character have existed in the central region of the world, named Cyclopes and Laestrygones, and that quite recently the tribes of the parts beyond the Alps habitually practised human sacrifice, which is not far removed from eating human flesh.”9 Furthermore, Pliny argues, even if some of the things he describes may seem fantastic or dubious, given that humans tend to regard the unfamiliar with suspicion, they are all supported by the best sources that he could find. He presents himself as a skeptic who is naturally inclined to view evidence with measured suspicion. When describing parts of Africa for which his information is dubious, he refers to them as “imaginary.”10 And when he describes a litany of monstrous humans, he presents such specimens as real to the best of his knowledge, including people born with horse hooves; humans with ears large enough to cover their whole body; a race known as the Blemmyes who have no heads, only a mouth and eyes on their chest; and people with strap-like feet who must crawl instead of walk.11 In this way he assures readers that even if one or more of the claims he makes turn out to be false, the rest of the work should not be discredited as he was merely working from the knowledge of others.
In addition to physically monstrous humans, Pliny discusses humans whose cultural practices and traditions are the cause of their monstrosity. For example, the Gamphasantes “do not practice marriage but live with their women promiscuously” and “go naked, do not engage in battle, and hold no intercourse with any foreigner,” while the people of the Atlas tribe do not dream like other humans nor assign proper names to individuals, which have caused them to fall “below the level of human civilization.” The aptly named Cave-dwellers live in caves, eat snakes, and are unable to speak.12 Monstrous humans, then, are those whose bodies are well outside the normal range for humanity or whose cultures fail to meet the minimum standard for rationality and civilization as Pliny defines them.
In his descriptions of the various kinds of humans that exist in the world, Pliny specifies three places where monstrous humans are most likely to live: sub-Saharan Africa, the central Asian steppes, and Southeast Asia. In other words, monstrous humans reside in the places farthest from the influence of Mediterranean civilization. Out of all of these regions, it is the area around Scythia in the central Asian steppes that receives the most attention. Pliny lists the various tribes that fall under the general umbrella term Scythian. Some of these tribes he designates as civilized and others as savage. Those groups that inhabit the edges of the Scythian world are the recipients of most of Pliny’s condemnation. Some of the lands just beyond the “Scythian promontory” are too snowy to be inhabited, while others are “uncultivated because of the savagery of the tribes that inhabit it. This is the country of the Cannibal Scythians who eat human bodies; consequently the adjacent districts are waste deserts thronging with wild beasts lying in wait for human beings as savage as themselves.”13 The lands inhabited by the Cannibal Scythians appear to mirror the savagery of its supposed inhabitants. Savage people inhabit savage lands.
Book VII of Natural History is devoted to describing humanity’s various forms and capacities. A number of monstrous groups live in the lands just beyond the Scythians, including “people dwelling in forests who have their feet turned backward behind their legs”; people who “drink out of human skulls and use the scalps with the hair on as napkins hung round their necks”; and Albanians, who “are born with keen grey eyes and are bald from childhood.”14 These descriptions underscore an important element of the intellectual tradition that early modern Europeans would inherit: the conflation of physical and cultural “deformities” into a single category described variously as savage, barbarous, or monstrous. In this way an individual who looks like a “normal” human but turns out to be a cannibal is as far from “civilized” as physically divergent creatures like Cynocephali or Cyclopes.
Pliny spends the rest of book VII discussing human physiology, devoting considerable space to sex and reproduction. He links the earlier section on monstrosity with the section on physiology through the example of the “Hermaphrodites formerly called androgynes” and individuals who had transformed from female to male or vice versa. Thus individuals (and in some cases whole tribes) who are born with ambiguous genitalia provide the necessary link between variations of the human form and the “science” of sex and reproduction. Pliny reports that humans are the only species who indulge in procreative copulation all year round rather than during a fixed season. Human gestation, in his estimation, ranges from six to ten months. Pregnant women first feel the movement of the fetus on the fortieth day if it is male and on the ninetieth day if it is female. The birth of male children was reportedly easier for the mother. Together these beliefs about reproduction reinforce the notion of maleness as humanity’s default (and more “natural”) state.15
Like other classical writers, Pliny found the female sex both degraded and frighteningly powerful. Women’s bodies were believed to do mysterious things that could have a profound impact on the environment. Contact with menstrual blood, for example, “turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seeds in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees falls off, the bright surface of mirrors [in] which it is merely reflected is dimmed, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.” Thus women were in some way always monstrous. Even in death, the corpses of men float on their back, while women float on their face “as if nature spared their modesty after death,” preserving the idea that women and men are fundamentally different in both form and capacity.16 Such sentiments were echoed often by early modern Europeans in their encounters with Indigenous Americans.
Early Christianity
At roughly the same time that Pliny was composing the Natural History, the religious teachings of Jesus and his disciples began spreading around the Mediterranean. The early years of Christianity were difficult for its adherents; they faced suppression and vilification for their beliefs, including accusations of anthropophagy. As evidenced by writers like Herodotus, Strabo, and Pliny, such claims about those who resided outside of civilization were not uncommon. The allegations against the Christians, however, remind us that one did not need to be geographically removed from the polis to be considered uncivilized or Other. Individuals whose cultural or religious practices differed from the masses, whose traditions remained mysterious, or who posed a threat to society as a whole could easily find themselves suspected of anthropophagy. Traditionally scholars have understood the accusations against the early Christians as a misinterpretation of the ritual of the Eucharist by the pagan majority. While this symbolic correlation seems obvious (and in fact will be deployed by English settlers against their French neighbors in America nearly a millennium and a half later), the Anglican theologian Andrew McGowan argues that this simplistic explanation fails to account for the fact that other groups were accused of cannibalism who possessed no such ritual.17
In the first century ce, Christians were accused of both cannibalism and incest. Much of the discussion about Christian practices among the pagan Romans centered on what transpired at their ritual meals. Pliny the Elder’s nephew, referred to as Pliny the Younger, wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan while serving as the governor of Bithynia-Pontus (in modern-day Turkey) regarding his interactions with Christians. In addition to providing a useful window into the prevailing Roman policy toward Christians at the time, Pliny the Younger’s letter also hints at the mystery surrounding Christian meals. In his account of his initial investigations into the crimes of Christians, he argues that their “pertinacity and inflexible obstinacy” alone “should certainly be punished,” and he also hints at other questionable practices. He reports on the confessions of several Christians who described their religious practices: after pledging themselves to Christ, “it was their custom to depart and meet again to take food; but it was ordinary and harmless food, and they had ceased this practice after my edict in which, in accordance with your orders, I had forbidden secret societies.”18 According to Pliny the Younger, the accused Christians steadfastly maintained that their ritual meals were harmless. The need to defend their ritual meals reinforces the fact that speculation ran rampant in the Roman world.
Other sources from the first few centuries of the Common Era also mention
