Pigs in culture
Pigs, widespread in societies around the world since Neolithic times, have been used for many purposes in art, literature, and other expressions of human culture.
In classical times, the Romans considered pork the finest of meats, enjoying sausages, and depicting them in their art.
The scholar Michael MacKinnon writes that "Pork was generally considered the choicest of all the domestic meats consumed during Roman times, and it was ingested in a multitude of forms, from sausages to steaks, by rich and poor alike.
No other animal had so many Latin names (e.g. sus, porcus, porco, aper) or was the ingredient in so many ancient recipes as outlined in the culinary manual of Apicius.
[1] Benton Jay Komins, a scholar of culture, notes that the pig has been celebrated throughout Europe since ancient times in its carnivals, the name coming from the Italian carne levare, the lifting of meat.
Local tradition states that farm hands carried these while at work; aristocratic fox hunters of the Quorn, Cottesmore and Belvoir hunts supposedly saw this and acquired a taste for the pies.
The Nuremberg bratwurst is required to be at most 90 millimetres (3.5 in) long and to weigh at most 25 grams (0.88 oz); it is flavoured with mace, pepper, and marjoram.
In Early Modern times starting in 1614, Nuremberg's butchers paraded through the city each year carrying a 400 metres (440 yd) long sausage.
[9][10] Pigs have appeared in literature with a variety of associations, ranging from the pleasures of eating, as in Charles Lamb's A Dissertation upon Roast Pig, to William Golding's Lord of the Flies (with the fat character "Piggy"), where the rotting boar's head on a stick represents Beelzebub, "lord of the flies" being the direct translation of the Hebrew בעל זבוב, and George Orwell's allegorical novel Animal Farm, where the central characters representing Soviet leaders are pigs.
[15] One of the earliest literary references comes from Heraclitus, who speaks of the preference pigs have for mud over clean water in the Fragments.
[17] Plato in the Republic discusses a "healthy state" of simplicity as "a city for pigs" (Greek: huōn polis).
Pigs have appeared in art in media including pottery, sculpture, metalwork, engravings, oil paintings, watercolour, and stained glass, from neolithic times onwards.
As the scholar Richard Horwitz puts it, people all over the world have made pigs stand for "extremes of human joy or fear, celebration, ridicule, and repulsion".
