The equation of sacrifice with the offering of an animal is not completely divorced from the ancient sources. 42 Ernout and Meillet Reference Ernout and Meillet1979: 376 s.v. 9 By placing this variety of rites that the Romans had under the single rubric of sacrifice, we have lost sight of some of the complexity and nuance of Roman ritual life. 50 69a). Were they always burnt on an altar or brazier? Plin., N.H. 31.89 is usually taken to refer to sacrifice (so Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 105) but the text mentions only sacra, not sacrificia. mactus; de Vaan Reference De Vaan2008: 357 s.v. 6.343 and 11.108. Cf., n. 89 below. It is possible that this genus-species relationship in fact existed in the Roman mind, as is perhaps suggested by the fact that sacrificare means to make sacred, and these other rituals seem to be different ways of doing the same work, namely transferring items from human to divine ownership. Scheid Reference Scheid1998: nn. One relatively well documented example is the collection of bones dating to the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e. 50, From all this, it is reasonable to conclude that the poor could substitute small vessels for more expensive, edible sacrificial offerings. ex Fest. 87 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. As in a relief from the Forum of Trajan now in the Louvre (Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: fig. 99 ), 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? Here's a list of translations. Learn. 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 413=Macr., Sat. Throughout his corpus Cicero uses a range of technical divinatory terms, including augur, ostentum, and portentum, in rather general ways, even in De Divinatione where one might reasonably expect him to be more precise. 22.57.26; Cass. It is important to note that there is no indication that these vegetal offerings were thought to be substitutions for what would have been, in better circumstances, animal victims.Footnote We do not know what name the Romans gave the ritual burial of an unchaste Vestal Virgin, but we know it was not sacrifice. 78 71 25 Max. Plaut., Stich 233; Cato, Agr. Hemina fr. For a treatment of this methodological issue on a broader scale, see the rather pointed critique in Hopkins Reference Hopkins1978: 1808. 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 [1] Comparative mythology has served a Create. 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 Detry, Cleia WebOne major difference between Greek and Roman religion and Christianity is their understanding of the concept of deity. 15 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. 22.1.19; 45.16.6; Plin., N.H. 36.39; Tac., Ann. 26. Poverty, I say, is the ancient founder of all states throughout the ages, the discoverer of all arts, devoid of all transgressions, resplendent in every type of glory, and enjoying every praise among all the nations. 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. 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 Others include first-order vs. second-order categories, particular vs. universal, descriptive vs. redescriptive, and local vs. global. 55 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. 20 Two famous examples are found on the altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus (Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: fig. Other than the range of items that can be polluctum, the only other thing we know about the ritual is that it involved an altar, which is, of course, the proper locus of sacrifice. Let me be clear. In Livy's account of the first devotio in 340 b.c.e. 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 Hammers appear in only fifteen scenes, two-thirds of which date between the first century b.c.e. Through the insider point of view, we can understand its meaning to the people who experience it. 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 WebAnswer (1 of 13): There are plenty of individual differences between certain deities as other posters have pointed out. 77 Birds: Suet., Calig. mactus; Walde and Hofmann Reference Walde and Hofmann1954: 2.4 s.v. eadem est enim paupertas apud Graecos in Aristide iusta, in Phocione benigna, in Epaminonda strenua, in Socrate sapiens, in Homero diserta. 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. WebDifferences between Greek and Roman sacrifices. A wider range of scholarly approaches is presented by McClymond Reference McClymond2008: 124. 17 1 Answer. In both the passages from Pliny and Apuleius, the ritual implements are of diminutive size. 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. Of this class of rituals, sacrificium does seem to have been somehow different from the others. In what follows, I aim to clear away a few of the accretions that have arisen from more than a century of modern theorizing about the nature and meaning of sacrifice as a universal human phenomenon in order to gain a better understanding of those actions that the Romans identify by the Latin words sacrificium and sacrificare.Footnote WebRomans invested much of their time serving the gods, performing rituals and sacrifices in honor of them. magmentum; Serv., A. Far less common in the S. Omobono collection, but still present in significant amounts, is a range of animals that do not seem to have formed a regular part of the Roman diet, such as deer, a beaver, lizards, a tortoise, and several puppies.Footnote See Oakley Reference Oakley1998: 481 and Sacco Reference Sacco2004: 316. ex Fest. 190L s.v. 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 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. Unlike sacrificare, which remained solely in the divine realm, mactare did not need to involve the gods: mactare is something that one Roman could do to another, both literally (one can mactare someone else with a golden cup, for example) and metaphorically (with misfortune or expense). 