Anthropophagy and cannibalism in ancient Greek literature

In ancient Greek religious and social thought, few transgressions were as heinous as incest, parricide, and cannibalism. However, as early as Hesiod’s Theogony, the gods engaged in cycles of incestual, parricidal, and cannibalistic acts in order to control divine reproduction and establish their power. Divine cannibalism, while not condoned, receives fewer protestations than when humans eat one another. Humans’ motives and modes of eating each other differ from the divine versions of the practice. In this dissertation, I explore the meanings and underlying anxieties behind consuming human flesh, especially when performed by humans and humanoid hybrids (e.g., Cyclopes, the Sphinx, Scylla, etc.). Although animals engage in anthropophagy, the placement of mortals within the bestial-divine spectrum defines cannibalism, when perpetrated by humans, as a marker of transgression, bordering on the theomachic, because it subverts the hierarchy between humans and the divine. I argue that the close alignment with cycles of life, death, consumption, and regeneration, which inform the divine examples of cannibalism and extend to the understanding of the varieties of the practice that mortals engage in, underly the taboo of cannibalism in Greece. This taboo is further explored through the consistent reference to the practice of dismembering food sources to prepare them for consumption by humans, in contrast to the gods who are able to consume what they ingest whole and without the need for dismemberment or even chewing. The critical lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “bodily grotesque” is best suited to understanding the reproductive symbolism of cannibalism, while the well-established body of work by structuralists and the responses it has generated are valuable in terms of approaching the broad spectrum of cannibalistic acts in Greek myth and ethnographies and the discrete practices that inform them within ancient and modern cultures.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Classical Philology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Gipson, Christopher Lawrence

Contributors dc:contributor

• Tzanetou, Angeliki
• Williams, Craig
• Bosak-Schroeder, Clara
• León, Daniel

• cannibalism
• anthropophagy
• Lycophron
• Euripides
• sacrifice
• Hesiod
• Theogony
• Cyclops

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Christopher Gipson

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116037

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F116037