Animal sacrifice

What is attested

The best-documented thing about Greek animal sacrifice is not what it meant but what it cost and when it was due. Attic demes and civic bodies inscribed sacrificial calendars on stone: month-by-month schedules naming the recipient deity, the species and often the sex, age or colour of the victim, a ceiling price in drachmas, and sometimes who was entitled to eat and who was to be paid. The calendar of the deme Thorikos (SEG 33.147) preserves all twelve months in the standard Athenian order; the calendars of Erchia (SEG 21.541) and of the Marathonian Tetrapolis (IG II² 1358, re-edited as SEG 50.168) are comparable documents. Read as what they are — budgets, ratified and displayed — they establish that sacrifice was a recurring, priced, audited municipal obligation, planned a year in advance, and that a small Attic community expected to kill animals for named gods and heroes on dozens of fixed days. Lysias' prosecution speech against Nikomachos, who was charged with mishandling the re-inscription of Athens' sacred calendar, turns on the same premise: adding sacrifices to the list meant money, and money spent on new rites was money not spent on inherited ones.

The physical residue confirms the practice independently of any text. At the ash altar of Zeus on Mount Lykaion in Arcadia, micromorphological analysis has shown that the mound is not soil but pulverised burnt animal bone mixed with ash, carbon and potsherds, accumulated directly on bedrock; roughly 98 per cent of the identified faunal remains are burnt sheep or goat thigh bones, with much smaller quantities of pig and cattle, and burning at the spot is documented from about the sixteenth century BC, at the beginning of the Mycenaean period, and continuing into the Hellenistic period, though the terminal date is given variously in the excavation reports. Two things follow that no literary source is needed to establish: a narrow and repeated selection of animal parts was burnt in the same place over an extraordinary span of time, and the whole animal was not consumed by fire. Which anatomical parts should be identified with the god's portion of the literary descriptions is itself argued over — the Homeric formula speaks of thigh bones wrapped in fat, while the burnt material recovered from altars has been read both as femur and as tail and sacrum — but the fact of a restricted, repeated selection is not in doubt. Whatever else sacrifice was, it produced a residue of selected burnt bone and a great deal of edible meat that went somewhere else.

Where the meat and the by-products went is also documented. Sacred laws specify priestly perquisites down to particular cuts — a leg, the skin, a portion of the entrails — as an enforceable entitlement rather than a courtesy. The Athenian dermatikon accounts (IG II² 1496) record the state's revenue from the sale of hides taken from public sacrifices, itemised by festival across the 330s BC, including the Dionysia in Piraeus, the City Dionysia, sacrifices to Zeus Soter and the Asklepieia. A sacrificial animal was therefore a divided asset: an incinerated portion for the god, defined perquisites for the officiant, hides converted into cash for the treasury, and meat distributed to participants. This is an attested economy, not an inference from myth.

Iconography supplies the choreography. Attic black- and red-figure vases and votive reliefs — the corpus assembled by F. T. van Straten in Hierà kalá (1995) is the standard reference — show a repeating sequence: the animal led on a rope in procession, a basket-bearer carrying the kanoun, a water vessel, the burning altar, and, after the killing, attendants roasting the splanchna on long spits beside the altar while the god's portion burns. What the painters show consistently is the moment before the blow and the moment of the roasting; the killing itself is largely absent from the Attic repertoire. That absence is a genuine feature of the evidence and should be reported as such rather than explained away.

The literary evidence is real but must be dated. The Homeric poems describe sacrificial procedure in some detail — the hecatomb for Apollo at Chryse in Iliad 1, Nestor's sacrifice at Pylos in Odyssey 3, with barley grains, the burning of thigh-portions wrapped in fat, libations of wine and the roasting of entrails on spits — and the outline matches what calendars, altars and vases attest centuries later. But these are hexameter poems composed for performance, not manuals, and they idealise: gilded horns and an on-call goldsmith belong to an epic register. At the other end, Porphyry's De Abstinentia (2.29–30), written in the third century AD by a philosopher arguing against eating meat, preserves earlier material traced to Theophrastus; it is a valuable but tendentious witness, reporting a classical Athenian rite at a distance of some seven centuries and through an argument he wants to win.

How the rite worked

What follows is a modern reconstruction, and it should be read as one: no single ancient source describes the sequence entire, and the material from which it is assembled is weighted heavily towards Attica and towards Homer. A public sacrifice is presented as beginning with a procession to the sanctuary. The Attic vases and reliefs collected by van Straten show the animal led on a rope, decorated, and a participant carrying the kanoun, a flat basket holding barley grains, fillets and the knife concealed beneath them. Homer and Attic drama supply the acts at the altar: the washing of hands, the scattering of barley grains, the cutting of hair from the victim's forehead to be thrown on the fire, and a prayer naming the god and the request. The killing is described in texts rather than shown on pots — small victims held over the altar, larger ones brought down first, the throat cut, the blood directed onto or around the altar. The ololygē, the ritual cry raised by women at the moment of the kill, is attested in Odyssey 3 and in Aeschylus. Each element has its own witness; the continuous sequence is the work of modern scholarship on an Attic-weighted corpus.

Butchery followed immediately and was technical work. The god's portion — thigh bones wrapped in fat, with other selected pieces and often the tail — went onto the altar fire with wine poured over it; the splanchna, the heart, liver, lungs and kidneys, were spitted and roasted quickly and eaten at the altar by the inner circle of participants. The remaining meat was boiled or roasted and distributed. Distribution was the politically sensitive part: sacred laws and decrees specify who receives portions, in what order, and whether shares are equal or graded, and public sacrifices funded by a city were frequently framed as meat for the citizen body.

Personnel and money were formalised. A priest or priestess of the particular cult presided and drew defined perquisites; a mageiros — at once butcher, cook and sacrificial technician — could be hired for the killing and carving; magistrates such as demarchs or hieropoioi supervised expenditure and answered for it. The calendars set a maximum price per victim, and the relative order of magnitude is clear even where individual figures are uncertain: cattle cost several times what sheep and goats cost, and piglets were cheap enough for small groups and modest occasions. Hides were sold, and in Athens the proceeds were accounted for centrally.

Timing was calendrical: for most rites the day was prescribed rather than chosen, and only a few texts specify a time of day. Some documents distinguish forms of offering by verb, by altar type, and by whether the meat could be carried away from the sanctuary or had to be consumed on the spot — a real distinction in the texts, though the neat modern division of all Greek sacrifice into 'Olympian' and 'chthonian' types imposes more system on the evidence than the evidence carries.