XI.

The Sacred Slaughter

Greece is full of wonderful sights and stories, but nowhere is the aura of divinity so powerful as during . . . the Olympic Games.

—PAUSANIAS, DESCRIPTION OF GREECE, C. A.D. 160

IT TAKES A serious leap of our modern imaginations to remember that the pagan Olympic Games were devoted first to religion and only second to athletics: every sporting contest was dedicated to Zeus, and sacred rituals took up as much time as sports. In fact, asked to name the highlight of the Games schedule, a classical sports fan would not have chosen the chariot races, long jump, or even wrestling, but would instead have picked day three, when one hundred white oxen were sacrificed on a grand altar. This rite, coinciding with the rise of the full moon, was the Greeks’ most important national ceremony, as spiritually profound as witnessing the secret mysteries of Eleusis or consulting Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. Animal sacrifice was the central pagan practice, and at Olympia every moment was choreographed to show the unity of gods, men, and animals, while strict codes of conduct confirmed the hierarchy of all the mortals gathered. And yet, to modern eyes, the entire day seems a baffling mix of pomp and butchery—as if Anglican High Mass were being performed in an abattoir.

The sacrifice rite. Two athletes are ready to roast chunks of meat on spits over the altar fire (where the head and horn of an ox are already cooking). The figure at left oversees the ritual; at right, a flute player provides music, while the goddess Nike (Victory) hovers above the proceedings. (From a Greek amphora, c. 475 B.C.)

Early on day three, spectators squeezed wherever they could around the Sacred Grove of Zeus. They tried to make themselves look respectable after two days of nonstop revelry; without baths, the dust was beginning to mat their hair, and bloodshot eyes squinted at the fierce rising sun. Many would have perched on stone fences and climbed olive trees for a view of the Council House, where the festival’s largest and most colorful procession was gathering.

At first the scene resembled a village cattle market, with the one hundred lowing beasts, which were always donated by the host city of Elis, having to be whipped by shepherds into line. Sacred as it was, the practice of such a large-scale sacrifice could not help but be firmly embedded in earthly realities: Olympic officials in their robes of office tried in vain to keep their sandals clean, while the frankincense from the priests’ swaying braziers fought a losing battle with the odors of terrified animals.

By the time the procession passed through a gate into the Sacred Grove, protocol had been enforced: Judges led, followed by priests and ambassadors bearing expensive gifts for Zeus, then the athletes, their family members and trainers, and finally the cows and bulls garlanded with flowers. The whole convocation did a turn around the perimeter for the crowds, before halting at the Great Altar of Zeus. On an elliptical base, a pyre of smoldering ashes over twenty feet high sent up a plume of smoke like a Hawaiian volcano; it stood before the Temple of Zeus, where an imposing bronze statue of the king of the gods, itself twenty-seven feet high, could watch the proceedings (unlike Christian ceremonies, performed in cathedrals, pagan rites were always conducted outside the temples). The chief priest took control and, with little introduction, an attendant came forward with sharpened blades.

The sacrifice procedure, as reconstructed by historians from ancient accounts, displayed a surprising reverence toward the animals about to be slaughtered—almost as if the Greeks wished to allay their residual carnivores’ guilt. The first beast was brought to the altar, a carved slab of dark marble below the pyre. Flutists played calming melodies while the Olympic attendants stood in a circle around an animal, washed their hands in blessed water, then sprinkled drops of moisture on the animal’s head—an act that symbolically made it nod in agreement to its honorable fate. A curl of hair was cut from its mane and tossed onto the altar fire. As the scent of singed hair wafted through the air, the priest below muttered an invocation to Zeus, while the attendants each took handfuls of barley grain—a symbol of fertility—and scattered them across the altar. Finally, the animal’s head was held by assistants and its arterial vein cut so as to direct blood into a silver bowl. Accounts describe how the flutists broke into a high-pitched ululation, eerie and intense, then tapered off as the struggle ebbed and ceased.

