Animals, Gods and Humans

Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Thought

Ingvild Saelid Gilhus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134169153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

Consulting a wide range of key texts and source material, Animals, Gods and Humans covers 800 years and provides a detailed analysis of early Christian attitudes to, and the position of, animals in Greek and Roman life and thought.

Both the pagan and Christian conceptions of animals are rich and multilayered, and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus expertly examines the dominant themes and developments in the conception of animals.

Including study of: biographies of figures such as Apollonus of Tyana; natural history; the New Testament via Gnostic texts; the church fathers; and from pagan and Christian criticism of animal sacrifice, to the acts of martyrs, the source material and detailed analysis included in this volume make it a veritable feast of information for all classicists.

1: ANIMALS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The presence of animals

In the Roman Empire, humans exploited animals on their farms, hunted them in the wilderness and at sea, trained and tamed them, used them to transport people and goods, utilized them in magic and medicine, kept them as pets, cheered them on the racetrack, killed them in the arenas, and sacrificed them to the gods. Generally speaking, the type of society contributes to determining conceptions of animals – an agricultural society will have other perspectives than a society of hunters and gatherers, an industrial society or a late modern society. Conceptions of animals in the Roman Empire were among other things influenced by these societies being agricultural and dependent on organic power and the productivity of animal muscles.

The presence of animals was not the same everywhere. Some people, such as farmers, hunters and fishermen, were dependent on animals for their living. On small farms and in villages, people lived closer to the animal population than they did in Rome, for instance. However, the difference between the countryside and the cities was only one of degree – Egyptian cities had an extensive animal population (Bagnall 1996: 50, 81). The empire with all its provinces was held together by animals trotting through mountainous areas, forests and deserts, transporting food over land to the cities. Export articles were carried on their backs or on wagons to the docks, and animals were used for personal travel. Everywhere, the Mediterranean economy was totally dependent on and involved with animal life.

How human animals and non-human animals relate to each other depends on the moral, material and technological developments in a particular human society. It further depends on how the distinctions between humans and animals are drawn and on which sort of animal species we are talking about. The relationship between humans and sheep, for instance, will always be different from the way humans relate to lions or locusts. The cultural value of animals is strongly influenced by their usefulness to man, whether they are conceived of as useful, destructive or neither. A hierarchy of animals is normally based on the affinity that animals have with humans. Often an animal represents conflicting values. While a tame snake could be a benevolent protector of the house and a pet, and snakes generally were regarded as guardians, some were dangerous. While the Christians usually conceived of the serpent as evil and a symbol of Satan, in Christian texts too, the serpent sometimes appears as a wise animal and even as a symbol of the saviour.

Out of the conglomeration of contexts in which animals appeared, the emotions and thoughts they awakened, the ways they were used and the dangers some of them were taken to represent, a tangle of different discourses about them emerges. Animals were treated as subjects of philosophical debates and of natural histories, they were part of the cultural imagination and were used in descriptions of people as well as in images of the divine. The first part of this book aims at surveying the interaction between humans and animals in the Roman Empire: what people did to animals, how they thought about animals, what they felt in relation to animals, what images they made of them and how they included them in their religion.

This first chapter will start from a description of real animals, animals of flesh and blood. It will give an overview of their function and use in the Roman Empire. We will proceed from surveying types of relation between animals and humans and the different uses of animals for food, clothes and hauling power to describing specific institutional ceremonies using animals, ceremonies that were typical of the Graeco-Roman world in the first to the fourth century CE. Such ceremonies were connected with entertainment and religion. They included hunting spectacles as well as sacrifice and divination. In these ceremonies, animals were given a central role, cultural issues were focused on, and animals contributed to defining the limits and norms of Graeco-Roman culture. We are interested in what these animals were defining but even more in the views on animals that these established customs reflect. How was the role of animals interpreted by the establishment that exploited them?

