former hunters kept, naturally, some of their hunting customs and techniques, as Meuli’s investigations have convincingly shown. It remains difficult, however, to define the development of Greek sacrifice more precisely in time, since the early Indo-Europeans did not have a specific term for ‘‘sacrifice.’’ Consequently, we have little information about the sacrificial rites which the proto-Greeks practiced before they invaded Greece, probably at the beginning of the second millennium. We are also badly informed about the state of sacrifice that the Indo-European invaders encountered in Greece. We cannot even be sure that the Minoans practiced burnt-animal sacrifice. It is only in Homer that we find the first detailed descriptions of normative animal sacrifice, but although his description is rather formulaic, it does not look that old. Greek sacrificial practice, then, seems to have received its more definitive form only relatively late.
The chronology of sacrifice does not, of course, explain the reason(s) for its origin. Comparison with pastoralist tribes suggests that domesticated animals were considered so valuable for the nourishment of the community that they could be eaten only under the restraints of a ritual context. Once these restrictions were introduced, wild animals must have been considered no longer valuable enough to be offered to the gods and, consequently, they were excluded from sacrifice, although exceptions remained possible. In Artemis’ sanctuary at Kalapodi, excavators have found bones of boars and deer; the latter have also come to light in the Theban Kabirion and the Samian Heraion. Epigraphical sources, such as sacrificial calendars, never mention or prescribe wild animals, and a possible explanation for the finds would be to postulate an origin in a successful hunt. Yet we have at least one literary testimony for the sacrifice of a wild animal: in the Cypria, Artemis substitutes a deer to be sacrificed in place of Iphigeneia. We may also observe that in ancient Israel, where, as in Greece, cattle, sheep, and goats constituted the normal sacrificial victims, excavations have demonstrated incidental sacrifices of fallow deer. Evidently there were sometimes fuzzy edges at the boundaries of the accepted sacrificial victims in order to include the most popular game.
If for the Greeks themselves the primary aim of sacrifice was communication with the gods, their ‘‘primitive’’ way of doing so remains curiously hard to accept for modern interpreters. For Meuli sacrifice was nothing but ritual slaughter, for Burkert the shared aggression of the sacrificial killing primarily led to the founding of a community, and for Vernant sacrifice was, fundamentally, killing for eating. Rather striking in these modern explanations is the ‘‘secular,’’ reductionist approach, which does not take into account the explicit aims of the Greeks and tries to reduce sacrifice to one clear formula. It is absolutely true that sacrifice is ritual slaughter, does constitute a community, and is killing for eating, but, as I hope to have shown, it is similarly true that sacrifice is much more than that. It is also an occasion for the display of physical strength, for displaying one’s status, for having a nice dinner, for demonstrating the boundaries of the group, and, above all, for approaching the gods. A ritual act that stands at the very center of the community cannot but have economic, political, social, and cultural meanings, in addition to its religious significance. It will be the challenge for future analyses of Greek sacrifice to show the richness of all these meanings and not to fall into the temptation to reduce them to one formula, however attractive.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
For the historical development of sacrifice see Meuli 1975:2.907-1021 and J. Z. Smith 1987:202-5. For step-by-step accounts see Van Straten 1995, Bowie 1995, Bremmer 1996:248-83 (from which this chapter is adapted), and Himmelmann 1997. For the vocabulary of sacrifice see Casabona 1966, and for the economic aspects Jameson 1988. Burkert 1983 is a classic study of the role of sacrifice in Greek myth, ritual, and society. The best introduction to the views of Vernant and his Parisian colleagues is Detienne and Vernant 1979, but see also the ‘‘second thoughts’’ of the younger generation: Georgoudi, Koch-Piettre, and Schmidt 2005. For new ideas about sacrifice to heroes and chthonian gods see Ekroth 2002, and Hagg and Alroth 2005.
World History
