Drawing from Pindar’s seventh Olympian Ode, Barbara Kowalzig (Singing for the Gods, 230-1) argues that the poem provides an etiology for the fireless sacrifice established for Athena at Rhodes. Why a sacrifice without fire, given that “as is nowhere clearer than in Aristophanes’ Birds, on the whole it is the fire that enables a city’s communication with the gods?”

In fact, she argues, non-burnt animal sacrifice, not to mention votive gifts of fruit and craft products, were well-known in the ancient world: “Non-burnt animal sacrifice, strange as it might seem to the Greek eye, is not an entirely unknown practice. It was the dominant pattern in the prehistoric Mediterranean East, that is, in Bronze Age Anatolia, the Near East, and in Egypt, where it continued to prevail into historic times. Similarly, whereas fire occurs regularly in Greek sacrificial iconography, Minoan depictions, although offering abundant evidence for animal sacrifice, provide none for the use of fire. Minoan seals, the repertoire for such imagery, feature slaughtered animals on tables, sometimes with a jar placed underneath, suggesting a role for blood in the ritual, similar to the smearing of the altar in Greece. Fire, however, does not feature; what happens to the dead animal is unclear: an animal appears once in a libation scene, and elsewhere one is carried away on a woman’s shoulder. In this respect, it is suggestive that, for example, no Minoan altar structures have been revealed, nor have traces of burnt bones been found in connection with the possible candidates. All there is presents evidence for the cooking and consumption of ritual meals.”

Pindar’s poem does not, she thinks, match actual sacrificial practice, but she concludes that “it is likely that the tradition of Athena’s fireless sacrifices is either really rooted in that milieu, or presents a conscious evocation of it. . . . the performance of this ode does indeed evoke a special continuity from a pre-Greek past and is interested in Rhodes’ geographical position in the eastern Mediterranean.” (238).

The aim, Kowalzig suggests, “to concentrate . . . different traditions. If [Athena] had indeed once been a deity worshipped in the Near Eastern tradition of fireless meat sacrifice, this is perhaps what allows her to perform this role: because of her own oscillation between a Bronze Age tradition and an unmistakeably historic-Greek aspect, she can fit the unrelated memories into a Greek temporal and perceptual frame and gloss over the island’s diverse pasts and peoples (Minoans, Egyptians, Greeks) and the various groups on the island cherishing traditions of Cretans, Telkhines, Heliadai, Akhaians” (261-2). 

By linking Athena’s sacrifice to the earlier history of Rhodes, the Ode evokes a tradition, even while, in Kowalzig’s view, it introduces a ritual innovation. The song thus “orchestrates innovation through traditionalizing” (262). The khoros that sings of this ancient practice becomes itself “the performers of the fireless sacrifice.”