The sheer volume of animal sacrifices performed around Greece in antiquity—it was the basic act of worship, repeated every time the favor of the gods was requested, whether before a battle, a voyage across the seas, a marriage, a political vote, or a business deal—meant that Greek temple attendants were experienced butchers. The oxen’s thighs, as Zeus’s portion of each beast, were sprinkled with wine and laid onto the fire, which was fed only with twigs of white poplar and olive branches. The crowd below watched with satisfaction as dark smoke billowed up to the skies, where it would give sustenance to the famished god. Later, the ashes would be mixed with water from the river Alpheus, then plastered onto the tall conical pyre, which thus increased in height at every Games.

The sacrificial production line had begun.

THROUGHOUT THAT THIRD morning, laborers would drag the remaining carcasses back to the Council House, where they were laid on slabs for an official named the “butcher-cook” to slice. They would be disemboweled, and the inedible intestines thrown into the river Alpheus. (It was said that a spring in Sicily magically erupted at this precise moment every four years, due to a subterranean connecting tunnel; another rumor was that a cup tossed into the Alpheus would magically float up there.) The carcass was then dissected into meal-sized portions. Ancient butchers had none of our modern regard for cuts based on tenderness, quality, or grain; they simply chopped a carcass geometrically. Even in cosmopolitan Greek cities, the only choice for customers at a market was between meat and offal. At Olympia, the chunks were placed in giant roasting pits, with the sweetmeats on metal skewers, an incipient form of shish kebab (and nicknamed by the Greeks of Egypt “obelisks,” after the needlelike monuments).

It must have made an infernal scene. The sights and smells—blood soaking into the dry earth, the discarded skin and bone, the heat, the flies clustering in droves, the gore-covered attendants—would probably turn the stomach of a modern observer. But even in ancient Greece, there were vegetarians who rebelled at the slaughter. The Western world’s first known animal-rights protest was made on day three of the Olympic Games in 460 B.C., by the philosopher Empedocles, who made his own life-sized bull out of dough, garnished it with expensive herbs, and distributed it among the onlookers. (Empedocles preached the doctrine of reincarnation, announcing that he himself had once been a fish and a bird, so eating flesh was tantamount to cannibalism.)

Few Greeks were won over. Meat was expensive, and sacrifices were the only time most citizens had a chance to savor it. On the evening of day three, spectators lined up for a public feast—for convenience, an impressive structure called the Southern Stoa would probably have been turned into a huge buffet with meat served on long trestle tables. The throngs would have arrived with their own plates. They could only hope for a small chunk of the sacrificial meat, and took whatever they were given, whether it was a mix of bone and gristle, a kidney, or a chunk of juicy filet mignon. The deliberate randomness symbolically reflected the equality of Greek worshipers. Officials called oinoptai were on hand to make sure that each citizen received an equal amount of wine. The aristocrats of Elis, who funded the feast, would no doubt have supplemented the meal with bread, and possibly vegetables, cheese, and the ubiquitous Greek barley porridge.

Plates and cups filled, the happy spectators filed back around the Temple of Zeus and the god’s still-smoking altar, to dine al fresco beneath the summer stars.

The poet Pindar captures the exuberant scene: “The whole company raised a great cheer, while the lovely sight of the fair-faced moon lit up the evening, and then in joyful celebration the whole Sacred Grove of Zeus rang with the banquet song.”

The Hairless Ones

INCIDENTALLY, THE AFTERNOON of day three, when spectators were waiting for the feast to be prepared, was the time allotted for the three boys’ events—considered a low-key but pleasurable diversion. The contests, comprising running, wrestling, boxing, and the pankration, did not have the same prestige as men’s competitions, but they were still extremely popular to watch. Cities feted the youngsters for their achievements; proud fathers would erect statues of their victorious sons and commission victory odes.

The exact cutoff age is uncertain, but “boys” appears to have included all adolescents from twelve to eighteen. Few twelve-year-olds may have made the final rounds in the boys’ boxing, but on the running track, as with gymnastics today, child prodigies could defeat older teenagers: The twelve-year-old Damiscus of Messene won the boys’ sprint in 368 B.C. Without birth certificates, well-developed teenagers might find themselves classified by the judges as men, as happened to a young boxer from Samos, who in 588 B.C. found himself sparring with full-grown adults and defeating them soundly.

Not everyone was enthusiastic. Aristotle argued that overzealous parents pushed their children too far in training. As proof, he noted that few adolescent Olympic champions were ever successful in the adults’ categories once they came of age.