Parents: Aeacus: Zeus and Aegina; Rhadamanthus and Minos: Zeus and Europa. These two passages from Pliny and Apuleius may provide an explanation for the hundreds of thousands of miniature fictile vessels (plates, cups, etc.) 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 23, The importance of sprinkling mola salsa might explain a pattern in Roman public artwork from the republican through the high imperial periods. Footnote 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. More Greek words for sacrifice. 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. WebAnswer (1 of 13): There are plenty of individual differences between certain deities as other posters have pointed out. On the general absence of wild meat from the Roman diet, see MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2004: 1902. 58.47, 64.1.467, and 68.1.49. aryxnewland. Var., L 5.122. Was a portion consumed later? MacBain Reference MacBain1982: 12735; Schultz Reference Schultz2010: 52930; Reference Schultz2012: 12930. 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. As has long been recognized, sacrificare and sacrificium are compounds of the phrase sacrum facere (to render sacred), and what is sacrum is anything that belongs to the gods.Footnote 69 Burkert Reference Burkert and Bing1983: 3; Girard Reference Girard and Gregory1977: 1. Rhadamanthus and Minos were brothers. 40 68 ex Fest. Greek Gods and Religious Practices | Essay | The Metropolitan Lelekovi, Tino 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 54 Even if this is the case, the argument still stands that these passages underscore how essential was consumption to the ritual of sacrificium. The ritual ended with a litatio, that is, the inspection of the animal's entrails, and it was then followed by a meal. 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 Although the remains come from a known sacred area, it should not be assumed that all of them are evidence of sacrificium or other rituals: some may be garbage, material used as fill, or even the remains of animals (like mice) that died while exploring the refuse heap. 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 and Narbo in Gallia Narbonensis (CIL 12.4333, dated to 11 c.e.). 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. 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. molo. Since Greeks were the first ones, Romans followed them. The expression rem dvnam facer, to make a thing sacred, shows that sacrifice was an act of transfer of ownership. 96 4 60 30 and more. 76. Created by. 88. Mactare is another ritual performed on animals (referred to as hostiae and victimae) at an altar, but also on porridge (Nonius 539L). 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 Modern etymologists disagree on the origin of the term. Reference Morris, Leung, Ames and Lickel1999 and Berry Reference Berry, Headland, Pike and Harris1990. 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. Scheid Reference Scheid1998: nn. 43 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 83 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 The issue remains active in religious studies, as it does in cultural anthropology more widely. 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. 32 Peter=FRH F33. 57 358L, s.v. All of this indicates a certain flexibility and elasticity in the ritual of sacrificium that suggests, especially if a similar flexibility could be demonstrated in other ritual forms, a need to moderate the emphasis both ancient and modern on the orthopractic nature of Roman religion. 42 67 For this same poverty is, among the Greeks, just in Aristides, kind in Phocion, vigorous in Epaminondas, wise in Socrates, and eloquent in Homer. 14 Jupiter also concentrated on protecting the Roman state. 70 For example, think about the Roman and Greek mythologies about gods. The skeletal remains of dogs sometimes found interred with human remains or inside city walls are often interpreted as sacrifice by archaeologists.Footnote 48 Douglas Reference Douglas and Douglas1982: 117. 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 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. This repeated coincidence of ritual performances suggests that the two forms of ritual killingFootnote The elder Pliny, in his Natural History, discusses the high regard in which ancient Romans held simple vessels made of beechwood. 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. 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. 50 It is a hallmark of poverty, whether in a religious context or not, appearing often in poetic passages where the narrator describes a low-budget lifestyle.Footnote Terms in this set (7) Which one and indeed it certainly fits the modern notion of an act by which one suffers great loss for the benefit of others. 11 50, From all this, it is reasonable to conclude that the poor could substitute small vessels for more expensive, edible sacrificial offerings. 423L s.v. As in the Greek world, sacrifice was the central ritual of religion. 