Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Claude Rawson

   No more entreating ... you dog ... I wish only that my spirit and fury
   [menos and thumos] would drive me to hack your meat away and eat it raw ...
   no, but the dogs and the birds will have you all for their feasting.

      (XXII. 345-54)

This cannibal taunt, sandwiched (if you like) between the dogs, has a beguiling resemblance to an Amerindian warrior taunt reported by Hans Staden, who was captive of another Tupi tribe, the Tupinikin, some years before Montaigne wrote of the Tupinamba: "Cursed be thou my meat ... vengeance on you for the death of my friends ... before sunset your flesh shall be my roast meat," language that in turn bears a resemblance to some boasts of Tupinamba captives in Montaigne's essay.(11) From one perspective, these taunts are part of a ritualized battlefield machismo, not necessarily cannibal, equally common in epic speechmaking and in various real-life warrior cultures (including the Japanese samurai),(12) and nowadays domesticated in the verbal foreplay of the professional boxing ring. That the latter ritual has not lost all traces of older cannibal aggressions to this day may be surmised from the episode, a year or two ago, when Mike Tyson "bit both of Evander Holyfield's ears in a heavyweight title fight." His boxing license has recently been restored by the Nevada State Athletic Commission, an event that may seem to exist in a more or less fearful symmetry with the fact that cannibalism is not in itself illegal in the United States or the United Kingdom, though it is punishable (sometimes by fifteen months' hard labor) in Papua New Guinea, or by death in Burundi.

But Achilles' cannibal taunt differs from the one reported by Staden because it is hypothetical. He isn't going to do it, so it isn't a threat. "I wish I had the menos and thumos to eat you raw." It's not that he wants to, or would if he could: he can, if he wins, and he is going to win. It's that he wants not so much to do it, as to want to do it. The implication is that he doesn't do such things, though if he did he would do it violently and do it raw: ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (XXII. 347; the Greek word order puts "raw" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) at the beginning of the line, then "tear" or "hack," then "flesh," then "eat"). Once again, raw-eating reinforces the ferocity or savagery of the act, but in this case the act is not performed. In fact, nobody gets eaten by a human in the Iliad (the folk-tale ogres of the Odyssey are another matter, honorary non-humans, if you like) and, for all the talk about corpses being eaten by dogs and birds in the Iliad, "no one is ever fed to the dogs" either. Dogs may or may not be a substitute fantasy, replacing what, in more primitive versions of the Iliadic epic, might have been direct cannibal threats or even cannibal acts from warrior to warrior, as some Homeric scholars believe (Griffin, 1980).

We may or may not be witnessing, on the poet's part, a comprehensive shrinking from the subject, as too shocking to Greek tastes, and on Achilles' part, a suggestion that whatever may pass on battlefields as the world goes, Greeks don't actually do such things, even when sorely provoked. In Book XXIV, there is a closely parallel scene that adds color to this reading (XXIV. 200 ff.). The Trojan queen Hecuba, mother of the dead Hector, is raging at Achilles for what he did to Hector, just as Achilles had raged at Hector for what he did to Patroclus, and calling Achilles [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (207), a word usually translated as "savage" but that literally signifies raw-eating. In the earlier scene, Achilles had told Hector that "not even ... the lady your mother" (XXII. 352-53) can prevent his fate (i.e., being eaten by dogs and birds).