Sacrifice in Ancient Rome

And we're going to jump into this. I'm an archaeologist. I direct the American Institute for Roman Culture. I think we're doing a pretty doggone good job on social media, but we're now sharing much more of our content for Ancient Rome Live on our YouTube channel, two webinars. That's one hour of real, researched content from yours truly, a practicing archaeologist. We'd like to have many more conversations. We did three last week with a number of scholars and organizations like Tramontium Trust, so we're going to be doing more of that and sharing that as well. It's all going to be on AncientRomeLive.org, which has bibliography and written content, but also you're always going to find the video section on our YouTube channel that we ask you always please to subscribe. And then, of course, I have a YouTube channel as well now that's going to be giving a lot more information as well about the city of Rome in my own way through collaborations that I've also created that have allowed me now to share more content. So hi there in the Etruscan countryside, from India, from London. And we'll talk about the Seventorelia, of course, Latin Teacher 4, New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Miami, wow, Portland, fantastic. This is absolutely phenomenal to have so many of you from so many different places and more that aren't saying where they're from, but that's all great. So we're going to talk about what's behind me. We're going to be talking about Roman sacrifice. And it is a very interesting phenomenon. Of course, we have religions all over the world. We've had religions in the past and religions today. And so many of us, of course, are going to be making an offering to a deity in some way. And so we'll talk about what the Romans did. There's great variety. And there's great amount of ritual involved. Let's please then jump in here and keep the questions coming. And I'll address them as as I get a chance. So first of all, where do you make the sacrifice? We'll talk about what the sacrifice is after, but where do you make a sacrifice? Well, oftentimes, they're in an inaugurated space. They're in a place that's been set aside from daily activity. But of course, it's not just in a sacred space like a templum. It sounds like the word temple, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a temple structure. It can be an inaugurated space, can be any kind of structure or any kind of area. But a temple is obviously a classic. There can be a grove of trees occupied by a deity, a pool, a spring, a tomb, just the altar itself, a standalone altar without a temple. Temple of Peace is a very famous example of that. Confitus shrines, crossroads shrines, the lares. And of course, you can have things in your house. And so it's not just big public spaces. You can also make the sacrifice in the sanctity, in the privacy of your home. So you're doing all kinds of things. Let's just really jump right into it and really get into the mechanics of the sacrifice. OK, so there are going to be two kinds of sacrifices that you can make. Blood, animal sacrifice, bloodless. What does bloodless mean? If you're going to make an offering to a deity, what can you give them? So we'll get into this, but essentially think of something like flowers, grain, sacrificial cakes, wine. But when you think about the animal, because like, look what's behind me here, a big bull being sacrificed, that's about as large of an animal that you could sacrifice. They didn't go around sacrificing elephants or something. So the bull is about as big as it gets. And on that note, Nancy asked about the severed Torellia. The severed Torellia is essentially a word that means one sheep, one pig and one bull. And there are certain moments of time in which you're going to offer this kind of group, sacrificial victims, these three, one pig, one sheep and one bull. And that's just the terminology for it. So as opposed to saying, let's sacrifice one of each of these three creatures, they're just the word. And there's a really famous example on the backside of the Anaglypha Traiani reliefs currently housed in the Curia in the Roman Forum, found originally outside in the Forum Piazza itself. So coming back here, we've got to have an animal. Now, when you choose an animal, you don't just choose any animal. It's like when you go to the Humane Society and you pick out an animal. So you're looking for something, right? And then you choose an animal to become your pet. For the Romans and the Greeks, when they're selecting from a herd of cattle or something like that, what do you think they're looking for? They're looking for healthy, they're looking for large, very nice presentation, thinking about defects. Is there some sort of weird patterning on the body? Is there something atypical? Then you don't want that. You want something that what you think then is going to be pleasing to the gods. So it's just like in a beauty contest or the weightlifting contest. And you're looking for that perfect musculature or whatever, the bodybuilder. Oh, but those biceps are not quite developed. Well, then I don't think the guy gets the first prize. So you really are looking for something that is a noble creature, is a beautiful creature, is a healthy creature. And then when do you usually conduct your activities? Well, it's usually in the morning. So how does it start? You don't just go and sacrifice the creature like we see here, this bull about to be struck by a slave attendant. Rather, first you start off with the procession. So previously. That's surrounding a particular deity. So you want to make that offer. So the first thing you do is you have a pompa and a pompa is a procession of animals with slave attendants is the victimati and they will then process proceed to the altar where the creature is going to be or creatures are going to be sacrificed. Here's a question here. Is the type of animal picked for sacrifice influenced by the God the sacrifice is being made to? Absolutely. We haven't even gotten into it, but you can definitely think, for example, one that just pops up in my mind when you're sacrificing to Persephone. So Ceres, Demeter, her daughter, is stolen away from her by Hades. So Persephone goes and has to end up spending half her time with Hades in the underworld. Well, the deity associated, the creature that you typically associate with making a sacrifice to Demeter or Ceres and her daughter, Persephone, is a pig. So you go to and so then you have the literary sources, you have poems, you have descriptions. Then you go to the archaeological sites and you find little votive offerings. So if you can't even afford a pig and you're going to that sanctuary to venerate that deity and you don't have a pig, you can't afford a pig, it's kind of expensive. It's not like you're going to your HEB or your Kroger or whatever and picking up some meat in the market. It's much more expensive. So what do you do? You make an offering of something that represents that pig. That's