My favorite part of Works and Days is the bit where Hesiod patiently explains how, even though fish and beasties and birds eat one another, we don’t do that – because Zeus gave us justice, which is way better than cannibalism (δίκην, ἣ πολλὸν ἀρίστη γίγνεται.) Sure – but what are the hors d’oeuvres like?
I take this kind of closely with my favorite part of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is where Aristotle starts talking about things that we’d probably characterize as tabloid headlines or urban legends. The one that sticks out in particular for me is the story about the slave who ate his fellow-slave’s liver, just because of the effort you would have had to go to. That’s one of a few in this section of the EN that feature cannibalism, a practice that was supposed to be limited to other, non-human animals. And what’s the heading that brings all these stories together? The vice that Aristotle’s trying to illustrate is theriodes, or beastliness.
It’s true that, maybe, sometimes, humans can be a little animalistic too. That reminds me of a story about Mt. Lykaion, first told by Plato in the Republic and recently sort of confirmed by archaeological evidence. Every year, people go up to the top of the mountain and eat some stew, but it’s a bit of a lottery, because some of the meat is from human sacrifice. Whoever eats it gets turned into a wolf; the only way for them to turn human again is to abstain, as a wolf, from human flesh for a period of about ten years. If eating people makes you an animal, not eating them, in turn, makes you a human being.
There’s a kind of a puzzle here, though we (modern, Western observers) may have to look pretty hard to see it. Herodotus can help: he tells a story aobut Darius getting some Greeks together with some Kallatians (a tribe from India) and asking the former how much money they’d take to eat their dead parents. Of course, they just won’t do it. The punchline comes when Darius asks the Kallati, who eat their parents as a matter of custom (οἳ τοὺς γονέας κατεσθίουσι), how much he’d have to pay them to cremate their parents like the Greeks. They’re just as freaked out about that possibility as the Greeks were about endocannibalism. From some points of view, not eating people looks weird. Why do the Greeks make such a big deal out of it?
One possibility is the kind of social nightmare (I think) envisioned by Hesiod and Aristotle, where we’d just be eating each other all the time if we let ourselves do it one. Giacomo Leopardi works out this fantasy in a short work called “The Wager of Prometheus,” where the latter finds out that humans in general weren’t really worth sacrificing his liver for. At one stage, he travels to the New World and finds it almost entirely depopulated by cannibalism: human flesh is too good to resist once you’ve tried it, so gluttony takes over and everyone gets eaten.
The worry is that cannibalism might turn out to be a natural desire (like any other kind of eating, some Greeks think) rather than a social practice. In other words, you might not be able to make distinctions about who to eat. Cannibalism might be like man being a wolf to man, which is no basis for a social collective. There are, of course, some pretty important counterexamples in the Odyssey, like the Cyclopes and the Laestrygones, both groups of giants who eat outsiders while sparing their own, but these are basically represented as monsters.*
We know from those stories, as from others (the cosmogonic fable in Plato’s Protagoras, any number of maiden/sea-monster myths) that the Greeks thought of themselves as maybe especially delicious. In any case, they thought that animals and monsters were always out to eat them. Was a sense of their own nice flavor actually part of Greek identity? And did these beliefs about human deliciousness make cannibalism seem more taboo than other taboo activities? You get plenty of incest on the tragic stage, e.g., but not much cannibalism.
However that may be, we now know quite a lot about the effectiveness of cannibalism for mediating social organization. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in particular has written extensively about how exocannibalism, the hostile kind of cannibalism which the Greeks most feared, contributes to forming affinal or potential-marriage bonds in Amazonian societies. Socialized cannibalism is all about making choices: whom you can eat, whom you can’t. As such, it’s also a way to recruit new socii.
With the Greeks, it’s basically the opposite: cannibalism is how you recruit enemies. Or rather, since all forms of socially-acceptible eating are by definition not cannibalism, that is not the eating of a being like you, eating something is a way of making it an enemy, an outside to your society. In most cases, that’s a state of affairs rather than an etiology; where it does become etiological, as with Odysseus in the Cyclops’ cave, the enemy eats you first. How to justify our eating of sheep and goats and things, which can’t possibly have tried to eat us first? They ate our crops, so we escalated proportionally. The Cyclops, however, might want to take advantage of that logic by asserting that Odysseus ate his cheese before he ate Odysseus’ men, also a proportionate escalation.
In the end, there’s no consistent logic behind these social structures. The point is just that the structures themselves can be used as a logic, recruited for talking about other things – justice, for instance, or vice or gift-exchange. To the extent that you can support them with the threat of cannibalism, you’ve managed to sell them to the Greeks and, pari passu, to us. But you have to wonder what a cannibal would make of Hesiod’s plea on behalf of dike. Would he be forced to assume that fish, beasts and birds were somehow human, and that the non-cannibal anthropoi in this passage represent quite another species?
*interestingly, Aristotle in the Politics seems to read the cyclopes as particularly isolated human beings rather than as monsters. But then, pace Homer, he denies them any social cohesion.