The Judgment of Animals in Classical Greece: Animal Sculpture and ...

SAUSAGE SELLER
Well, I swear by the fists whose blows I’ve borne many on many
a time from a child up, and by the slashes of butchers’ knives,
I think I will surpass you in that. Otherwise it would be for nothing
that I’ve grown to such a size on a diet of hand-wipes (a)pomagdalia&j).
PAPHLAGON
Hand-wipes (a)pomagdalia&j), like a dog? Poor rascal, how on a diet
of dog’s food do you expect to fight with a dog-faced baboon?
(Eq. 411-416) [37]
Paphlagon identifies his rival’s diet of hand-wipes with that of a dog. This identification
implies that hand-wipes were made of edible material, a point that will be discussed
shortly. The surprise and pity that Paphlagon expresses, when the sausage seller alleges
to have been raised on hand-wipes, demonstrates that this was food befitting only dogs.
This line of thought reveals that the contemporary anthropocentric attitude that viewed
humans as a category separate from and superior to that of animals extended even to the
domain of food. 278 The statement of the sausage seller, however, that he grew to an
exceptional size owing to eating hand-wipes, suggests that they were considered
nutritious food. As with the milk for puppies seen above, this evidence suggests that a
criterion for selecting food for dogs was its nutritional value, which in turn suggests that a
degree of care was invested on the well-being of the animal.
The definition of the term a)pomagdalia&j as “hand-wipes” is based on a note by
a scholiast, who explains that the objects on which diners wiped their fingers were made
of dough and, after dinner was completed, were given to dogs as food. 279 Similarly, a
fragment from the Epistle Concerning Obscure Words, a work ascribed to Polemon (c.
278
For a detailed discussion of this attitude, see Renehan, “The Greek Anthropocentric View of Man,” 239-
259. Although it refers to food for humans, an interesting discussion of food as “divisive [and] being
distributed and consumed in accordance with existing hierarchies,” can be found in P. Garsney, Food and
Society in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, 1999) xi; also 6, where the author also remarks that, “food
separates and divides…in existential, cultural, social and economic terms.”
279
D. M. Jones, ed., Scholia Vetera in Aristophanis Equites (Scholia in Aristophanem 1.2; Groningen and
Amsterdam, 1969) 104, 414a-414c.
186