>>23819

No, Europe and the Middle East don't feature in the book, though the author describes that Europeans were occasionally involved in such acts happening elsewhere.

As for the Roman Empire: yes, infanticide was practiced there and the author writes that in Roman law, just as in many other societies that accepted slavery, slaves did not "have a right to life" of their own – their owner could kill them with impunity and without having to give a reason, at least throughout long parts of Roman history. But he also writes: "the consumption of a dead slave’s body was unthinkable in most regions where slavery was common, due to food taboos preventing the consumption of human flesh."

Generally I think that each society has its own morality, its own set of moral rules, which govern what's allowed and what's forbidden, or even strictly taboo. The difference is only in the specific contents of these rules. Like, for example, the Romans considered infanticide entirely acceptable, but they would never had cut the throat of one of their own infants – that would have been murder, just as in our society. Instead they exposed the infants, so they would be killed by cold or thirst, or eaten by wild animals or straying dogs. So they would nature let do the killing rather than do it themselves.

Likewise, they were comfortable with slaves or captives being killed at gladiator games, and they probably had little qualms about throwing the corpses of the killed to the wild animals afterwards, but putting them into the oven and eating them themselves – no, for all I know that would have been as unimaginable as it is in our society. Eating human flesh just wasn't something a Roman would do – only barbarians might do that, in Roman eyes.

So something like the casual cannibalism of China (in some periods), where the flesh of executed criminals or killed enemies was sold to bystanders for consumption, can very likely be completely ruled out for the Roman Empire, simply because it would have been a gross violation of the social rules regarding the treatment of the dead.

On the other hand, while those were the moral rules of the Roman Empire, other countries of Antiquity had their own, sometimes considerably different rules. For example, this article I found: https://ancientimes.blogspot.com/2017/08/cannibalism-in-roman-egypt.html indicates that cannibalism was neither unknown nor despised in Ancient Egypt before it become a province of the Roman Empire. But there cannibalism, in so far as it happened, seems to have been connected to destroying enemies vanquished in war, or to human sacrifice. It doesn't seem to have been particularly "culinary" in nature, and I don't think that slaves were ever butchered and eaten in that region, in contrast of some of the regions described in the book here.

The linked article also mentions that "the Romans despised any cult practices that included human sacrifice" – so they despised Carthage (where infants were routinely sacrificed) not because that could have been considered a form of infanticide (after all the practiced infanticide themselves), but because the infants were sacrificed in a religious ritual – that seemed sacrilege to the Romans. And they considered their own gladiator games fine exactly because they took place OUTSIDE of any religious context, meaning they were NOT sacrifices in the religious sense.

For other cultures, of course, it was just the other way around: they accepted human sacrifices because of the sacred context they took place in, but would have rejected the Roman gladiator games as an unexcusable form of deadly entertainment because of the ABSENCE of such a context.

So, to summarize: different cultures, different rules. In order to understand any specific culture, you have to ask which rules were in force there, and why. EVERY cultures has its rules, even if their content varied and varies enormously.