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

the passage refers to dog flesh as an ingredient of sausages, and thus indicates the
consumption of this flesh in the fifth century B.C. The only scholar who has recognized
the importance of this evidence is Geoffrey Arnott, who states that Aristophanes’s
comment should be taken to mean that dog meat was indeed eaten, but only by the
poor. 315 In support of his argument, Arnott presents a fragment of the comic poet Alexis
(c. 375-275 B.C.) that refers to the consumption of dog meat by a poor devotee of the
Pythagoreans. The fragment, which belongs to Alexis’s comedy Men of Tarentum, and is
cited by Athenaeus, is a discussion between two persons of the types of food from which
the Pythagoreans abstained:
A. The devotees of Pythagoras, we hear, eat neither fish nor anything else
that has life, and they are the only ones who drink no wine.
B. Yes, but Epicharides devours dogs, and he is a Pythagorean.
A. Of course, after he has killed one, for then it no longer has life!
(Deipn. 4.161b-4.161c) [72]
This fragment refers directly to the consumption of dog flesh. Epicharides, a
Pythagorean, ignored the dietary laws of his sect and ate dog flesh. His behavior appears
shameful, when seen in the context of evidence that Pythagoras considered dogs to be
reincarnated human souls, and proposed abstinence from eating them because it was like
eating deceased friends. 316 Arnott suggests that Epicharides should be considered a poor
man. According to him, in fourth-century comedic contexts, the term “Pythagorean,”
which Alexis applies to Epicharides, signified, usually with contempt, beggarly ascetics,
succinct discussion of these interconnected ideas, see Wilkins, “Comic Cuisine,” in Dobrov, ed, The City as
Comedy 259.
315 W. G. Arnott, Alexis: The Fragments. A Commentary (Cambridge, 1996) 636, n. 1.
316 For the ancient sources for Pythagoras, see C. Osborne, “Boundaries in Nature: Eating with Animals in
the Fifth Century B.C.,” BICS 37 (1990) 23-24.
202