58 Aldrete Reference Aldrete2014: 32. 19 Were they used in some form of divination?Footnote From this same root also derives the name for the mixture sprinkled on the animal before it was killed, mola salsa.Footnote Horses: Plin., N.H. 28.146; Fest. The relationship between magmentum and augmentum (Paul. 86 Nor, in broader terms, do I think that internal, or emic, categories should automatically be privileged over external, or etic, ones.Footnote Marcellus, de Medicamentis 8.50; Palmer Reference Palmer and Hall1996: 234. 3.12.2. 27 38 Curius Dentatus, famous for his victory over Pyrrhus in 275 b.c.e. Plaut., Stich 233; Cato, Agr. 76 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 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. 101. The expression rem dvnam facer, to make a thing sacred, 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. Finally, both ancient societies have twelve main gods and goddesses. e.g., J. Scheid, s.v. 1996: The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edn), Oxford. But then they turn out to be us. rutilae canes; Var., L. 6.16. Subjects. 1419). mactus; de Vaan Reference De Vaan2008: 357 s.v. Learn. 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. 3, 13456; Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 1225; Rpke Reference Rpke and Gordon2007: 1378. Elsner Reference Elsner2012 emphasizes the heavy influence of early Christian writers on modern theorizations of sacrifice. 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. If we allow only items explicitly identified as sacrificia in Roman sources, our list includes beans,Footnote The survival beyond the early Empire of most aspects of the distinction among ritual forms discussed in Section IV cannot be asserted with any confidence. In Livy's account of the first devotio in 340 b.c.e. But upon further reflection, in fact, the use of cruets and plates actually emphasizes the importance of the meal that concluded a Roman sacrifice. 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. ex Fest. 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 To my knowledge, the sole exception is a phrase preserved twice in the Commentarii Fratrum Arvalium (Scheid Reference Scheid1998: nn. 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. 68 37 Carretero, Lara Gonzalez On the Latin terminology for living sacrificial victims, see Prescendi Reference Prescendi2009. 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. 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 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 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. 62 for this article. 15 ex. hasContentIssue true, Copyright The Author(s) 2016. 63 62. Cato's instruction to pollucere to Jupiter an assaria pecunia refers to produce valued at one as (Agr. 47 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).. 53 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 22.1.19; 45.16.6; Plin., N.H. 36.39; Tac., Ann. The answers to these questions might reshape our understanding of what were the crucial elements of sacrificium. Nacirema is American spelt backwards, and Miner shows to, and interprets for, us our own bathroom habits.Footnote 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. Looking at Roman sacrifice through the insider-outsider lens lets us see more clearly that, for the Romans, sacrifice was both more and less than it is for many scholars writing about it today. mactus; Walde and Hofmann Reference Walde and Hofmann1954: 2.4 s.v. 72 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. There are at least two other rituals that the Romans performed that also required the death of a person. 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. 56 WebOn the whole, political development in Greece followed a pattern: first the rule of kings, found as early as the period of Mycenaean civilization; then a feudal period, the 1034 seems to draw an equivalence between sacrificare and mactare (cf. Reed, Kelly Greek influences on Italian craftsmen in the 6 th century BC saw the image of Indeed these two rituals appear at first glance to be identical live interment in underground chambers, though admittedly in different locations within the city and with different victims. 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. Var., L. 6.3.14. This assertion is based on a search of sacrific* on the Brepolis Library of Latin Texts A. I concede that, to a certain extent, the insider-outsider lens does not show us difficulties that were previously invisible. Match. noun. 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 77L, s.v. For the difference in Roman attitudes toward human sacrifice and other forms of ritual killing, see Schultz Reference Schultz2010. Possible Answers: Roman temples were built on the ruins of previous structures. How, if these animals did not make desirable entrees, could they be considered suitable for sacrifice? 24 e.g., Faraone and Naiden Reference Faraone and Naiden2012: 4; Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 36 and 1089.
