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

that is Friendship.
They made her kind (i9la&skonto) with pious a)ga&lmasin
With graptoi=j zw|&oisi and with subtle scents,
With sacrifice of purest myrrh of frankincense
Sweet-scented; and they poured upon the ground
Libations from the tawny bees.
These practices are still preserved among some peoples, like traces of
truth:
the altar was not soaked by violent deaths
of bulls. (Abst. 2.20-2.21) [166]
Through citing Theophrastus, Porphyry reaches back to a fragment of Empedocles to
support his argument in defense of bloodless sacrifice. Owing to this theme, the fragment
is considered to be part of Empedocles’ poem Katharmoi, which, according to Hippolytus
of Rome (A.D. II-III), discussed, though not exclusively, the affiliated theme of
prohibition against eating meat. 349 The idea of ascribing bloodless sacrifice and
abstinence from meat to early times is a traditional feature of the Classical Greek
conception of early men as simple, innocent, and morally superior beings. 350 In the
349 For a discussion of the fragment of Empedocles as part of his Katharmoi on the basis of Hippolytus’s
remark (RH 7.30.3), see M. R. Wright, ed., Empedocles: The Extant Fragments (New Haven and London,
1981) 81, n. 20. For the division of Empedocles’ quotations into two poems, Physics and Katharmoi, on
the basis of subject matter (i.e., scientific, religious), and the idea that this division is a historiographic
invention of post-Classical, most likely, second- to third-century A.D. date, see C. Osborne, “Empedocles
Recycled,” CQ 37 (1987) 24-50. For Empedocles as an adamant proponent of abstinence from sacrificing
and eating animals, and how this idea influences his wider philosophical stand, see Sorabji, Animal Minds
and Human Morals 174-175; also Osborne, “Boundaries in Nature” 23-24. For Porphyry’s excessive
borrowing from writers, such as Theophrastus and Empedocles in order to strengthen his argument for not
killing and eating animals, see G. Clark, tr., Porphyry. On Abstinence from Killing Animals (Ithaca, New
York, 2000) 19-20.
350 For a detailed discussion of this idea and its prominence in ancient Greek thought, see W. K. C. Guthrie,
In the Beginning: Some Greek Views on the Origins of Life and the Early State of Man (Ithaca, New York,
1957; repr. 1965) 69-73. A representative advocate of the belief that early men did not sacrifice animals is
Plato, who states in the Laws (782c): “the custom of men sacrificing one another, is, in fact, one that
survives even now among many peoples; whereas amongst others we hear of how the opposite custom
existed, when they were forbidden so much to eat an ox, and their offerings to the gods consisted, not of
animals, but of cakes of meal, grain, and honey, and other such bloodless sacrifices, and from flesh they
abstained as though it were unholy to eat it or to stain with blood the altars of the gods; instead of that,
those of us men who then existed lived what is called an “Orphic life,” keeping wholly to inanimate food,
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