Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras

‘REMEMBERING THE ANCIENT WAY
OF LIFE’: PRIMITIVISM IN GREEK
SACRIFICIAL RITUAL

Before there were ‘historians’, there was ‘sacred history’ – at least, there was in many societies. Indeed, one might almost say that for such cultures the primary way of apprehending the past was through its narrative and depiction in the central texts of the various religious traditions. The lives of Abraham and Moses, of Rama and Krishna, and so on, defined not only a group’s sense of its identity, but also its view of the stages through which it and the world had passed. Ancient Greece, however, is notoriously lacking in sacred texts; many myths existed not in continuous, more or less canonical redactions, but in fragmented local forms, while on the other hand Homer and the epic tradition have only an oblique connection with the religious systems of the Greek cities. If we are to look for a link between Greek religion and views of the past, we must look elsewhere. And while some views of Greek religion in the last half-century or so have been unhelpfully reductive (to render the concept ‘religion’ meaningful in a Greek context it would be better to think of the more inclusive ‘things to do with the gods’ than merely of ‘ritual’), it remains true that ritual practice bulks very large, and should probably be regarded as occupying the central position in the Greek religious complex. Yet it is apparent that religious ritual cannot of itself say anything about the past. That can only be done by texts which touch on religious matters, or alternatively by our own interpretations of the fragmentary information we possess on the subject of religious ritual. The pitfalls in the second case are obvious, although it is a method almost universally used in the study of Greek religion. The other possibility may bring us closer to contemporary standpoints, but we are still dependent on the often idiosyncratic views of probably untypical individuals.

These are serious limitations, but for the post-classical period at least there is an abundance of material to suggest that links between cult practice and past ages were part of the framework of ordinary thought, so that the relationship between ideas about religion and ideas about the past is certainly a legitimate subject for investigation. It seems most unlikely that this connection should have appeared ex nihilo in the Hellenistic period, and as we shall see there is some direct evidence for its existence earlier. But before we examine the material (or part of it) in detail, it may be helpful to consider why the link between ritual and the past should exist, and how it might be expressed within Greek culture.

If ritual is in the strict sense meaningless, as maintained notably by Frits Staal, it does not at all follow that it remains meaningless in the perception of those who practise or observe it.1 Indeed, if we wish to assume that the formation of the ritual itself is always primary (a proposition which is something of an act of faith), one might say that here is a vacuum waiting to be filled. Even simple sorts of statement about ritual – that it must be done this way because the deity likes it so, or because it is ancestral custom, or, simplest of all, because this is the right way to do it – create meaning and set the ritual in a context.² And it is a documentable fact that Greek statements about ritual are frequently more complex than this. Nick Lowe once proposed ‘a thought-experiment: suppose one were actually able to ask the Hierophant, the chief priest of the Eleusinian mysteries, as one initiate to another, what the secret ritual of revelation actually meant. It is hard to imagine he would simply answer, “Oh, it doesn’t mean anything really; it’s just something you do.”’³ Of course, the Mysteries are a particularly high-profile case, and further, whatever meaning the hierophant might have proposed, even though it was the hierophant who proposed it, would not have quite the same status of unalterable truth that the ritual itself possessed. It might be supplemented by other explanations, or even with time superseded entirely; the point is that explanations tend to be supplied. Plato, in a well-known passage from Meno, attests the existence of priestly personnel who ‘have taken the trouble to be able to give an account of the practices they engage in’.4 His immediate context relates to ideas with an ‘Orphic’ or similar flavour, concerning the immortality of the soul; his words suggest that at least some priests and priestesses might be expected to supply other types of explanation as well.

In general, religious ritual has two features, or apparent features, which might seem to make it particularly prone to the need for an explanation. First, there is a degree of fixity, which often makes it appear that the sequence of actions can never change, and must therefore date back to time immemorial. And it is of course true that although in practice ritual may alter either suddenly or gradually, it cannot simply be changed at will. Second, the actions prescribed in ritual seem frequently strange, even counterintuitive. Sometimes the strangeness is due to some divergence from the norm in a particular case, and sometimes it is the norm itself which might seem poorly calculated to please the divine and to cement divine–human relations. The Greek context supplies many examples of local and particular rituals details of which struck observers (and no doubt practitioners) as odd, and it is clear also that the normal distribution of the sacrificial meat, in which the divine recipients are allotted a scanty portion of less attractive meat than that received by their worshippers, was a practice arousing some curiosity.⁵

