Anthropophagi

Also Known As: singular Anthropophagus; Greek Androphagoi, the form Herodotus uses; Latin Anthropophagi in Pliny the Elder; both mean “man-eaters”, from Greek *anthropos*, “human being”, and *phagein*, “to eat”
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: The Anthropophagi are a nation of people who live on human flesh, set by Greek and Roman writers beyond the northern desert of Scythia and later carried by travellers’ books to Ethiopia, to islands off Asia and onto the Elizabethan stage.
Role in Mythos: They mark the point on the ancient map where known customs run out, the last people before an empty land, defined by the one appetite that put them outside every law.
Relation to Humans: Herodotus says they recognise no justice and keep no law, and that they alone of all the northern nations eat men. Later writers made them a byword for savagery at the world’s edge, and by the time Othello names them they are a traveller’s thrill told to a listening audience.

The desert north of the farmers’ fields does not end so much as thin out. Eleven days’ sail up the Borysthenes, the river the Greeks of Olbia traded on and we now call the Dnieper, the grain country stops, and after that there is a long stretch of nothing. On the far side of the nothing, Herodotus was told, lived a people who ate other people. Beyond them was more desert, and then, as far as anyone knew, no one at all.

Herodotus called them the Androphagoi, the Man-Eaters, and he was precise about them in the way he was precise about everyone on his map of the Black Sea north. They were nomads. They wore clothing like the Scythians’ but spoke a language of their own. They were a race apart, with no connection to the Scythians despite the borrowed dress. And they had, he wrote, the most savage manners of all human beings: they acknowledged no rule of right and observed no customary law, and alone of all those northern nations they ate men.

That is almost the whole of it, and it is worth noticing how little it is. Herodotus does not give them tusks or dog heads or eyes in their chests. Their neighbours in his fourth book include the Neuroi, who were said to turn into wolves for a few days each year, and the Melanchlainoi, named for the black cloaks every one of them wore. Next to those, the Androphagoi look almost ordinary. A herd moving across the grass, felt and leather against the wind, smoke from a camp fire, a stranger speech than the Scythian. The horror is not in the body. It is in the cookpot.

They even have a walk-on part in history. When Darius of Persia marched into Scythia, the Scythians refused to fight him in the open and instead retreated, drawing the Persian army deliberately into the lands of the neighbours who had refused to join them against him. They led the invaders first to the Melanchlainoi, then into the country of the Androphagoi, and on to the Neuroi, stirring up each people in turn. It is an odd, quiet moment: the great king’s columns pushing through the man-eaters’ grazing lands, and the man-eaters, as far as the story tells, doing nothing but being disturbed.

Five centuries later Pliny the Elder picked the thread up in Rome, and Latin gave the name its lasting form, Anthropophagi. Pliny knew the tribes as Scythian and knew there were many of them. He anticipated his readers’ doubt and answered it by pointing close to home: people of this portentous kind, he wrote, had existed in the very middle of the world, the Cyclopes and the Laestrygones of Sicily and Italy, and only recently the tribes beyond the Alps had practised human sacrifice, which he considered not far from eating human flesh. The man-eaters of the north were meant to seem less a fantasy than a stage the whole world had once passed through.

Pliny also supplied the detail that made them unforgettable. Citing Isigonus of Nicaea, he placed them ten days’ journey beyond the Borysthenes and said they drank from human skulls and wore the scalps, hair still attached, hung around their necks as napkins. The image is domestic and all the worse for it. Supper done, a man wipes his mouth on the dried scalp of someone else and sets the bone cup down.

The same book of Pliny keeps company with stranger things. Close by in the north he sets the one-eyed Arimaspi who fight the griffins for their gold, and, beyond the other Scythian cannibals in a valley of the Imavus range, the backward-footed people of Abarimon. In his account of Ethiopia he lists Anthropophagi a second time among the tribes of Ethiopia, whose diet, he says, is human flesh. Philostratus, writing his life of the wonder-worker Apollonius, likewise counts the Man-Eaters among the peoples of Ethiopia alongside the Pygmies and the Shadow-Feet. The name had stopped belonging to one tribe on one river. It had become a category, a thing that could be found wherever the map grew faint.

The medieval imagination kept moving it outward. The book of travels attributed to Sir John Mandeville, a fourteenth-century compilation whose narrator’s journey is doubtful at best, never uses the Greek word, but it feeds on the same idea. On the isle of Lamary, it says, the people eat man’s flesh more gladly than any other, though their country is rich in meat and fish and corn; merchants bring children there to sell, and the islanders eat the fat ones at once and feed the lean ones until they are fat. On the isle of Dondun, when a sick man’s idol says he will die, his family stop his breath, cut the body in small pieces and call in friends and minstrels to feast, believing it a mercy to spare the dead from the worms. A further isle holds giants who would rather eat men than anything else.

Then, in 1492, Columbus met the Caribs of the Antilles, and the word “cannibal” was born from their name. It gradually took over the work the Greek had done for two thousand years, and “anthropophagy” retreated into scholarship as the formal term for people eating people. The old name had one great last performance. In Shakespeare’s Othello, the general explains how he won Desdemona: by telling stories, in her father’s house, of vast caves and idle deserts, “of the cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders.” The words that had once described a nomad people on the Dnieper are now the stuff of a courtship story, and she loved him, he says, for the dangers he had passed.

What made the Anthropophagi frightening was never strength. No source gives them unusual size, magic or weapons. Their power is the power of the frontier, the fact that beyond them lies only empty land, and that to reach them a traveller must first cross a desert with nothing in it. Their menace is entirely in their appetite and their lawlessness, the refusal of every custom that made a Greek or a Scythian feel human.

Their weakness is that they could not stay put. Every time a real traveller reached the place where they were supposed to be, they had moved on to the next blank space: from the northern steppe to Ethiopia, from Ethiopia to Mandeville’s islands, from there to the Caribbean and a new word. No ancient writer records how the Androphagoi ended, what became of them after Darius passed, or what they called themselves. Herodotus admitted that beyond them his knowledge simply stopped. Nobody has ever returned from their country to describe a single meal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Anthropophagi?

The Anthropophagi were a people said by Greek and Roman writers to eat human flesh. Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, called them the Androphagoi and placed them beyond a desert north of the Scythian farmlands on the Dnieper. Pliny the Elder later gave the Latin form of the name, Anthropophagi, which means man-eaters.

Where did the Anthropophagi live?

Herodotus placed the Androphagoi north of the agricultural Scythians, eleven days’ sail up the Borysthenes (the Dnieper) and across a stretch of desert, with nothing but uninhabited land beyond them. Pliny put them ten days’ journey beyond the same river. Pliny and Philostratus also listed a separate group of Anthropophagi among the peoples of Ethiopia.

What did the Anthropophagi look like?

No ancient source gives the Anthropophagi an unusual body. Herodotus says they dressed like Scythians but spoke their own language and lived as nomads. Pliny, citing Isigonus of Nicaea, adds that they drank from human skulls and wore human scalps with the hair on around their necks as napkins.

Are the Anthropophagi in Shakespeare?

Yes, the Anthropophagi appear in Othello. Othello tells how he won Desdemona with stories of “the cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders.” In the play they are part of a traveller’s tale of distant wonders.

What is the difference between Anthropophagi and cannibals?

Anthropophagi is the ancient Greek and Latin name for man-eaters, used by Herodotus and Pliny more than two thousand years ago. The word cannibal is much younger and comes from the Caribs of the Antilles, whom Columbus encountered in 1492. Anthropophagy survives as the formal term for humans eating human flesh.