ABSTRACT
Aside from prayer, animal sacrifice appears in the artefacts as a key act of Greek interaction with the gods. And not just in ancient Greece: animal sacrifice — the ritual slaughter of live animals before the eyes of humans and gods — was a major ritual act in all religions of the ancient Mediterranean and far beyond before the rise of Christianity put an end to the practice. Animal sacrifice, after all, is a paradoxical gift in the sense that the giver receives all the material benefits and the recipient nothing but smoke. The dominant form of animal sacrifice in Greece, as in most ancient and modern cultures, was the slaughter of domesticated animals. Ethical discourses about the best form of sacrifice — which invariably reject animal sacrifice in favour of something much simpler — pre-date the fourth century BCE. Animal sacrifice followed its own system of categorisation, overlapping only partially with others.