In Greece as elsewhere, for some participants the default explanation would no doubt suffice: it is so because it is so, or in a more nuanced way, because it is in accordance with ancestral practice – κατὰ τὰ πάτρια. But going beyond this, it seems that there are perhaps three main types of explanation for ritual. The first relates specific cultic features to the intended recipient (god or hero) – thus the prescription of a dark-coloured sacrificial victim might be related to the fact that the deity thus honoured is connected with the earth or the Underworld.⁶ Second, there are explanations which invoke the purpose of the ritual. Thus, for instance, the fact that at the sacrifice for the Seasons, probably at one of the midsummer festivals in Athens, the gods’ portions and the entrails are not roasted or grilled but boiled like the rest of the meat is explained by Philochoros as due to a wish to be spared excessive heat and drought.7 But it is the third type of explanation which concerns us now: that which maintains that the current form of the ritual derives from a past time when this form was the one logically to be expected; the present is explained by the circumstances of the past. Broadly speaking, of course, the perceived connection of ritual with the past is fundamental, simply because ritual is understood as having been handed down from past times.⁸ But we are concerned here with those cases where the past relates in a more particular and individual way to the present. There are many types of past-related explanations for ritual, all of which could broadly be labelled ‘aetiological’, but we can make a further distinction between aetiologies in the usual sense, in which it is a very specific set of circumstances invoked to account for the ritual form, and explanations which rely on a more general idea of conditions in the past. Aetiologies in the more usual sense are extremely well documented in a range of genres. They may either be self-standing stories, like (for instance) that of a certain Embaros pretending to sacrifice his daughter while actually sacrificing a goat, which gives an aition for the cult of Artemis Mounichia at Peiraieus, or they may tap into the structure of panhellenic mythology, evoking well-known figures like Odysseus, Orestes or Iphigeneia; but either way they depend on the narrative of a particular event situated in mythological time.9 The other form, if perhaps from our point of view equally speculative, refers to supposed lifestyle differences between now and the remote past, and is less reliant on mythological elements. It is clear that this latter sort of connection can very easily be modified, so that instead of the explanation itself forming a bridge between two givens, the ritual and the view of the past, ritual practices become actual evidence for the life of earlier ages. In particular the modalities of sacrifices are taken to give information about ancient diets, the main subject of this chapter.

This process can be seen in quite a developed form in a passage from Book 6 of the Laws, where Plato is using a theory which suits his argument, but which would probably also be recognised by his audience:

We see that even now among many peoples the custom of sacrificing each other remains, and we hear of the opposite among others, when they¹⁰ would neither venture to taste ox flesh nor did they sacrifice animals to the Gods, but rather flour mixtures, and grains moistened with honey, and other pure offerings of that kind. They abstained from flesh as something it was not right to eat or with which to pollute the altars of the Gods, but those of us then living led what is called an Orphic life, keeping to everything that is without a soul, and conversely abstaining from everything that possesses one.¹¹

The contextual argument is that as diet and customs have changed over time, so they can also change in the future. In other words, Plato’s primary interest here is actually not the reconstruction of human history, but the use of what he at least presents as widely accepted methodology and theories in the service of a quite different argument. ‘What you say is widely reported and easy to credit’, says the speaker’s interlocutor Kleinias in Bury’s translation.¹² The method explains certain customs now current or allegedly current by taking them to be survivals of practices which were once far more widespread. It is evident that sacrifices which diverge from the norm in opposite directions – human sacrifices on the one hand, bloodless offerings on the other – have become bound up with two opposing pictures of the lifestyle of primitive mankind; early humans were either cannibals or vegetarians, or perhaps both at different times. Plato invokes the supposed customs of certain non-Greeks as evidence for a once quite normal habit of cannibalism (ἀλληλοφαγία, ‘eachother eating’, in Greek); but he may also have in mind the tradition of human sacrifice in the worship of Lykaian Zeus in Arcadia,13 and numerous Greek cults for which the aition involved a human sacrifice changed or averted. On the other side of the equation, Plato seems to recount the conclusions reached by others¹⁴ with regard to a past time; other primitive people neither consumed animate beings themselves nor offered them to the Gods; the mention of a ‘so-called Orphic lifestyle’ indicates that whatever source Plato is following here must have made a similar connection between practices current among a relatively small group of contemporary people, seen as diverging from the norm, and what was supposed once to have been the prevailing custom. The ‘Orphic life’, in other words, just as much as the barbarian human sacrifices, testifies to the state of primitive humanity. Sacrifice is able to function in this way because while it is at the heart of most religious ritual, its human dimension relates closely to what people eat, which itself is taken as an indicator of what people are, in particular of their degree of civilisation. Plato’s words, as we have seen, suggest that there is nothing very novel about the type of argument used. It is noticeable that he does not refer to specific instances suggestive of human sacrifice, or to particular cults in which only bloodless offerings are acceptable, but rather attempts to provide the strongest possible evidence for differently based past diets by adducing contexts in which human sacrifice is normal, and the avoidance of bloodshed a rule universally applied. This leads him to areas outside the usual experience of Greek sacrifice, but it is apparent that a link could also be made between past conditions and certain peculiarities in the rituals of numerous individual Greek cults.

Cult complexes such as those of the two Artemises of eastern Attica (Brauronia and Tauropolos) or Artemis Orthia in Sparta, which link an element of ritual, perhaps the shedding of blood, with a tradition of the commutation of human sacrifice to this vestigial form, have often an aition – ‘real’ or ‘invented’ – of mythological type, whether this relates to a well-known figure like Iphigeneia or whether it forms a purely local myth.15 And the aition is usually clear that the original human sacrifice happened either in non-Greek lands, or, more often, as a terrible last resort demanded in extreme circumstances.

