Braga, Cristina 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. This line of interpretation has enjoyed a wider influence in the study of Classical Antiquity than work along the lines of Burkert Reference Burkert and Bing1983 and Girard Reference Girard and Gregory1977, and the bibliography is enormous. WebAnswer (1 of 13): There are plenty of individual differences between certain deities as other posters have pointed out. MacBain Reference MacBain1982: 12735; Schultz Reference Schultz2010: 52930; Reference Schultz2012: 12930. As suggested by Bouma Reference Bouma1996: 1.23841. Has data issue: true 132.12). 24 Ov., F. 4.90142 with Fest. 29 Reed, Kelly The skeletal remains of dogs sometimes found interred with human remains or inside city walls are often interpreted as sacrifice by archaeologists.Footnote Paul. 53 38 60 1; Sall., Hist. Greeks call the queen Hera, whereas Romans queen of gods is Juno. The Greek gods domain over law had been mostly limited to the hereditary kings of individual city-states, but Rome grew into a unified Republic. Possible Answers: Roman temples were built on the ruins of previous structures. Test. At the centre of the whole complex was the immolatio, during which the animal was sprinkled with mola salsa (a mixture of spelt and salt), the flat of a knife was run along its back, and then it was slaughtered. Livy, however, treats each burial in a distinct way. As in a relief from the Forum of Trajan now in the Louvre (Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: fig. 3.95: Quid Agamemnon, cum devovisset Dianae quod in suo regno pulcherrimum natum esset illo anno, immolavit Iphigeniam, qua nihil erat eo quidem anno natum pulchrius? Because the context is Greek, it is safe to assume that Cicero is using, as he often does elsewhere when addressing a general audience, technical terms in a very general way. In Latin, one does not sacrifice with a knife or with an axe. 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. 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. Compare Var., R. 2.8.1. But upon further reflection, in fact, the use of cruets and plates actually emphasizes the importance of the meal that concluded a Roman sacrifice. This meant that Were these items sprinkled with mola salsa?Footnote 56 In Livy's account of the first devotio in 340 b.c.e. 97 52 9.641. 39 1). Scheid Reference Scheid1998: nn. Others include first-order vs. second-order categories, particular vs. universal, descriptive vs. redescriptive, and local vs. global. There is no question that the live interment of the Gauls and Greeks was a sacrifice: Livy identifies it as one of the sacrifices not part of the usual practice ordered by the Sibylline Books (sacrificia extraordinaria). 22 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 government, understanding of literature, and enlightened ideas. 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 In overlooking the differences between the Roman idea of sacrificium and the modern idea of sacrifice, we lose some of the details of how the Romans perceived a core element of their own experience of the divine. 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. Footnote Fontes, Lus the killing of the animal was not it, at least in an early period. The most common form of ritual killing among the Romans was the disposal of hermaphroditic children.Footnote See, for example, Morris et al. For an argument that wild animals are more common in ancient Mediterranean, and specifically in Etruscan, sacrifice than is generally acknowledged, see Rask Reference Rask2014. 16 J. C.), Quand faire, c'est croire: les rites sacrificiels des romains, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Dogs and People in Social, Working, Economic or Symbolic Interaction, Proceedings of the 9, Annalisi dei resi faunistici dell'area sacra di S. Omobono, Il Viver quotidiano in Roma arcaica: materiali dagli scavi del tempio arcaico nell'area sacra di S. Omobono, Hiera Kala: Images of Animal Sacrifice in Archaic and Classical Greece, Materia Magica: The Archaeology of Magic in Roman Egypt, Cyprus, and Spain, Rome's Vestal Virgins: A Study of Rome's Vestal Priestesses in the Late Republic and Early Empire, http://apps.brepolis.net/BrepolisPortal/default.aspx. 17ac) and the Cancellaria relief (Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: fig. Thus far, we have identified two points on which emic and etic ideas of what constitutes a Roman sacrifice do not align: when the critical transition from profane to sacred occurs and what kinds of things can be presented to the gods through the act of sacrificium. For a treatment of this methodological issue on a broader scale, see the rather pointed critique in Hopkins Reference Hopkins1978: 1808. Greek Translation. In this way, the native, or emic, Roman view of sacrifice is more expansive than ours. 413=Macr., Sat. 59 17 37 Aul. The answers to these questions might reshape our understanding of what were the crucial elements of sacrificium. and for his old-fashioned frugality and incorruptibility.Footnote 2 84 78 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. Match. 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. 83 and for front limbs.Footnote Jupiter was a sky-god who Romans believed oversaw all aspects of life; he is thought to have originated from the Greek god Zeus. In both the passages from Pliny and Apuleius, the ritual implements are of diminutive size. 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. 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 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. Lodwick, Lisa pop. The expression rem dvnam facer, to make a thing sacred, 86 26 incense,Footnote 78 Marcellus, de Medicamentis 8.50; Palmer Reference Palmer and Hall1996: 234. Some rituals, such as the recitation of prayers, were simple. 94 a more expensive offering that dominates in literary accounts of sacrifice. 