Citation with stable link: Philip A. Harland, 'Egyptians: Juvenal on “demented Egypt,” animal worship, and the eating of raw human flesh (early second century CE),' Ethnic Relations and Migration in the Ancient World, last modified July 13, 2026, https://philipharland.com/Blog/?p=22771.

Ancient author: Juvenal (early second century CE), Satires 15 (link).

Comments: In this satirical poem in Latin from some time just after 127 CE, Juvenal launches into a characterization of Egyptians (using two specific village populations as illustration) as demented animal worshippers and, even more starkly, savage eaters of raw human flesh. (The terms “cannibals” and “cannibalism” are best avoided as a scholarly terms, since they are modern colonial racializing categories for Carribean – Caniba was Columbus’ designation – peoples as inherently savage eaters of human flesh). The latter accusation allows him to criminalize Egyptians as even worse than some other ostensibly notorious and inherently violent populations, such as Taurians and Britons from the north. He does not refer directly to stories associated with Bousiris, the legendary Egyptian king who was often associated with human sacrifice (link to other posts). Juvenal puts some energy into underlining just how savage Egyptians were by contrasting their behaviour to peoples in Iberia (Sarguntians, who he here identifies with Vasconians) who, under pressure of military siege, ended up resorting to the consumption of fellow humans to avoid death itself. All of this leads Juvenal to contemplate what distinguishes civilized peoples from animalistic savage and criminal peoples.

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[Egyptian animal worship as demented]

Who doesn’t know, Bithynian Volusius, what monsters demented Egypt worships? One district adores the crocodile, another venerates the Ibis that gorges itself with snakes. In the place where magic chords are sounded by the truncated Memnon [statue at Thebes], and ancient hundred-gated Thebes lies in ruins, men worship the glittering golden image of the long-tailed ape. In one part cats are worshipped, in another a river fish, in another whole townships venerate a dog. No one adores Diana, but it is an impious outrage to crunch leeks and onions with the teeth. What a holy people (gens) to have such divinities springing up in their gardens! No animal that grows wool may appear upon the dinner-table. It is forbidden there to slay young goats, but it is lawful to feed on human flesh! When Ulysses [Odysseus] told a tale like this over the dinner-table to the amazed Alkinous [King of the Phaiakians], he stirred some to anger, some perhaps to laughter, as a lying story-teller. “What?” one would say, “will no one throw this fellow into the sea, who merits a terrible and a true Charybdis with his inventions of monstrous Laistrygonians and Cyclopes? For I could sooner believe in Scylla, and the clashing Kyanean rocks [at the Bosporos], and skins full of storms, or in the story how Kirke, by a gentle touch, turned Elpenor and his comrades into grunting swine. Did he consider the Phaiakians people so devoid of brains?” So might some one have justly spoken who was not yet tipsy, and had taken but a small drink of wine from the Korkyraian bowl, for the Ithakan’s tale was all his own, with none to bear him witness.

[Supposed crimes committed in the rivalry between Egyptians at Ombos and Tentyra]

I will now relate strange things that happened lately when [Aemilius] Juncus was consul [i.e. 127 CE], beyond the walls of broiling Koptos. This is a crime (scelus) of the common herd, worse than any crime of the tragedians. For even if you turn over all the tales of long-robed Tragedy personified from the days of Pyrrha onwards, you will find there no crime committed by an entire population. But hear what an example of savagery (feritas) has been displayed in these days of ours.

Between the neighbouring towns of Ombos and Tentyra [in Upper Egypt] there burns an ancient and long-cherished feud and undying hatred, whose wounds are not to be healed. Each people is filled with fury against the other because each hates its neighbours’ gods, considering that none can be held as deities except its own. So when one of these peoples held a feast, the chiefs and leaders of their enemy thought it was a good time to seize the occasion, so that their foe might not have an enjoyable and happy day, with the delight of grand banquets, with tables set out at every temple and every crossway, with night-long feasts, and with couches spread all day and all night, and sometimes discovered by the sun upon the seventh morning. No doubt, Egypt is a rude country; but in indulgence, so far as I myself have noted, its barbarous (barbara) rabble does not yield to notorious Kanopos [or: Canobus; Konon, Fifty Narrations 8; Strabo, Geography 17.1.17]. It was thought that victory would be easy over men steeped in wine, stuttering and stumbling in their cups. On the one side were men dancing to a dark-skinned (nigro) piper, with unguents, such as they were, and flowers and chaplets on their heads. On the other side, there was a ravenous hate.

First come loud words, as preludes to the fight. These serve as a trumpet-call to their hot passions. Then shout answering shout, they charge. Bare hands do the deadly work of war. Hardly a single cheek is left without a gash; hardly one nose, if any, comes out of the battle unbroken. Through all the ranks might be seen battered faces, and features other than they should be: bones gaping through torn cheeks and fists dripping with blood from eyes. Yet the combatants consider themselves at play and waging a boyish warfare because there are no corpses on which to trample. What use is a mob of so many thousand fighters if no lives are lost? So fiercer and fiercer grows the fight; they now search the ground for stones – the natural weapons of civic strife – and hurl them with bended arms against the enemy: not such stones as Turnus or Ajax flung, or like that with which the son of Tydeus struck Aeneas on the hip, but such as may be cast by hands unlike theirs, and born in these days of ours. For even in Homer’s day humanity was in decline. Earth now produces nothing but weak and wicked men that provoke such gods as lead them to laughter and to hatred.

[Supposed eating of raw human flesh]

To come back from our digression: the one side, reinforced, boldly draws the sword and renews the fight with showers of arrows. Those who live in the shady palm-groves of neighbouring Tentyra turn their backs in headlong flight before the Ombite charge. Next one of them, over-afraid and hurrying, tripped and was caught.  The conquering host cut up his body into a multitude of scraps and morsels, so that one dead man might enough for everyone, and devoured it bones and all. There was no stewing of it in boiling pots, no roasting upon spits. They thought it was slow and tedious to wait for a fire, so they satisfied themselves with the corpse uncooked!