It is nonetheless the case that each cult – and even more strongly, for those with a knowledge of different local traditions, several cults together – indicates quite clearly that, exceptional circumstances or no, human sacrifice is no longer performed. There is then some overlap here between the mythological aition and the more general reference to past conditions, as story and cult taken together create the category of a past age in which such sacrifices could happen and demarcate it from the present time, in which they cannot. For the opposite kind of divergence from the norm, a similar point could be made about the aition of the Bouphonia rite, performed for Zeus Polieus in Athens. In this strange ritual, oxen are led past a table on which are placed cereal offerings, and the first to taste those offerings is sacrificed, in a somewhat unusual way; the killing is then presented as culpable slaughter, the sacrificed ox is stuffed as though still alive and the sacrificial knife is found guilty and cast into the sea. In the past, much has been made to hang on this cult complex and its accompanying myth.16 More recently we have become accustomed to regard such an atypical rite with caution, and it is certainly not my intention to use the Bouphonia to make any general points about sacrifice; I merely observe that while the story explaining this bizarre cult practice certainly relates one specific event to one specific cult, it also contains in its narrative frame the tradition of a past time in which the sacrifice and therefore the consumption of the ploughing ox, perhaps of all animals, was not the norm; it is clear in the story that the cakes or grains which were placed on the altar and which the unfortunate ox ate were the sacrificial currency of the ‘pre-modern’ age, and also that that age came to an end when the oracle ratified the killing of the ox and commanded its annual repetition. At least by the fourth century, then, and demonstrably earlier in the case of the ‘end of human sacrifice’ motif, the rituals of certain cults could be taken as referring to the sacrificial and perhaps dietary norms of past ages (although myth generally shrinks from introducing cannibalism into Greek sacrificial contexts¹⁷) and to the moment when that norm was changed, to create the customs of the present day.

Let us now look a little more closely at the view that early humanity abstained from sacrificing and eating meat, and the possible correlatives of such a time in cult. Probably the earliest extant author to describe a vegetarian past clearly is Empedocles. Of course he is parti pris for vegetarianism anyway, and when looking at the present age he represents normal animal sacrifice as exactly equivalent to cannibalism, because of the transmigration of souls.¹⁸ His past also differs from the way the past is normally conceived, being strongly conditioned by a cyclical view of the universe. The age when Love was dominant will inevitably one day come round again, so in a sense the events of the past, or at least past states, are not absolutely past. Still, from the perspective of contemporaries at the present stage of the Empedoclean world-cycle, the transition towards the rule of Strife, the stage of the rule of Love corresponds more or less exactly with that mythical, pre-modern and often pre-heroic stage of human existence (in the vaguer and more generally prevalent conception) when things were done differently, so it is this area of the past that Empedocles populates with his worshippers of Kypris:

For them there was no god Ares, no Battle-din; there was no king Zeus, or Kronos, or Poseidon, but Kypris was queen [some words missing]. Her they would worship with pious images, painted animals, and variously scented perfumes, and sacrifices of unmixed myrrh and smoky/fragrant frankincense, pouring to the ground libations of golden honey. The altar was not drenched with the unmixed blood of bulls, but this was the greatest abomination among mankind, to excise the life and to eat the goodly limbs.19

Empedocles does not say where he draws this picture from, but it is evident that it cannot be a simple fantasy; the offerings made as standard in his past ages bear a strong resemblance to the bloodless offerings of his own time. There is a heavy and rather exotic emphasis on perfumes and incense, it is true, but incense was certainly an obvious offering to the Gods as much in bloodless as in bloody sacrifice. Libations of honey rather than wine are mentioned, I suggest, at least partly because wineless libations commonly accompanied bloodless sacrifice; if bloodless sacrifice is therefore the more ancient form, so too must be wineless libations.²⁰ The ‘painted animals’ may seem less familiar, but I think could be an idea inspired by the custom of making cakes and similar vegetal offerings in the shape of the animals which would not on that occasion be sacrificed. Cakes, often shaped in this way, were a staple of bloodless sacrifice, and an understanding of the phrase along these lines seems to be implied in the tradition found in Diogenes Laertius and Athenaeus, that Empedocles offered to Zeus at Olympia a model ox made either from barley meal and honey – normal components of what we call sacrificial ‘cakes’ – or of myrrh and frankincense, a variant surely inspired by the prominence of incense in this passage of Empedocles’ poem.21 Empedocles then uses the familiar currency of a particular type of offering in his own day, that of Plato’s ‘so-called Orphic lifestyle’, and no doubt his own – to that extent there may be some truth in the story of his Olympian offering, even if the philosopher has been confused with an athlete of the same name – to extrapolate to a generalised style of offerings in past times. But because in the contemporary world ‘bloodless offerings’ could equate to ‘inexpensive, minor offerings’ as well as to ‘pure offerings’ he has made his materials into something more rich and strange, in particular giving a special emphasis to the perfumes and incense as costly, high-grade ingredients in the ensemble, a pure equivalent to the costly ox. This could be seen as a kind of ‘soft’ primitivism; the life of these past humans was happy, innocent and pious, but it was certainly not devoid of material good things, even those now considered luxuries.