65 68 Foundational is the collection of essays on Greek sacrifice in Detienne and Vernant Reference Detienne, Vernant and Wissing1989. On the contrary, Greek religion did not prefer to execute rituals as much as Macr., Sat. 89 78L, s.v. 344L and 345L, s.v. The elder Cato instructs his reader to pollucere a cup of wine and a daps (ritual meal) to Jupiter Dapalis (Agr. Plaut., Amph. 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. The prevalence of Roman images of sacrificial victims standing before the altar, that is, of the instant before mola salsa is sprinkled on them, is due to the importance of that moment. 66 and for looking at Roman religion in the context of other religious traditions. It is entirely possible that miniature ceramics were not, in reality, less expensive offerings than actual foodstuffs. Macr., Sat. for this article. 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. Greeks call the queen Hera, whereas Romans queen of gods is Juno. molo; Walde and Hofmann Reference Walde and Hofmann1954: 2.1046 s.v. Of the various forms of ritual killing that were part of their religious experience, the Romans only reacted with disgust to that form they identified as human sacrifice, a distinction in value sometimes lost when all these ritual forms are grouped together under the rubric sacrifice.Footnote 48 69 pecunia sacrificium makes clear that, despite its name, this ritual did not involve money. In fact, devotio is viewed positively by the Romans as a selfless, almost superhuman act of true leadership.Footnote Even if this is the case, the argument still stands that these passages underscore how essential was consumption to the ritual of sacrificium. Scheid Reference Scheid2005: 1002; Reference Scheid2012: 84. 46 22.57.26, discussed also in Schultz Reference Schultz2012: 1267. ex. See also Scheid Reference Scheid2012: 901. When the Romans sacrificed plant matter to the gods, it appears to be because that is what it was appropriate to do in the specific circumstance. Beavers, too, had curative properties for example, a mixture of honey wine, anise seed, and beaver oil was thought to cure flatulence (Plin., N.H. 20.193) and their anal scent glands (mistaken for testicles) were part of the Roman trade in luxury goods.Footnote 9 The biggest difference that I'm aware of is that the Classical Greek religion was much more the religion of myths that we all know, while the Class The catinus is a piece of everyday ware used to serve food that contains a lot of liquid (L. 5.120). WebOne major difference between Greek and Roman religion and Christianity is their understanding of the concept of deity. Sacrificium included vegetal and inedible offerings, and it was not the only Roman ritual that had living victims. from the archaic temple at the site of S. Omobono in Rome.Footnote I follow Elsner Reference Elsner2012: 121 in setting aside the plethora of images of the tauroctony of Mithras and the taurobolium of Cybele and Attis. Neither of the acts that Pliny mentions is explicitly identified as sacrificium, or as any other rite in particular. 9.7.mil.Rom.2). Footnote Created by. 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 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 5 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. ex Fest. Plu., RQ 83=Mor. 81 17 3.12.2. As the most extensive survey of meat production in Roman Italy has concluded, Dogs were variously trained as guards, protectors, companions, and pets, but they were not raised to be eaten (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2004: 74). WebRoman sacrificial practices were not functionally different from Greek, although the Roman rite was distinguishable from the Greek and Etruscan. 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 caedi. 50, From all this, it is reasonable to conclude that the poor could substitute small vessels for more expensive, edible sacrificial offerings. 190L s.v. From this same root also derives the name for the mixture sprinkled on the animal before it was killed, mola salsa.Footnote 36 wine,Footnote The hypothesis that only sacrificium required mola salsa is strongly supported by the sources, but because that is an argument ex silentio, it cannot be proved beyond all doubt. Footnote It is the only one of these terms that does not come to be used outside the realm of the divine. Devotio is frequently called self-sacrifice by modern scholars,Footnote 93L, s.v. The ritual seems to be even more flexible than sacrificium in the range of objects on which it could be performed. 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. 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. were linked.Footnote 11 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. and Paul. 81, Here we have two rituals that look, to an outsider, almost identical, but Livy takes pains to distinguish between them. 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 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. 91 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. 79 Although Roman sources identify some specific types of sacrifice (e.g., sollemne, piaculare, lustrale, anniversarium), they do not identify any of the other rituals under discussion here as types of sacrificium.Footnote 4.57. 2 WebIt housed an altar for animal sacrifice and was said to constantly burn incense. Chr. Moses, Reference Moses, Brocato and Terrenatoforthcoming, table 8. 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. 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. Similar difficulties beset efforts, both ancient and modern, to reconstruct the technical differences among the concepts of sacer, sanctus, and religiosus: see Rives Reference Rives and Tellegen-Couperus2011. e.g., J. Scheid, s.v. WebThe Greeks were striving for perfection in their art while the Romans were striving for real life people. Interim ex fatalibus libris sacrificia aliquot extraordinaria facta, inter quae Gallus et Galla, Graecus et Graeca in foro boario sub terram vivi demissi sunt in locum saxo consaeptum, iam ante hostiis humanis, minime Romano sacro, imbutum. Decline was interrupted by the short-lived Restoration under the emperor Augustus (reign 27 BC AD 14), then it resumed. Of these, three-fourths come from the first and second centuries c.e. 96 See, for example, Wilkens Reference Wilkens2006 and De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti Reference De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti2006. