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 the slanderous accusation of cannibalism 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