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

efers to some countries as consumers of dog flesh, which suggests his view of the
practice as a cultural and perhaps ethnic marker, but does not specify which these
countries are. It may be reasonable to assume that he thinks of them as distant and/or
foreign. Although absent from his statement, evidence that this was most likely the case
comes from the next passage, in which Galen clearly states that Asia, Greece, and Italy,
the immediate world in which he lived, worked, and traveled, abstained from eating dogs.
In his treatise On the Thinning Diet, he says:
As for dogs and foxes—I have never tasted their meat, since it is not the custom
to eat it either in Asia or in Greece, or indeed in Italy. But there are apparently
many parts of the world where they are eaten, and my conjecture would be that
their effects would be similar to those of the hare; for hare, dog, and fox are all
equally dry. (Vict. Att. 8) [94]
In this passage, Galen points out that he never ate dog meat. He also counts Greece
among the places which abstained from this practice in his day. As was the case above,
Galen reports that many parts of the world did not shun eating dogs, thus suggesting
again his conception of the practice as a cultural marker. Galen states that dog meat, like
that of the hare and fox, would be dry as food. As it will be seen later, the idea of the
dryness of dog flesh features prominently in the Hippocratic treatises, evidence
suggesting that Galen was well acquainted with his predecessors’ writings.
The Greek practice of abstaining from eating dogs is also attested in the writings
of Sextus Empiricus, another philosopher and physician of the second century A.D. In
ritual meal, comprises an one-handled jug, an oinochoe, a skyphos, a shallow dish, an iron knife, and the
bones of a puppy placed in the jug. Regarding these bones, C. H. Greenewalt, Jr., Ritual Dinners in Early
Historic Sardis (Berkeley, 1978) 24, remarks that: “in no case is the baculum (or penis) present, but this
need not imply that the puppies were all females as this bone is rather small and fragile in male canids as
young as this.”
197