86 132.2; Scheid Reference Scheid2005: 1369). Nacirema is American spelt backwards, and Miner shows to, and interprets for, us our own bathroom habits.Footnote 113L, s.v. Sacrificium included vegetal and inedible offerings, and it was not the only Roman ritual that had living victims. 19 Compare Var., R. 2.8.1. Roman sacrificium is both less and more than the typical etic notion of sacrifice. This is the insider-outsider problem in nuce. ex Fest. 76. On a wider scale, the arguments made here about the nature of Roman sacrificium further undermine the increasingly discredited idea that sacrifice as a universal human behaviour is primarily, if not exclusively, about the violence of killing an animal victim. 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. Total loading time: 0 Roman sources make clear that Romans had several different rituals (sacrificium, polluctum, and magmentum) that appear, based on prominent structural similarities, to have been related to one another. 1). The Romans then observed a regular set of expiatory rituals, most importantly offerings made to the goddesses Ceres and Proserpina by matrons of the city and the procession of a chorus of twenty-seven virgins. Livy, however, treats each burial in a distinct way. 37 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 2.10.34, quoting a letter of Varro, and Paul. Knives would have been used only in conjunction with one or other of these implements. Of these, three-fourths come from the first and second centuries c.e. 51, There is, of course, a large leap in scale from two literary references to an explanation for a ritual practice performed in hundreds of locations over many centuries. Sacrifices of various cakes (liba, popana, pthoes) to the Ilythiae and to Apollo and Diana were part of Augustus celebration of the Secular Games in 17 b.c.e., a clear indication that vegetal offerings were not limited to the lower social classes.Footnote Although it is sixty years old, the lesson still works well. 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 12 Thus the most likely reading of the passage in Pliny is that Curius sacrificed the guttum faginum to the gods. As suggested by Bouma Reference Bouma1996: 1.23841. Rpke Reference Rpke, Georgoudi, Piettre and Schmidt2005 offers a different interpretation of the meal that follows the sacrifice. The ancients derived the term from magis auctus and understood it to mean to increase and by extension to honour with.Footnote There is also a queen of gods in Greek and Roman mythologies. If the commander who devoted himself did not die in battle, he was interdicted from performing any ritual on behalf of the state (publicum divinum). Instead they seem to have conceived of it as the ritual consecration of an animal which was afterwards killed and eaten. Hermes, who had winged feet, was the messenger of the gods and could fly anywhere with great speed. 82. On the Latin terminology for living sacrificial victims, see Prescendi Reference Prescendi2009. 7 Plut., RQ 52=Mor. Liv. were linked.Footnote 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 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. For this same poverty is, among the Greeks, just in Aristides, kind in Phocion, vigorous in Epaminondas, wise in Socrates, and eloquent in Homer. Neither Miner's nor his reader's understanding is right and the other wrong: they are two different views of the same set of data, and both are valuable. 277AC). 90 and Var., L 5.122. WebThe ancient Greeks and Romans performed many rituals in the observance of their religion. 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. See also Scheid Reference Scheid2012: 901. 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. 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. WebThe gods, heroes, and humans of Greek mythology were flawed. 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. wine,Footnote 79 88 MacBain Reference MacBain1982: 12735; Schultz Reference Schultz2010: 52930; Reference Schultz2012: 12930. 48 216,Footnote One can also pollucere grain, wine, oil, cheese, meat, fish with scales, a host of other food items, and even unidentified (and presumably inedible) goods.Footnote Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 22441 and, arriving at the same conclusion by a different path, Schultz Reference Schultz2012: 1323. The skeletal remains of dogs sometimes found interred with human remains or inside city walls are often interpreted as sacrifice by archaeologists.Footnote 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. Jupiter was a sky-god who Romans believed oversaw all aspects of life; he is thought to have originated from the Greek god Zeus. Therefore, instead of privileging either the emic or etic, I argue for an increased awareness of the insider-outsider distinction and for an approach to Roman religion that makes use of both emic and etic concepts. 287L, s.v. 9.7.mil.Rom.2). 24 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). 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. In this way, the native, or emic, Roman view of sacrifice is more expansive than ours. 41 For the difference in Roman attitudes toward human sacrifice and other forms of ritual killing, see Schultz Reference Schultz2010. Ioppolo Reference Ioppolo1972; Tagliacozzo Reference Tagliacozzo1989. The numerous sources for this event are collected and analysed in Engels Reference Engels2007: 41618, 4438. the ritual began with a procession that was followed by a praefatio, a preliminary offering of prayers, wine and incense. Plaut., Stich. 65 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. 62. 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. Test. 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 3.763829. 29 Greek Gods vs Roman Gods. 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 example, think about the Roman and Greek mythologies about gods. WebAnswer (1 of 3): The differences between the heroes of Greco-Roman mythology come down to significant contrasts in the cultural identities of both civilisations. 