And that comic poet Pherecrates, in The Fugitives, facetiously represents the gods themselves as finding fault with men on the score of their sacred rites:
"When to the gods you sacrifice,
Selecting what our portion is,
'Tis shame to tell, do ye not take,
And both the thighs, clean to the groins,
The loins quite bare, the backbone, too,
Clean scrape as with a file,
Them swallow, and the remnant give
To us as if to dogs? And then,
As if of one another 'shamed,
With heaps of salted barley hide."[1]
And Eubulus, also a comic poet, thus writes respecting sacrifices:
"But to the gods the tail alone
And thigh, as if to psederasts you sacrifice."
And introducing Dionysus in Semele, he represents him disputing:
"First if they offer aught to me, there are
Who offer blood, the bladder, not the heart
Or caul. For I no flesh do ever eat
That's sweeter than the thigh."[2]
And Menander writes:
"The end of the loin,
The bile, the bones uneatable, they set
Before the gods; the rest themselves consume."
For is not the savour of the holocausts avoided by the beasts? And if in reality the savour is the guerdon of the gods of the Greeks, should they not first deify the cooks, who are dignified wdth equal happiness, and worship the chimney itself, which is closer still to the much-prized savour?
And Hesiod says that Zeus, cheated in a division of flesh by Prometheus, received the white bones of an ox, concealed with cunning art, in shining fat:
"Whence to the immortal gods the tribes of men
The victim's white bones on the altars burn."
