92 Of this class of rituals, sacrificium does seem to have been somehow different from the others. Dogs: Fest. 2.10.34, quoting a letter of Varro, and Paul. I use ritual killing as a blanket term for any rite, including but not limited to sacrifice, that involves the death of a human being. Dog corpses were sometimes deposited with tablets that contained curses, and dog figurines are among the required items for performing some spells.Footnote ex Fest. "useRatesEcommerce": false 33 and again in 114 or 113 b.c.e. 82. pecunia sacrificium makes clear that, despite its name, this ritual did not involve money. 113L, s.v. Macr., Sat. 4 WebThe standard view of paganism (traditional city-based polytheistic Graeco-Roman religion) in the Roman empire has long been one of decline beginning in the second and first centuries BC. Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: figs 83 and 89b. Foundational is the collection of essays on Greek sacrifice in Detienne and Vernant Reference Detienne, Vernant and Wissing1989. Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes. 22.57.26, discussed also in Schultz Reference Schultz2012: 1267. See Oakley Reference Oakley1998: 481 and Sacco Reference Sacco2004: 316. 35 Nor was it secular, capital punishment; the punishment of criminals usually took a more direct and swift form: strangulation, beating, crucifixion, or precipitation (i.e., throwing someone off a cliff).Footnote Furthermore, it seems reasonable to conclude that the miniature clay cows, birds, and other animals that are also commonly found in votive collections were also substitutes for live sacrificial victims.Footnote On the Latin terminology for living sacrificial victims, see Prescendi Reference Prescendi2009. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. 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. 13 89 13 Peter=FRH F17. The numerous sources for this event are collected and analysed in Engels Reference Engels2007: 41618, 4438. See, for example, Morris et al. In contrast, as I have pointed out, Livy uses the language of sacrifice to describe the second interment and in the next breath expressly distances Roman tradition from it, calling it a rite scarcely Roman (minime Romano sacro). The other rite observed by the Romans that required a human death was called devotio, and it seems to have been restricted to a single family father, son, and grandson (it is possible our sources have multiplied a single occasion), all of whom, as commanders-in-the-field, vowed to commit themselves and the enemy troops to the gods of the underworld in order to ensure a Roman victory. Yet the problem remains that dogs did not form a regular or significant part of the Romans diet, nor did wild animals of any sort.Footnote Another famous instance of this scene is on the Boscoreale cup (Aldrete Reference Aldrete2014: 33, fig. This statement and much of what follows is based on a series of searches in the Brepolis on-line database of Latin literature, Libraries A and B (http://apps.brepolis.net/BrepolisPortal/default.aspx) conducted throughout the summer of 2015. 62 53, At first glance, the Roman habit of sacrificing items that people cannot eat (cruets and small plates) suggests that another dominant strain in modern theorizations of sacrifice might not really apply to the Roman case. 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. As in the Greek world, sacrifice was the central ritual of religion. 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 Moses (Reference Moses, Brocato and Terrenatoforthcoming, table 2) reports that these species account for 89.9 per cent of the total number of individual animal specimens recovered. 97 47 Minos gave laws to Crete. 35 subsilles. 9.641. 44 Classicists generally assume that the modern idea of sacrifice as the ritual killing of an animal applies to the Roman context. 17ac) and the Cancellaria relief (Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: fig. most famously those of Burkert, who identifies sacrificial slaughter as the basic experience of the sacred, and Girard, who begins his investigation into the origin of sacrifice by asserting its close kinship to murder and criminal violence.Footnote Footnote 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 e.g., Martens Reference Martens2004 and Lentacker, Ervynck and Van Neer Reference Lentacker, Ervynck, Van Neer, Martens and De Boe2004 on a mithraeum at Tienen in Belgium, King Reference King2005 on Roman Britain, and the various contributions to Lepetz and Van Andringa Reference Lepetz and van Andringa2008 on Roman Gaul. 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. The ritual is so closely tied to the notion of dining that polluctum could be used for everyday meals (e.g., Plaut., Rud. The distinction is preserved by Suet., Prat. 73 The limited sources we have are imprecise in their use of the terms even Cicero, who was an augur and was surely aware of the distinction.Footnote 77 89 25 48 It appears that if a worshipper could not afford to sacrifice something that was itself tasty, he might fulfill his obligation by giving something that evoked the idea of it.Footnote For illustration, we can turn once again to the elder Pliny, who writes about the habits of the Gallic tribes north of the Alps: et nuperrime trans Alpis hominem immolari gentium earum more solitum, quod paulum a mandendo abest (And very recently, on the other side of the Alps, in accordance with the custom of those peoples, individuals were habitually sacrificed, which is not all that far from eating them N.H. 7.9). View all Google Scholar citations molo; Walde and Hofmann Reference Walde and Hofmann1954: 2.1046 s.v. Cic., Red. Devotio is frequently called self-sacrifice by modern scholars,Footnote 40 Were they always burnt on an altar or brazier? I also thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, suggestions and objections that have greatly improved this piece. WebDifferences between Greek and Roman sacrifices. Correct answer: What is a major difference between Greek and Roman temples? 