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TEXTS/CONTEXTS
APOLLO'S
SLAUGHTERHOUS
MARCELDETIENNE
46
silent and immobile, is a functionary of the fire. The fire eats, devours; it is the only guest as
well as the god of the banquet. Then, one fine day, a piece of flaming meat falls from the
altar;the priest performingthe service rushes to pick up the burning morsel in order to throw
it back onto the fiery table. But without meaning to, his fingers move to his lips and suddenly
he is seized with the desire to taste the grilled, juicy meat. His wife is there, perhaps alerted
by the accident, and Pygmalion's priest, still in silence, extends his finger to her to lick. A
little later, and despite the king's brutaldissuasion, all the inhabitantshave discovered a taste
for grilled meat and the pleasures of a delicious aroma [fumet] [Jacoby (Porphyry, De
Abstinentia), 752 F 1].
This story gives us a sensualistic version of the discovery of the food sacrifice [sacrifice
alimentaire], or ratherof carnal nourishment revealed at an altar. Taste, touch, tactile values
introduce humanity to a new diet; meat-eating institutes itself via the detour of savory taste
and the highly enlightened gustatory judgment of a priest in the process of exercising his
functions. We may also note that this priest is attentive to the altar'sappetite; he is present at
the fire's feast, and is thus in a position that is highly favorable to his own future culinary ac-
tivity. Moreover, Greek sacrificial ritual incited the development of both the one and the
other activity. The testimony for this also comes from Cyprus-from a sanctuary for Apollo
discovered at Pyla in the nineteenth century.2 The sanctuary has two rooms, and over it
reigns a two-headed Apollo. The firsthead is called Lakeutes;he presides over the fiery feast
of sizzling meat and flaming flesh: a sonorous Apollo, whose music is the hissing of flames,
the wheezing of deflated entrails, and the more subdued crackling of naked bones. As for
the second epithet of the deity at Pyla, mageiros, it designates Apollo as the god of butchers
and cooks, people whose functions are a direct continuation of those of the sacrificialpriest.
In additon, on the esplanade in front of the sanctuarythe statues of both butchers and cooks
are erected, each one wearing a large sacrificial knife from his belt. Thus are indicated two
domains of Apollo's competence: divination by means of signs made by fire, empyromancy;
and bloody sacrifice on the odorous table. The oldest butchers of the Greek world - certain
large-sized sculptures from Pyla date to about the end of the sixth century B.C.-are the
chosen companions and servants of the sizzling Apollo, of Apollo the gourmet who presides
over the aromatic sacrifice, his fingers smeared with grease.
Apollo's passage through the kitchen is neither an accident nor is it an episode without
glory in his career. On the contrary:at the panhellenic temple of Delphi, where he would be
protected from the memory of earlier or bad activities, Apollo is publicly and without reser-
vation hailed by the title "Prince of Sacrificers,"or, if you wish, "Prince of Butchers and
Cooks" [Aristophanes, F. 684 Edmonds]. And is he not also the god who, officially so to
speak, in the Homeric hymn addressed to him, proudly announces to his Cretan priests that
in his sanctuary a good knife in the right hand will not remain unused [Homeric Hymns to
Apollo, 535-36]? Moreover, Apollo is not satisfied with inviting his officiants to wield the
slaughter-knife, not with frequenting, himself, kitchens and the lower altars; rather, he ex-
hibits a quite perverse taste for sacrificialleft-overs:the animal's liquids, it viscera, its organs,
all that is not transformed into aromatic smoke but remains attached to the stones of the
altar, coagulating and hardening on the plaster; all those liquids that stain, that solidify into
foul-smelling crusts. At Thebes, at Didymos, at Rhodes, in the sanctuaries where his power is
affirmed, Apollo loves to be offered altars made of blood and ashes: the insipid and heavy
blood mixing with the ashes of victims, sometimes burned under the gaze of diviners,
sometimes consumed as legs of veal [cuisseaux]offered to the gods who love them when
they are carbonized.3 Constructions made of sacrificialremains cemented with the blood of
victims; these altarsare the opposite of the pure tables such as the shrine [6dicule] at Delos,
2S. Besques, "LApollon Mageirios de Chypre," Revue Archeologique, 11 (1936) 3-11; 0. Masson,
"Kupriaka," Bulletin de Correspondence Hellenique, 1 (1966) 10-24; and especially L. Robert, "Surun
Apollon oraculaire a Chypre,"Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres,
(1978) 338-344.
