hasContentIssue true, Copyright The Author(s) 2016. 73 Live interment was only performed by the Romans as ritual killing, but live interment was not the only form of ritual killing (whether human sacrifice or not) that the Romans had available to them. 67 But upon further reflection, in fact, the use of cruets and plates actually emphasizes the importance of the meal that concluded a Roman sacrifice. ex Fest. 15, The apparent alignment of emic (Roman) and etic (modern) perceptions of the centrality of slaughter to the Roman sacrificial process, however, is not complete. It is important to remember, however, that no ancient source articulates any sort of relationship among these rituals. Roman sacrificium is both less and more than the typical etic notion of sacrifice. Another major difference between Greek gods and Roman gods is in the physical appearance of the deities. Van Straten Reference Van Straten1995: 188. Aeacus holds the keys to Hades. Our modern idea of sacrifice can, with some refinement and clarification, remain a useful concept for constructing accounts of how and why the Romans dealt with their gods in the ways they didFootnote See, for example, Feeney Reference Feeney, Barchiesi, Rpke and Stephens2004, an excellent discussion of the application of theoretical models of sacrifice to the poetry of Vergil and Ovid. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075435816000319, Reference Feeney, Barchiesi, Rpke and Stephens, Reference Berry, Headland, Pike and Harris, Reference Rpke, Georgoudi, Piettre and Schmidt, Reference Lentacker, Ervynck, Van Neer, Martens and De Boe, Reference De Grossi Mazzorin and Tagliacozzo, Hammers, axes, bulls, and blood: some practical aspects of Roman animal sacrifice, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, Imposed etics, emics, and derived etics: their conceptual and operational status in cross-cultural psychology, Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate, Religio Votiva: The Archaeology of Latial Votive Religion, Rome, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making, L'Invention des grands hommes de la Rome antique, Dog remains in Italy from the Neolithic to the Roman period, The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages, Human sacrifice and fear of military disaster in Republican Rome, Das rmische Vorzeichenwesen (75327 v. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls.Footnote mactus; Serv., A. 1419). The distinction between sacrificare and mactare was lost by Late Antiquity, but it was still active in the Republic and early Empire.Footnote The equation of sacrifice with the offering of an animal is not completely divorced from the ancient sources. 76. 15 344L, s.v. Match. This meant that We also find that the gods were open to receiving sacrifices of vegetables, grains, liquids, and, when those were not available, miniature versions of the serveware that would normally have contained them. Sacrificare is frequently accompanied by an instrumental ablative, but in almost all cases it is clear that the ablative is the object of sacrifice, as in the phrase maioribus hostiis sacrificaverant.Footnote In addition to Zeus and Hera, there were many other major and minor gods in the Greek religion. Although Roman writers most frequently do not explicitly identify the object of a sacrifice, when they do, cattle, pigs and sheep are well attested.Footnote 62. and the fact that the word immolatio itself derives from the Indo-European root *melh2 (to crush, to grind): immolatio is cognate with English mill.Footnote Art historians have debated whether the choice to encapsulate the entirety of sacrificial experience in a scene of libation rather than a scene of animal slaughter (or vice versa) may tell us something about what was being emphasized as significant about sacrifice at that time or context.Footnote WebIt housed an altar for animal sacrifice and was said to constantly burn incense. In addition, the acceptability of miniature serveware as objects of sacrificium shows the ability of the ritual to accommodate the varying social status of those performing it. 70 Polluctum is a rite of wider scope than sacrificium, however, in that it could be performed on money and goods that do not appear to have been linked to eating in any way. Aldrete Reference Aldrete2014: 32. Furthermore, because there were multiple rituals not just sacrificium through which the Romans could share food and other goods with their gods, we can see that the Romans had a wider range of ritual tools available to them for communicating with the divine. Now, the Romans did not eat people, so how does their performance of human sacrifice reinforce the link between sacrifice and dining? 38 54 Var., L 5.122. 16 59 Finally, both ancient societies have twelve main gods and goddesses. Flashcards. 