Greek sacrifice has received a great deal of attention over the past century, particularly over the last three decades. Nearly the entire corpus of Greek literature, archaeology, and art history has been surveyed for the meanings possibly attributed to sacrifice, from Mycenaean archeology through Classical texts and artifacts to early Christian complaints about the inaccessibility of meat that was not the product of pagan sacrifice (1 Corinthians 8:10). The curious relationship between thusia (commensal sacrifice) and phonē (murder or slaughter) practically dominated Classical scholarship in Italy and France during the 1970s and 1980s, for instance. Yet, with a few exceptions, sacrifice in the context of Homeric oaths has been given scant attention. More often it is treated peripherally in wider studies of Greek treaty-making, promising, reciprocity, and friendship. While these studies shed much light on their respective topics, they tend to eclipse the sacrifice in oath-making for the end results, and more often than not the persuasive strategies of ritualized violence are not fully addressed.

Yet violence is a conspicuous theme in Homeric oath-making. Oathsacrifices are striking dramatizations of ritualized violence, and oaths without sacrifices commonly invoke analogies that are symbolically violent, for instance, Achilles swearing by his own life (1.88), or Odysseus swearing by his life and also by his fatherhood of Telemachos, as if to stake his identity as a generator of life (2.257–64).