*Spoiler Warning*

Discovery made good use of an interesting classical trope: the cannibalistic barbarian.

I talked about this a little bit in my previous post on Discovery, when in ‘The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not for the Lambs Cry‘ the Klingons eat the corpse of Captain Georgiou…

Although some might argue that this isn’t cannibalism, since they aren’t the same species, I have an excellent quote from Captain Picard to explain this away…

“We’ve all advanced enough to feel that all sentient humanoids are members of the same species.” Dvorkin & Dvorkin, The Captains’ Honor, pp.73-74.

The act of eating Georgiou places the Klingons into the trope of ‘cannibalistic barbarians at the edge-of-the-world’, a trope we can trace back to classical sources. Herodotus talks about the Androphagoi, or Man-eaters, a tribe dwelling at the edge of the known world of the Greeks…

“[They] are the most savage of all men in their way of life; they know no justice and obey no law…they are the only people that eat men.” Herodotus, 4.106

This trope is continued in other classical authors and you can read similar passages in Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny. Just like the barbarians in these classical sources, the Klingons in Discovery are ‘other-ed’ through their act of cannibalism. They are made to seem unlike us, devoid of justice and law.

This trope of connecting cannibalism to barbaric foreigners continues throughout the classical tradition. One quite visceral example comes from Achilles Tatius. In his novel Leucippe and Clitophon a band of barbarous Egyptian bandits ritually sacrifice and consume the entrails of our heroine (Leucippe)…

“Then two of them led up the girl, her hands tied behind her back…First they poured libations over her head and led her round the altar while, to the accompaniment of a pipe, a priest chanted what seemed to be an Egyptian hymn…Then…one of the younger attendents laid her down…[taking] a sword and plunging it in about the region of her heart, drew it down to the lower part of the belly, opening up her body; the bowels gushed out, and these they drew forth in their hands and placed upon the altar; and then they were roasted, the whole body of them cut them up into small pieces, divided them into shares and ate them.” Achilles Tatius, Leucippe & Clitophon, Tr. Gaslee, S. (1969).

While our heroine manages to recover from this (read the book to find out how), this is another example of how cannibalism is used to demonstrate foreign barbarians, complete devoid of justice and law.

However, the cannibalism the Klingons engage in in Discovery is very specific. The Klingons are eating Georgiou’s corpse, rather than killing her purely to consume her. This type of ritual, the eating of the dead, is also mirrored by other edge-of-the-world barbarians in the classical sources. Let’s take a look at what Herodotus says about the Issedones, one of these edge-of-the-world tribes…

“It is said to be [their] custom…that whenever a man’s father dies, all the nearest of kin bring beasts of the flock, and having killed these and cut up the flesh they cut up also the dead father of their host, and set out all the flesh, mingled together for a feast.” Herodotus, 4.26

Herodotus goes on to talk about a number of these tribes, such as the Massagetae, the Callatiae, and the Padaei. All of them have two things in common: they are found at the end of the world and consume the flesh of the dead. Similarly, the Egyptian bandits we see in Achilles Tatius are not casually engaging in cannibalism, but are doing so as part of a distinct ritual process.

This connection adds to the characterisation of the Klingons as barbarous, not just through the act of cannibalism, but through the inverting of cultural norms. Just as the barbarians in Herodotus are presented as having a morality utterly dissimilar to the society of the Greeks, so are the Klingons seen as an utterly alien culture to the Federation through the consuming of Georgiou’s corpse.

But Discovery then plays with these classical barbarism tropes later in the series. In the episode ‘Vaulting Ambition‘, while the Discovery crew enjoy a jaunt into the Mirror Universe, Michael Burnham has a meal with Emperor Georgiou…

Burnham is forced to essentially commit an act of cannibalism. Even having unknowingly chosen her victim moments earlier…

While this scene does recall some other elements of cannibalism in classical sources, such as Thyestes‘ eating of his own sons, its serves better as a mirror (see what I did there?) to the earlier cannibalism of the Klingons.

The barbaristic qualities of the Klingon’s cannibalism pales in comparison to the Mirror Universe. The act of the Klingons stems from a moment of desperation, starving on an abandoned starship, and is conducted on a carcass, similar to the traditions of the Issedones in Herodotus.

However, in the Mirror Universe, sentient Kelpiens are slaughtered and eaten casually at the regular evening meal. With this, we find an act far more barbarous than any committed by the Klingons. With this scene, Discovery demonstrates that humans, given the right circumstances, can be far more barbarous and uncivilised than the Klingons.

In my opinion, the exploration of this trope of barbarous cannibalism in the classical sources helps drive home the message of Discovery‘s Mirror Universe. While ‘the other’ may seem foreign and barbarous, we have far more to fear from the barbarism that dwells within us, given the right push.

This is part of a series of posts on Star Trek: Discovery, that you can read here. And if you are curious about classical reception in other elements of Star Trek, browse through some more of these posts

If you are curious about Herodotus and his use of cannibalism, or the other barbarous tribes he describes, you can read the whole work at Perseus Digital Library.

While you are there, you can also read Aristotle, Pliny, and Strabo. All of them are interesting reads, if quite long.

I’d also recommend reading Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon, if just to find out how Leucippe manages to escape being sacrificed alive…

If you want to learn more about Herodotus in general, theses are a couple of books to get started: Herodotus (2000) by John Gould and Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus (2008) by Emily Baragwanath.

If you want to delve deeper in Herodotus and cannibalism, there is an interest article by E. M. Murphy and J. P. Mallory entitled ‘Herodotus and the Cannibals’ (2000).

For a larger exploration of the divide between the Greeks and who they saw as barbarians, take a look at Greeks and Barbarians (2013) by Kostas Vlassopoulos.