differences between greek and roman sacrifice differences between greek and roman sacrifice

Nacirema is American spelt backwards, and Miner shows to, and interprets for, us our own bathroom habits.Footnote 71 11 87 233; CIL 12.1531=ILLRP 136=ILS 3411 (from Sora). WebThe Greeks were striving for perfection in their art while the Romans were striving for real life people. mactus. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, suggestions and objections that have greatly improved this piece. Sorted by: 6. 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. The literary evidence for this is slender but persuasive. On the early Christian appropriation and transformation of Roman sacrificial imagery and discourse, see Castelli Reference Castelli2004: 509. and for looking at Roman religion in the context of other religious traditions. 101 This is the insider-outsider problem in nuce. 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. 85 The numerous sources for this event are collected and analysed in Engels Reference Engels2007: 41618, 4438. Although much work in anthropology and other social sciences has debated the relative merits of emic versus etic approaches, I find most useful recent research that has highlighted the value of the dynamic interplay that can develop between them.Footnote 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. 41 31 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 Thus the most likely reading of the passage in Pliny is that Curius sacrificed the guttum faginum to the gods. 11213L, s.v. 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 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. Carretero, Lara Gonzalez 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. Plaut., Stich 233; Cato, Agr. 53 Devotio is primarily a form of vow that is, ideally, followed by a death (si is homo qui devotus est moritur, probe factum videri (Liv. 58 9 39 and first fruits.Footnote It is unfortunate that the ancient sources on vegetal sacrifice are as exiguous as they are: it is not possible to determine what relationship its outward form bore to blood sacrifice. 344L and 345L, s.v. 45.16.6. There is growing consensus that the answer is affirmative. Tereso, Joo Pedro The vast majority of the bones come from pigs, sheep, and goats. The lack of interest in vegetal sacrifice is widespread in the field of religious studies (McClymond Reference McClymond2008: 65). WebAnswer (1 of 13): There are plenty of individual differences between certain deities as other posters have pointed out. 22.57.26; Cass. 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. 93L, s.v. Fontes, Lus 77 34 This is made clear in numerous passages from several Roman authors. 99 Also Var., Men. 59 The objectivity of the outside observer can also facilitate cross-cultural comparison. 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. For example, Cic., Rep. 3.15 and Font. 54 69a). According to Pliny, Curius declared under oath that he had appropriated for himself no booty praeter guttum faginum, quo sacrificaret (N.H. 16.185). 4.57) is not clear. Augustine, Civ. 280 BC and 290D; Rom. They were rewarded for their endeavors with the position of judge in the Underworld. As is implied in all the relevant entries in the OLD. Greek Gods vs Roman Gods. In this way, the native, or emic, Roman view of sacrifice is more expansive than ours. The ancient Greek and Roman gods did not become incarnate the way Jesus was, did not enter the stream of real human history the way Jesus did, did not die as a Here's a list of translations. 78 It is also noteworthy that sacrificium appears to be the only member of this class to require mola salsa. There are at least two other rituals that the Romans performed that also required the death of a person. 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. This is suggested by Ov., F. 1.1278. 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). Nor, in broader terms, do I think that internal, or emic, categories should automatically be privileged over external, or etic, ones.Footnote 66 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. 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. Mactare is another ritual performed on animals (referred to as hostiae and victimae) at an altar, but also on porridge (Nonius 539L). 344L, s.v. 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. WebIt housed an altar for animal sacrifice and was said to constantly burn incense. Pliny and Apuleius may reflect an lite misconception about the religious praxis of lower class worshippers, offering an incorrect, emic interpretation of an observable phenomenon. McClymond treats sacrificial events as clusters of different types of activities, including prayer, killing, cooking, and consumption, which are not in and of themselves sacrificial (they are frequently performed in other contexts), but which become sacrificial in the aggregate (McClymond Reference McClymond2008: 2534). Sacrificare is frequently accompanied by an instrumental ablative, but in almost all cases it is clear that the ablative is the object of sacrifice, as in the phrase maioribus hostiis sacrificaverant.