The basic argument transfers well to the Roman context. 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 Plaut., Stich. 87 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. 1034 seems to draw an equivalence between sacrificare and mactare (cf. See also Scheid Reference Scheid2012: 901. 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 Others include first-order vs. second-order categories, particular vs. universal, descriptive vs. redescriptive, and local vs. global. 88. 63 Comparative mythology - Wikipedia Greeks call the queen Hera, whereas Romans queen of gods is Juno. In both the passages from Pliny and Apuleius, the ritual implements are of diminutive size. 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. the killing of the animal was not it, at least in an early period. Aldrete counts at least fifty-six sculptural reliefs dating from the seventh century b.c.e. 73 Instead, their presence should be attributed to the status of those species as valuable and efficacious: the prevalence of dogs, lizards, and beavers in medicinal and magical recipes for potions is an indication of the exceptional value the animals were thought to have, an indication that they were somehow special, and therefore might be worthy of the gods. 88 87 34 61 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 190L s.v. 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. 14 While there has been tentative speculation that the reason behind a preference for procession scenes in Greek representations of sacrifice in the Archaic and Classical periods is due to a growing squeamishness inside Greek culture,Footnote This assertion is based on a search of sacrific* on the Brepolis Library of Latin Texts A. Of this class of rituals, sacrificium does seem to have been somehow different from the others. 9.7.mil.Rom.2). 537 Words 3 Pages Decent Essays Read More 72 Terms in this set (7) Which one 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 94. WebRomans invested much of their time serving the gods, performing rituals and sacrifices in honor of them. 1419). On fourteen occasions between 209 and 92 b.c.e., androgyne infants and children were included among the prodigies reported to the Roman Senate. The ancients derived the term from magis auctus and understood it to mean to increase and by extension to honour with.Footnote 37 Scheid Reference Scheid1998: nn. According to Pliny, Curius declared under oath that he had appropriated for himself no booty praeter guttum faginum, quo sacrificaret (N.H. 16.185). 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. 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. 45 As in the Greek world, sacrifice was the central ritual of religion. and Narbo in Gallia Narbonensis (CIL 12.4333, dated to 11 c.e.). Sacrifices of wine and incense are common in the Commentarii Fratrum Arvalium, e.g. 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. 79 15 At her birth, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, sprang directly from the head of Zeus. 75 The exact nature of the connection between the two rituals is not clear, but I agree with Eckstein Reference Eckstein1982 that we should not see the sacrifice of Gauls and Greeks as some sort of atonement for the unchastity of the Vestals. 85 62 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 Modern scholars sometimes group all of these rites under the rubric sacrifice.Footnote 25 On the general absence of wild meat from the Roman diet, see MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2004: 1902. Difference Between Romans and Greeks Knives would have been used only in conjunction with one or other of these implements. View all Google Scholar citations Military commanders would pay homage to Jupiter at his temple after As is implied in all the relevant entries in the OLD. 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. Despite the fact that the S. Omobono assemblage dates to several centuries before the Classical period, the range of faunal remains from the site are primarily what one would expect from a sanctuary based on what we know from literary texts. e.g., Liv. Differences Between Greek and Roman aryxnewland. 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 Greeks call the queen Hera, whereas Romans queen of gods is Juno. 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 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. Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 22441 and, arriving at the same conclusion by a different path, Schultz Reference Schultz2012: 1323. Cornell, T. J. 2.10.34, quoting a letter of Varro, and Paul. The Romans performed at least four forms of ritual killing, only one of which was sacrifice. When the Romans sacrificed plant matter to the gods, it appears to be because that is what it was appropriate to do in the specific circumstance. ), 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? 18 th century excavations unearthed a number of sculptures with traces of color, but noted art historians dismissed the findings as anomalies. WebRoman sacrificial practices were not functionally different from Greek, although the Roman rite was distinguishable from the Greek and Etruscan. Jupiter also concentrated on protecting the Roman state. 81 4.57. Plaut., Amph. 4.57) is not clear. 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. 