More usually, it seems, the bloodless sacrifices of bygone days were seen in terms of ancient simplicity. Perhaps a basically linear view of history is more conducive to the concept of the growth of complexity in human culture and society than is the cyclical structure of Empedocles, and the comparison with the present day was surely also influential: as we have seen, the bloodless offerings of contemporary times generally appeared more basic, less showy and sophisticated than animal sacrifice (though to be sure there were many gradations within animal sacrifice itself). A likely fifth-century example of this association is to be found in a fragment of the early comic poet Chionides (though Athenaeus, who preserves it for us, is in some doubt as to the play’s authorship). In Athenaeus’ paraphrase ‘the Athenians, when setting a meal before the Dioskouroi at the prytaneion, placed on the table cheese, barley pastries, ripe olives and leeks, creating a reminder of the ancient way of life’.²² Only the list of foodstuffs can be a direct quotation from the text, and even that, for metrical reasons, cannot be quite right as it stands, but the context must still be indicative. What is being described is a cult meal, a theoxeny for the Dioskouroi, intriguingly reminiscent of that promised to them in a fragment of Bacchylides, in which they will receive sweet wine, song and a friendly disposition, and, one imagines, similarly simple food, rather than slaughtered bulls served in surroundings of gold and purple.23 This simplicity may then be something to do with the Dioskouroi themselves – it certainly is unlikely that all theoxeny meals were characterised by simple fare – but there is surely no reason why the explanation given by Athenaeus, that it recalls the Athenians’ ancient way of life, should not have been part of the original context. The comic poets are well aware of a tradition of ancient times when food was somehow different; usually in comedy this means more abundance, more variety and no hassle in preparing it, since this picture is more suited to the general preoccupations of comedy,²⁴ but in a play entitled Beggars (Πτωχοί) one can see that a different picture might seem appropriate. But since there is nothing intrinsically funny in the idea that the meal for the Dioskouroi, or Anakes to give them their Attic title, was consciously reminiscent of ‘ancient times’ it is likely that the dramatist was invoking an idea already known to his audience, the humour perhaps lying in the application of the point which is now lost to us.

But what exactly was understood by this ‘ancient way of life’? How ancient is ancient? The word ἀρχαῖος is capable of several different applications, not only the etymological ‘primeval’, and of course we cannot even be sure of the exact words used by Chionides in linking the meal with a former way of life. But let us recall that the divine recipients of the feast were associated with Attica in mythology, which according to Herodotus related that Kastor and Polydeukes had come there in pursuit of Theseus, who had abducted their sister Helen. So far, relations were perhaps not very promising, but Xenophon knows of their initiation at Eleusis, suggesting that he also knew something like the tradition of their adoption by the local hero Aphidnos for this purpose, and hence their integration into the polis.²⁵ It would make a good deal of sense then if the festival meal was thought to allude to this event, recapitulating an original meal at the prytaneion (which according to Pausanias was near to their sanctuary)26 in which the Anakes were received into citizenship, in which case the ‘ancient lifestyle’ would be that of Attica in the heroic age. Not primitive times, then, when people might be either cannibals or vegetarians; although the meal is in fact a vegetarian one, it seems very unlikely that anyone joining up the dots would have supposed that Theseus and the Dioskouroi abstained from meat. The point is the simplicity of the meal, not its exclusion of a doubtful material. And a further point would surely be that this was somehow the characteristic, the ‘real’ food of Attica; the ‘recollection made’ could not have been a neutral matter of supposed historical fact, but a celebration of the kind of food that made Attica great. A similar idea may have been behind the so-called kopis feasts in Sparta, which Athenaeus treats in an adjoining section. These were held in connection with various festivals, and the ‘ancient simplicity’ motif is suggested by the fact that the diners reclined on rough mattresses or beds of straw (stibades) in specially constructed tents or bothies. The kopis was certainly not vegetarian, but the only animals sacrificed were goats, and each diner was given a meal of set form and ingredients – meat products, a special cake, cheese and tragemata or ‘nibbles’ of beans and figs. Again, though all Spartan meals seemed notoriously simple, poor even, to other Greeks, this may have been thought to indicate the kinds of food available at an early stage of culinary development – no boiling of pea soup, for instance – but looked at from another perspective could also have celebrated the institution of civilised eating; the cooking of domesticated animals, the use of their milk, and above all perhaps a system of eating based on agriculture – cereals, fruits and vegetables.

