Prometeo e l’istituzione del rito sacrificale: elementi per una lettura antropologica

This paper stems from the attempt to show that the sacrifice is not – as Marcel Detienne claimed – a ‘notion of yesterday’, by means of the recognition of a sort of compatibility: some central elements of the sacrifice in ancient Greece can be analyzed and read throughout the filter of some theoretical observations about sacrifice made by the Italian anthropologist Valerio Valeri, scholar not of the ancient Greek world, but of the Polynesian and Indonesian contemporary ones. My aim is to examine the paradigmatic case of the foundation of Greek sacrificial practices – i.e. the ‘archetypal’ sacrifice set up by Prometheus – in order to show that ‘sacrifice’ is still a useful and necessary notion and that, more specifically, its ‘inclusive notion’ of Valeri is good to describe the contents and various meanings of these Greek rituals.