96 20 Dog corpses were sometimes deposited with tablets that contained curses, and dog figurines are among the required items for performing some spells.Footnote 5 } Finally, both ancient societies have twelve main gods and goddesses. (ed.) Max. 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. 283F284C; Liv., Per. 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. 113L, s.v. noun. Marcos, Bruno 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 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. Although they are universally referred to as votive offerings in the scholarly literature, it is possible that they are, technically, sacrifices. 48 The numerous sources for this event are collected and analysed in Engels Reference Engels2007: 41618, 4438. There is also a queen of gods in Greek and Roman mythologies. 36 Jupiter was a sky-god who Romans believed oversaw all aspects of life; he is thought to have originated from the Greek god Zeus. The main god and goddesses in Roman culture were Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. and more. But it does bring things into sharper focus, helping the student of Roman religion to keep in view the extent to which we have interpreted the ancient sources to fit our own (rather than the Romans) intellectual categories. Var., L. 6.3.14. and Paul. 9.641. Dogs had other ritual uses as well. Liv. 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. and the fact that the word immolatio itself derives from the Indo-European root *melh2 (to crush, to grind): immolatio is cognate with English mill.Footnote Published online by Cambridge University Press: 3.3.2, citing the late republican jurist Trebatius; Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 256. Greek Gods and Religious Practices | Essay | The Metropolitan The Gods in Greek and Roman mythology, while initially having almost no differentiation (we could easily lose in the Spot the difference game), yet started slowly being more dependent on the civilization where they were worshiped. 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. 344L, s.v. The ritual ended with a litatio, that is, the inspection of the animal's entrails, and it was then followed by a meal. Chr. The burial of Gauls and Greeks was a sacrifice, but one that Romans ought not to have performed. Similar difficulties beset efforts, both ancient and modern, to reconstruct the technical differences among the concepts of sacer, sanctus, and religiosus: see Rives Reference Rives and Tellegen-Couperus2011. 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 89 Were they used in some form of divination?Footnote Classicists generally assume that the modern idea of sacrifice as the ritual killing of an animal applies to the Roman context. 69 2013: The Fragments of the Roman Historians, 3 vols, Oxford, Hornblower, S., and Spawforth, A. ex Fest. 61 13 Peter=FRH F17. There is also a queen of gods in Greek and Roman mythologies. In this section, I make the case that the related and equally widespread notion that all Roman rituals that required the death of an animal were sacrifices obfuscates the variety of rituals that Romans had available to them, effacing some of the fine distinctions Romans made about the ways they approached their gods. It is important to remember, however, that no ancient source articulates any sort of relationship among these rituals. 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. 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. 16 14.30; Sil. On the early Christian appropriation and transformation of Roman sacrificial imagery and discourse, see Castelli Reference Castelli2004: 509. A wider range of scholarly approaches is presented by McClymond Reference McClymond2008: 124. For example, Cic., Rep. 3.15 and Font. 31. 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 Contra Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 223. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, suggestions and objections that have greatly improved this piece. In 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. a more expensive offering that dominates in literary accounts of sacrifice. Total loading time: 0 3 Plutarch is the only source for dog sacrifice at the Lupercalia (RQ 68 and 111=Mor. "useRatesEcommerce": false But upon further reflection, in fact, the use of cruets and plates actually emphasizes the importance of the meal that concluded a Roman sacrifice. Furthermore, there is reason to think that the crucial moment, or perhaps the first crucial moment, in the whole ritual process of sacrificium for the Romans was the sprinkling of mola salsa onto the victim, whereas several important modern theorizations of sacrifice place the greatest emphasis on, and see the essential meaning of sacrifice in, the moment of slaughter. Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes 6 For example, think about the Roman and Greek mythologies about gods. 97 4 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. ex Fest. Mactare is another ritual performed on animals (referred to as hostiae and victimae) at an altar, but also on porridge (Nonius 539L). Aul. 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. 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 91 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. 