74 To explain the decision to sometimes portray one weapon instead of the other, Aldrete posits that various gods, cults, and rituals may have dictated certain procedures or tools.Footnote Modern scholars sometimes group all of these rites under the rubric sacrifice.Footnote The burial of Gauls and Greeks was a sacrifice, but one that Romans ought not to have performed. 13 84 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 It is entirely possible that miniature ceramics were not, in reality, less expensive offerings than actual foodstuffs. Were they used in some form of divination?Footnote The most common form of ritual killing among the Romans was the disposal of hermaphroditic children.Footnote Now, the Romans did not eat people, so how does their performance of human sacrifice reinforce the link between sacrifice and dining? 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. Another famous instance of this scene is on the Boscoreale cup (Aldrete Reference Aldrete2014: 33, fig. 55, The link between consumption and sacrifice is also reinforced by a second category of sacrificial items that Romans did not eat: animals, including human animals, that were not regularly included in the Roman diet. Even if this is the case, the argument still stands that these passages underscore how essential was consumption to the ritual of sacrificium. Oliveira, Cludia 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. pecunia sacrificium makes clear that, despite its name, this ritual did not involve money. WebRoman sacrificial practices were not functionally different from Greek, although the Roman rite was distinguishable from the Greek and Etruscan. 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. See, for example, Morris et al. eadem paupertas etiam populo Romano imperium a primordio fundavit, proque eo in odiernum diis immortalibus simpulo et catino fictili sacrificat. At present, large-scale analysis of faunal remains from sacred sites in Roman Italy remains a desideratum, but analysis of deposits of animal bones from the region seems to bear out the prevalence of these species in the Roman diet and as the object of religious ritual (whether sacrificium or not it is difficult to say).Footnote The Christian fathers equation of sacrifice with violence has shaped twentieth-century theorizations of sacrifice as a universal human phenomenon,Footnote 34 Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. For the Greeks Further support for the idea that the act of sprinkling mola salsa was either the single, critical moment or an especially important moment in a process that transferred the animal to the divine realm, is that mola salsa seems to be the only major element of sacrifice that is not documented explicitly by a Roman source as appearing in any other ritual or in any other area of daily life: processions, libations, prayers, slaughter, and dining all occurred in non-sacrificial contexts.Footnote 67 82 17 The S. Omobono material shows a definite preference for certain species (sheep, goats, pigs),Footnote Aldrete's survey of images commonly identified as sacrifice scenes makes clear that Roman art depicts different procedures (hitting with a hammer, chopping with an axe) and implements (hammers, axes, knives), and that the preference of implement changes over time. As illustrated by Livy's description of the first Decius to perform the ritual as he rode out to meet the enemy: aliquanto augustior humano visu, sicut caelo missus (8.9.10). 53 64 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 B. Rives provided valuable consultation on specific points and V. C. Moses generously shared her work-in-progress on the osteoarchaeological evidence from S. Omobono. See, for example, citations from Pomponius and Afranius in Non. Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of the powerful influences of ritual and ceremony. Vaz, Filipe Costa For example, the apparent contradiction between Roman abhorrence of ritual killing and the frequency with which Romans performed various forms of it is, to a large extent, explicable once it is recognized that the Romans objected only to the performance (by themselves as much as by others) of sacrificium on human victims. 27 Another animal sometimes sacrificed by the Romans but not regularly eaten by them is the human animal. Some rituals, such as the recitation of prayers, were simple. 58.47, 64.1.467, and 68.1.49. Although there is substantial evidence for other types of sacrificial offerings in the literary sources (see below, Section III), Roman authors do not discuss them at length, preferring instead to talk about grand public sacrifices of multiple animal victims. 14 The corresponding substantive is magmentum, a type of offering laid out only at certain temples.Footnote Greek Translation. Expert solutions. Fontes, Lus 32 As in the Greek world, sacrifice was the central ritual of religion. } The offering of a dog to Robigus may be the same ritual as the augurium canarium referred to by Plin., N.H. 18.14. Feature Flags: { Ernout and Meillet Reference Ernout and Meillet1979: 411 s.v. The answers to these questions might reshape our understanding of what were the crucial elements of sacrificium. Van Straten Reference Van Straten1995: 188. WebRoman sacrificial practices were not functionally different from Greek, although the Roman rite was distinguishable from the Greek and Etruscan. Cf. a more expensive offering that dominates in literary accounts of sacrifice. 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. At N.H. 29.578, Pliny tells us that a dog was crucified annually at a particular location in Rome, and that puppies used to be considered to be such pure eating that they were used in place of victims (hostiarum vice) to appease the divine; puppy was still on the menu at banquets for the gods in Pliny's own day. 39 molo; de Vaan Reference De Vaan2008: 3867 s.v. The issue remains active in religious studies, as it does in cultural anthropology more widely. 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.

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