Robert SIMMS La vraie cuisine du sacrifice en pays Grec

This paper describes a new epigraphically-derived database of Greek sacrificial victims, now numbering 357 entries, to be available both in print and, regularly updated, on a website currently under construction. Its creation challenges the common view that victim choice was largely free, apart from considerations of cost.

For each sacrifice listed, the following information, to the extent available, is provided: divine epithet, victim, occasion, time, ethnicity, date of inscription and reference. No formal attempt has been made to segregate "private" from "public" sacrifice: offerings actually lie on a continuum from public to private, and inscriptions, I believe, represent an upper-tier subset of all sacrifices which, even if not all "public," are nonetheless allied with the values and practices of public sacrifice. Other conventions in forming the database, which cannot be described here, all aimed at credible identification and attribution of sacrifices.

What can this list do? First, it can correct decades of false generalization about divinities' "favored" sacrifices, e.g., of W. Burkert (Greek Religion, Cambridge, Mass., 1989, 65), "Bulls for Zeus (correct by a narrow margin) and Poseidon (incorrect), stags and goats for Artemis (goats correct, no stags) and Apollo (incorrect), rams and he-goats for Hermes (incorrect), and doves for Aphrodite (fantastic). For the record, the attested animal favorites are: Aphrodite, eriphos; Artemis, aix; Athena, ois and bous; Demeter, hys; Kore and Zeus, bous; Hera, Hermes and Poseidon, ois; Kourotrophos, choiros; Apollo, Herakles and Asklepios, bous; Dionysos, eriphos and bous.

Secondly, like any database, this one can support certain tests. A preliminary test of divine epithets and their associated victims gave an entirely negative result; viz, that divine homonyms across the Greek world are not at all correlated by victim. More significant was a test of ethnolingual variation: "Ionic" (including Attic) vs. "Doric" (including Northwest, Arcado-Cypriot and Aeolian). Such variation does appear, and is, in the larger victim pools, credible: "Doric" Athena, Dionysos and Zeus are much more caprid-oriented, while "Doric" Athena, Demeter and Kore have much less bovid- and much more *ovid (my coinage)-involvement, than their respective "Ionic" manifestations . By contrast, "Doric" Apollo completely lacks his substantial "Ionic" ovid-component. Kourotrophos, finally, is as often noted a distinctively Attic goddess, whose victim pool, surprisingly, contains aiges and oies as well as the ubiquitous choiroi.

A few further conclusions can be drawn from initial perusal of the database: (1) male divinities have nothing to do with the commonest victims choiros, hys, aix, aren, bous, ois of the opposite (F.) gender, while female divinites are either much (Demeter, Aphrodite) or slightly (Artemis, Athena) more gender-flexible; (2) ois and hys are the only victims specified as pregnant, (3) the only recipients of pregnant victims are Demeter (Kore), Athena and Hera; (4) bovids many feminine are characteristic victims for Athena Polias at the Panathenaia, while for Demeter, a division is noticeable between bovids many masculine at the Eleusinian Mysteries and Eleusinian agones, and hyes feminine and often pregnant at Thesmophoria; (5) bovids are also characteristic victims for Dionysos at the Dionysia: Dionysos, moreover, is of all male divinities by far the most specifically masculine in his victim pool; (6) Apollo, Zeus and Athena tend to receive bous in major state festivals, especially those of which they are eponymous; while in their more random and "private" manifestations these divinities receive smaller victims.