If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it has appeared in several versions since the time of Herodotus. Most notably, William Shakespeare co-opted it for the filial cannibalism scene in The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. In the Bard’s most violent and arguably most maligned play, Titus, a Roman general, engages in an increasingly gory running battle with his archenemy, Tamora, the queen of the Goths. Late in the play, and after his daughter has been raped and mutilated by Tamora’s two sons, Titus exacts his revenge. He kills the siblings and has their bodies baked in a pie, which he serves at a banquet to the queen and her husband, Saturninus. After Titus reveals his secret ingredient, everyone’s plans for a quiet meal get tweaked a bit when Titus kills Tamora, Saturninus kills Titus, and Titus’s son kills Saturninus.28
It is also possible that Shakespeare may have gotten his cannibal inspiration from Seneca’s 1st century Roman tragedy, Thyestes, in which the title character not only tricks his twin brother, Atreus, out of the throne of Mycenea, but also takes his sister-in-law as a lover. Thyestes continues his bad behavior by chiding Atreus that he can have the throne back as soon as the sun moves backward in the sky. Zeus however, overhears the taunt and “drives the day back against its dawning.” Before you can say “banished,” Thyestes is forced to surrender the throne. Atreus, though, isn’t done with his slimy sibling, and after learning of his wife’s infidelity, he invites Thyestes to a reconciliatory banquet. As part of the party prep, Atreus murders Thyestes’s two sons from the forbidden relationship and serves them to their unsuspecting dad (who has obviously not been keeping up with his readings of Herodotus). At dinner’s end, Atreus presents Thyestes with the hands and heads of his slain children on a platter, forever defining the term Thyestian Feast as one at which human flesh is served.
In short, from the Ancient Greeks to William Shakespeare, and in stories written across a span of 2,500 years, cannibalism was depicted as either the ultimate act of revenge or the gruesome work of gods, monsters, and savages (a.k.a. non-Christians and anyone living in the vicinity of some gold). By the 17th and 18th centuries, with the taboo firmly established, the threat of cannibalism would reach a new audience and serve a new purpose—as a way to terrorize children into behaving.
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (born in 1785 and 1786 respectively) were German academics who collected oral folk tales during the early 1800s. They did so by interviewing peasants, servants, middle-class types, and aristocrats, and they published hundreds of fairy tales in the years between 1812 and 1818. In the parade of new editions that followed, the brothers changed, added, and subtracted stories, depending on how well they had been received previously. Like the ancient Greek and Roman myths, the original fairy tales depicted violence, desire, heartbreak, and fear. They also portrayed the all-too-common hardships of their own time, especially famine and the abandonment of children by destitute parents. The language was often scatological and, as such, many of the updates the authors initiated reflected the fact that the originals were definitely not kid-friendly.
As the Grimms sanitized these tales for publication, and for a much younger readership, themes were also modified. But rather than molding them into the bedtime stories familiar to modern readers, the brothers transformed them into cautionary tales, many of which ended badly for children who chose not to obey their parents. On one level at least, fairy tales can be seen as literary relics from a time when terror was an accepted educational tool. Bearing almost no resemblance to the politically correct stories written today for kids, the original Grimm’s fairy tales were tools employed by parents to socialize children, to increase their moral standing, and to frighten them into obeying the directives of their elders.