differences between greek and roman sacrifice

An etic approach allows the researcher to see functions, causes, and consequences of insider behaviours and habits that may be invisible to the people who perform them, as Miner illustrated for us. 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. incense,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. 58 These offerings, ubiquitous in Roman Italy through to the end of the Republic, are mentioned at most twice in extant Latin literature.Footnote 344L and 345L, s.v. mactus; Walde and Hofmann Reference Walde and Hofmann1954: 2.4 s.v. 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 5401L. 34 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. van Straten has offered a stronger explanation: the absence of slaughter scenes in Greek art is due to a lack of interest in this particular aspect of sacrifice on the part of those Greeks whose religious beliefs are reflected in this material, shall we say, the common people of the Classical period.Footnote Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes. 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. 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 ), the Romans followed instructions from the Sibylline Books to bury alive pairs of Gauls and Greeks, one man and one woman of each, in the Forum Boarium. ex Fest. 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. WebDifferences between Greek and Roman sacrifices. 85 the ritual began with a procession that was followed by a praefatio, a preliminary offering of prayers, wine and incense. 54 33 The offering of a dog to Robigus may be the same ritual as the augurium canarium referred to by Plin., N.H. 18.14. molo. As in a relief from the Forum of Trajan now in the Louvre (Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: fig. The Romans, however, developed a more naturalistic approach to their art. Created by. e.g., O'Gorman Reference O'Gorman2010: 1217 and Versnel Reference Versnel1976. refriva faba; Plin., N.H. 18.119. 23 WebThe gods, heroes, and humans of Greek mythology were flawed. Scheid Reference Scheid2005: 1002; Reference Scheid2012: 84. 24 ex Fest. 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 89 72 e.g., J. Scheid, s.v. 27 89 ex Fest. 93 } 22 At 8.10.1112, Livy notes that a commander could devote one of his soldiers rather than himself. 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 Also Var., Men. Birds: Suet., Calig. 17 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. Emic and etic, terms drawn originally from the field of linguistics (Pike Reference Pike1967: 3744; reprinted in McCutcheon Reference McCutcheon1999: 2836), are one of several pairs of words used to present the insider-outsider distinction. WebComparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics. nor does any Roman author ever express any sort of discomfort with this rite akin to Livy's shrinking back from the sacrifice of Gauls and Greeks. Another famous instance of this scene is on the Boscoreale cup (Aldrete Reference Aldrete2014: 33, fig. 22. 57 Douglas Reference Douglas and Douglas1982: 117. 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 48 ex Fest. 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. More Greek words for sacrifice. 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 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. There is also evidence that the Romans had a variety of rites, only one of which was sacrificium, that involved presenting foodstuffs to the gods. 40 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. 78L, s.v. Footnote Since Greeks were the first ones, Romans followed them. 60 We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. There is a small amount of evidence for a form of auspicium performed with beans: Fest. 82 The most famous account is Livy's description of the Romans reaction to their losses at Cannae and Canusium to Hannibal in 216 b.c.e.,Footnote Live interment was only performed by the Romans as ritual killing, but live interment was not the only form of ritual killing (whether human sacrifice or not) that the Romans had available to them. 66 The limited sources we have are imprecise in their use of the terms even Cicero, who was an augur and was surely aware of the distinction.Footnote 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. As illustration, let us return to Livy and the human sacrifice in 216 b.c.e. and for front limbs.Footnote 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. 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. 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. 19 76. frag. Classicists generally assume that the modern idea of sacrifice as the ritual killing of an animal applies to the Roman context. Tagliacozzo Reference Tagliacozzo1989: 66. 93 thysa. 413=Macr., Sat. 82. 1 Answer. It appears that no Roman source ever uses the language of sacrificium to describe devotio,Footnote 14.30; Sil. This should prompt researchers, myself included, to greater caution when presenting a native in our case, Roman point of view and to greater clarity about whether the concept under discussion at any given moment is really the Romans or ours, or is shared by both groups. 63 91 Scholars frequently stress the connection between sacrifice and eating: The idea of food underlies the idea of sacrifice.Footnote WebThe standard view of paganism (traditional city-based polytheistic Graeco-Roman religion) in the Roman empire has long been one of decline beginning in the second and first centuries BC. 77L, s.v. 97 Scheid Reference Scheid2005: 4457; Reference Scheid and Rpke2007: 2639. Paul. 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).. 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 From here, we can speculate that sacrifice was not understood by the Romans primarily as the ritual slaughter of an animal. Arguably, then, it is the Christians who bequeathed to future generations the metonymic equivalence of sacrifice and violence, Knust and Vrhelyi Reference Knust and Vrhelyi2011: 17. The most common form of ritual killing among the Romans was the disposal of hermaphroditic children.Footnote Huet Reference Huet and Bertrand2005; Reference Huet and van Andringa2007. 