ABSTRACT
According to the Hebrew Bible, the earth before the flood was fully populated with humans and creatures of all kinds. But animals were not to eat each other, and humans were not to eat animals: God explicitly states that his creatures are to nourish themselves from the plant kingdom, not the animal. Sacrifice was pervasive. It was the chief source of such meat as was eaten, and Greeks took it for granted as part of the settled order of things. Inscriptional evidence from later periods gives an idea of the enormous cost of sacrificial oxen. A single ox of the cheaper sort could cost what one person in fourth-century Athens would expect to spend on food in five months. A considerable part of the modern discourse concerning eating animals has turned on the question of whether they have souls. If a creature has a soul, then it might be immoral to kill it save in circumstances of self-defence.
