Abstract
The eating of the corpses of fellow crew members has been a survival strategy for shipwrecked sailors for centuries. In this paper I ask whether we can see any traces of this practice in the Odyssey. I find them in the structure of the episode of the cattle of the sun on Thrinacia, in the cannibalistic undertones and drawing of lots on Circe’s island, Aeaea, and in the trope of human sacrifice to obtain fair winds, suggested by Menelaus’s experiences on Pharos and the death of Elpenor. These traces reflect the anxieties of an early seafaring culture, illuminate the Odyssey’s most famous anthropophage, the Cyclops, and suggest an allusive relationship between the Odyssey text and ancestral narratives of survival cannibalism.
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