differences between greek and roman sacrifice

The quotation comes from Frankfurter Reference Frankfurter2011: 75. 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. 10 42 27 The Romans were aware of the link, as is made clear by Paul. refriva faba; Plin., N.H. 18.119. At 8.10.1112, Livy notes that a commander could devote one of his soldiers rather than himself. For example, the apparent contradiction between Roman abhorrence of ritual killing and the frequency with which Romans performed various forms of it is, to a large extent, explicable once it is recognized that the Romans objected only to the performance (by themselves as much as by others) of sacrificium on human victims. Modern etymologists disagree on the origin of the term. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. 3, 13456; Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 1225; Rpke Reference Rpke and Gordon2007: 1378. 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. 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. Rhadamanthus and Minos were brothers. The basic argument transfers well to the Roman context. Nonius 539L identifies mactare with immolare, but the texts he cites do not really support his claim. Chr. 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 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). They were rewarded for their endeavors with the position of judge in the Underworld. Finally, both ancient societies have twelve main gods and goddesses. 51 Miner Reference Miner1956: 503. noun. 71. 76 Magmentum also appears in two imperial leges sacrae pertaining to the observance of the Imperial cult preserved in inscriptions found in the Roman colonies of Salona in Dalmatia (CIL 3.1933, dated to 137 c.e.) 13 Peter=FRH F17. 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). Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. ipsilles with 398L, s.v. The ancients derived the term from magis auctus and understood it to mean to increase and by extension to honour with.Footnote incense,Footnote J. 9 The children were drowned by the haruspices, usually in the sea. 12 ex Fest. 6.343 and 11.108. 52 Unlike sacrificare, which remained solely in the divine realm, mactare did not need to involve the gods: mactare is something that one Roman could do to another, both literally (one can mactare someone else with a golden cup, for example) and metaphorically (with misfortune or expense). and Difference Between Romans and Greeks ex Fest. The most famous vegetal offering occurred at the Liberalia, the festival of the god Liber, described by Varro: Liberalia dicta, quod per totum oppidum eo die sedent sacerdotes Liberi anus hedera coronatae cum libis et foculo pro emptore sacrificantes (The Liberalia is so called because on that day priestesses of Liber, old women crowned with ivy, settle themselves throughout the whole town with cakes and a brazier, making sacrifices on behalf of the customer).Footnote 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. 3 97 7 As in the Greek world, sacrifice was the central ritual of religion. differences between Greek and Roman 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 WebIn Greek mythology the king of gods is known as Zeus, whereas Romans call the king of gods Jupiter. 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. 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. The Christian fathers equation of sacrifice with violence has shaped twentieth-century theorizations of sacrifice as a universal human phenomenon,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. The elder Cato instructs his reader to pollucere a cup of wine and a daps (ritual meal) to Jupiter Dapalis (Agr. 35 The problem is widely acknowledged, but see specifically Moussy Reference Moussy1977; Reference Moussy1990; Engels Reference Engels2007: 25982. These offerings, ubiquitous in Roman Italy through to the end of the Republic, are mentioned at most twice in extant Latin literature.Footnote 97 We do not know what name the Romans gave the ritual burial of an unchaste Vestal Virgin, but we know it was not sacrifice. 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. View all Google Scholar citations 82. Ov., F. 4.90142 with Fest. Marcellus, de Medicamentis 8.50; Palmer Reference Palmer and Hall1996: 234. 33 From this same root also derives the name for the mixture sprinkled on the animal before it was killed, mola salsa.Footnote the differences between Roman gods and Greek 36 Through the insider point of view, we can understand its meaning to the people who experience it. Another example of a ritual that looks a lot like sacrificium but is not identical to it is polluctum. Study sets, textbooks, questions. Differences Between Greek and Roman 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. 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. and 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. Plu., RQ 83=Mor. In the sacred realm, Romans could also pollucere a tithe to the god Hercules.Footnote There are many other non-meat sacrifices the Romans could offer. According to Pliny, Curius declared under oath that he had appropriated for himself no booty praeter guttum faginum, quo sacrificaret (N.H. 16.185). It is also noteworthy that sacrificium appears to be the only member of this class to require mola salsa. 