Cannibalism is to us but a curiosity that we once practised. We find no injunction against cannibalism, or eating one's children, among the crimes on the statute books. It is no crime under the Common Law. A man who would commit cannibalism among us would be sent to an insane institution. There are no laws against a thing when no one has the least inclination to do it. Society recognises that the instinct for cannibalism is dead, but it is nevertheless in our unconscious. Our psyche never forgets the episodes in the lives of our ancestors. The only places where there are laws against cannibalism are in savage countries where there is a disposition to practise it; and these laws are made by colonists. It is prevalent to-day in Africa. John H. Weeks in _Among Congo Cannibals_ (1913) tells us he saw savages carrying dismembered parts of human bodies for a feast and that he was offered some cooked human food. He also speaks of a white man who was a dealer in human flesh to a tribe, an example of degradation that finds a parallel in Kurtz's conduct in Conrad's story _The Heart of Darkness_. Mr. Herbert Ward in his _A Voice from Congo_ (1910) describes how some human victims were hacked to pieces, alive, for feasts; he witnessed organised traffic in human flesh and saw several cannibal feasts. II Let us mark the part played by cannibalism in ancient Greek literature. We will see that the cannibalistic instinct was part of the psychic life of the earliest Greeks. There was a reaction to it as there was to incest of the son with the mother as shown in Sophocles's _Œdipus_. Enforced cannibalism, where a man was made to eat his own children unknowingly, is the revenge motive of the famous Greek play--_Agamemnon_; this play depicts the reaction to cannibalism. In the Atreus legend which Æschylus used in _Agamemnon_, Thyestes eats the flesh of his children, offered up to him by his brother Atreus, in revenge for having seduced Atreus's wife. In expiation of Atreus's crime his future descendants suffer. The unfortunate Thyestes had a son, Ægisthus, as the offspring of the connection with Atreus's wife--(Pelopia, Thyestes's own daughter, by the way). Atreus and his son Agamemnon were later killed by Ægisthus, who had besides seduced Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra. Agamemnon's son, Orestes, avenges the murder by killing his mother and her paramour. Orestes is shown as expiating his matricide in the _Oresteia_ trilogy of which _Agamemnon_ is the first play.