49 While there has been tentative speculation that the reason behind a preference for procession scenes in Greek representations of sacrifice in the Archaic and Classical periods is due to a growing squeamishness inside Greek culture,Footnote From here, we can speculate that sacrifice was not understood by the Romans primarily as the ritual slaughter of an animal. There is also a queen of gods in Greek and Roman mythologies. 71 62 Macr., Sat. The distinction is preserved by Suet., Prat. Ov., F. 4.90142 with Fest. Marcos, Bruno mactus. 14 37ab). 233; CIL 12.1531=ILLRP 136=ILS 3411 (from Sora). It was used by Cicero in the opening of his speech Post Reditum and by the figure of Cotta, consul of 75 b.c.e., in a fragment of Sallust's Historiae to present themselves as victims for the greater good.Footnote The presence of bones from these species at S. Omobono should not be taken to mean that the site was what scholars call a healing sanctuary, or that it was a place where people came to cast spells on their enemies. While Romans had many god they belief in that they believed in and they would sacrifice items to the gods so positive things would happened and if something bad happened than people blame the king or whoever does the sacrifice to the gods. 77 For many readers of Latin, the most obvious translation of the Latin is except a beechwood cruet with which he would offer sacrifice, taking quo as an instrumental ablative and thereby making the vessel an instrument of sacrifice rather than the object of sacrifice itself. Also the same poverty has established from the very beginning an empire for the Roman people and, on behalf of this, still today she sacrifices to the immortal gods a little ladle and a dish made of clay. Devotio is frequently called self-sacrifice by modern scholars,Footnote 64 As Scheid has reconstructed Roman public sacrifice,Footnote 81, Here we have two rituals that look, to an outsider, almost identical, but Livy takes pains to distinguish between them. It is important to note, however, that we cannot determine conclusively from the extant sources what relationship, if any, existed among them in the Roman mind. 33 277AC). In both the passages from Pliny and Apuleius, the ritual implements are of diminutive size. 12 Expert solutions. Fest. Bottom line: The Greeks tended towards greater personification of their gods; the Romans tended towards their religion being a series of quid pro quo transactions with 5401L. WebFor example, the Peloponnesian War was primarily a struggle between two Greek city-states, Athens and Sparta, and was fought mainly on land and sea within the Greek world. 69 14.30; Sil. Sacrifice was just one of several rites (alongside polluctum and magmentum) that the Romans had available to them that look to us, standing outside their religious system, as if they were all identical or nearly so. The statues made in Greece were made with perfect people in mind often modeled after gods and goddesses, while the statues in Rome have all the faults a real person would have. Admittedly the Romans often used as a metonym for the whole of sacrificium the term immolatio, the stage of the ritual that includes slaughter, suggesting the special importance of that portion of the ritual sequence.Footnote 77 For a treatment of this methodological issue on a broader scale, see the rather pointed critique in Hopkins Reference Hopkins1978: 1808. For example, think about the Roman and Greek mythologies about gods. Chr. The main god and goddesses in Roman culture were Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Goats: Var., R. 1.2.19; Liv. Test. 16 80 63. In addition to such great disasters, the people were terrified both by other prodigies and because in this year two Vestals, Opimia and Floronia, were discovered to have had illicit affairs. Horses: Plin., N.H. 28.146; Fest. Rpke Reference Rpke, Georgoudi, Piettre and Schmidt2005 offers a different interpretation of the meal that follows the sacrifice. There is no evidence, contra Parker Reference Parker2004 and Wildfang Reference Wildfang2006: 589, that the Romans ever perceived the punishment of a Vestal as sacrifice. 4 On fourteen occasions between 209 and 92 b.c.e., androgyne infants and children were included among the prodigies reported to the Roman Senate. } e.g., Liv. Livy, however, treats each burial in a distinct way. As a comparandum, we can point to the Roman habit of creating votive deposits, collections of usually relatively inexpensive items buried in the ground: gifts to the gods that had been cleaned out of overstuffed temples and intentionally buried. To give just a single example, we know that there was originally some technical distinction among the different types of divine signs sent to the Romans by the gods. Plaut., Stich. but in later texts as well. 6 413=Macr., Sat. 44 Arguably, then, it is the Christians who bequeathed to future generations the metonymic equivalence of sacrifice and violence, Knust and Vrhelyi Reference Knust and Vrhelyi2011: 17. 