Whether or not this idea belongs in the Spartan kopis, it is certainly a theme which grows in popularity with authors seeking to explain the origins of civilisation. Various advances were canvassed as the crucial one which put an end to a primeval ‘wild’, often cannibalistic, diet; most often, and most convincingly, the cultivation of cereals, but also the discovery of honey and of figs (as we shall see shortly). That the idea certainly became a familiar one is shown by a fragment of the comic dramatist Athenion, who makes one of his characters expound in great and parodic detail how the art of cooking meat is actually what put an end to cannibalism and enabled the birth of civilisation.²⁷ But the roots of the idea are certainly well established in the fourth century, when Isocrates, speaking of Eleusis, points out that the establishment of agriculture through Demeter’s gift to the Eleusinians and hence the Athenians ‘distinguished our life from that of the animals’; indeed the idea is probably implicit already in the fifth-century Athenian claim to first fruits for Eleusis from the rest of Greece.28 So it is not surprising to find that this nexus of ideas, too, appears among the explanations of various cult practices: such-and-such a ritual commemorates the introduction of such-and-such a food, the first time it was eaten, or the beginning of a civilised diet in general. The testimonia are often late, but the habit of thought is probably a good deal earlier. We might think also of the well-established pattern of the hero worshipped alongside a god and commemorated as the first recipient of the god’s instruction who disseminated the new technique among humanity in general, such as Triptolemos at Eleusis or the various and often less fortunate Dionysiac heroes; it is surely likely that in many of these cases aspects of the related cult complex were understood to refer to the introduction of that new technique, most often something concerning diet.²⁹

A more general example lies to hand in the case of the Haloa, one of the women’s festivals in Athens. Here the scholia to Lucian, it has long been recognised, in the midst of a confusing and perhaps confused jumble of information, contain snippets which suggest a knowledgeable ultimate source.³⁰ The idea seems to be that the foods set out at the women’s feast, containing ‘all foods from land and sea except those forbidden in the Mysteries’, represent ‘civilised nourishment’, αἱ ίμεροι τροφαί. At any rate, this is what the archons represent to the foreigners present, extending the point made by Isocrates; in this festival celebrating the Two Goddesses, Dionysos and perhaps Poseidon, it is not only agriculture in the narrow sense of the cultivation of cereal crops, but all components of the civilised diet which are claimed to have had their origins in Attica and thence been disseminated to the rest of the world. The festival is full of peculiar features, and this angle can hardly exhaust the ‘meanings’ that were available to contemporary actors and observers; from the wording of the scholion, it might seem as though it were a particularly public and male meaning attached to a group of rituals which possibly had quite other significances to the women who were the primary celebrants. But from our point of view, what is important is that a prominent feature of the festival is thus linked with a crucial moment in the past. The ritual here represents and commemorates not simply a vague, indefinite primitive past, whether that is presented for our approval (the ‘ancient simplicity’ form) or horrified repulsion (the ‘human sacrifice’ type and its congeners), but the actual moment of transition from a wild and unattractive past to the civilised present.

This kind of representation of the ‘early diet’ theme is quite a common one, as the mythological pattern of the benefactor god and/or the institutor hero is also widely diffused, but in its individual instances it is usually attached to particular cults. Most often, perhaps, these are connected with Demeter or Dionysos, but this is not invariable. My final example appears in a ritual centred on Athena, and as with the Haloa, the information derives from a late source, or rather sources.31 It is impossible to be quite sure that the connection is old, but as we have seen the thought patterns it represents are certainly found in the classical period. Hesychius and Photius gloss ἡγητηρία as a string of figs carried in the procession at the Plynteria, a summer observance when the statue of Athena was washed and her temple closed, and further explain the name as due to the supposed fact that the fig was the first component of ἣμερος τροφή to be experienced, the ‘leader’ into a civilised life. A much more likely prima facie reason for the name would seem to be simply that the fig string ‘led’ the procession, but recherché explanations are by no means always unattractive to those participating in a ritual,³² and the mythical tradition surrounding the festival also speaks of very early times, specifically of Athena’s first priestess Aglauros, daughter of the Athenian culture-hero Kekrops, and the institution of the customs we know now. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood has in fact suggested that ‘primordiality’ is a key part of the meaning of the Plynteria festival mix,³³ but I think it is important to note once more the difference from a simple then-and-now antithesis; as at the Haloa, it is the moment of change which is highlighted, and the change is seen as a positive thing, but here the focus is sharper; the implied history would narrate that other changes took place after mankind discovered, or was shown, how to cultivate and eat figs, but that this was the key development which made possible what followed. Thus it would seem that even within the ritual complex of the same polis different, complementary and supplementary narratives were entirely possible.

