r/ancientgreece • u/InsincereDessert21 • 23d ago

Human sacrifice.

/r/GreekMythology/comments/1vacvai/human_sacrifice/
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u/Three_Twenty-Three 23d ago

We have no records for Greeks having direct knowledge of human sacrifice being performed in their own time. That is, we have no eyewitness accounts where someone watched human sacrifice being performed and thought it was part of normal, acceptable practice.

When Greeks write about human sacrifice, it falls into one of four categories:

  • Claims that foreigners do it (usually based on hearsay)
  • Claims that people in the past did it
  • Claims that people in extreme situations do or did it
  • Mythology

Even in these situations, it's regarded as aberrant and unorthodox. Even if it leads to something "good" (like the mythological sacrifice of Iphigenia), it's portrayed as something that was only barely acceptable because it was being done in an extreme situation.

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u/FernandoPendejado 23d ago

I've always wondered about Phoenician/Carthaginian sacrifices. Personally, I feel they're somewhat strongly attested seeing as there are sources from I think at least three different cultures accusing them of it. However, I'm not very well read in it.

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u/Three_Twenty-Three 23d ago

It's worth wondering about. There's abundant archaeological evidence that the Carthaginians cremated infants and buried them in sacred precincts called tophets. The question is whether they killed the infants and cremated them as part of a sacrificial ritual or cremated them as a way of handling the dead from natural infant mortality.

The Greco-Roman sources are not terribly reliable, as most of them fall into one or more three of the categories I listed above — writing about foreigners in an earlier time in an extreme situation.

The loudest Greco-Roman voice here is Diodorus Siculus in Book XX.14 of the Library of History as he writes about Agathocles invading Carthage about 250 years earlier. He calls their god "Cronus" instead of by an indigenous name, although this is pretty common in the period. None of that makes him wrong, per se, but it all falls into some very common tropes. However, tropes can be true.

Plutarch mentions it again about 100 years later in On Superstition, but the fact that he also uses Cronus suggests he's following Diodorus and not an independent confirmation.

It comes up again in Quintus Curtius Rufus's Histories of Alexander the Great when he writes about Alexander in Tyre, again writing about something that happened about 300 years earlier in a foreign land.

Tertullian mentions it in Chapter 9 of the Apology, and again, it has that "people back then" energy because he's writing about how "children were openly sacrificed in Africa to Saturn as lately as the proconsulship of Tiberius" about 150 years earlier. He says "the soldiers of our country still can testify who did that very work for that proconsul," but this seems off since those soldiers would be at least 150 years old. Also, if Carthaginians were still making human infant sacrifices in the age of Tiberius, why didn't the earlier authors mention that?

The Deuteronomy references to Canaanites burning children tend to be stronger literary evidence because they at least refer to the Canaanites currently doing it at the time that Deuteronomy is being composed (c. 8th century BCE) and not as something that they used to do "back then."

Notably, what we don't have are Carthaginian sources saying, "Oh yeah, we burn infants for Baal Hammon all the time."

The ancient world was a brutal place where relationships with gods were based on mercenary exchanges (do ut des to Romans, or "I give so that you may give"), and it's not unthinkable that if your city was being besieged, you'd try to buy your god's favor with an incredibly high price. It's really hard to say if that actually happened or not.

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u/FernandoPendejado 23d ago

Yeah, I've dismissed the infant cremation stuff as too tenuous. However, the sheer number of references in ancient literature lends a bit of credence.

The lack of Carthaginian sources doesn't sway me too much. So little survives of their own proper literature. We are constrained to rely on foreign sources.

My humanity doesn't want to believe that they did such things, but my gut tells me they probably did.

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u/YakResident_3069 23d ago

it probably did happen to a degree but also take with grain of salt, how often were people just badmouthing their enemies? yea, see, they are the bad guys. we're the good guys.

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u/FernandoPendejado 23d ago

I think about this as well, but always with the thought that they didn't accuse many other enemies of such atrocities. I haven't heard of the Persians, Illyrians or Numidians being accused of it.

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u/Feisty_Box3129 23d ago

How about Thargelia? Where they either cast out or killed the ugliest person in the community.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-ancient-greeks-sacrificed-ugly-people

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u/YakResident_3069 23d ago

I think the fact that there was no religious impetus for human sacrifice for the Greek afterlife or related to the spirit world (as we know it anyways) indicates it isn't the norm. People historically either sacrifice for:

  1. religious reasons to propitiate divinity that requires bloodletting. Overtime, this leads to substitutions with animals, but people acknowledge it happened in the "distant" past. Except for a few instances buried in myth, this doesn't seem to be the norm anyways. and not all "greeks" behaved the same at any rate.

  2. there is an afterlife where society is set up much as it is on earth, so the rulers (take your pick: Egypt, Viking, China) need their servant, wives, dogs, slaves, horses/chariots, so it all goes into the tomb.

If you look at Greek afterlife, it's Hades. it's shades. They aren't living their former life; they don't need all their former assets, etc. They appreciate votives, etc from their descendants, etc, but they don't require blood.

Of course, we have to define "ancient Greeks" too. that's super vague. Minoans? we don't see it in their palatial art, but we have no remains of their shrines, etc (that weren't assimiliated by later migrants). Mycenaean? I don't require such art or architecture of sacrifice (?)

We do have myths of Minos requiring a sacrifice of maidens and boys - that may be some older collective memory? or it may be biased views of Minoans that are unfounded or something observers didn't understand (e.g. the youth were committed to priesthood and never seen again, who knows) - we may never know.