Bryn Mawr Classical Review: 2010.12.59

Bryn Mawr Classical Review: 2010.12.59

Jeremy McInerney, The Cattle of the Sun: Cows and Culture in the World
of the Ancient Greeks. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2010. Pp. xvii, 340. ISBN 97806911400. $45.00.
Reviewed by Susan A. Curry, University of New Hampshire

In The Cattle of the Sun: Cows and Culture in the World of the Ancient
Greeks, J. McInerney argues convincingly that cattle continued to play
a central role within the Greek imaginaire long after it became
impractical for Greek households to keep and pasture large herds of
cattle. Although by the Classical period the Greeks could no longer be
described as transhumanant pastoralists, McInerney discusses how the
Greeks retained a "bovine register," never entirely abandoning "the
herder's habits of mind" (4). Later Greek practices and cultural
artifacts evince this "bovine register" and preserve traces of a time
in Greece's history when cows were, indeed, king. On the whole,
McInerney's book is stronger on the historical and religious aspects
of Greek cattle culture than on the role cattle played in Greek
literary culture, but readers interested in early Greek pastoralism,
land management, the evolution of sanctuaries, the ancient Greek
economy, and, to a lesser extent, animal studies will discover much of
value. Scholars interested in extending the discussion of the role
cows played in the Greek imaginaire through analyses of later Greek
sayings, literature, and visual art will find McInerney's
demonstration of the deeply embedded importance of cattle in Greek
society a solid historical foundation on which to build.

In Chapter 1, "Cattle Habits," which serves as an introduction,
McInerney is careful to stress that the cow is not just a symbol to
the ancient Greeks. He employs Pierre Bourdieu's term habitus "'a
system of internalized schemes that have the capacity to generate all
thoughts, perceptions, and actions characteristic of a culture'" as a
way of understanding the complex, enduring relationship between Greeks
and their cattle (5). This term does two kinds of work for McInerney.
It allows for how several Greek cultural institutions "are refracted
through the prism of herding" and "it can continue to reflect
notions, values, and experiences that inform the individual's
perceptions and the culture's shared grammar of symbols and ideas long
after the empirical circumstances that gave rise to any part of it are
changed or lost" (5). In other words, the continued expression of
institutions such as marriage in terms of cattle suggests the
institutions' cattle-based past even though herding no longer played a
central role in daily life.

McInerney delves into that pastoralist past in Chapters 2 and 3. In
Chapter 2, "The Paradoxes of Pastoralism," he traces the development
of pastoralist societies, the breeding of herds, and the differences
between killing a wild animal in hunting and a domesticated animal
with which one has an ongoing relationship. Unlike hunting, which
"depends upon luck or the cooperation of the gods," killing a
domesticated animal is a kind of betrayal that "favors a sacralized
treatment" (37). This paradox at the heart of pastoralism, that one
kills what one has tended and nourished, gives rise to certain
features of Greek sacrifice, the need to trick the sacrificial animal
or to gain its consent. The bull, too, complicates the role cattle
play in Greek culture. For the bull, though technically domesticated,
remains wild and dangerous. McInerney concludes Chapter 2 with a
discussion of how bulls and kingship become linked in Near Eastern
culture citing the role of the bull in the Epic of Gilgamesh in
particular (40-47). The intertwining of bulls and kings is complex and
fascinating, and one wishes McInerney had engaged with this topic more
deeply.

In Chapter 3, "Cattle Systems in Bronze Age Greece," McInerney
examines how cattle occupied a special place within the Minoan and
Mycenaean economies. Because cattle were a "luxury item of enormous
value" to the Minoans, palaces like Knossos tightly controlled the
cattle system even as they relied on regional cooperation for cattle
production (52-53). Knossos also had a monopoly of sorts on bull-
leaping, an important religious expression of Minoan cattle culture.
The palace employed specialists in bull-leaping whose performances
helped make Knossos the center of both real and symbolic cattle
culture. Meanwhile, at the palace at Pylos, the social ritual of
feasting required a ready supply of cattle. The palace, subordinate
communities, and wealthy individuals kept herds (63), but after the
palace system came to an end, herding and feasting remained markers of
elite status.

The fall of the palace system and with it palace control of herding
and feasting lead nicely into Chapters 4 and 5, "Epic Consumption" and
"Heroes and Gods." In these chapters, McInerney explores the literary
and mythological evidence for the continued cultural importance of
cows, relying mostly on Homer and Hesiod. In "Epic Consumption,"
McInerney analyzes the references to cows and cow-related activities
such as plowing in the Iliad and Odyssey and discusses the important
role feasting played in the lives of the Homeric heroes. In "Heroes
and Gods," McInerney focuses on Odysseus and Herakles as cattle
raiders and the associations between the Olympian gods and cattle.
While these chapters serve to extend the discussion of cows from the
practical into the cultural, they are, in my opinion, the weakest of
the book. McInerney makes several excellent points (such as linking
the eating of the cattle of the sun to the punishment of the suitors)
but these points could have been made very quickly and the remaining
discussion offers little that will be new to readers familiar with
Homeric scholarship.