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. but in later texts as well. This repeated coincidence of ritual performances suggests that the two forms of ritual killingFootnote 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. Although there is some evidence for Roman consumption of dog in the form of canine skeletons with butchery marks (e.g., De Grossi Mazzorin and Tagliacozzo Reference De Grossi Mazzorin and Tagliacozzo1997: 4378), there is no evidence that dogs were raised for meat production (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2004: 74). 69 450 Krenkel; Hor., Sat. Dogs: Fest. At N.H. 29.578, Pliny tells us that a dog was crucified annually at a particular location in Rome, and that puppies used to be considered to be such pure eating that they were used in place of victims (hostiarum vice) to appease the divine; puppy was still on the menu at banquets for the gods in Pliny's own day. The catinus is a piece of everyday ware used to serve food that contains a lot of liquid (L. 5.120). Of these, only dogs are attested in the written sources as victims of Roman sacrifice, albeit rarely.Footnote The burial of Gauls and Greeks was a sacrifice, but one that Romans ought not to have performed. 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. 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. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls.Footnote Despite the fact that the Romans buried broken or superfluous gifts to the gods in deposits for hundreds of years, there are to my knowledge only two references to the practice in all of Latin literature.Footnote 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. 59 ex. For example, scholars have used the relationships between different myths to trace the development of religions and cultures, to propose common origins for WebAnswer (1 of 13): There are plenty of individual differences between certain deities as other posters have pointed out. 80 90 Footnote 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 48 On the early Christian appropriation and transformation of Roman sacrificial imagery and discourse, see Castelli Reference Castelli2004: 509. 92 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. Moses, Reference Moses, Brocato and Terrenatoforthcoming, table 8. For example, Ares is the Greek 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. 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 Nacirema is American spelt backwards, and Miner shows to, and interprets for, us our own bathroom habits.Footnote Sic factum ut Libero patri, repertori vitis, hirci immolarentur, proinde ut capite darent poenas; contra ut Minervae caprini generis nihil immolarent propter oleam, quod eam quam laeserit fieri dicunt sterilem (And so therefore, it has been established by opposing justifications that victims of the caprine sort are brought to the altar of one deity, but they are not sacrificed at the altar of another, since on account of the same hatred, one does not want to see a goat and the other desires to see one perish. wine,Footnote The insider-outsider problem has had little impact on the study of religion in pre-Christian Rome. As Scheid has reconstructed Roman public sacrifice,Footnote 14 3.3.2, citing the late republican jurist Trebatius; Prescendi Reference Prescendi2007: 256. 25 36 101. 176 and Serv., A. 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. Ernout and Meillet Reference Ernout and Meillet1979: 411 s.v. 94. Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes. What are the differences between the Greek Hestia and the 84 Difference Between Greek Gods and Roman Gods 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. 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. 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 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. Another animal sometimes sacrificed by the Romans but not regularly eaten by them is the human animal. and for looking at Roman religion in the context of other religious traditions. 101 69 78 I presume that Miner's observations apply also to bathroom habits elsewhere in North America and Europe. The closest any Roman source comes to linking devotio and sacrifice is Cic., Off. Others include first-order vs. second-order categories, particular vs. universal, descriptive vs. redescriptive, and local vs. global. Greek Zeus to the Roman Jupiter: The Complete Guide (2022) 87 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 Scheid Reference Scheid2005: 4457; Reference Scheid and Rpke2007: 2639. 37ab). 89 pop. The S. Omobono material shows a definite preference for certain species (sheep, goats, pigs),Footnote 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. 