The material for such narratives, as we have seen, could be drawn not only from the familiar rituals of one’s own city, but from other Greek communities and beyond the Greek world as well. Differing styles of ritual, united only by their puzzling features, which invited the question ‘why do we do this?’, produced different pictures of the past. Some could be linked with specific incidents in the mythologicalheroic past, while others suggested more general pictures of a past contrasting with the way we do things now. In one version, the past was a time of wildness and savagery typified by the demand for human sacrifice and perhaps, by a further step of association, by cannibalism. In another, the past evoked was a gentler world in which even animal sacrifice had yet to be instituted, when life was simpler and therefore perhaps better. A third view concentrated on the process of civilisation or else the single moment when the change to a civilised diet and lifestyle began. In essence, these are separate, unitary pictures of the past, and yet it is easy to see how they can be put together and made into a continuous narrative; the wild version of the past is susceptible to the taming and civilising process which in a cult context is usually ascribed to the intervention of a god or a hero or both, resulting in a diet and lifestyle dominated by agriculture, a state now in this combined narrative no longer primordial, but still ancient, belonging to the very beginning of the civilised life, so that if desired the narrative can still incorporate the motif of over-complexity and moral decline dating from this point. If we look again at the Plato passage (above, p. 305), it is evident that one possible interpretation could be based along these lines: the discoveries of agriculture put an end to cannibalism and enabled people to live on food that is ‘lifeless’, ᾂψυχον, although this second type of diet survives now only among small groups.

Of course, when the Greeks thought along these lines they were not restricted to the ‘evidence’ of cult. A basis for ideas about the remote past was available to all Greeks, even if they did not accept the full picture, in the poems of Hesiod and, for the heroic age, Homer and the Epic Cycle. This allowed and encouraged people to think not only about the mythological past, but also about still more remote times when life was even more different from now than it was in the heroic age; and most Greek cities had their traditions of an original culture-hero who instituted the components of present-day civilised life. This was the framework, sometimes heavily modified, into which the data quarried from cult were typically placed, and the evidence of Plato (above) strongly suggests that by his time the process was well under way, with differing views of the past widely available. But the process does not stop there: once it is accepted that the detail of ritual gives out clues to the past, ritual itself is approached and experienced in the light of this connection. The line which might at first seem to begin with the ritual experience and proceed to the explanation in terms of the past is completed as a circle. In fact, it is a chicken-and-egg question, and the process must have worked in both directions. Explanations come together to create a narrative past, which feeds into the understanding of cult, which stimulates more questions and more explanations . . . If religious ritual itself does not (at least in ancient Greece) incorporate a narrative of the past, it nonetheless has clearly a para-narrative which attempts to answer some of the most fundamental questions about the history of humanity.