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. The skeletal remains of dogs sometimes found interred with human remains or inside city walls are often interpreted as sacrifice by archaeologists.Footnote 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 The offering of a dog to Robigus may be the same ritual as the augurium canarium referred to by Plin., N.H. 18.14. aryxnewland. From this same root also derives the name for the mixture sprinkled on the animal before it was killed, mola salsa.Footnote 52 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. 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. 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. e.g., Liv. The catinus is a piece of everyday ware used to serve food that contains a lot of liquid (L. 5.120). 3 Was a portion consumed later? CIL 6.32323.13940=ILS 5050.13940=Pighi Reference Pighi1965: 117 (from Rome). I have tried to respond to them all. 22.57.26, discussed also in Schultz Reference Schultz2012: 1267. 38 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 22 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. 6.343 and 11.108. 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. To my knowledge, the sole exception is a phrase preserved twice in the Commentarii Fratrum Arvalium (Scheid Reference Scheid1998: nn. Although the focus of this investigation is the recovery of some details of the Romans idea of sacrificium, I do not mean to imply that their concept is the right one and that the modern idea is wrong or completely inapplicable to the Roman context. 94. 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 22.1.19; 45.16.6; Plin., N.H. 36.39; Tac., Ann. 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. An exception is Scheid Reference Scheid2005: 52. noun. It is important to note, however, that we cannot determine conclusively from the extant sources what relationship, if any, existed among them in the Roman mind. 1.3.90 and 1.6.115; Juv. Dogs had other ritual uses as well. Create. Marcellus, de Medicamentis 8.50; Palmer Reference Palmer and Hall1996: 234. sacrima. Since Greeks were the first ones, Romans followed them. In both the passages from Pliny and Apuleius, the ritual implements are of diminutive size. 47 93 Liv. As suggested by Bouma Reference Bouma1996: 1.23841. ex Fest. 72 Greek gods had heavy emphasis placed on their 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 11 80 The Romans, however, developed a more naturalistic approach to their art. 14.30; Sil. One was killed at the Colline Gate, under the earth as is the custom and the other took her own life Since this horrible event which occurred in the midst of so many terrible things, as is wont to happen, was turned into a prodigy, the Board of Ten Men was ordered to consult the Books. 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 uncovered in votive deposits throughout Italy. 70 WebOne major difference between Greek and Roman religion and Christianity is their understanding of the concept of deity. 5 33 Plut., RQ 52=Mor. 69 36 ex Fest. 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 Cf. Even if this is the case, the argument still stands that these passages underscore how essential was consumption to the ritual of sacrificium. Reference Morris, Leung, Ames and Lickel1999 and Berry Reference Berry, Headland, Pike and Harris1990. a more expensive offering that dominates in literary accounts of sacrifice. 45 ex Fest. Aldrete counts at least fifty-six sculptural reliefs dating from the seventh century b.c.e. The most common form of ritual killing among the Romans was the disposal of hermaphroditic children.Footnote were linked.Footnote On fourteen occasions between 209 and 92 b.c.e., androgyne infants and children were included among the prodigies reported to the Roman Senate. 46 A brief survey of the bone assemblages from sites in west-central Italy is offered by Bouma Reference Bouma1996: 1.22841. that contain scenes of ritual slaughter where the implements can be clearly discerned.Footnote WebThe gods, heroes, and humans of Greek mythology were flawed. 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. 24 In Greek and Roman religion, the gods and Test. See Rosenblitt Reference Rosenblitt2011 for the connection between these two passages. 28 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). 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. 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 63 Yet to limit the consideration of immolatio to the moment of killing is to overlook the other actions (running a knife along the animal's back, cutting a few hairs from it) that Scheid has identified as being part of that stage of sacrificium 74 Footnote 66 MacBain Reference MacBain1982: 12735; Schultz Reference Schultz2010: 52930; Reference Schultz2012: 12930. 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. 85 Douglas Reference Douglas and Douglas1982: 117. Military commanders would pay homage to Jupiter at his temple after 71. Hermes, who had winged feet, was the messenger of the gods and could fly anywhere with great speed. I concede that, to a certain extent, the insider-outsider lens does not show us difficulties that were previously invisible. We do not know what name the Romans gave the ritual burial of an unchaste Vestal Virgin, but we know it was not sacrifice.