Animals and humans

The relationship between humans and animals depends on which animal species we are talking about but also on which human group is involved – whether it consists of Romans or foreigners, men or women, free or slaves, old people or children, rich or poor. Some of these groups viewed the link between animals and humans as being closer than others did. Animals and humans in some instances have similar functions and roles. One example is that of animals and children, who are often associated with each other. Hellenist artists made statues of children with pets, and Hellenist epigrammatists wrote epitaphs for little animals in which these animals were described in connection with childhood and simplicity (Fowler 1989). These pet animals were bemoaned when they died – dolphins, cockerels, locusts, cicadas and ants have their own epitaphs as well as dogs and horses. Some pets were played with and attended to in ways similar to human children.

The inhabitants of the Roman Empire were completely dependent on an animal labour force. For instance, animals worked in the fields, they pulled carts and chariots, and served as mounts and beasts of burden. Oxen were used for ploughing, donkeys worked the millstones and the wheels that were used to draw water from wells, mules and oxen pulled wagons, and horses served in war. The functional division between humans and animals was not absolute. As the roles of animals and children sometimes overlapped, so did the roles of working animals and poor people and slaves, who often engaged in the same sort of work. If people were poor and could not afford to buy animals to help in the work, they carried, pulled and laboured themselves – like beasts. Millstones were pulled by slaves as well as by donkeys. The similarities between animals and slaves in their physical work were noted by Aristotle: “And also the usefulness of slaves diverges little from that of animals; bodily service for the necessities of life is forthcoming from both, from slaves and from domestic animals alike” (Politics, 1254b).

In Roman law, animals and slaves were sometimes treated together, as in the Lex Aquilia: “If anyone kills unlawfully a slave or a servant-girl belonging to someone else or a four-footed beast of the class of cattle, let him be condemned to pay the owner the highest value that the property had attained in the preceding year” (Lex Aquilia, in The Digest of Justinian, 9.2.2; cf. also 9.2.5.22). The jurist Gaius, commenting on the law, stresses that this statute “treats equally our slaves and our four-footed cattle which are kept in herds” (9.2.2.2). A discussion follows as to whether pigs should be included among cattle. Dogs do not fall within this class, and neither do wild beasts such as bears, lions, and panthers, while elephants and camels do (ibid.). Authors on agriculture such as the elder Cato (234–149 BCE), Columella (fl. 50 CE) and Varro (116–27 BCE) associate slaves and cattle with each other and sometimes treat them alike (Cato, On Agriculture, 2.7; Columella, On Agriculture, 1.6.8; Varro, On Agriculture, 1.17.1). Cato exhorts us: “Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit” (On Agriculture, 2.3). In Greece, the terminology used stressed the functional similarities between slaves and certain animals. A slave was designated andrapodon, “man-footed creature”, a term invented as an analogue to tetrapodon, “four-footed creature” (Bradley 2000: 110).

Between humans and animals there are similarities and dissimilarities, functions that overlap as well as restrictions on the sort of contact that is permitted between them. Differences between humans and other species tend to be stressed in the continual work to maintain the categorical boundary. Meat eating is especially significant. It marks the boundary showing the difference between humans and animals. Humans cooked and roasted meat and did not, like other meat-eating species, eat it raw, a point made by Lévi-Strauss and refined in relation to Greek religion by M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant (Detienne and Vernant 1989).

Which animals are eaten depends on which species are – for religious or other reasons – regarded as permitted and edible. Judaism is the classic example of a religion with strict rules for food that is permissible. In contrast, the Romans had few religious dietary regulations and seem not to have been squeamish in their tastes. According to Galen’s (c. 129–199 CE) directions, restrictions on the Roman kitchen seem to have stopped only at cannibalism (Garnsey 1999: 84). Although carefully chosen diets based on physiological knowledge appealed to the Graeco-Roman world (Rousselle 1988), the goal of these diets was to keep the balance between the humours in the body and thus keep it vigorous and healthy. Diets clearly emphasized class and elite status but did not contribute to maintaining a clean/unclean distinction based on religious taboos, as was the case with the Jews (see Chapter 8).

