Free Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig by Mark Essig Page A

were the most common sacrificial animal in both Greece and Rome. They didn’t pollute—they purified.In Greek mythology, after Jason and Medea kill Medea’s brother, the enchantress Circe captures a piglet from “a sow whose dugs yet swelled from the fruit of the womb,” slits its neck, and sprinkles its blood over the hands of the killers to remove the stain of murder.Similarly, a painted vase shows Apollo holding a sacrificed piglet, still dripping blood, over the head of Orestes, who has killed his mother. Priests killed a suckling pig to honor the gods before every public gathering in Athens.Romans killed pigs to seal public agreements, such as contracts and treaties, and to mark important private occasions, such as births and weddings.
    Although the pig served as an all-purpose sacrificial animal, it carried a more specific meaning as a symbol of fertility. Demeter, Greek goddess of wheat, was honored with pig sacrifices. With her daughter Persephone—who was condemned to spend a third of each year in Hades—Demeter symbolized the circle of life, of death in winter followed by rebirth in spring. At Thesmophoria, the most widespread festival in ancient Greece, priestesses cast piglets into a pit and later retrieved their rotting carcasses and placed them on the altar of Demeter.The rotted pork was then scattered in the fields to ensure a good harvest.In Greece young pigs were known by the terms khoiros and delphax , both of which also could refer to women’s genitalia, and the Latin porcus carried the same dual meaning.Aristophanes makes some horrifying puns on this double meaning in his play A charnians , where a starving man disguises his two daughters as pigs and sells them in the market.The scholar Varro noted that Romans “call that part which in girls is the mark of their sex porcus ” to indicate that they were “mature enough for marriage.”
    A swine, a sheep, and a bull are led to their deaths on a Roman altar. Whereas Jews rejected pigs as unclean, Romans sacrificed them to the gods and feasted on them with abandon. These two attitudes—Jewish repulsion and Roman embrace—have defined Western attitudes toward pigs ever since.

    The use of pigs as fertility symbols traces back to the region’s first farming communities. Just north of Greece in the Balkans, archaeologists have found early Neolithic statues of pigs studded with grains of wheat and barley. Like a seed germinating in the soil, a sow giving birth to many piglets demonstrated the bounty of nature.Sacrificing pigs honored the gods and ensured that the fields, and the people themselves, would enjoy abundant fertility.

    M ost people in the ancient world ate vegetarian diets heavy on grains and beans.This was the cheapest way to feed large populations. Rome was different. Although meat was expensive, Rome was rich, and a sizable class of people had enough money to eat it regularly.
    Romans ate beef, lamb, and goat, but they preferred pork. Hippocrates, the Greek physician, proclaimed pork the best ofall meats, and his Roman successors agreed.There were more Latin words for pork than for any other meat, and the trade became highly specialized: there were distinct terms for sellers of live pigs ( suarii ), fresh pork ( porcinarius ), dried pork ( confectorarius ), and ham ( pernarius ).According to the Edict of Diocletian, issued in 301 ad, sow’s udder, sow’s womb, and liver of fig-fattened swine commanded the highest prices of any meat, costing twice as much as lamb. Beef sausages sold for just half the price of pork.After the Punic Wars, the percentage of pig bones in Carthage doubled, just as it had in Jerusalem under Roman occupation: Romans kept eating pork even in arid climates such as North Africa and Palestine, where pigs were more difficult to raise.
    The richest source on Roman cuisine, a recipe book known as De re coquinaria , or On Cooking , confirms this love of swine. Pork dishes far outnumber those made with other meats. The