Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg? Some thoughts on bird sacrifices in Ancient Greece

Abstract

• Sokrates’ famous last words, ‘Krito, I owe a cock to Asklepios; will you remember to pay the debt?’, as reported in Plato’s Phaidon (117e–18a), have long occupied scholars trying to understand the reason for the ‘debt’, but the choice of sacrificial animal has equally surprised. Cattle, sheep, goats and pigs are well known as the main animals offered in Greek sacrificial rites – but why a bird? Sokrates’ rooster, however, is not altogether unique. Other famous figures of antiquity, too, sacrificed birds: when in the second century ad Aelius Aristeides in search of a cure for his ailments comes to Smyrna and visits the warm baths, the goddess Isis herself intervenes and orders him to sacrifice two geese to her (Sacred Tales 3.45). What do we know about birds as sacrificial animals? A hundred years ago, Stengel in his 1910 publication on the sacrificial customs of the Greeks devoted a fair number of pages to the discussion of birds, game and fish as sacrificial animals, but the modern scholarly discourse of ancient Greek sacrifice rarely mentions, let alone engages with, sacrificial animals beyond the ‘traditional’ quartet of domesticated cloven-hoofed mammals. This is even though not just written sources but also recent osteological evidence confirm that Greek sacrificial customs and feasting were more colourful and wide-ranging. This menagerie on the fringes of ‘typical’ Greek sacrifice is neglected at peril: it is here that light is shed on areas beyond large-scale civic ritual of the landed polis, that the dichotomy of domesticated and wild, ‘Greek’ and ‘foreign’, and the relationship between sacrificer, animal and deity can be interrogated from a fresh perspective in a broader social and economic context.