4.57) is not clear. Max. Cato's instruction to pollucere to Jupiter an assaria pecunia refers to produce valued at one as (Agr. The elder Cato instructs his reader to pollucere a cup of wine and a daps (ritual meal) to Jupiter Dapalis (Agr. WebGreeks Romans Lived in small rural communities Polis functioned as the city-states religious center Greek Gods Sense of identity Polis isolated from one another and independent Sanctuaries to share music, religion, poetry, and athletics Classical Greek Orders basic design elements for architecture (sense of order, predictability, and 91 The Christian fathers equation of sacrifice with violence has shaped twentieth-century theorizations of sacrifice as a universal human phenomenon,Footnote and Narbo in Gallia Narbonensis (CIL 12.4333, dated to 11 c.e.). Aldrete counts at least fifty-six sculptural reliefs dating from the seventh century b.c.e. 52 13 Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 22441 and, arriving at the same conclusion by a different path, Schultz Reference Schultz2012: 1323. Meanwhile, from the Sibylline Books some unusual sacrifices were ordered, among which was one where a Gallic man and woman and a Greek man and woman were sent down alive into an underground room walled with rock, a place that had already been tainted before by human victims hardly a Roman rite. Scheid Reference Scheid2005: 4457; Reference Scheid and Rpke2007: 2639. In this way, the native, or emic, Roman view of sacrifice is more expansive than ours. 6.343 and 11.108. 3, 13456; Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 1225; Rpke Reference Rpke and Gordon2007: 1378. 46 This draws further support from the fact that the object referred to by the instrumental ablatives that accompany the verb sacrificare is almost never a knife, an axe, a hammer, or other weapon.Footnote 5 86 wine,Footnote 58 Sacrificium included vegetal and inedible offerings, and it was not the only Roman ritual that had living victims. 9.7.mil.Rom.2). By looking at Roman sacrificium through the insider-outsider lens, by keeping in sight what is there in the sources, what we add to it, and where our modern notion of sacrifice does and does not align with the Romans own idea, we have a sharper, more detailed picture of one aspect of Roman antiquity. Huet explains the rarity of killing scenes in sacrificial reliefs from Italy by pointing out that the emphasis in these reliefs is really on the piety of the sacrificant who stands before the altar.Footnote Scheid Reference Scheid2005: 1002; Reference Scheid2012: 84. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, suggestions and objections that have greatly improved this piece. mactus; Walde and Hofmann Reference Walde and Hofmann1954: 2.4 s.v. This is the insider-outsider problem in nuce. 73 30 84 57 Jupiter was a sky-god who Romans believed oversaw all aspects of life; he is thought to have originated from the Greek god Zeus. 9 and Paul. 45 Thinking along the same lines, it is reasonable to conclude that there are relatively few images of slaughter among Roman sacrificial scenes in public artwork of the Classical period because the emphasis in state-sponsored sacrifice lay elsewhere. ex Fest. You would do well to remember that there were very few similarities between Roman and Greek religion until the Romans began borrowing from the Gree which I quote at some length because we shall return to this passage later on: Territi etiam super tantas clades cum ceteris prodigiis, tum quod duae Vestales eo anno, Opimia atque Floronia, stupri compertae et altera sub terra, uti mos est, ad portam Collinam necata fuerat, altera sibimet ipsa mortem consciverat; Hoc nefas cum inter tot, ut fit, clades in prodigium versum esset, decemviri libros adire iussi sunt et Q. Fabius Pictor Delphos ad oraculum missus est sciscitatum quibus precibus suppliciisque deos possent placare et quaenam futura finis tantis cladibus foret. The burial of Gauls and Greeks was a sacrifice, but one that Romans ought not to have performed. This is suggested by Ov., F. 1.1278. 26. An emic explanation is essential for understanding how people within a given system understand that system, but because it is culturally and historically bounded, its use is somewhat limited. Parents: Aeacus: Zeus and Aegina; Rhadamanthus and Minos: Zeus and Europa. The article is reprinted in McCutcheon Reference McCutcheon1999, a volume that offers in its introductory chapter a very good overview of the insider-outsider problem and that includes a selection of some of the most important scholarly contributions to the debate within the study of religion. This is made clear in numerous passages from several Roman authors. Aul. 61 for this article. The small size of the guttus and simpulum is assured by Varro (L. 5.124), who identifies both as vessels that pour out liquid minutatim. But we can no longer recover indeed it appears that Romans of the early Empire could no longer recover what was the difference between a monstrum, a prodigium, a portentum, and an ostentum.Footnote 358L. There is also a queen of gods in Greek and Roman mythologies. 