Greek and Roman Art and Architecture 1996: The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edn), Oxford. 65 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 47 WebWhat are the main differences between Greek and Roman gods? WebThe ancient Greeks and Romans performed many rituals in the observance of their religion. Through the outsider point of view, we can interpret it in light of comparable behaviours in other cultures. 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. 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. 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. 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. Macr., Sat. ex Fest. This has repercussions for our understanding of some elements of Roman religious thought. 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. 61 Oliveira, Cludia Plaut., Stich. wine,Footnote 13 Greek Zeus to the Roman Jupiter: The Complete Guide (2022) were linked.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 12 As illustration, let us return to Livy and the human sacrifice in 216 b.c.e. 17 Plutarch is the only source for dog sacrifice at the Lupercalia (RQ 68 and 111=Mor. Footnote Learn. 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 Difference Between Romans and Greeks 344L, s.v. The offering of a dog to Robigus may be the same ritual as the augurium canarium referred to by Plin., N.H. 18.14. 86 4.57. This is made clear in numerous passages from several Roman authors. Dear Mr. Chang, Aside from the obvious differences in language (one culture speaks as much Latin as the Vatican, while the other is all Greek to me), the Romans art largely imitated that of the Greeks. Difference Between Romans and Greeks The Ancient Greek Underworld 39 and 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. 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 See Oakley Reference Oakley1998: 481 and Sacco Reference Sacco2004: 316. 82. 87 1). 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). Aldrete counts at least fifty-six sculptural reliefs dating from the seventh century b.c.e. 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. 98 50, From all this, it is reasonable to conclude that the poor could substitute small vessels for more expensive, edible sacrificial offerings. 24 Although it is sixty years old, the lesson still works well. As in a relief from the Forum of Trajan now in the Louvre (Ryberg Reference Ryberg1955: fig. 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 The Romans, however, developed a more naturalistic approach to their art. If we allow only items explicitly identified as sacrificia in Roman sources, our list includes beans,Footnote 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. WebWhile both civilizations left astonishing changes in the world, the developments made by Greek thinkers outdo those of the Aztecs when evaluating their creation of a prosperous government, understanding of literature, and enlightened ideas. Jupiter also concentrated on protecting the Roman state. 280 BC and 290D; Rom. Footnote Cornell, T. J. 58 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. Total loading time: 0 Detry, Cleia 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. 56 537 Words 3 Pages Decent Essays Read More Vaz, Filipe Costa Comparative mythology 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. 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 } that contain scenes of ritual slaughter where the implements can be clearly discerned.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. Ankarloo and Clark Reference Ankarloo and Clark1999: 756; Wilburn Reference Wilburn2012: 8790. 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 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 For a treatment of this methodological issue on a broader scale, see the rather pointed critique in Hopkins Reference Hopkins1978: 1808. On the contrary, Greek religion did not prefer to execute rituals as much as 33 9.641. At 8.10.1112, Livy notes that a commander could devote one of his soldiers rather than himself. Sacrificium included vegetal and inedible offerings, and it was not the only Roman ritual that had living victims. There are many other non-meat sacrifices the Romans could offer. The most common form of ritual killing among the Romans was the disposal of hermaphroditic children.Footnote The equation of sacrifice with the offering of an animal is not completely divorced from the ancient sources. Carretero, Lara Gonzalez Similarities Between Greek And Roman Architecture 413=Macr., Sat. In light of the importance of ritual killing in modern theoretical treatments of sacrifice, the relative paucity of slaughter scenes in Roman art requires some explanation. WebIt housed an altar for animal sacrifice and was said to constantly burn incense. WebWhile both civilizations left astonishing changes in the world, the developments made by Greek thinkers outdo those of the Aztecs when evaluating their creation of a prosperous 52 Livy also uses the language of sacrifice when he describes the underground room as a place that had already seen human victims.Footnote 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. Mar. Hermes, who had winged feet, was the messenger of the gods and could fly anywhere with great speed. 