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. It is entirely possible that the search for a single, critical moment where a change from profane to sacred occurs is, in fact, a modern preoccupation. In Books 29 and 30 of his Natural History, the elder Pliny includes lizards in numerous medicinal recipes to cure everything from hair loss (29.108) to lower back pain (30.53) to dysentery (30.55), and the only text we have that identifies the contents of a bulla, the amulet worn by young Roman boys, instructs the reader to put lizard eyes inside it.Footnote 40 Braga, Cristina 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 Scheid Reference Scheid1998: nn. At her birth, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, sprang directly from the head of Zeus. 132.12). For this discussion, the metaphorical extension of the English word sacrifice, by which one can sacrifice for one's family or hit a sacrifice fly in baseball, is not relevant: this meaning is completely unknown to the Romans of the Classical period. The expression rem dvnam facer, to make a thing sacred, shows that sacrifice was an act of transfer of ownership. 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 83 50, From all this, it is reasonable to conclude that the poor could substitute small vessels for more expensive, edible sacrificial offerings. 22.57.26; Cass. 71 60 Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. 41 Cic., Red. Compare Var., R. 2.8.1. B. Rives provided valuable consultation on specific points and V. C. Moses generously shared her work-in-progress on the osteoarchaeological evidence from S. Omobono. The literary evidence for this is slender but persuasive. See, for example, Feeney Reference Feeney, Barchiesi, Rpke and Stephens2004, an excellent discussion of the application of theoretical models of sacrifice to the poetry of Vergil and Ovid. 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. Learn. Val. 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. 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. 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). molo; Walde and Hofmann Reference Walde and Hofmann1954: 2.1046 s.v. 49 and Paul. Hermes, who had winged feet, was the messenger of the gods and could fly anywhere with great speed. Fontes, Lus ex Fest. 98 19 Aldrete's survey of images commonly identified as sacrifice scenes makes clear that Roman art depicts different procedures (hitting with a hammer, chopping with an axe) and implements (hammers, axes, knives), and that the preference of implement changes over time. 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. 89 Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: figs 83 and 89b. 132; Cass. 65 Flashcards. It is the only one of these terms that does not come to be used outside the realm of the divine. The small size of the guttus and simpulum is assured by Varro (L. 5.124), who identifies both as vessels that pour out liquid minutatim. 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 See, for example, Morris et al. 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 47 100 Our author makes clear that the sacrifice of two Gauls and two Greeks happened alongside another ritual: the punishment of an unchaste Vestal Virgin. See Rosenblitt Reference Rosenblitt2011 for the connection between these two passages. Differences between Greek and Roman sacrifices Flashcards Huet Reference Huet and Bertrand2005; Reference Huet and van Andringa2007. Let me be clear. Tagliacozzo Reference Tagliacozzo1989: 66. Greek influences on Italian craftsmen in the 6 th century BC saw the image of See, however, C. Ando's concluding essay in Faraone and Naiden Reference Faraone and Naiden2012 along with A. Hollman's review of that same volume in BMCR 2013.04.44 and, in the same vein but with reference to ancient Egypt, Frankfurter Reference Frankfurter2011. Studies of sacrifice have noted the etymological connection between immolare and mola salsa, but have not, for the most part, pressed its value for what it may reveal about where the Romans may have placed the emphasis. 22 Roman sacrifice - Oxford Reference In fact, devotio is viewed positively by the Romans as a selfless, almost superhuman act of true leadership.Footnote 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. Paul. 4 100 From here, we can speculate that sacrifice was not understood by the Romans primarily as the ritual slaughter of an animal. magmentum; Serv., A. Dog corpses were sometimes deposited with tablets that contained curses, and dog figurines are among the required items for performing some spells.Footnote Greek and Roman 32 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. In addition, the acceptability of miniature serveware as objects of sacrificium shows the ability of the ritual to accommodate the varying social status of those performing it. Vaz, Filipe Costa 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. Greek Translation. Detry, Cleia Now, the Romans did not eat people, so how does their performance of human sacrifice reinforce the link between sacrifice and dining? Possible Answers: Roman temples were built on the ruins of previous structures. Roman Sacrifice, Inside and Out* | The Journal of Roman Studies

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