3Thebes, Ashen Apollo, Spodios. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 9.11.7-9; 9.12.1; Didymos, an
altar erected to Heracles, see Pausanias, Description of Greece, 5.13.8; Rhodes (Camiros),a "cinderall"
Apollo,see D. Morelli,I culti in Rodi(Pisa,1959), 103.
4G. Roux, "Meurtredans un sanctuaire sur I'amphorede Panaguriste,"Antike Kunst, 7 (1964) 30-41;
Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Acheans (Baltimore, 1979), 120-126.
48
left empty-handed, if he is lucky enough not to fall under the dagger blows rainingdown on
the occasion.
The Knife Man, the murderer of Neoptolemus, is totally invested in the apollonian
realm in terms of both his ancestors and his descendants. His father, whose names is Daitas,
"the Man who Divides up," the man who divides the victim into pieces, who evokes the
meal divided in equal shares, like the banquet in Cyprusat which Apollo presides as Apollo
Eilapinastes,the feasting, the banqueting Apollo. And by his progeniture, Machaireus avows
his affinitieswith the oracle, with purificationand with Apollo's installationsat Didymos. His
son Branchos is the eponyum of the Branchides. He inaugurates his career by purifyingthe
citizens of Miletus of a plague, a loimos: the plague is driven out with laurel and musical in-
cantations [Callimachus, F. 194 and 229 Pfeiffer and Clement of Alexandria, Stromatus,
5.8.48 in Stahlin, Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller,v. 11,359]. It is also at the sanc-
tuary of the Branchides, at Didymos, that Heracles erects to Apollo one of his altars of
coagulated blood, like those favored by the Ashen Apollo, the Theban Apollo.
By staging the scene in which Neoptolemus' throat is cut, the apollonian sanctuary
makes public the extreme fragilityof a cultural frontier between the blood-crime and the
sacrificial meal. Other stories surrounding Apollo, moreover, recount violence at the altar,
even among blood relatives. At Thebes, a certain Eumelosoffers splendid sacrificesto Apollo
Ismenios. One day in the middle of the officiations, his son throws himself gluttonously on a
piece of lamb's brain which has not yet been consecrated [Antoninus Liberalis,Metamor-
phoses 18]. This impiety is doubled when the father seizes a firebrandand breaks the skull of
the impatient perpetratorof sacrilege. At Megaros the same scenario unfolds. The founder of
the city is Alkathoos, a murderer who has exiled himself from Elis.Apollo protects him, and
he establishes the firstaltars, erects a temple to Artemis and her brother, and raises walls for
the city. But one day while he is busy officiatinga sacrifice, his son Callipolis runs up with the
news that his brother, Ischepolis, has just been killed while hunting. Impatient,with an angry
5Document and analysis in J.-L., Durand, "Lecorps du d6lit,"Communications 26 (1977) 46-61 and
Bouphonia. Recherches sur le sacrifice et le labour en Grece Ancienne (Thesis, Paris IV, 1981), forth-
coming.
50
the law: that shedding blood and killing is the business of the knife, the same knife that in the
sacrificialceremony is carefully hidden in a basket, in the kanoun. An occulted knife which
the daily sacrifice designated without naming it as the old murderer, unforgettable because it
is necessary.