1	F. Staal, ‘The meaninglessness of ritual’, Numen 26 (1979), pp. 2–22; Staal, Rules Without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1989). With different overall aims and interests, Maurice Bloch reaches an allied and perhaps even more radical conclusion: ‘Religion is the last place to find anything “explained” because . . . religious communication [that is, for Bloch, ritual] rules out the very tools of explanation’ (M. Bloch, ‘Symbols, song, dance and features of articulation: Is religion an extreme form of traditional authority?’, European Journal of Sociology [= Archives Européennes de Sociologie] 15 [1974], pp. 55–81, at p.71). Staal admits (in the Numen article, p. 3) that ‘such absorption [in the correct performance of ritual], by itself, does not show that a ritual cannot have symbolic meaning’.
2	Cf. Staal, ‘Meaninglessness of ritual’, p. 3, listing possible reasons given by brahmins for performing rituals: ‘we do it because our ancestors did it; because we are eligible to do it; because it is good for society; because it is good; because it is our duty; because it is said to lead to immortality; because it leads to immortality’. He claims that symbolic explanations are given only seldom and in relation to minor specifics. My own experience of listening to Tamil brahmins has been that they are usually very keen to explain the symbolic significance of their actions to participants and spectators in the ritual.
3	N. J. Lowe, ‘Thesmophoria and Haloa: Myth, physics and mysteries’, in S. Blundell and M. Williamson (eds), The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 149–73, esp. p. 162.
4	Plato, Meno 81a: οἱ μέν λέγοντες είσι τῶν ἱερέων τε καὶ τῶν ἱερειῶν ὅσοις μεμέληκε περὶ ὧν μεταχειρίζονται λόγον οἵοις τ’εἶναι διδόναι.
5	This is suggested for an early date by Hesiod’s strange story of the attempt by Prometheus to deceive Zeus, resulting in the latter’s deliberate choice of the more attractive looking, but actually less edible, portion: Theogony 535–61. New Comedy is more explicit, e.g. Menander, Dyskolos 447–53, com. adesp. fr. 142.
6	This phenomenon has often been seen as part of a systematic distinction between ‘Olympian’ and ‘chthonian’, both in deities and in the forms of sacrifice offered to them, but this hypothesis is now more controversial. See R. Schlesier, ‘Olympian versus chthonian religion’, Scripta Classica Israelica 11 (1991–2), pp. 38–51, challenging the assumption; S. Scullion, ‘Olympian and chthonian’, Class. Ant. 13 (1994), pp. 75–119, attempting to reinstate it partially; R. Hägg and B. Alroth (eds), Greek Sacrificial Ritual Olympian and Chthonian (Stockholm: Paul Astroms, 2005); G. Ekroth, The Sacrificial Rituals of Greek Hero-Cults in the Archaic to the Early Hellenistic Periods (Kernos suppl. 12, Liège: Centre International d’Étude de la Religion Grecque Antique, 2002). However, the simple observation that dark victims are sometimes offered to ‘earthy’ deities is incontestable, e.g. Il. 3.103–4, IG II² 1358 (Tetrapolis calendar, Attica, fourth century BCE), LSCG 96.25 (Mykonos, third/second century BCE).
7	FGrHist 328 F 173; see R. Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 204.
8	See the formulation of Barbara Kowalzig, Singing for the Gods: Performances of Myth and Ritual in Classical Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 53: ‘All rituals carry with them if not elements of a real past, certainly of a perceived one.’
9	Embaros: Bekk. Anecd. 1.445.1–13, Eustath. Il. 2.732 (331.25). Odysseus: e.g. Paus. 8.14.5–6. Orestes: Paus. 8.34.1–3, as well as in Athens (Aesch. Eumenides, Eur. IT 947–60). Iphigeneia: Phanodemus, FGrH 325 F 14, schol. Ar. Lys. 645. On aetiology in general see Kowalzig, Singing for the Gods, pp. 24–32.
10	Following Schanz’s ἐτόλμων μέν for MSS ἐτολμῶμεν.
11	Plato, Laws 782c–d: τό δέ μήν θύειν ἀνθρώπους ἀλλήλους ἔτι καὶ νῦν παραμένον ὁρῶμεν πολλοῖς· κsαὶ τοὐναντίον ἀκούομεν ἐν ἄλλοις, ὅτε οὐδέ βοός ἐτόλμων μέν γεύεσθαι, θύματά τε οὐκ ᾖν τοῖς θεοῖσι ζῷα, πέλανοι δὲ καὶ μέλιτι καρποὶ δεδευμένοι καὶ τοιαῦτα ἄλλα ἁγνὰ θύματα, σαρκῶν δ’ ἀπείχοντο ὡς οὐχ ὅσιον ὄν ἐσθίειν οὐδ τοὺς τῶν θεῶν βωμοὺς αἳματι μιαίνειν, ἀλλὰ Ὀρφικοί τινες λεγόμενοι βίοι ἐγίγνοντο ὴμῶν τοῖς τότε, ἀψύχων μὲν ἐχόμενοι πάντων, ἐμψύχων δὲ τοὐναντίον πάντων ἀπεχόμενοι.
12	Laws 782d: καὶ σφόδρα λεγόμενά τ’ εἲρηκας καὶ πιστεύεσθαι πιθανά.
13	Which he mentions in Rep. 8.565d.
14	Note ἀκούομεν contrasting with ὁρῶ μεν.