One may here rejoice that no violence was done to the fire that Prometheus stole from the highest heavens, and gifted to the earth. I give thanks for that element, and do not doubt that you are pleased. But never was flesh so greatly enjoyed as it was by those who endured putting that corpse between their teeth. For in that criminal act, do not doubt or ask whether it was only the first mouth that enjoyed its meal. For when the whole body had been consumed, those who stood furthest away actually dragged their fingers along the ground and so got some taste of the blood.

[Comparison with other incidents of the consumption of human flesh in Iberia / Spain]

The Vasconians (Vascones) [in Iberia / Spain], as rumour tells us, once extended their lives by eating food such as this; but their case was different. Unkindly fortune had brought on them the last severe extremity of war, the famine of a long [Punic] siege [of Saguntum by Hannibal; Polybios, Histories 3.17; Petronius, Satyrica 141; Augustine, City of God 3.20]. In a plight like that of the people just named, resorting to such food deserves our pity, since it was not until they had consumed every plant, every living thing, and everything else to which the pangs of an empty stomach drove them – not until their very enemies pitied their pale, lean and wasted limbs – did hunger make them tear the limbs from other humans, being ready to feed even upon their own kind. What man, what God, would not forgive those with bellies which had suffered such dire straits, and those who might look to be forgiven by the Manes [spirits] of those whose bodies they were devouring?

In fact, Zeno [founder of the Stoic sect] gives better teaching to us, because he permits some though not all things to be done in order to save a life. But how could a Cantabrian [in Iberia] be a Stoic, and that too in the days of old Metellus [who battled with Sertorius in Iberia, ca. 80-72 BCE]? Today the whole world has its Greek and its Roman Athens. Eloquent Gaul has trained the pleaders of Britain, and distant Thule [the most northern island] talks of hiring a rhetorician. Yet the people I have named were a noble people, and the people of Zakynthos [i.e. Saguntum, Iberia], their equals in bravery and honour, their more than equals in calamity, offer a similar excuse.

[Egyptians more savage that Taurians, Britons, Kimbrians, and Agathyrsians]

However, Egypt is more savage than the Maiotian altar [i.e. the supposed location of human sacrifice by Taurians for Artemis on lake Maiotis, now the Sea of Azov]. For, if we may consider the poet’s [Euripides’] tales to be true, the founder of that accursed Taurian ritual [Artemis] does nothing but slay her victims. The victims have nothing else or more terrible than the knife to fear.

But what calamity drove these Egyptians to the deed? What extremity of hunger, what exhausted army, compelled them to do such a detestable monstrosity (monstrum)? Were the land of Memphis to run dry, could they do anything else except this deed to shame the Nile for being unwilling to rise? No dreaded Kimbrians or Britons, no savage Scythians or monstrous Agathyrsians, ever raged so furiously as this unwarlike and worthless rabble [of Egyptians] that hoists tiny sails on crockery ships and uses puny oars on boats of painted clay!

[Proper distinctions between humans and savage animals]

There is no penalty (poena) you can devise for such a crime (scelus), no appropriate punishment for a people (populus) in whose minds rage and hunger are exactly the same things. When Nature gave tears to humanity, she proclaimed that the human was tender-hearted, and tenderness is the best quality in humanity. She therefore bids us weep for the misery of a friend upon his trial, or when a ward whose streaming cheeks and girlish locks raise a doubt as to his sex brings a defrauder into court. It is at Nature’s prompting that we weep when we meet the casket of a full-grown maiden, or when the earth closes over a baby too young for the funeral pyre. For what good man, what man worthy of the torch used in the mysteries and such as the priest of Ceres [i.e. Demeter at Eleusis] would wish him to be, believes that any human woes do not concern him? It is this that separates us from the dumb herd; and it is for this that we alone have had allotted to us a nature worthy of reverence, capable of divine things, fit to acquire and practise the arts of life, and that we have drawn from on high that gift of feeling which is lacking to the beasts that crawl with their eyes looking at the ground.

In the beginning of the world, our common maker gave only life to animals. To us he gave souls as well, so that fellow-feeling might lead us to request or offer help; might gather scattered inhabitants into a people by deserting the primeval groves and woods inhabited by our ancestors by building houses for ourselves with others adjacent to our own, so that a neighbour’s threshold might give us peaceful slumbers because of the confidence that comes from a feeling of union; might shield with weapons a fallen citizen, or one staggering from a grievous wound; might give battle signals by a common trumpet; and, might seek protection inside the same city walls and behind gates fastened by a single key.

But in these days there is more friendliness among snakes than among humans. Wild beasts are merciful to beasts spotted like themselves. When did the stronger lion ever take the life of the weaker lion? In what wood did a boar ever breathe his last under the tusks of a boar bigger than himself? The fierce tiger of India lives in perpetual peace with her fellow tiger; bears live in harmony with bears. But the human being finds it all too little to have forged the deadly blade on an impious anvil. The first craftsmen only tired themselves with forging hoes and harrows, spades and ploughshares, not knowing how to beat out swords. Yet we now witness a people (populus) whose anger is not alleviated by killing someone, but who think that a man’s chest, arms, and face provide some kind of food. What would Pythagoras say, or to what place would he not escape, if he witnessed these horrors of today, namely Pythagoras who refrained from every living creature as if it were human and who would not satisfy his stomach with just any kind of vegetable?

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Source of the translation: G.G. Ramsay, Juvenal and Persius (LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univesrity Press, 1918), public domain, adapted by Harland.