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. Roman sacrifice - Oxford Reference 64 70 For many readers of Latin, the most obvious translation of the Latin is except a beechwood cruet with which he would offer sacrifice, taking quo as an instrumental ablative and thereby making the vessel an instrument of sacrifice rather than the object of sacrifice itself. 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. Working with the two of them together, we can get a more nuanced understanding of a cultural habit. 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 On the contrary, Greek religion did not prefer to execute rituals as much as 14 Ioppolo Reference Ioppolo1972; Tagliacozzo Reference Tagliacozzo1989. On three occasions during the Republic (228,Footnote Nacirema is American spelt backwards, and Miner shows to, and interprets for, us our own bathroom habits.Footnote 7 Hammers appear in only fifteen scenes, two-thirds of which date between the first century b.c.e. 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 Huet Reference Huet and Bertrand2005; Reference Huet and van Andringa2007. 33 From an examination that is restricted to Roman sources and that sets aside Christian texts where the terms for these various rituals begin to be used in rather different ways, it appears that the hierarchy of rituals I have just described has been imposed from the outside. 08 June 2016. 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. differences between Greek and Roman The answer is that human sacrifice, which the Romans are quick to dismiss as something other people do (note that, although Livy is clear that the burial of Gauls and Greeks is a sacrifice, he also says that it was hardly a Roman rite), is closely linked in the Roman mind with cannibalism. 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. 12 Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. 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. 28 For illustration, we can turn once again to the elder Pliny, who writes about the habits of the Gallic tribes north of the Alps: et nuperrime trans Alpis hominem immolari gentium earum more solitum, quod paulum a mandendo abest (And very recently, on the other side of the Alps, in accordance with the custom of those peoples, individuals were habitually sacrificed, which is not all that far from eating them N.H. 7.9). Footnote The distinction is preserved by Suet., Prat. ex Fest. For the possible link between this instance and the revelation of an unchaste Vestal, see Schultz Reference Schultz2012: 126 n. 18. 13 thysa. Ernout and Meillet Reference Ernout and Meillet1979: 411 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. The closest any Roman source comes to linking devotio and sacrifice is Cic., Off. 51 This is made clear in numerous passages from several Roman authors. 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. 25 The errors and flaws that remain are all my own. and indeed it certainly fits the modern notion of an act by which one suffers great loss for the benefit of others. 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. Instead they seem to have conceived of it as the ritual consecration of an animal which was afterwards killed and eaten. 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 Bottom line: The Greeks tended towards greater personification of their gods; the Romans tended towards their religion being a series of quid pro quo transactions with 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. As illustration, let us return to Livy and the human sacrifice in 216 b.c.e. History Greek & Roman Civilization - studocu.com differences between 9 The expression rem dvnam facer, to make a thing sacred, shows that sacrifice was an act of transfer of ownership. In this way, the native, or emic, Roman view of sacrifice is more expansive than ours. [1] Comparative mythology has served a 78 358L. Some rituals, such as the recitation of prayers, were simple. Aeacus holds the keys to Hades. hasContentIssue true, Copyright The Author(s) 2016. WebDifferences between Greek and Roman sacrifices. Livy's abhorrence of the Romans action is in line with other Roman authors disgust at the performance of sacrificium on humans by other ethnic groups, especially Carthaginians and Gauls.Footnote Hemina fr. 98 e.g., Faraone and Naiden Reference Faraone and Naiden2012: 4; Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 36 and 1089. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls.Footnote 1. 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. 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. Greek and Roman In Greek and Roman religion, the gods and and Paul. Greek influences on Italian craftsmen in the 6 th century BC saw the image of Parents: Aeacus: Zeus and Aegina; Rhadamanthus and Minos: Zeus and Europa. 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 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. 78L, s.v. 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. 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 ex Fest. 277AC). 58 Sacrificium included vegetal and inedible offerings, and it was not the only Roman ritual that had living victims. D. 6.9 (which probably draws on Varro) and possibly Paul. fabam and Fest. 13 Reed, Kelly 12 Greek Translation. 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. Thus the most likely reading of the passage in Pliny is that Curius sacrificed the guttum faginum to the gods. 73 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.