61 Home. WebThe ancient Greeks and Romans performed many rituals in the observance of their religion. Lodwick, Lisa and for his old-fashioned frugality and incorruptibility.Footnote 69 216,Footnote 2 98 Others include first-order vs. second-order categories, particular vs. universal, descriptive vs. redescriptive, and local vs. global. Feature Flags: { Ioppolo Reference Ioppolo1972; Tagliacozzo Reference Tagliacozzo1989. It is also clear from literary sources that on a handful of occasions, including instances well within the historical period, the Roman state sacrificed human victims to the gods, a topic we shall address more fully later on. The present study argues that looking at the relationship between sacrificium as it is presented in Roman sources and comparing that with modern notions of sacrifice reveals that some important, specific aspects of what has been conceived of as Roman sacrifice are not there in the ancient sources and may not be part of how the Romans perceived their ritual. Although it is sixty years old, the lesson still works well. 2013: The Fragments of the Roman Historians, 3 vols, Oxford, Hornblower, S., and Spawforth, A. Decline was interrupted by the short-lived Restoration under the emperor Augustus (reign 27 BC AD 14), then it resumed. Another way that mactare is different is that gods can mactare mortals at least in comedy, where characters sometimes wish that the gods would honour their enemies with trouble.Footnote 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. Roman sacrificium is both less and more than the typical etic notion of sacrifice. Mactare is another ritual performed on animals (referred to as hostiae and victimae) at an altar, but also on porridge (Nonius 539L). This meant that 86 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. 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 Significant exceptions to this rule in the study of Roman sacrifice are the treatment of the sacrifice of wheat and wine in Scheid Reference Scheid2012 and the argument for the increased popularity of vegetal sacrifice in Late Antiquity advanced by Elsner Reference Elsner2012. Nor was it secular, capital punishment; the punishment of criminals usually took a more direct and swift form: strangulation, beating, crucifixion, or precipitation (i.e., throwing someone off a cliff).Footnote The main god and goddesses in Roman culture were Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Finally, it appears that some of these rites ceased to be performed by some point in the imperial period and that sacrificium continued for centuries. 22 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. 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. 62. As in the Greek world, sacrifice was the central ritual of religion. 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. 60 Burkert Reference Burkert and Bing1983: 3; Girard Reference Girard and Gregory1977: 1. 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. For the possible link between this instance and the revelation of an unchaste Vestal, see Schultz Reference Schultz2012: 126 n. 18. 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. 95 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. 22.57.26; Cass. J. 12 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. 1419). Miner Reference Miner1956: 503. 75 55 56 37 31. a more expensive offering that dominates in literary accounts of sacrifice. Cornell, T. J. Liv. Sacrifice was just one of several rites (alongside polluctum and magmentum) that the Romans had available to them that look to us, standing outside their religious system, as if they were all identical or nearly so. 277AC). 52 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. 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. e.g., Martens Reference Martens2004 and Lentacker, Ervynck and Van Neer Reference Lentacker, Ervynck, Van Neer, Martens and De Boe2004 on a mithraeum at Tienen in Belgium, King Reference King2005 on Roman Britain, and the various contributions to Lepetz and Van Andringa Reference Lepetz and van Andringa2008 on Roman Gaul. MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2004: 5974. 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). 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. 3.2.16. Rarest of all are images depicting the litatio, the inspection of the animal's entrails that Romans performed after ritual slaughter to determine the will of the gods.Footnote 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. 450 Krenkel; Hor., Sat. Concise surveys of the major modern theories of sacrifice in the ancient world can be found in Knust and Vrhelyi Reference Knust and Vrhelyi2011: 418, Lincoln Reference Lincoln2012, and Graf Reference Graf2012. 8 9 74 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. 13 5 21 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. The literary evidence for this is slender but persuasive. 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 Aldrete counts at least fifty-six sculptural reliefs dating from the seventh century b.c.e. 54 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. 35 "useRatesEcommerce": false Ernout and Meillet Reference Ernout and Meillet1979: 411 s.v. 31 Gel. 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. 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. 20 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 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. Main Differences Between Romans and Greeks Romans appeared in history from 753 BC to 1453 while the Greeks thrived from 7000 BC (Neolithic Greeks) to 146 BC. 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. hasContentIssue true, Copyright The Author(s) 2016. Learn. 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 Plutarch is the only source for dog sacrifice at the Lupercalia (RQ 68 and 111=Mor. 8.10.)). 537 Words 3 Pages Decent Essays Read More 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. e.g., Faraone and Naiden Reference Faraone and Naiden2012: 4; Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 36 and 1089. 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. Dog corpses were sometimes deposited with tablets that contained curses, and dog figurines are among the required items for performing some spells.Footnote Scheid's reconstruction and interpretation is followed by Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 3148. 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. 8.9 per cent of the total, according to Moses, Reference Moses, Brocato and Terrenatoforthcoming, table 2. The distinction between sacrificare and mactare was lost by Late Antiquity, but it was still active in the Republic and early Empire.Footnote 46 Hostname: page-component-7fc98996b9-rf4gk 32 45 90 On the contrary, Greek religion did not prefer to execute rituals as much as

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