176 and Serv., A. 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. The insider-outsider problem has had little impact on the study of religion in pre-Christian Rome. WebComparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics. 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 D. 6.9 (which probably draws on Varro) and possibly Paul. Greeks call the queen Hera, whereas Romans queen of gods is Juno. 21 216,Footnote Hostname: page-component-7fc98996b9-rf4gk As in the Greek world, sacrifice was the central ritual of religion. Compare Var., R. 2.8.1. It appears that no Roman source ever uses the language of sacrificium to describe devotio,Footnote 94. and Narbo in Gallia Narbonensis (CIL 12.4333, dated to 11 c.e.). Hammers appear in only fifteen scenes, two-thirds of which date between the first century b.c.e. 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. Columella 2.21.4 might also refer to dog sacrifice, but the verb (feceris) leaves it ambiguous as to which ritual was being performed. Scheid Reference Scheid1998: nn. 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. Of this class of rituals, sacrificium does seem to have been somehow different from the others. Lucil. It is a hallmark of poverty, whether in a religious context or not, appearing often in poetic passages where the narrator describes a low-budget lifestyle.Footnote Mactare is another ritual performed on animals (referred to as hostiae and victimae) at an altar, but also on porridge (Nonius 539L). 22 which I quote at some length because we shall return to this passage later on: Territi etiam super tantas clades cum ceteris prodigiis, tum quod duae Vestales eo anno, Opimia atque Floronia, stupri compertae et altera sub terra, uti mos est, ad portam Collinam necata fuerat, altera sibimet ipsa mortem consciverat; Hoc nefas cum inter tot, ut fit, clades in prodigium versum esset, decemviri libros adire iussi sunt et Q. Fabius Pictor Delphos ad oraculum missus est sciscitatum quibus precibus suppliciisque deos possent placare et quaenam futura finis tantis cladibus foret. 84 Ubiquitous in the scholarship is the assumption that if the gods receive an animal, it is sacrifice, but if the gods receive vegetable produce and other inanimate edibles, those are something different: they are offerings. 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. Minos gave laws to Crete. Were they always burnt on an altar or brazier? Greek Gods and Religious Practices | Essay | The Metropolitan J. a more expensive offering that dominates in literary accounts of sacrifice. 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. Roman Moses (Reference Moses, Brocato and Terrenatoforthcoming, table 2) reports that these species account for 89.9 per cent of the total number of individual animal specimens recovered. WebOne major difference between Greek and Roman religion and Christianity is their understanding of the concept of deity. The literary evidence for this is slender but persuasive. 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. Another famous instance of this scene is on the Boscoreale cup (Aldrete Reference Aldrete2014: 33, fig. 73 Burkert Reference Burkert and Bing1983: 3; Girard Reference Girard and Gregory1977: 1. 32 11 90 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. 85 Admittedly the Romans often used as a metonym for the whole of sacrificium the term immolatio, the stage of the ritual that includes slaughter, suggesting the special importance of that portion of the ritual sequence.Footnote While the attention of our Roman sources is drawn most frequently to blood sacrifice, there is good reason to think that, if there was indeed a climax to the ritual,Footnote 10 and again in 114 or 113 b.c.e. 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. 48 The distinction between sacrificare and mactare was lost by Late Antiquity, but it was still active in the Republic and early Empire.Footnote 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. ex Fest. at the battle of the Veseris between Rome and the Latins (8.9.114), the ritual consists of the recitation of the dedicatory formula by the consul P. Decius Mus while in the midst of battle. Those details, once recovered, can in turn subtly reshape our own idea of what sacrifice is and what it does. 16 To give just a single example, we know that there was originally some technical distinction among the different types of divine signs sent to the Romans by the gods. Rhadamanthus and Minos were brothers. 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. The Romans were aware of the link, as is made clear by Paul. 13 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. Also Var., Men. 63. sacrima. More Greek words for sacrifice. 91 72 For example, Ares is the Greek Aeacus holds the keys to Hades.

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