While humans were allowed to eat the meat of animals as well as turning their wool and skin into clothing, they were not permitted to eat human flesh. This prohibition was a strong cultural taboo. An underlying presupposition is that humans are not animals, and therefore human meat must not be eaten. The prohibition is a boundary marker that was also transferred to animals, which were likewise kept from eating humans. But even if the right order in the food relationship was that animals are food for men, not men food for animals, this hierarchy of correct diet was sometimes reversed. In the Roman Empire, animals were sometimes allowed and urged to taste human flesh. The wild beasts destined for the arena were perhaps trained to eat humans (Auguet 1994: 94). According to Suetonius (b. c. 70 CE), who is in the main hostile to Caligula and depicts the emperor as a bloodthirsty monster, Caligula showed his brutality (sauitia) by feeding the wild animals with criminals instead of feeding them with small animals, because small animals were more expensive than convicts (Caligula, 27.1).¹ The Church fathers were especially concerned about the bodily resurrection of humans whose bodies had been devoured by beasts, which in their turn were devoured by other beasts (see Chapter 9).

When animals were allowed to eat humans, it was an extreme degradation of the human form – “in all his body was nowhere a body’s shape”, writes Martial (c. 38/41–101/104 CE) about a crucified robber after he had been attacked by a bear in the arena (On the Spectacles, 7). Sometimes what was eventually eaten had never been recognized as being really human in the first place. Not only criminals who were thrown to the beasts but also newborn babies who were exposed and sometimes killed by animals were thus denied their humanity. In the case of infant exposure, where the abandoned child risked being eaten by stray dogs or other animals (Harris 1994: 6, 8), such children had not been recognized by their father, the pater familias, and were therefore not classified as proper human beings. It is also worth noting that there were open pits on the Esquiline where all sorts of refuse – as well as the bodies of the poor and animal carcasses – were thrown (Robinson 1994: 122; Kyle 1995: 185). They were called puticuli, a word that is associated with putescere, “to rot” (see Potter 2002: 169, note 2). In death, the similarities in the material and physiological equipment of animals and people were underlined as they were united through the stench that engulfed the area of these pits.

Another important restriction between animals and humans is that they are usually not permitted to have sexual contact with each other. Thus the categorical distinction between the species is maintained. But even if this relationship is forbidden, it tends to exist all the same, both as a phantasm and in reality. Apuleius’ (c. 125–170 CE) novel Metamorphoses tells about a woman who especially hired the ass as her partner. In this novel, sexual intercourse with an ass is further thought of as a special punishment for a female transgressor, reflecting something that also seems to have been actual punitive practice (cf. Martial On the Spectacles, 5; Coleman 1990: 63–64; Barton 1996: 68).

Necessities of life

Meat

The usefulness to man of animals had three main aspects, one pertaining to the necessities of life, another to religion and the third to entertainment, all of which overlapped.

Animal husbandry was the basis of Mediterranean economics. From domesticated animals people obtained meat, milk, eggs, honey and material for clothing. Columella describes the care of animals on a Roman farm. The management of oxen, bulls and cows, horses, mules and asses, sheep, goats, pigs, dogs, as well as different types of farm bird and fish in the fish ponds is explained. Columella also includes lengthy instructions for the management of bees (On Agriculture, 6–9). His description shows the variety of animal life on a farm and the diversity in food production, in which different types of animal husbandry were combined with other kinds of food production. Animals that are not domesticated in the Western world today were also kept by the Romans. One example is dormice (glires), which were fattened in small pottery vessels with holes and served as delicacies (Zeuner 1963: 415–16).

The daily diet of common people did not necessarily consist of meat. Animal husbandry in the Graeco-Roman world was not primarily for the production of meat but for producing hides, wool and milk. Meat and food from animals have often been regarded as being of minor importance in the Graeco-Roman diet, especially red meat (Garnsey 1999: 122–3). At the same time, meat was highly valued, eaten on special occasions and viewed as a prestige food, with pork as the favourite. The eminence and status of meat as a foodstuff is seen, above all, in the significance of the animal sacrifice, where the commonest species were pigs, sheep, goats and cattle.

Classification of animals based on the taste and wholesomeness of their meat represents their demotion to the status of objects. They were made into things to be eaten (The Hippocratic Collection, Regimen, 2. 46–9). At the same time, sacrifice involved domestic animals in a process of religious elevation before they were reduced to meat. As well as turning animals into meat, the sacrificial process transformed parts of the bodies of the animals into food for the gods on the altar and made it possible for the priests to read the future in their intestines. Imperfect animals or working cattle were prohibited as sacrifices (Jameson 1988).

