Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The Public Sphere 201
Roasting meat on an altar. The bearded man on the left performs a libation.
To right of center is a herm. From Religion and the Greeks by Robert
Garland (Bristol, U.K.: Bristol Classical Press, 1994). Reprinted by permission
of Duckworth Publishers.
by the state. The high point of the festival was the sacrifice. At the
Great Dionysia held in Athens in honor of Dionysos in 333 b.c.e., no
fewer than 240 bulls were slaughtered. Just before the axe fell, barley
grains were sprinkled on the victim’s head to induce the animal
to nod in pretended assent at its own killing. The animal was then
flayed, chopped up, and roasted on top of the altar. Public sacrifices
afforded one of the few occasions when the entire citizen body had
an opportunity to eat meat, because everything except for the thigh
pieces was later distributed among the priests and the celebrants.
More importantly, from a religious perspective, public sacrifices
helped to define the polis, since only citizens were permitted to partake
of the meat. As such, it was an act of communion, in much the
same way, mutatis mutandi s, that the Eucharist is (in a double sense)
an act of communion, in that only those who have been through the
rite of initiation (termed confirmation) are permitted to partake of
the host. (Only those who belonged to exclusive religious sects such
as Orphism and Pythagoreanism, rejected sacrifice, which indicates