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

. Dogs as Food in Classical Greece
Comedy
A passage from Aristophanes’ Knights that refers to the selling of sausages made
of dog meat constitutes the earliest comic reference to dogs as food. Cleon/Paphlagon
and the sausage seller, who seeks to replace the former as representative of the Athenian
assembly (demos), rival each other in order to win the favor of the demos represented
here by a homonymous old man. Demos sides with the sausage seller, who proposes the
following punishment to be inflicted on Paphlagon:
DEMOS
And Paphlagon, who behaved this way, tell me how you’ll
punish him.
SAUSAGE SELLER
Nothing severe; he’s merely going to take my old job. He’ll
have his own sausage stand at the city gates, hashing up
dog (ku&neia) and ass meat instead of politics (pra&gmasin),
getting drunk and trading insults with the whores,
and drinking the runoff from the public baths. (Eq. 1395-1401) [39]
Despite its allusion to dog flesh as food, the proposal of the sausage seller that Paphlagon
should be demoted to a person who stuffs the meats of dog and ass into sausages, 306 and
sells them at the gates of the city, 307 has been interpreted as evidence that dog flesh was
not consumed in Classical Greece. Commenting on the subject, René Merlen, for
306 Dalby, Siren Feasts 60, discusses a passage from Galen’s On the Properties of Foods (3.1.9), as
evidence that ass flesh was sometimes eaten in historic times in ancient Greece. Pollux (Onom. 9.47-9.48)
indicates that the place where asses’ flesh was sold in the agora was called memno&neia; also Erotian
(Glossarium Hippocraticum 82.8), who cites Aristophanes as his source, says that the place in the agora
where carrion was sold was called kene/breion after the word for the flesh of carrion. For these testimonia,
see R. E. Wycherley, The Athenian Agora III. Literary and Epigraphical Testimonia (Princeton, 1957) 186,
197. J. Wilkins, The Boastful Chef: The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy (Oxford, 2000) 180,
n. 136, notes that the location of these stalls is unknown.
307 Additional evidence that sausages were sold both in the agora and at the gates derives from another part
of Aristophanes’ Knights, where Paphlagon asks the sausage seller: “Did you really sell your sausages in
the agora, or at the gates?”(1245-1247); translation: Sommerstein, Knights 126. For further discussion of
both of these areas as the ones were various goods were sold, see Wilkins, The Boastful Chef 180, ns. 133-
135.
200