Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Animal Sacrifice and the Greek Gods

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the names and settings may be remote but the stories of war and the return home continue to resonate. There’s a timelessness to these epics: even all this time later, modern readers can still relate to the themes of friendship, honor, and love.

There is one thing, however, that’s hard to fathom. The ancient Greeks—and others in the ancient eastern Mediterranean—sacrificed animals to their gods, rendering the animals to meat offered to the gods and the worshippers themselves.