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. 55 WebDifferences between Greek and Roman sacrifices. Aldrete Reference Aldrete2014: 32. 233; CIL 12.1531=ILLRP 136=ILS 3411 (from Sora). The numerous sources for this event are collected and analysed in Engels Reference Engels2007: 41618, 4438. 51 The present study turns the insider-outsider lens on the study of Roman sacrifice: it aims to trace, through an analysis of a set of Latin religious terminology, how Romans thought about sacrifice and to highlight how this conception, which I refer to by the Latin term sacrificium, relates to two dominant aspects of modern theorizations of sacrifice as a universal human behaviour: sacrifice as violence and sacrifice as ritual meal. favisae. Vaz, Filipe Costa Finally, while other rituals seem to have fallen into desuetude, or at least to have fallen out of the literature, by the late Republic or early Empire, sacrificium remained a vital part of Roman religious life for centuries. Ubiquitous in the scholarship is the assumption that if the gods receive an animal, it is sacrifice, but if the gods receive vegetable produce and other inanimate edibles, those are something different: they are offerings. 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 Upon examination of the Roman evidence, however, it becomes evident that this distinction is an etic one: while we see at least two different rituals, the Romans are clear that they sacrifice a wide range of food substances beyond animal flesh. molo. 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).. Vuli, Hrvoje 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 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. Although it is sixty years old, the lesson still works well. refriva faba; Plin., N.H. 18.119. On the general absence of wild meat from the Roman diet, see MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2004: 1902. uncovered in votive deposits throughout Italy. The main god and goddesses in Roman culture were Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. 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. Another famous instance of this scene is on the Boscoreale cup (Aldrete Reference Aldrete2014: 33, fig. 54 It is likely, but admittedly not certain, that the concept of sacrificium I delineate here was also at play in citizen communities throughout the Empire, at least at moments when those communities performed public rituals in the same manner as did people in the capital. 7 molo; de Vaan Reference De Vaan2008: 3867 s.v. 280 BC and 290D; Rom. For the difference in Roman attitudes toward human sacrifice and other forms of ritual killing, see Schultz Reference Schultz2010. 3, 13456; Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 1225; Rpke Reference Rpke and Gordon2007: 1378. 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 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. thysa. As in the Greek world, sacrifice was the central ritual of religion. 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 Rhadamanthus and Minos were brothers. 14.30; Sil. At her birth, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, sprang directly from the head of Zeus. Cornell, T. J. 76. Burkert Reference Burkert and Bing1983: 3; Girard Reference Girard and Gregory1977: 1. (ed.) This is a clear difference from Athena, who was never associated with the weather. 29 47 Modern theorizations of sacrifice focus on animal victims, treating the sacrifice of vegetal substances, if they are considered at all, as an afterthought or simply setting vegetal offerings as a second, lesser ritual, a substitution or a pale imitation.Footnote 2013: The Fragments of the Roman Historians, 3 vols, Oxford, Hornblower, S., and Spawforth, A. 2.47.10 (M)=2.44.10 McGushin. 66 Military commanders would pay homage to Jupiter at his temple after pecunia sacrificium; Paul. 75 33 358L, s.v. and Paul. It is understandable that, from the etic viewpoint, two rituals performed in roughly the same way should appear to be identical to each other, even if emic accounts distinguish between them. Fest. The corresponding substantive is magmentum, a type of offering laid out only at certain temples.Footnote The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. 74 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 Douglas Reference Douglas and Douglas1982: 117. WebIn Greek mythology the king of gods is known as Zeus, whereas Romans call the king of gods Jupiter. sacrima. 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 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. Ernout and Meillet Reference Ernout and Meillet1979: 376 s.v. Feature Flags: { 423L s.v. mactus; Walde and Hofmann Reference Walde and Hofmann1954: 2.4 s.v. 56 While there appears to have been an original distinction among the rites of sacrificium, polluctum, and magmentum, we cannot recover the details of it in any serious way. 60 The errors and flaws that remain are all my own. The only inedible items that we know from literary sources were objects of sacrificium are all miniature versions of regular, everyday serveware: a cruet, a plate, and a ladle. There is a difference, however. The database is a very useful, but not infallible tool. 67 Another major difference between Greek gods and Roman gods is in the physical appearance of the deities. 67 ex Fest. 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. Q. Fabius Pictor was sent to the oracle at Delphi to ascertain by what prayers and supplications the Romans might placate the gods, and what end would there be to such calamities. Others, such as animal Contra Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 223. The ritual is so closely tied to the notion of dining that polluctum could be used for everyday meals (e.g., Plaut., Rud.