LITMIR.BIZ

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and his wife, who had just given birth to a stillborn child, passed him off as their own and put their deceased child in his place as evidence of the deed. Years later Astyages discovered that his grandson, called Cyrus, was still alive and brought Harpagus before him to answer for his crime. After pretending to be happy with this turn of events, Astyages told Harpagus to invite his own son to greet Cyrus. “However, when Harpagus’ son arrived, Astyages murdered him and dismembered him. He baked some of his flesh, stewed the rest and prepared it all for the table.” After Harpagus had eaten, Astyages asked him if he enjoyed the feast and called the servants to bring in a platter containing the boy’s head, hands, and feet. Rather than recoil in terror or grief, Harpagus told the king that he could do no wrong and returned home with his son’s remains. Years later, at the urging of Harpagus, Cyrus rebelled against his grandfather and ruled in his place, thus fulfilling Astyages’ dream premonition. In another story of cannibalism in the sordid, sad tale of the kingdom of Media, troops under Cyrus’s father, Cambyses, resorted to cannibalism in the face of starvation on an ill-fated attempt to conquer Ethiopia. Cambyses had been warned that this mission was foolhardy, but it took the desperate cannibalistic acts of his soldiers to finally convince him of this.3

      While the Scythians are implicated in the revenge cannibalism of book I of The Histories, it is in book IV that they receive greater scrutiny and become the paradigmatic cannibals. Herodotus begins by describing the conquests of the Scythians and Darius’s plan to seek vengeance on them for their acts of aggression against the Medes. He then relates several different versions of the origins of the Scythian people, one of which traces their descent to the offspring of Heracles and Echidna, a snake-human hybrid. Much of book IV is taken up with a detailed description of the people and places in the region of Scythia. But despite the anthropophagous reputation of the Scythians, it is in fact their neighbors that Herodotus accuses of institutionalized cannibalism: “North of this agricultural region there is a vast uninhabited area, and then there are the Cannibals, who have their own distinct way of life and are not Scythian at all.”4

      There are other people Herodotus accuses of occasionally committing acts of cannibalism, but the Cannibals are the only group to be defined by these acts. For example, he describes the funerary practices of the Issedones, who prepare a special feast on the occasion of a father’s death made of sacrificial animals and the dead man’s body.5 Herodotus is actually quite careful to distinguish among types of man-eating. He passes only minimal judgment on ritualized cannibalism, like that practiced by the Issedones. Acts of revenge cannibalism similarly are not judged as significantly worse than other acts of revenge, all of which bear severe consequences for those involved and their descendants. In other words, in tales of revenge cannibalism, it is not that a human being is killed and consumed that causes repercussions; more often it is the rashness and pride of the perpetrators that come back to haunt them. Thus Herodotus distinguishes between cannibalism (ritual, starvation, revenge) and Cannibals (people who actively seek to consume human flesh).

      Throughout the Histories, Herodotus makes sure to give his reader all available information on a topic even if he does not find his sources very credible. For example, of the different versions of the origins of the Scythians that he relates, he indicates which he finds most reasonable. He is unconvinced by the version preferred by the Scythians themselves, which ties their origins to Heracles and Echidna. That does not mean, however, that Herodotus’s conclusions are always plausible. In his lengthy narrative on the regions surrounding Scythia, he describes a group of people living on the edges of the kingdom: “Far past this rugged region, in the foothills of the mountain range, live people who are said—men and women alike—to be bald from birth; they are also supposed to have snub noses and large chins, to have a distinct language, to dress like Scythians and to live off trees.” Beyond the lands of the bald people, Herodotus reports, he has only the sparest of evidence. He claims that the bald people tell of “goat-footed men living in the mountains, and that on the other side of the mountains there are other people who spend six months of the year asleep,” but he does not trust these reports. In fact in book III he offers a statement similar to that of Montaigne more than a thousand years later: “If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being by far the best.”6 Thus much more than most writers who followed him, Herodotus treats the act of cannibalism carefully and with a crude nod to cultural relativism.

      Much has been written about the plausibility or implausibility of the existence of Herodotus’s Cannibals, but whether or not he is to be trusted on the topic, other classical writers followed his example and believed that Scythia and other regions on the edges of the “civilized world” were populated by man-eaters.7 Strabo describes the cannibalistic practices of the Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles, who are “more savage” than others in the region, practice incest, and are “man-eaters as well as heavy-eaters.” To shore up this claim, which he admits comes from less than trustworthy sources, he looks to the reputation of the Scythians for support: “And yet, as for the matter of man-eating, that is said to be a custom of the Scythians also and in cases of necessity forced by sieges, the Celti, the Iberians and several other peoples are said to have practiced it.” Thus, it is because the anthropophagy of the Scythians is so notorious that he finds the tales of Irish cannibalism to be somewhat credible. Furthermore, like Herodotus, Strabo maintains that there is a difference between resorting to cannibalism out of necessity and being a Cannibal, although he does seem to criticize acts of starvation cannibalism, as he asserts that only those on the fringes of “civilization” have resorted to it.8

      Pliny the Elder echoes these sentiments in book VII of his Natural History. In the opening pages of this section, he discusses the authoritativeness of his work, pointing to men like Herodotus as his trustworthy sources: “We have pointed out that some of the Scythian tribes and in fact a good many, feed on human bodies—a statement that perhaps may seem incredible if we do not reflect that races of this portentous 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

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