against Christians. The second-century Christian apologist Athenagoras writes, “Three things were alleged against us: atheism, Thyestean feasts, Oedipodean intercourse,” and asserts that if any evidence of such crimes could be found among the Christian population, then they deserved to be punished.19 The charge of Thyestean feasts refers to the legendary conflict between Thyestes and his brother Atreus over the Mycenaean throne. Thyestes’ children were served to him as an act of vengeance over his seduction of Atreus’s wife, Aerope. Later Thyestes raped his own daughter, thus committing a reversal of Oedipal incest.20 Athenagoras dismisses the charges against Christians as absurd but nonetheless devotes a great deal of time to refuting them. He argues that the charges of incest and sexual impropriety are illogical given that Christians focus their corporeal lives on preparation for the eternal spiritual one and as such are not “enslaved to flesh and blood, or overmastered by carnal desire,” following the Pauline belief in the spiritual superiority of celibacy. He argues that the Romans are accusing the Christians of the very things that they themselves are guilty of: sodomy, prostitution, and more. In a curious passage Athenagoras accuses non-Christian Romans of being pederasts, adulterers, and sodomites, indicating that he believes such acts of promiscuity are innately cannibalistic as they do violence to the body: “These adulterers and pæderasts defame the eunuchs and the once-married (while they themselves live like fishes; for these gulp down whatever falls in their way, and the stronger chases the weaker: and, in fact, this is to feed upon human flesh, to do violence in contravention of the very laws which you and your ancestors, with due care for all that is fair and right have enacted).”21 Christians were accused not only of sexual impropriety and man-eating but also of incestuous orgies and the consumption of babies. Their supposed crimes went well beyond the violation of social norms; they were believed to be in violation of natural law itself.
The accusations of incest and anthropophagy were widely reported by men like Theophilus of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Origen, Lucian, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and in great detail by Minucius Felix.22 These were not mere rumors, as they had real and tragic consequences for Christians in the Roman Empire, as is evidenced by the case of the Christians of Lyon and Vienne in 177. After a particularly tumultuous year, in which the Christian population came under increasing suspicion, Christians were forced to stand before the governor to face charges of incest and cannibalism. For these crimes the defendants were executed and became martyrs. An imperial edict stated that Roman citizens should be decapitated, not tortured, but although one of the defendants was a Roman citizen, he was tortured before being thrown to the beasts with his fellow believers in Christ.23 The denial of the appropriate sentence in this case indicates that perhaps accusations of such a horrific crime as cannibalism rendered the privileges of Roman citizenship null and void.
Ultimately fear of unknown religious practices led to rumor and conjecture, resulting in the accusation of cannibalism, for why would a group want to keep their meal practices secret if not for some nefarious purpose? Toward the end of his letter to Trajan, Pliny the Younger refers to the growth of Christianity as a contagion that is spreading quickly.24 The danger inherent in not knowing becomes even more frightening if the mystery appears to be growing. As Christian adherents spread throughout the Roman world, their hidden and mysterious rites took on a new and terrifying face. Centuries later, men like Columbus and Vespucci would write of their fears of the contagious nature of practices like cannibalism and sodomy.
Classical Cannibal Discourse
Taken together all of these accusations of cannibalism in the classical world help us to better understand a number of important precedents that would profoundly shape the minds of early modern explorers, conquerors, evangelists, and settlers as well as those back in Europe reading of the American experience. While ancient Western writers accused a variety of peoples of cannibalism, the Scythians stand out as the most notorious group.25 Their alleged anthropophagy was prevalent in the literature, as was their supposed uncouthness and stupidity. Herodotus was careful to distinguish between the Scythians and the Androphagi, for example, underscoring the fact that although some Scythian practices might be savage and cannibalistic, they were not solely defined by their supposed anthropophagus ways. In spite of Herodotus’s contradictory and complicated depiction of Scythian peoples, it is the negative aspects of their culture that proliferated in popular discourse.26 The first-century Jewish chronicler Josephus, for example, described the Scythians as “reveling in the murder of humans, and only slightly better than wild beasts.”27
The proliferation of the myth of Scythian cannibals across time and space demonstrates the staying power of such accusations. But even more important, these accusations of anthropophagy against the groups collectively called the Scythians not only created the trope of cannibalism in the Central Asian steppes but helped to establish precedents regarding who cannibals were, what they were like, and where they lived. These accusations also constrained ways of thinking about cannibalism in the ancient Mediterranean world, for if Scythians were cannibals, then one knew what a cannibal was: a Scythian. This kind of circular logic will be repeated throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Those who were believed to be cannibals because of their geographic location (or other defining characteristics, such as cultural practices or appearance) become themselves the very definition of “cannibals.” Thus the definition of cannibal is more complicated than merely one human who consumes another, encompassing a web of assumptions about Otherness as well.
The endurance of the Scythian reputation for cannibalism also reveals how whole groups of people were conflated into artificial categories and how the differences between them were minimized. The category of Scythian encompassed a rather poorly defined group of people inhabiting a region whose boundary was equally vague. Discursively, however, these differences and vagaries mattered little. The Scythians were cannibals, whoever they were and wherever they lived. Again this pattern will be repeated often in the following millennia.
The anthropophagus accusations lodged at other groups, like Celts and Christians and even starving soldiers, reveal another important discursive legacy of the ancient world. If one were reading Herodotus, Pliny, or Strabo in a Mediterranean metropole like Athens or Rome, it might seem that the vast majority of cannibals live on the edges of civilization, places whose landscapes mirrored the savagery of their people. In other words, the overall impression from these works is that the cannibal always lives elsewhere. Yet these authors also described acts of human consumption that supposedly occurred a lot closer to home. In each of these examples, however, the act of cannibalism was an act of desperation or revenge, not a defining cultural practice. While the unfortunate Harpagus might have unknowingly consumed his own son, this act is presented as an isolated incident that arose from the intertwining of prophecy, vengeance, and overzealous passion. In this case cannibalism occurred under extreme circumstances rather than as a habitual act. The driving force of bloodlust is undeniable in such tales, but the object of rage and hatred is pointed in a specific direction rather than indiscriminately at all human beings; the paradigmatic cannibal society was presumably one in which the bonds of shared humanity were weak and all human beings were potential food sources. Even when Cambyses’ troops were driven to cannibalism in the desert, it was out of desperation, not desire.
In the case of the Christians in the Roman Empire, however, a complicated situation developed in which a group a people who inhabited “civilization” were accused of ritualized, institutionalized cannibalism. The Christians were not an undifferentiated Other living somewhere on the fringes of civilization; they were not people who had been raised as savages, yet they chose to abandon their traditions and follow a path leading to inhumanity. Living among civilized people did not automatically make them part of civilization. In contrast to Pliny’s lurid descriptions of cannibalistic monsters in the far reaches of the world, the Christians who were accused of cannibalism in the second century seemed to have chosen rather than inherited the practice of anthropophagy. This presents a challenge to the simplistic assertion that cannibals are always fundamentally Other. If there are people living in Rome or Antioch who are secretly cannibals, then the threat of savagery and consumption is much closer at hand. One need not travel to distant lands to be exposed to threats to one’s body and spirit. These accusations highlight the distinction between the internal and external