15	Artemis at Brauron: two myths refer to the shedding of blood, one in sacrifice, Suda s.v. ᾂρκτος ἦ Βραυρωνύοις, Phanodemus FGrH 325 F 14; the ritual details are uncertain. Tauropolos at Halai, Eur. IT 1458–61; on these see H. Lloyd-Jones, ‘Artemis and Iphigeneia’, JHS 103 (1983), pp. 87–102. A. Orthia: Paus. 3.16.7–11. On the wider diffusion of this type of Artemis, see F. Graf, ‘Das Götterbild aus dem Taurerland’, AW 10.4 (1979), pp. 33–41, and in general, P. Bonnechere, Le sacrifice humain en Grèce ancienne (Liège: Centre International d’Étude de la Religion Grecque Antique, 1994), esp. pp. 26–62; D. D. Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 71–138. Euripides in particular has been suspected, perhaps rightly, of inventing aitia, but for our purposes it does not make much difference whether the aition was a ‘traditional’ one, developing gradually from a local basis, or whether it came into existence as the creation of a historian or tragedian; ‘literary’ aitia have a tendency to gain wider acceptance. More radical is the view that the tragedians, again particularly Euripides, invented cult practice, including the supposed rites of Artemis Tauropolos at Halai: see F. M. Dunn, Tragedy’s End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996), esp. pp. 62–3; S. Scullion, ‘Tradition and invention in Euripidean aitiology’, in M. Cropp, K. Lee and D. Sansone (eds), Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century (Champaign, IL: Stipes, 2000 = ICS 24–5 [1999–2000]), pp. 217–33; for a more balanced view, Romano in this volume. I cannot, however, accept the point that Menander, Epitr. 415–17, disproves Euripides’ version of the Tauropolia by showing the real character of the festival, since festivals (for instance the Anthesteria) may exhibit quite diverse ‘characters’ at different points and for different participants. More generally, I believe that even if Euripides was inventing details, they must at least have been details which would make sense to his audience because they belonged to a familiar type.
16	Beginning with Theophrastus, who is quarried in extenso by Porphyry, De abstinentia 2 (the Bouphonia at 2.10, 29–30); in recent times by Karl Meuli (‘Griechische Opferbräuche’, in O. Gigon, K. Meuli, W. Theiler, F. Wehrli and B. Wyss (eds), Phyllobolia für Peter von der Mühll (Basle: Benno Schwabe, 1946), pp. 185–288) and then Walter Burkert (Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, Eng. tr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983; German orig. 1972), esp. pp. 136–43).
17	It is possible that myths such as those of Tantalos and Thyestes, which present the cooking of children’s butchered bodies in a cauldron and their subsequent consumption, may relate to the boiling of sacrificial and other meat together for the feast at a sacrifice, but their narratives do not incorporate sacrifice as such.
18	Empedocles fr. 137 D–K (128 Inwood).
19	Empedocles fr. 128 D–K (122 Inwood):
	οὐδέ τις ἦν κείνοισιν Ἂρης θεός οὐδὲ Κυδοιμός οὐδὲ Ζεὺς βασιλεὺς οὐδὲ Κρόνος οὐδὲ Ποσειδῶν, ἀλλὰ Κύπρις βασίλεια. τὴν οἵ γ’ εὐσεβέεσσιν ἀγάλμασιν ἱλάσκοντο γραπτοῖς τε ζώιοισι μύροισί τε δαιδαλεόδμοις σμύρνης τ’ ἀκρήτου θυσίαις λιβάνου τε θυώδους, ξανθῶν [v.l. ξουθῶν] τε σπονδὰς μελιτῶν ῥίπτοντες ἐς οὖδας· ταύρων δ’ ἀκρήτοισι φόνοις οὐ δεύετο βωμός, ἀλλὰ μύσος τοῦτ’ ἔσκεν ἐν ἀνθρώποισι μέγιστον, θυμὸν ἀπορραίσαντας ἐνέδμεναι ἠέα γυῖα.
20	Although wineless libations could also be employed with animal sacrifice. On these libations, see A. Henrichs, ‘The “sobriety” of Oedipus: Sophocles OC 100 misunderstood’, HSCP 87 (1983), pp. 87–100.
21	D.L. 8.53 (from Favorinus); Athen. 1.3e; the tradition gives a chapter title to Detienne’s discussion of Pythagorean dietary prescriptions (M. Detienne, Les jardins d’Adonis (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 71–114; revised edn (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp. 58–90).
22	Chionides fr. 7 K–A, Athen. 4.137e: ὁ δὲ τοὺς εἰς Χιωνίδην ἀναφερομίνους Πτωχούς ποίησας τοὺς Ἀθηναίους φησίν, ὅταν τοῖς Διοσκούροις ἐν πρυτανείῳ ἂριστον προτιθῶνται, ἐπὶ τῶν τραπεζῶν τιθέναι τυρόν καὶ φυστὴν δρυπεπεῖς τ’ἐλόας καὶ πρόσα, ύπόμνησιν ποιουμένους τῆς ἀρχαίας ἀγωγῆς.
23	Bacchylides fr. 21 Maehler. On ritual theoxenies, see M. Jameson, ‘Theoxenia’, in R. Hägg (ed.), Ancient Greek Cult Practice from the Epigraphical Evidence (Stockholm: Paul Aströms, 1994), pp. 35–57.
24	See J. Wilkins, The Boastful Chef: The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 110–23. The point is noted already in Athenaeus, who collects these passages at 6.267e–70a.
25	Herodotus 9.73, perhaps from the Theseid; Xen. Hell. 6.3.6; Plut. Thes. 33.2.
26	Paus. 1.18.1–3; on the topography, see G. C. R. Schmalz, ‘The Athenian prytaneion discovered?’, Hesperia 75 (2006), pp. 33–81.
27	Athenion, fr. 1 K–A. This author has been dated to the fourth or third centuries, but may be as late as the first.
28	Isoc. Panegyricus 28; IG I³ 78 (= I.Eleusis 28), with Clinton, I.Eleusis II 5–7.
29	On institutor heroes, see A. Kleingünther, Πρῶτος εύρετής (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1933); A. Brelich, Gli eroi greci (Rome: Angelo Brelich, 1969), pp. 166–84.
30	Schol. Lucian, Dial. Mer. 7.4. On the Haloa, see A. Brumfield, The Attic Cults of Demeter (New York: Beaufort Books, 1981), pp. 104–31; Parker, Polytheism and Society, pp. 199–201; and Lowe, ‘Thesmophoria and Haloa’.
31	Hesychius s.v. ἡγητηρήα (παλήθη σύκων, ἣν ἐν τῇ πομπῇ τῶν Πλυντηρίων φέρουσιν· ὅτι ήμέρου τροφῆς πρώτης ταύτης ἐγεύσαντο). Cf. Photius s.v. ἡγητηρία. Less clear, but deriving from the same tradition, is Athen. 3.74d.
32	Indeed both explanations could have been current together, or it could have been thought that the leading of the procession was symbolic of the fig’s role in history.
33	C. Sourvinou-Inwood, Athenian Myths and Festivals: Aglauros, Erechtheus, Plynteria, Panathenaia, Dionysia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 140–1, 151–8.