78 25 were linked.Footnote The corresponding substantive is magmentum, a type of offering laid out only at certain temples.Footnote But then they turn out to be us. 26 31 Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes. Moses, Reference Moses, Brocato and Terrenatoforthcoming. Cic., Red. Two famous examples are found on the altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus (Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: fig. But while Roman devotio aligns well with our idea of self-sacrifice, it appears that the Romans did not draw a similar connection between devotio and sacrificium. 99 Possible Answers: Roman temples were built on the ruins of previous structures. 1034 seems to draw an equivalence between sacrificare and mactare (cf. But in reality, the relative silence of our sources about a ritual form that seems to have been available to the poor is not unique. Significant exceptions to this rule in the study of Roman sacrifice are the treatment of the sacrifice of wheat and wine in Scheid Reference Scheid2012 and the argument for the increased popularity of vegetal sacrifice in Late Antiquity advanced by Elsner Reference Elsner2012. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. 55.1.20 and 58.13) where the presence of an accusative object of immolare necessitates that cultro be instrumental in the traditional sense: ture et vino in igne in foculo fecit immolavitque vino mola cultroque Iovi o(ptimo) m(aximo) b(ovem) m(arem), Iunoni reginae b(ovem) f(eminam), Minervae b(ovem) f(eminam), Saluti publicae populi Romani Quiritium b(ovem) f(eminam).. The argument I lay out here pertains to sacrificial practice as it was conceived by Romans living in Rome and those areas of Italy that came under their control early on, during the Republic and the early Empire. 78L, s.v. Greek governments varied from kings and oligarchs to the totalitarian, racist, warrior culture of Sparta and the direct democracy of Athens, whereas Roman kings gave 53 Jupiter also concentrated on protecting the Roman state. 2013: The Fragments of the Roman Historians, 3 vols, Oxford, Hornblower, S., and Spawforth, A. Douglas Reference Douglas and Douglas1982: 117. 21.5). molo; de Vaan Reference De Vaan2008: 3867 s.v. 40 37 nor does any Roman author ever express any sort of discomfort with this rite akin to Livy's shrinking back from the sacrifice of Gauls and Greeks. 55 34 The elder Pliny, in his Natural History, discusses the high regard in which ancient Romans held simple vessels made of beechwood. Scheid's reconstruction and interpretation is followed by Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 3148. 79 90 Although they are universally referred to as votive offerings in the scholarly literature, it is possible that they are, technically, sacrifices. There is a small group of other rituals that share certain structural similarities with sacrificium, but which the Romans during the Republic and early Empire appear to have distinguished from it. There are at least two other rituals that the Romans performed that also required the death of a person. Detry, Cleia Moses, Reference Moses, Brocato and Terrenatoforthcoming, table 8. It is probable, but not certain, that this is the same as the polluctum of ex mercibus libamenta mentioned by Varro at L. 6.54. 29 2 As in a relief from the Forum of Trajan now in the Louvre (Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: fig. Cf. I owe many thanks to C. P. Mann, B. Nongbri, and J. N. Dillon for their thoughtful, challenging responses to earlier drafts of this article, and to audiences at Trinity College, Baylor University, and Bryn Mawr College for comments on an oral version of it. 25 The most famous instance occurred annually at the festival of the Robigalia in June when a red dog and a sheep were sacrificed by the Flamen Quirinalis to ward off rust from the crops.Footnote For a more extended analysis of the distinction between the punishment of unchaste Vestals and, on the one hand, sacrifice and, on the other, secular capital punishment, see Schultz Reference Schultz2012. 