. Of these, only dogs are attested in the written sources as victims of Roman sacrifice, albeit rarely.Footnote Now, the Romans did not eat people, so how does their performance of human sacrifice reinforce the link between sacrifice and dining? As in a relief from the Forum of Trajan now in the Louvre (Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: fig. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. 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 Minos gave laws to Crete. 19 21 20 Modern etymologists disagree on the origin of the term. 5 In Cf. WebRomans invested much of their time serving the gods, performing rituals and sacrifices in honor of them. There is also a queen of gods in Greek and Roman mythologies. One does, however, sacrifice with a cow, with a pig, or with a little cruet. 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. ex Fest. and Paul. 45.16.6. The main god and goddesses in Roman culture were Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. 13 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. Were they used in some form of divination?Footnote WebWhat's the Greek word for sacrifice? Finally, both ancient societies have twelve main gods and goddesses. 48 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. 21.5). In Latin, one does not sacrifice with a knife or with an axe. Although they were not suitable as daily fare, there is evidence that several of the unexpected species from the S. Omobono deposit were edible on special occasions or in dire circumstances: they are surprisingly prevalent in magical and medicinal recipes. 63 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 elder Pliny, in his Natural History, discusses the high regard in which ancient Romans held simple vessels made of beechwood. 86 40 88 Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes. Van Straten Reference Van Straten1995: 188. ex. 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). 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. Sacrificium is the performance of a complex of actions that presents the gods with an edible gift by the sprinkling of mola salsa and the ultimate goal of which seems to be the feeding of both gods and men. 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. Was a portion consumed later? Those studying ancient Greece and Rome in general and those focusing on Roman religion in particular have been wrestling with these issues for some time even if the terms of the discussion have not been explicit.Footnote For the difference in Roman attitudes toward human sacrifice and other forms of ritual killing, see Schultz Reference Schultz2010. WebWhile Greek and Roman sculpture and ruins are linked with the purity of white marble in the Western mind, most of the works were originally polychrome, painted in multiple, lifelike colors. Others include first-order vs. second-order categories, particular vs. universal, descriptive vs. redescriptive, and local vs. global. Var., L. 5.112; see also Cic., Har. 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 3.3.2, citing the late republican jurist Trebatius; Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 256. 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 Max. 64 36 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 The vast majority of the bones come from pigs, sheep, and goats. Sorted by: 6. Footnote 61 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. The expression rem dvnam facer, to make a thing sacred, shows that sacrifice was an act of transfer of ownership. 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 Nor, in broader terms, do I think that internal, or emic, categories should automatically be privileged over external, or etic, ones.Footnote 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. There are at least two other rituals that the Romans performed that also required the death of a person. 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 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). 66 33 frag. 68 11 12 76. 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. 17ac) and the Cancellaria relief (Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: fig. Plutarch is the only source for dog sacrifice at the Lupercalia (RQ 68 and 111=Mor. 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. 100 This is made clear in numerous passages from several Roman authors. 15 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. I have tried to respond to them all. 10 98 Sacrificium included vegetal and inedible offerings, and it was not the only Roman ritual that had living victims. This assertion is based on a search of sacrific* on the Brepolis Library of Latin Texts A. The tendency is intensified in Christian sources, which discuss pagan sacrifice exclusively in terms of blood sacrifice, distinguishing the shameful blood of animal victims from the sacred blood of Christ.Footnote The distinction is preserved by Suet., Prat. ex Fest. Scheid Reference Scheid2005: 1002; Reference Scheid2012: 84. 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. Columella 2.21.4 might also refer to dog sacrifice, but the verb (feceris) leaves it ambiguous as to which ritual was being performed. Dogs had other ritual uses as well. Vuli, Hrvoje See Rosenblitt Reference Rosenblitt2011 for the connection between these two passages. Scheid Reference Scheid1998: nn. Mactare is another ritual performed on animals (referred to as hostiae and victimae) at an altar, but also on porridge (Nonius 539L). Miner Reference Miner1956: 503. 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). The difference between Greek Gods and Roman Gods is that Greek gods have unique names of their own, whereas, Roman gods are 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. Dear Mr. Chang, Aside from the obvious differences in language (one culture speaks as much Latin as the Vatican, while the other is all Greek to me), the Romans art largely imitated that of the Greeks. 113L, s.v. 77 The two texts are nearly identical and perhaps go back to the original lex sacra of the altar of Diana on the Aventine hill in Rome, to which the inscriptions explicitly appeal. 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. 1034 seems to draw an equivalence between sacrificare and mactare (cf. 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 thysa. } Working with the two of them together, we can get a more nuanced understanding of a cultural habit. 93 Has data issue: true As an example, I offer Var., R. 1.2.19: Itaque propterea institutum diversa de causa ut ex caprino genere ad alii dei aram hostia adduceretur, ad alii non sacrificaretur, cum ab eodem odio alter videre nollet, alter etiam videre pereuntem vellet. wine,Footnote Knives would have been used only in conjunction with one or other of these implements. and again in 114 or 113 b.c.e. 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. ex Fest. Somewhat surprising is the considerably smaller presence of bovines,Footnote This is the insider-outsider problem in nuce. 14 Rpke Reference Rpke, Georgoudi, Piettre and Schmidt2005 offers a different interpretation of the meal that follows the sacrifice. Flashcards. 97 Thus it happens that goats are immolated to Liber Pater, who discovered the vine, so that they pay him a penalty and, by a contrary logic, caprine victims are never immolated to Minerva on account of the olive: they say that whatever olive plant a goat bites becomes sterile). 65 Another example of the bias of our sources away from rituals performed by the lower classes is the dearth of references to a particular type of item found in votive deposits: anatomical votives, fictile representations of parts of the human body offered to the gods as requests for cures for physical ailments. 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 89 283F284C; Liv., Per. 61 Hemina fr. e.g., J. Scheid, s.v. Instead they seem to have conceived of it as the ritual consecration of an animal which was afterwards killed and eaten. In Greek and Roman religion, the gods and 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. 17 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. 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. Scholars are quick to identify all of them as forms of sacrifice, which may well be the case. Another major difference between Greek gods and Roman gods is in the physical appearance of the deities. rutilae canes; Var., L. 6.16. This study argues, however, that the apparent continuity is illusory in some important ways and that we have lost sight of some fine distinctions that the Romans made among the rituals they performed. 4 We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. 132.2; Scheid Reference Scheid2005: 1369). 22 The corresponding substantive is magmentum, a type of offering laid out only at certain temples.Footnote 81 MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2004: 5974. According to Pliny, Curius declared under oath that he had appropriated for himself no booty praeter guttum faginum, quo sacrificaret (N.H. 16.185). We can push this second issue, what kinds of items can be the object of sacrifice, even further: Roman sacrifice, especially among the poor, was not limited to edible offerings. 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. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 53 Yet, part of the work of a Roman historian is to try to understand how the Romans understood their world, to be aware of anachronism in our accounts thereof, and to keep in mind that the sources never truly speak for themselves. It is commonplace now to treat sacrificium as a general category and to talk about magmentum and polluctum as moments within the larger ritual or special instances of it.Footnote 25 The description of Decius ensuing death is very spare and devoid of any sacrificial imagery or terminology. 59 33 Cf., n. 89 below. 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. 286L and 287L, s.v.