In the ceremony played out on the Acropolis on the occasion of the Festivalof the Ox's
Murder, there are two elements that are remarkable as much for themselves as in the rela-
tion that joins them. On the one hand, there is a case of judgment, an anonymous tribunal
which we know was the Prytaneos, in the center of the city.6On the other, the clean separa-
tion between murder and bloody sacrifice is pronounced. But the tribunal for the blood
crime arises here in response to an anxiety engendered by a gesture destined to become in-
significant:the anguish of bloodshed is the dramatic motivation for the ritual. Because of this,
recourse is taken to Delphi and its god, Apollo. The same Apollo, who is so aware of the
misdeeds or the virtues of the knife, and who, moreover-and it is at Thebes that he is
honored as a "poliade"- invites his devotees to his ashen altarto slaughter an ox of labor in
his honor, a subject as hardworkingas Sopatros' companion. A competence so great and so
exact merits attention, because from it derives the place and the position Apollo occupies in
the domain where the pure and impure share boundaries. The character of Sopatros in the
business of the ox can lead us even farther, towards Apollo's greatest darkness. In effect,
Sopatros, once the beast is slaughtered, feels himself to be impious, polluted, enages, closed
up within an impuritywhich the Pythia identifies in designating him as a "murderer."Crete
welcomes him in his exile; and by its insular position it heightens the horrorthat separates
the guilty man from the others. But Crete with its purifiersis not foreign to an Apollo who is
deeply traumatized as Sopatros and who sees his companion-in-labor die under his blows.
There is Apollo the impudent murderer, the audacious cut-throat, stronger with each
act of violence. But next the Lordof Delphi, the wolf-faced god, there is the fugitive Apollo,
the god who exiles himself, the god who is livid and terrorized. This Apollo can be found in
Corinth, more specifically at Sicyon. Here the mythic ritualsare celebrated, the ritualswhich
were required for the purificationof the daughters of Proitos, who had been thrown into a
devastating madness after the victory over Python, the monstrous serpent. The death of
Python was looked upon as a murder; and Apollo came for purificationto a country where
neither diviners nor purifierswere lacking. Suddenly, the murderous god is overcome by an
immense fear, an anguish, phobos-de?ma, sometimes represented by the image of a woman
with a terrifyingface-the mask of an Erynie,we would say. And Apollo precipitously flees:
terror makes him mad, frenetic, beside himself, like Orestes, or like the possessed corybant.
His flighttakes him to Crete, to the land in which he himself may have originated and which
gave him his first officiators, his priests, his butcher-boys, but also the lofty purifierswho
press around him, lead him, calm him, and deliver him from his frightful pollution
[Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.7.7-9; 2.30.3]. The gods know the bitterness of a nine-
year-long exile, but alone with Dionysus, only Apollo journeys to the end of the night; it is
the same journey that Orestes, the matricide, once took. Apollo discovers in himself the
madness that invades the murderer:the frighteningvisions and exhausting hallucination, the
same illness that devours his protege and double, Orestes, murderer, martyr,and witness to
a homicide [M. Delcourt, Oreste et Alcmeon 92-113].
As a result, it is necessary to limit oneself to the observation that both the pure and the
impure are at work in a god whose power is double, who is purifierand killer, a god who
cures the plague and the sickness he himself brings to mortals. Perhaps one of his best-
known names will reveal the significance of this profound ambivalence. This name is the
word Phoibos, the greek form of Phoebus: Phoibos Apollon in Homer, an epithet trans-
formed into a proper name. In archaic Greek, phoibos signifies pure and holy, like Ocean's
water or the sun's brightness. In the religious vocabulary, according to Plutarch who was
well versed in it, phoibos in composite form designated a state of segregated purity, since
6Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1.28.10; 1.24.4; Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 57.4;
Pollux8.120. On the Prytanyas a tribunalchargedwith the most dangeroustransgression or sin, that
of one agent(hodrasas),see P. Carlier,Laroyauteen Grece
whichcannotbe limitedto the responsibility
avantAlexandre(Strasbourg,1984),343-44, 354.
diacritics/ summer 1986 51
during ill-fateddays the priests lived in isolation, withdrawn and distant from all impurities
and pollution. Such priests living in puritywere said to "phebonomize"[Plutarch,De E apud
Delphos, 20.393c.]
