Seneca in the first century A. D. wrote Thyestes, dramatising all the repulsive episodes, describing the preparing of the children for the feast and the feast itself. The most loathsome theme is made the main idea of the story. Shakespeare has a scene in Titus Andronicus where Titus makes the wicked Tamora eat the heads of her two sons baked in a pie. Crebillon wrote a cannibalistic play in the 18th century, Atrée et Thyeste.
The tale of Saturn, who swallowed his children when they were born so as not to be dethroned in accordance with the prophecy, with the result that he was compelled to disgorge them later by Zeus, has its parallels in folk-lore among the Bushmen, Eskimos and others. It is a very old story.
Freud saw in the Œdipus legend the horror reaction of the Greeks to two legendary deeds, the killing of a father and the marrying of the mother by the son, deeds which had their basis in reality and which were occasionally repeated in dreams. Similarly we can see in the Atreus legend a reaction to the idea of eating one's children, an act that used to accompany the offering of human sacrifices. But we cannot say that the cannibalistic instinct affects one's future as the Œdipus complex does. It is, however, part of our unconscious. The effectiveness of Swift's famous satirical proposition to help the poor in Ireland by suggesting that they sell the flesh of their own children for food to the rich, is due to the fact that children's flesh was actually once eaten. Swift wrote his essay with ironical intent but he was utilising an ancient historical fact, unknowingly.
We know from the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Jephthah and his daughter, and Iphigenia, as well as from historical records, that children were offered as human sacrifices and that the body of the victim was often eaten; hence there is a connection between human sacrifice and cannibalism.
J. A. MacCullouch in his scholarly article on cannibalism in the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, ventures the opinion that human sacrifice rose through an earlier cannibalism, on the principle that as men liked human flesh the Gods would also relish it. The worshippers later shared in the human feasts, with the Gods. Westermarck says that the sacrificial form of cannibalism springs from the idea that a victim offered to a God participates in his sanctity and the worshipper by eating the human flesh transfers to himself something of the divine virtue.
There were many cases of orgastic cannibalism in ancient Greece. There is a vase showing a Thracian tearing a child with his teeth in the presence of a god. Pausanias relates that a child was torn and eaten in a sacrifice to the Gods in Bœotia. In Plato's Republic, VIII 566, we have an account of a survival of an earlier cannibal sacrificial feast. It is related there that a piece of human flesh was placed among the animals sacrificed to Zeus Lycaeus and that in the feasts that followed the eater of the fragments became a were-wolf.
Other people like the Fijis who partook in a human feast offered first part of the slain to the gods.
The custom of human sacrifices and cannibalism died out among the Greeks, and in Æschylus's trilogy we have the horror reaction of the educated Greek against these institutions. The playwright shows the terrible retaliation visited on the man who indulges in cannibalism or makes another do so. Punishment for Atreus's deed is visited upon his son, Agamemnon, in many ways, one of which is being forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon is also punished by the infidelity of his wife with Ægisthus, and by being murdered by them.
The tale of Iphigenia thus sheds some light on the subject. She figures considerably in the Agamemnon. Æschylus tells us that Clytemnestra felt justified for being untrue to her husband Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. The latter's name is closely associated with human sacrifice in Greek legend.
In the Saturnalia of Rome a human victim was slain as late as the fourth century A. D.