Roman Sacrifice, Inside and Out

Abstract

The 'insider-outsider problem' has had little impact on the study of religion in preChristian Rome. Classicists generally assume that the modern idea of sacrice as the ritual killing of an animal applies to the Roman context. This study argues, however, that the apparent continuity is illusory in some important ways and that we have lost sight of some ne distinctions that the Romans made among the rituals they performed. Sacricium included vegetal and inedible offerings, and it was not the only Roman ritual that had living victims. Roman sacricium is both less and more than the typical etic notion of sacrice.Keywords: sacrice; Rome; emic; etic; pollucere; mactare I Those working in the social sciences have, for some time, been wrestling with the 'insider-outsider problem': how can one person genuinely understand the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of another? Insiders can report their own subjective experience, but very often this diverges from the assessments of those observing from the outside, from what is perceived as a more objective position. The problem was cleverly illustrated in a classic article that is standard reading for introductory anthropology and religious studies courses but that is generally unfamiliar to classicists, entitled 'Body rituals of the Nacirema' by the anthropologist Horace Miner. The article offers a brief account of the daily habits of this North American tribe whose members place a great deal of emphasis on maintaining and improving the body, for example: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. Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of the powerful inuences of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. 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. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls. 1 * 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. J. B. Rives provided valuable consultation on specic points and V. C. Moses generously shared her work-in-progress on the osteoarchaeological evidence from S. Omobono. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, suggestions and objections that have greatly improved this piece. I have tried to respond to them all. The errors and aws that remain are all my own.

Sacrifice and ‘Religion’: Modeling Religious Change in the Roman Empire

“…As I have already noted, animal sacrifice was by no means the only or even the most important form of offering, at least from what we might call a theological point of view. Fred Naiden has cogently demonstrated that the ancient Greeks did not single out animal sacrifice from other types of offerings as being in some way more efficacious in winning divine goodwill (Naiden 2013) and in a recent article Celia Schultz has made a similar point with regards to the ancient Romans (Schultz 2016). What did distinguish animal sacrifice from other forms of offerings were two things that had relatively little to do with beliefs about the gods.…”

A Feast in Carthage: Testing the Limits of ‘Secularity’ in Late Antiquity

“… 12 Bradbury 1995 and Cameron 2011: 65–7 focus too narrowly on blood sacrifice (cf. Schultz 2016), yet they do show real changes in inherited custom.…”

Tarpeia the Vestal

“… 24 Parker 2004: esp. 583–8; contra Cornell 1981: 34, who argued that the unchaste Vestal was announced by prodigia rather than being a prodigium herself; against the idea of the Vestal as sacrifice, see Schultz 2010: 530–4; 2012: 125–33; 2016: 70–2.…”

“… 44 Tarpeia appears on only one page in Staples’ analysis of the Vestals (Staples 1998: 144) and not at all in other standard works. For example, she is absent from Beard 1980; 1995; Cornell 1981; Lovisi 1998; Wildfang 2006; Takács 2008; Schultz 2010; 2012; 2016. Fraschetti 1984: 98–9 specifically excluded her from consideration in his examination of Vestal incestum .…”

“…The human sacrifices of the Gauls and Greeks were also intra-pomerial burials. See also Sanders 1904: 14 for a similar point; Schultz 2010: 530–4; 2012: 129–33; 2016: 68–72 for arguments distinguishing other types of capital punishment from both Vestal interment and human sacrifice (I would like to thank Celia Schultz for pressing me on this point in Michigan).…”