In Chapters 6-8, "Gods, Cattle, and Space," "Sacred Economics," and
"Cities and Cattle Business," McInerney demonstrates how cattle moved
from the heroic household to the Greek sanctuary. In other words,
Greek sanctuaries within and without the polis became centers for
those important Greek practices: herding, sacrificing, and feasting as
a community. McInerney discusses how gods became associated with
specific places, how the Panhellenic sanctuary provided a valuable
counterpoint to the institution of the city-state, and, most
importantly for readers interested in cows, how sanctuaries in cities
and in the countryside acquired enough cattle for sacrifice at a time
when the individual keeping of large herds as wealth had long passed.
In Athens, for example, "the commercialization of the meat supply
arose in response to pressure on the sacred economy to keep up with
demand" (195).

Having established the importance of sanctuaries, in Chapter 9,
"Sacred Law," McInerney discusses the role sanctuaries played in the
development of law, providing plentiful evidence for Greek laws'
origins in sacred law and the retention of traces of the sacred in
later polis laws. While McInerney effectively describes how
sanctuaries kept and acquired herds of cattle and makes the very
important point that commercial and sacred economies intermingle in
the sourcing of sacrificial victims, cows take second place to larger
historical issues. My biggest beef with this book is that in the
second half the author seems to lose track of his cows: I often had
the feeling that he was primarily interested in the history of
sanctuaries, their relationship to the polis, and their importance to
the development of Greek law.

In Chapter 10, "Authority and Value," McInerney ties a number of
cultural components together in his discussion of the role cows and
cattle-related accoutrements played in the development of Greek
coinage. Rejecting the notion that coinage was a simple adoption by
the Greeks of Near Eastern practices, McInerney argues that "cattle
wealth spurred the growth of a monetized economy by combining wealth,
value, and exchange into a single institution" (233). He suggests that
this involved several mental steps, pointing out that "in the sixth
century obeloi and drachmai originally referred to handfuls of iron
spits, used first for roasting sacrificial animals and subsequently
dedicated as valuable objects" and that "wealth could be expressed and
measured by coins that depicted cows" instead of by cattle themselves
(230). The images of cows on coins are a reminder of a time when
living cows were the measure of wealth. In Chapter 11, "Conclusions,"
McInerney pushes his thesis concerning the pervasive influence of
cattle on Greek culture even further using the idea of sacrifice to
tie pastoralism to the founding of Athenian democracy. Cows and
citizens both shed blood for the community.

One of the great strengths of this work is the author's use of
contemporary cattle-based cultures to help the reader understand
ancient Greek practices. While careful not to suggest that all
pastoralist societies or cattle-based cultures are alike or to present
a simplistic understanding of the role cattle play in their lives,
McInerney refers to the Ao, Bahima, Basotho, Dafla, Dinka, Fulani,
Gogo, Herrero, Maasai, Nuer, Tshidi and Xhosa to illustrate a variety
of beliefs and practices among cattle-focused people. In Chapter 10,
for example, McInerney discusses whether Bronze Age copper ingots were
intentionally fashioned to resemble oxhides. After noting that an
Ingot God, represented as a man with horns, was associated with
precious metal and the mining industry of Cyprus, McInerney shows how
cattle can "combine exchange value and symbolic importance" by
discussing the Tshidi, who use tokens described as "cattle without
legs" for transactions like marriage contract payments, and the
Basotho of Lesotho, for whom cattle are a special commodity set apart
from the regular cash economy by virtue of their being living
creatures (229).

These comparisons with other contemporary cultures, often fascinating
in themselves, also raise additional questions about cattle in the
ancient Greek context. I lived and taught for a few months in Lesotho
myself and was amazed at how the symbolic value of cattle affected so
many aspects of daily life. A kindergarten classroom, for example,
often combined six-year-old girls and teenage boys. Since boys herded
the cattle, they could only begin kindergarten once a younger brother
became old enough to take over. NGOs often have difficulty convincing
the Basotho to keep smaller herds for a number of practical reasons,
because cattle are not a simple economic investment. The symbolic
value of cows influences many aspects of day-to-day life in rural
Lesotho, and one also wonders about the life of ancient Greek herders
far away from towns and cities. McInerney touches on the
practicalities of a herding culture when he discusses rural
sanctuaries, but many questions remain. For example, if cattle
continued to imbue Greek cultural life long after large herds became
the business of sanctuaries, did the ancient Greeks experience this
transition as a trauma in any way? Is there a sense of loss or
nostalgia in the traces of cattle culture that remain in the myths,
literature, and coinage of ancient Greece?

If the reader is left with additional questions after an entire book
on cow culture in ancient Greece, this is a credit to McInerney's
engaging study. Any reader left wanting more will find McInerney's
extensive bibliography an excellent starting point. While foremost a
study of the role cattle played in the development of sanctuaries and
the role sanctuaries played in the development of law and a monetized
economy in ancient Greece, The Cattle of the Sun also provides a solid
contribution to the burgeoning field of animal studies and a
historical counterpoint to future discussions of animals in ancient
myth, art, and literature.