In Greece, most of the slaughtering was ritual, and the meat that was eaten came from animals that had been sacrificed. In Rome, sacrificial meat was eaten by the upper classes, and the leftovers were sold on the market. Sausages and other products made of low-quality meat, mixed with spices and cereals, could easily be obtained as snacks from street sellers (Garnsey 1999: 122–7).

In addition to farming and pastoralism, animals that ended up on the table had also been hunted. Game played a part in Roman cookery. The capture and killing of wild animals included the hunting, fishing and catching of birds. Hares were driven into nets, and deer, boars and bears were speared. The antlers of stags and fangs of wild boars were nailed on the walls of temples (Balsdon 1969: 219–20). This sort of meat was not classified as sacrificial (Wilkins 1995: 104). Meat from animals killed in the arenas was probably also distributed among the people (Kyle 1995).

As a supplement to what could be obtained in Italy, Roman elites had access to a wide variety of foodstuffs, and their exotic, elaborate and costly cuisine is well known. Thus their haute cuisine reflected the width and breadth of the empire and the way the representatives of this empire related to its complexities by virtually eating their way through its exotica. Seneca comments on the subject: “Look at Nomentanus and Appicius, digesting, as they say, the blessing of land and sea, and reviewing the creations of every nation arrayed upon their board!” (On the Happy Life, 11.4). In another work, Seneca describes the variety of animals eaten by the Roman elite in a more malicious way: “From every quarter they gather together every known and unknown thing to tickle a fastidious palate . . . they vomit that they may eat, they eat that they may vomit, and they do not deign even to digest the feast for which they ransack the whole world” (Consolation, 10.3). According to Suetonius, Emperor Vitellius mingled on a big platter ingredients from various birds and fish brought to him from the whole empire (Vitellius, 13). Plutarch (c. 50–120 CE) maintains that “nothing that flies or swims or moves on land has escaped your so-called civilized and hospitable tables” (Gryllus, 991D). Rather than keeping up distinctions between themselves and their neighbours by avoiding certain types of food, as did the Jews, the Romans ate meat and other foodstuffs from all over the empire.

There were different patterns of consumption. One was that more meat was consumed by people of the upper classes than those of the lower ones. Another was that vegetarian ways of life also existed. So even if meat was the sacrificial food and thus obligatory, there were those who rejected meat eating. This rejection could be partial or total. Vegetarianism was motivated by religious reasons, compassion for animals, or by reasons concerning diet and health. Thus vegetarianism could be based on concern for animals as well as on the idea that the slaughter of living creatures had a corrupting effect on human beings (see Chapter 3). In any case, vegetarianism reveals that meat was not neutral but had great symbolic value.

Fish

More important than meat in the daily diet was food from the sea. The Mediterranean consists of diverse and shifting micro-regions, and fishermen had to be flexible. But even if the fish population is less abundant than in the oceans, the Mediterranean was a treasury of animal life with more than 500 species living in the sea. Especially in the lagoons, many fish were caught, as the lagoons were probably twice as productive as the open sea (Horden and Purcell 2000: 190–7).

Fish was consumed fresh, made into sauces, dried, or pickled in salt for sale and export. Salt fish was exported from Egypt, the Black Sea and Spain. Fish were also kept in artificial ponds (piscinae) (Varro, On Agriculture, 3.17), which seem to have become fashionable among the elite in the first century BCE (Zeuner 1963: 479). When it was sold far from the sea, fish was expensive, even more expensive than meat (McGowan 1999: 42), but at least for those who lived close to the sea, fish and other types of seafood were important elements in the diet, even if the daily diet was mainly based on cereals, vegetables, wine, and oil.

The Romans were interested in the richness and variety of the life of the sea. Mosaics, for instance from Pompeii, show fish, shells, crayfish and octopuses, realistically modelled (House of the Faun and House VIII). Although these mosaics were reproduced in workshops, they were apparently based on original precise zoographical observations (Dunbabin 1999: 47–8). It is not unexpected that a fishing population knew a great deal about the varied life in the sea, but the care with which these artists made the animals look realistic is worth noting. The sensitive and accurate depiction of these sea creatures reveals a precise understanding of the dist...