The Roman Questions (110-111)

Why is this priest also forbidden to touch raw flesh?

Is this custom intended to deter people completely from eating raw meat, or do they scrupulously repudiate flesh for the same reason as flour? For neither is it a living creature nor has it yet become a cooked food. Now boiling or roasting, being a sort of alteration and mutation, eliminates, the previous form; but fresh raw meat does not have a clean and unsullied appearance, but one that is repulsive, like a fresh wound.

Why did they bid the priest avoid the dog and the goat, neither touching them nor naming them?

Did they loathe the goat’s lasciviousness and foul odour, or did they fear its susceptibility to disease? For it is thought to be subject to epilepsy beyond all other animals, and to infect persons who eat it[*] or touch it when it is possessed of the disease. The reason, they say, is the narrowness of the air passages, which are often suddenly contracted; this they deduce from the thinness of its voice. So also in the case of men, if they chance to speak during an epileptic fit, the sound they make is very like a bleat.

The dog has, perhaps, less of lasciviousness and foul odour. Some, however, assert that a dog may not enter either the Athenian acropolis[*] or the island of Delos[*] because of its open mating, as if cattle and swine and horses mated within the walls of a chamber

and not openly and without restraint! For these persons are ignorant of the true reason: because the dog is a belligerent creature they exclude it from inviolable arid holy shrines, thereby offering a safe place of refuge for suppliants. Accordingly it is likely that the priest of Jupiter also, since he is, as it were, the animate embodiment and sacred image of the god, should be left free as a refuge for petitioners and suppliants, with no one to hinder them or to frighten them away. For this reason his couch was placed in the vestibule of his house, and anyone who fell at his knees had immunity from beating or chastisement all that day: and if any prisoner succeeded in reaching the priest, he was set free, and his chains they threw outside, not by the doors, but over the roof. So it would have been of no avail for him to render himself so gentle and humane, if a dog had stood before him frightening and keeping away those who had need of a place of refuge.

Nor, in fact, did the men of old think that this animal was wholly pure, for it was never sacrificed to any of the Olympian gods: and when it is sent to the cross-roads as a supper for the earth-goddess Hecatê,[*] it has its due portion among sacrifices that avert and expiate evil. In Sparta they immolate puppies to the bloodiest of the gods, Enyalius: and in Boeotia the ceremony of public purification is to pass between the parts of a dog which has been cut in twain. The Romans themselves, in the month of purification,[*] at the Wolf Festival, which they call the Lupercalia, sacrifice a dog. Hence it is not out of keeping that those who have attained to the office of serving the

highest and purest god should be forbidden to make a dog their familiar companion and housemate.