Reviews REVIEWS The Cattle of the Sun: Cows and Culture in the World of the Ancient Greeks. By Jeremy McInerney (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2010) 340 pp. $45.00 How much meat did the Greeks eat? Where did they run their herds? How did they guarantee a ready supply for sacriªce? These practical stock-raising questions, and the symbiosis between the ancient Greeks and cattle that underpinned them, are some of the themes tackled by McInerney in Cattle of the Sun. This study is about both empirical and symbolic relationships. McInerney offers a theoretical approach that allows for historical contingencies, âfor the values, ideas, decisions, and actions that occur within a cultural matrix that informs an individualâs conscious and unconscious choicesâ (5). The study is multidisciplinary by nature; the literary, epigraphical, archaeological, and comparative evidence requires theories and methodologies from anthropology, sociology, literature, economics, and political sciences to bring ancient Greek society into focus. McInerney argues that Greece did not operate in a bovine idiom, as did some of the historical African herding cultures, but worked as a settled, agricultural, manufacturing, trading society that retained a âbovine register.â For the Greeks, keeping cattle engendered certain practices and experiences that ended
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