In all likelihood, the first mention of something approaching cannibalism in Western literature occurs in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, which dates from approximately the 8th century BCE. On an island stopover, the adventurer Odysseus (known as Ulysses in Latin) and his men enter the cave of Polyphemus, a Cyclops (albeit one with a human shape). Luckily, the giant is out tending his flock, so the Greeks make themselves at home: lighting a fire, eating some of the big guy’s cheese, and trying to decide what else they can steal. The party ends abruptly when Polyphemus returns home and blocks their exit with an enormous stone. Odysseus tries to bluff his way out, bragging about the city he had recently sacked and presumably his soon-to-be-famous wooden horse trick. He also tells Polyphemus to be extremely careful, since he and his pals are well protected by the gods. The Cyclops, however, appears somewhat less than impressed. According to Odysseus:
Lurching up, he lunged out with his hands towards my men and snatching two at once, rapping them on the ground he knocked them dead like pups—their brains gushed out all over, soaked the floor—and ripping them limb from limb to fix his meal he bolted them down like a mountain-lion, left no scrap, devoured entrails, flesh and bones, marrow and all!
After washing down the gruesome meal with milk, the giant falls asleep. The next day, Polyphemus consumes two more of the Greeks for breakfast and another pair for supper, and although Odysseus feels that the jury is still out on his intimidation ploy, his men suggest that he come up with an alternate plan. Soon after, our hero talks the Cyclops into drinking some wine he and his men had brought, telling the giant that they’d intended to present it to him as a gift—before he started eating everybody, that is. After downing three bowlfuls, Polyphemus falls down drunk, “as wine came spurting, flooding up from his gullet with chunks of human flesh.”
Presumably skirting bits of their partially digested crewmates, the vengeance-minded Greeks uncover an oar-sized piece of wood they had previously sharpened and buried under the sheep dung littering the cave floor. After heating the tip, Odysseus and four mates snap into battering-ram mode, slamming the point home and poking out the snoozing Cyclops’s favorite eye. The crafty Greeks avoid the enraged Polyphemus and also manage to make him look bad in front of his giant friends, who have stopped by to investigate the ruckus. The following morning, after the Cyclops rolls away the stone to let out his flock, Odysseus and his men make their escape—hanging beneath the bodies of the giant’s sheep.
In Theogony, Homer’s fellow poet Hesiod recounts the tale of Cronos, the Father of the Gods, who learns from his parents (Heaven and Earth) that his own son will one day overthrow him. To prevent this, Cronos eats his first four children, but the youngest, Zeus, is spared when the children’s mother hands her husband a rock wrapped in swaddling clothes instead of baby Zeus.
I interviewed classicist Mary Knight at her office in the American Museum of Natural History. “The tale of Cronos suggests an early religious connection with the taboo on eating people,” she said, “since Zeus would not do to his offspring what his father tried to do to him.” Echoing what Maggie Kilgore wrote about how eating can be used as a way to reinforce cultural differences, Knight continued. “The story may thus support cannibalism as a part of the ancient Greek view of a ‘primitive’ past vs. the ‘civilized’ present. Greeks came to see themselves as different, calling all non-Greeks ‘savages’—people who may have continued eating people.”
Although Polyphemus and Cronos were fictional characters, and not exactly card-carrying humans (which might upset cannibalism purists), this may not have been the case with some of the man-eaters described by another Ancient Greek, Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE). In his masterpiece, The Histories, the man often referred to as the Father of History wrote that the Persian king Darius asked some Greeks what it would take for them to eat their dead fathers. “No price in the world,” they cried (presumably in unison). Next, Darius summoned several Callatians, who lived in India and “who eat their dead fathers.” Darius asked them what price would make them burn their dead fathers upon a pyre, the preferred funerary method of the Greeks. “Don’t mention such horrors!” they shouted.
Herodotus (writing as Darius) then demonstrated a degree of understanding that would have made modern anthropologists proud. “These are matters of settled custom,” he wrote, before paraphrasing the lyric poet Pindar, “And custom is King of all.” In other words, society defines what is right and what is wrong.
But while some of Herodotus’s writings certainly reinforced the idea that “Culture is King,” at the same time his tales also portrayed cannibalism as a sensational and utterly repugnant act, thus helping to propagate a mindset that cannibalism was bad behavior. As such, his combination of history and myth offers important clues about the spread of the cannibal taboo.