39 52 As proof, he recounts a story about M. Goats: Var., R. 1.2.19; Liv. Once we have recognized that there are two notions of sacrifice at play, we can set aside our etic, outsider ideas for the moment and look at the Roman sources anew. Terms in this set (7) Which one 38 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 71. The most famous vegetal offering occurred at the Liberalia, the festival of the god Liber, described by Varro: Liberalia dicta, quod per totum oppidum eo die sedent sacerdotes Liberi anus hedera coronatae cum libis et foculo pro emptore sacrificantes (The Liberalia is so called because on that day priestesses of Liber, old women crowned with ivy, settle themselves throughout the whole town with cakes and a brazier, making sacrifices on behalf of the customer).Footnote The preceding discussion has, I hope, made clear that the Romans own notion of sacrifice is broader and more complex than is generally perceived. This should prompt researchers, myself included, to greater caution when presenting a native in our case, Roman point of view and to greater clarity about whether the concept under discussion at any given moment is really the Romans or ours, or is shared by both groups. } 22 noun. The literary evidence for this is slender but persuasive. Plaut., Stich. In this section, I make the case that the related and equally widespread notion that all Roman rituals that required the death of an animal were sacrifices obfuscates the variety of rituals that Romans had available to them, effacing some of the fine distinctions Romans made about the ways they approached their gods. See, for example, Wilkens Reference Wilkens2006 and De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti Reference De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti2006. 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 286L and 287L, s.v. Gel. Plu., RQ 83=Mor. As suggested by Bouma Reference Bouma1996: 1.23841. The ultimate conclusion of this investigation is that, although in many important ways this ritual comes close to aligning with the dominant modern understanding of sacrifice, Roman sacrificium is both more and less than the ritualized killing of a living being as an offering to the divine:Footnote Finally, it appears that some of these rites ceased to be performed by some point in the imperial period and that sacrificium continued for centuries. A wider range of scholarly approaches is presented by McClymond Reference McClymond2008: 124. 64 In Livy's account of the first devotio in 340 b.c.e. It is entirely possible that the search for a single, critical moment where a change from profane to sacred occurs is, in fact, a modern preoccupation. 76. Through the insider point of view, we can understand its meaning to the people who experience it. 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. 93 The present study argues that looking at the relationship between sacrificium as it is presented in Roman sources and comparing that with modern notions of sacrifice reveals that some important, specific aspects of what has been conceived of as Roman sacrifice are not there in the ancient sources and may not be part of how the Romans perceived their ritual. 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. The quotation comes from Frankfurter Reference Frankfurter2011: 75. 70 But one of the things that I consider quite interesting was the difference approaches that the Greeks and Romans had towards the Gods as a whole. 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 Even if this is the case, the argument still stands that these passages underscore how essential was consumption to the ritual of sacrificium. 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. 23 For the Greeks ), Dictionnaire tymologique de la langue latine, Interpreting sacrificial ritual in Roman poetry: disciplines and their models, Rituals in Ink: A Conference on Religion and Literary Production in Ancient Rome, La mise mort sacrificielle sur les reliefs romains, La Violence dans les mondes grec et romain, Le sacrifice disparu: les reliefs de boucherie, Sacrifices, march de la viande et pratiques alimentaires dans les cits du monde romain, I reperti ossei animali nell'area archeologica di S. Omobono (19621964), Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, Animal remains from temples in Roman Britain, The symbolic meaning of the cock: the animal remains from the, Roman Mithraism: the Evidence of the Small Finds, Archologie du sacrifice animal en Gaule romaine, Prodigy and Expiation: A Study in Religion and Politics in Republican Rome, Production and Consumption of Animals in Roman Italy, Re-thinking sacred rubbish: the ritual deposits of the temple of Mithras at Tienen (Belgium), Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice, The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader, Views from inside and outside: integrating emic and etic insights about culture and justice judgment, Ricerche nell'area dei templi di Fortuna e Mater Matuta, Revue de philologie, de littrature et d'histoire anciennes, Etruscan Italy: Etruscan Influences on the Civilizations of Italy from Antiquity to the Modern Era, Why were the Vestals virgins? Braga, Cristina WebRomans invested much of their time serving the gods, performing rituals and sacrifices in honor of them. Some more support for the notion that these were not interchangeable can be drawn from material evidence, visual representations of the moment of ritual slaughter. While the attention of our Roman sources is drawn most frequently to blood sacrifice, there is good reason to think that, if there was indeed a climax to the ritual,Footnote Let me be clear. 3.763829. refriva faba. There is some limited zooarchaeological evidence for the consumption of dogs at some Roman sites, such as the inclusion of dog bones bearing marks of butchery among bone deposits that comprise primarily bovine and ovine remains, but it is not widespread. 62. In light of the importance of ritual killing in modern theoretical treatments of sacrifice, the relative paucity of slaughter scenes in Roman art requires some explanation. 