To be phoibos is to be so rigorouslyseparate that one becomes consecrated, as are, in
effect, the priests with whom Apollo loves to surround himself. It means to be consecrated
like the Hosioi, the perpetually Pure of Delphi; but also like the suppliants of Cyrenus who
are round about his temple and are personally tied to the god, and who have indeed
become his own property. Among the latter are found the "decimated ones," the dekatoi,
homicides whose adominable polution places them entirely on the side of the gods, on the
side of phoibos.7 It is precisely here that the totally impure tends to merge itself with the
perfectly pure. Apollo is fully phoibos. He is the untouchable in his two poles: murdererto
the point of madness, he is a god who is like the night, the archer encamped on the
threshold of the Iliad. And when, in the sixth century, in the Orphic and Pythagoreansects,
the requirement for renunciation arises and grows, Apollo, the Hyperborean purifier,
becomes the emblem for a way of life so pure it excludes both the blood of death and the
blood of birth. Thus, the Orphic Apollo becomes a name for the Sun and its light at dawn.8
52
Thus, too Pythagoras'Apollo is so close to and so distant from the bloody god, that at Delos,
the holy island which is yet still touched by birth,the philosopher chooses to render homage
to his god at the table of an intact altar unsullied by the splash of animal blood. Butthis altar,
said to be pure and pious, is flanked by another made of interlacing horns which, without
scruples, invites the bloodiest sacrifices to be made upon it. Great Greece and its land open
to colonization witness Apollo the man-eater and the god of the pure ones and the white-
clad converge in the same fever. The Archegetes who founds altars and cities, the god who
savors the first born of humans and the bodies consecrated to him, is also the god of
Crotonus or of Metapontus of whom Pythagorasconsidered himself the intact and luminous
incarnation.
The excess of violence and the murderous madness of the angry young Apollo are not
to be assigned to his past, to the troubled life of an ancient, earlier god which the "Delphic
morality"would reject or cover with forgetfulness. The excesses of murder are inseparable
from the rigorsof purity.And when the tribunalsfor blood crimes arise between the seventh
and sixth centuries, at a time when the voice of city justice begins to be heard-a justice
competent at speaking the law and leaving the concern for purificationto the exegetes- it is
on the very Apollonian horizon of an extreme sensibility to bloodshed. Even in Libyain the
middle of the fourth century, the Apollo of Cyrenus demonstrates an obsessive casuistry in
which the most negligible taint is harshly penalized. Sicyone's mad murderer is not a
strangerto the obsession of purity cultivated in the sects, nor is he separable from the for-
mulation of a first penal code within the political arena. In Attica, one of these tribunals, the
Delphinion, is even placed under Apollo's patronage: it is on the basis of his competence
that murdersare pronounced legitimate, hosios phonos, when the tribunal is led to say: "This
murder is not a homicide."
Certainly, not all the gods of Greece are so elegantly immoral. And instead of the
Belvedere Apollo, which for Winckelmann evoked the calm power of form, I would point,
in order to have a glimpse of this, to the god of Vefes confronting Heracles on the ridge of the
roof. Fighters of baked earth, multi-colored, shaggy, dead-set against each other, the two
disputing the inert body of a doe in great danger of being torn apart. The lion against the
wolf: Heracles against Apollo, his lips snarling, revealing a cruel smile, entirely within his in-
stinct of wild beast-with the violent beauty not of the Devil but of Dionysus the night-
prowler, no doubt ravished by the shadow rising in his young accomplice, the beautiful
homicide of Delphi.
WORKSCITED
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Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Acheans. Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.
Pausanias. Description of Greece. Trans. W. H. S. Jones. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,
1918-35.
Plutarch. De E apud Delphos. In Moralia V. Ed. FrankBabbit. Loeb Classical Library,1936.
Snell, Bruno. Pindarus. 2 vols. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1964, 1971-75.