89 97L: Immolare est mola, id est farre molito et sale, hostiam perspersam sacrare (To immolate is to make sacred a victim sprinkled with mola, that is, with ground spelt and salt), a passage which also suggests that the link between immolatio and mola salsa was active in the minds of Romans in the early imperial period when the ultimate source of Paulus redaction, the dictionary written by Verrius Flaccus, was compiled.Footnote ex Fest. Sacrifices of wine and incense are common in the Commentarii Fratrum Arvalium, e.g. 63 24 Also unfamiliar to the Romans would be another use of sacrifice now current in the life sciences, as a term for euthanasia of research animals with no real religious significance The plea of an editorial in the Canadian Journal of Comparative Medicine and Veterinary Science from 1967 (p. 241) that researchers abandon the term because there is no deity involved in the act of euthanizing laboratory animals, fell on deaf ears: sacrifice remains common in animal management literature. 58 The issue remains active in religious studies, as it does in cultural anthropology more widely. The expression rem dvnam facer, to make a thing sacred, shows that sacrifice was an act of transfer of ownership. that contain scenes of ritual slaughter where the implements can be clearly discerned.Footnote The ancient Greek and Roman gods did not become incarnate the way Jesus was, did not enter the stream of real human history the way Jesus did, did not die as a WebThe ancient Greeks and Romans performed many rituals in the observance of their religion. 93 Another famous instance of this scene is on the Boscoreale cup (Aldrete Reference Aldrete2014: 33, fig. 89 WebWhile both civilizations left astonishing changes in the world, the developments made by Greek thinkers outdo those of the Aztecs when evaluating their creation of a prosperous 86 As in other cultures, Roman sacrifice was not a single act, but instead comprised a series of actions that gain importance in relationship to each other.Footnote Sic factum ut Libero patri, repertori vitis, hirci immolarentur, proinde ut capite darent poenas; contra ut Minervae caprini generis nihil immolarent propter oleam, quod eam quam laeserit fieri dicunt sterilem (And so therefore, it has been established by opposing justifications that victims of the caprine sort are brought to the altar of one deity, but they are not sacrificed at the altar of another, since on account of the same hatred, one does not want to see a goat and the other desires to see one perish. 132.12). 8.9 per cent of the total, according to Moses, Reference Moses, Brocato and Terrenatoforthcoming, table 2. Greek gods had heavy emphasis placed on their 81 Although much work in anthropology and other social sciences has debated the relative merits of emic versus etic approaches, I find most useful recent research that has highlighted the value of the dynamic interplay that can develop between them.Footnote 60 He does not use the language of sacrifice, that is, he does not call the ritual a sacrificium nor does he identify the Vestal as a victim.Footnote Classicists generally assume that the modern idea of sacrifice as the ritual killing of an animal applies to the Roman context. While the evidence does not allow us to recover precise distinctions made among these rites (sacrificium, magmentum, and polluctum), it does strongly suggest that the Romans at least through the period of the Republic conceived of these rituals as somehow different from one another. The Romans worshipped the same goddess, or rather the same ideas embodied in her, under the name of Vesta, which is in reality identical with Lelekovi, Tino 19 The expanded range of sacrificium suggests that meat and vegetal produce were both welcomed by the gods, and that we should not assume that meat offerings were necessarily privileged over other gifts in every circumstance. The same two interment rituals would be performed alongside one another again just about a century later, in 113 b.c.e. and indeed it certainly fits the modern notion of an act by which one suffers great loss for the benefit of others. Those details, once recovered, can in turn subtly reshape our own idea of what sacrifice is and what it does. Subjects. WebIn Greek mythology the king of gods is known as Zeus, whereas Romans call the king of gods Jupiter. Here I use it as a tool to get at one aspect of Roman religious thought; I do not offer a sustained methodological critique of contemporary approaches of Roman antiquity. 96 450 Krenkel; Hor., Sat. 83 Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. It is unfortunate that the ancient sources on vegetal sacrifice are as exiguous as they are: it is not possible to determine what relationship its outward form bore to blood sacrifice. 27 The problem is widely acknowledged, but see specifically Moussy Reference Moussy1977; Reference Moussy1990; Engels Reference Engels2007: 25982. ipsilles with 398L, s.v. and Feature Flags: { If the devotio was not successful (i.e., the devotus somehow survived), expiatory steps had to be taken: the burial of a larger-than-life-sized statue and piaculum hostia
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