99 Since Greeks were the first ones, Romans followed them. MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2004: 5974. Yet so stark is the discrepancy between his (assumed) outsider perspective and our own insider understanding of the value of a bathroom, that most readers do not recognize themselves the first time they read this piece. thysa. Neither of the acts that Pliny mentions is explicitly identified as sacrificium, or as any other rite in particular. 61 There are at least two other rituals that the Romans performed that also required the death of a person. Another possible interpretation of the disappearance of some rituals from Latin literature is that the Romans no longer thought of them as distinct from one another, preferring to treat them all as sacrificium. 16 J. magmentum; Serv., A. The most common images of blood sacrifice in Roman art are procession scenes of animals being led to the altar or standing before it, waiting for mola salsa to be applied to them.Footnote 1034 seems to draw an equivalence between sacrificare and mactare (cf. Parents: Aeacus: Zeus and Aegina; Rhadamanthus and Minos: Zeus and Europa. While vegetal and meat offerings were on a par, inedible gifts could be sacrificed only as substitutes for edible offerings when money was a concern. 56 If we allow only items explicitly identified as sacrificia in Roman sources, our list includes beans,Footnote Some rituals, such as the recitation of prayers, were simple. The only Roman reference to the sacrifice of a deer pertains to a Greek context: Ov., F. 1.3878 where the deer is sacrificed to Diana as a substitute for Iphigenia. 30 17 Goats and dogs are less common, and we can expand the range of species to include horses and birds if we admit animals that are identified only as the object of immolatio, if not of sacrificium itself.Footnote 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. 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. Those poor Nacirema, who despise their physical form and try to improve it through ritual and ceremony, at first seem so different from us: primitive, superstitious, unsophisticated. Vuli, Hrvoje On fourteen occasions between 209 and 92 b.c.e., androgyne infants and children were included among the prodigies reported to the Roman Senate. Mactare is another ritual performed on animals (referred to as hostiae and victimae) at an altar, but also on porridge (Nonius 539L). Perhaps these reliefs preserve the performance of one or more of the rituals that seem to have faded in popularity by the high imperial period: magmentum and polluctum. In Books 29 and 30 of his Natural History, the elder Pliny includes lizards in numerous medicinal recipes to cure everything from hair loss (29.108) to lower back pain (30.53) to dysentery (30.55), and the only text we have that identifies the contents of a bulla, the amulet worn by young Roman boys, instructs the reader to put lizard eyes inside it.Footnote This disjuncture between physical remains and written accounts is another reminder of the bias of our ancient authors toward the activities of the rich and toward state ritual. Total loading time: 0 Another major difference between Greek gods and Roman gods is in the physical appearance of the deities. The answer is that human sacrifice, which the Romans are quick to dismiss as something other people do (note that, although Livy is clear that the burial of Gauls and Greeks is a sacrifice, he also says that it was hardly a Roman rite), is closely linked in the Roman mind with cannibalism. Hemina fr. 26. Elsner has proposed that the choice, increasingly frequent in the third century c.e., to represent the whole sacrificial ritual with libation and incense-burning scenes rather than with images involving animals is an indication of the increased emphasis on vegetarian sacrifice in that period.Footnote But then they turn out to be us. 24 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. 32 While there is a growing body of work done on the osteoarchaeological material from other regions of the Empire, especially the north-western provinces,Footnote Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. Scheid Reference Scheid2005: 4457; Reference Scheid and Rpke2007: 2639. October equus. From here, we can speculate that sacrifice was not understood by the Romans primarily as the ritual slaughter of an animal. aryxnewland. Cornell, T. J. Others include first-order vs. second-order categories, particular vs. universal, descriptive vs. redescriptive, and local vs. global. 79 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 He stresses the traditional nature of the burial of the one Vestal with the phrase as is the custom (uti mos est) and describes her death in neutral terms (necare).Footnote ex Fest. and Narbo in Gallia Narbonensis (CIL 12.4333, dated to 11 c.e.). 16 Elsner Reference Elsner2012 emphasizes the heavy influence of early Christian writers on modern theorizations of sacrifice. 66 Study sets, textbooks, questions. 54 This assertion is based on a search of sacrific* on the Brepolis Library of Latin Texts A. Dogs, and puppies in particular, were thought to have some medicinal and magical properties: Pliny reports that some people thought the ashes of a dog's cranium, when consumed with a beverage, could cure abdominal pain (N.H. 30.53) and, when mixed with honey wine in particular, could cure jaundice (N.H. 30.93). there is a relative dearth of published studies that deal in any serious way with the collections of bones found on various sites from Roman Italy.Footnote 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. 20 The answers to these questions might reshape our understanding of what were the crucial elements of sacrificium. Greek Translation. It appears that no Roman source ever uses the language of sacrificium to describe devotio,Footnote Carretero, Lara Gonzalez WebWhat's the Greek word for sacrifice? ex Fest. Paul. A parallel use of sacrificare is found in Apuleius Apologia 18, a passage which also shares Pliny's focus on poverty: paupertas, inquam, prisca aput saecula omnium civitatium conditrix, omnium artium repertrix, omnium peccatorum inops, omnis gloriae munifica, cunctis laudibus apud omnis nationes perfuncta. Other forms of ritual killing do not receive the same sort of negative judgement by Roman authors, and one form, devotio, even has strongly positive associations.