just one example. You can imagine every deity, the complexity, the diversity, the different roles of the, excuse me, the roles of the deities. We have a lot of pollen right now in Rome. OK, so you have the procession, attendance with the animals, kind of accompanying them. There's a very famous example of that on the altar of the Arpachis. The crowd gathers, the invited guests gather, the priests are there, and in the end, there's someone that's officiating over this. Now, if you look at the scene behind me, you say, if I say to you, look at that image there, which guys are the slaves? So the dictamari, these attendants, they are uniform, they're designated by being bare chested and then having a little wrapping around the legs. They are slaves, but they're specialized slaves trained for stunning the animal, gutting the animal and eventually preparing the meat to be consumed by the people that are participating in the sacrifice. But the officiant, the person who's going to officiate over this, could very well be the emperor himself. He is not going to dirty his hands with that whole process, which is very messy. He's there to say prayers. He's there to burn some incense. He's there to be the kind of the the circus master, the ringmaster or something like that. But he's not going to do the nitty gritty. That's not his role. So the crowd gathers, invite a guest or that gathered the priest, right? You will wash your hands. We're all used to washing our hands now. So you wash your hands, as you see in so many other religions today. How are you preparing yourself mentally, spiritually, but then also physically? You are now going to be maybe touching implements, tools and so on that are very precious, very expensive. Devoted only to the deity. You're going to wash your hands and tons of religions still do that today. Silence is invoked. So you don't want and the Romans are really keen on this. You don't want anyone interrupting your sacrifice. So as Romans are filled with ritual and tradition and they do it by the book. So when you're going to start to speak or the celebrant makes a prayer in the preface, the prefatio, and he's offering some wine and burning some incense as an initial libation on that altar. If a baby suddenly goes, oh, my God, you might have to start over. And that's what the Romans are doing. They want to make sure that there's no interruptions, there's no stumbling physically, literally. You want to make sure that there's no kind of way to interfere with your communicating. You're offering to the deities. So oftentimes the Romans would then restart the system over, even choosing another sacrificial victim. It gets to be quite complicated because you don't want to mess up what someone before you has said you should do. Sacrifices of the goddess Isis were made also during the day or preferred evening time. Yeah, that's well, again, it depends on what the circumstances are. There are various festivities associated with Isis and so on. A lot of them could take place behind closed doors in the sanctity of a given sanctuary. And yes, there are also night rituals. Absolutely. So there's no one sacrifice that fits all. As I'm kind of teasing through as we're going in here, there are just so many different ways in which you make a sacrifice. But definitely you get a pompa, you gather, you wash your hands, you have the preface, you're making a prayer. And in that time period, you are also pouring libations. You are pouring already some offerings. So wine can be poured. And here's another critical thing that stands out is that there is Mola Salsa, something that's been prepared a couple of times a year, a couple of times a year by the Vestal Virgins themselves. And it is grain from the first harvest. So they physically would grind up the grain in the atrium and vesti and they would mix in it brine, salty water. So that combo together becomes something which is poured on the head. I designate this creature, this creature right now that I am now covering with the Mola Salsa to the deity. They run a knife along the back of a sacrificial creature. But this whole process is called Immolatio and really the Immolatio comes from this term of Mola Salsa. And while this is going on, attendants are holding the creature, whether it be a pig or a goat or sheep or bull. And you have attendants, I don't really see one here, usually like kids are the attendants holding the box of incense. They're holding some sort of implement, maybe the knife or whatever. And then the victimati are the people that are going to be bashing in the head, stunning the creature and slitting its throat and having the blood drain out. All the while, there's a flute player playing along. Why? Because that's creating negative noise. So you're kind of drowning out any kind of just anomalous sounds that we're saying. We don't want to disrupt the the the the sacrifice with a piercing cry of a baby or something like that. You stun the animal looking at the bull here. You kill the animal. You gut the animal. Then in come a number of specialized priests like the Herispices that would then examine the entrails of the deceased creatures. And the reason you're doing that, sacrifice the baby, right? Make it too much noise. When altars are outside in front of the temple, these altars are in front of the temple. But an altar can also just be an altar by itself without even having a temple. But every temple does have an altar in front of it or on the stairs or something like that. And these people, yes, the victim, somebody is asking, were indeed slaves. So in terms of who's performing the sacrifice, as we can see already, there's a big joint effort. There is this important person who is, you know, maybe paying for the festivities. So he gets to make some sort of offering prayers and so forth, kind of kicking it off. There's obviously going to be a priest that's an attendant of the full time job is to monitor the temple. Then you have a lot of slave attendants. They're employed by possibly being members of or belong to a particular temple, like in the temple that's in the background of the of the image that I'm showing. And so, you know, they're going to be doing things that are part of the process. But it's not that they have the most important role. The most important role is that person who's paying for the most important role is that person who's overseeing this all the time. Were there slaves? Okay. Thinking of Crassus, who appointed Plutarch, performed the sacrifice during his campaign. Yes. So, I mean, you're always going to have these slave attendants. But I mean, if you pull it back to something much more local, much more personal, much more intimate in your house, then the paterfamilias, the head of the household, will be officiating. Then it's less so about the big animal sacrifice and much more about barley cakes and pouring wine and so forth. So really, were the entrails examined and not the other parts of the sacrifice? So, yes, you're looking at all kinds of guts. Maybe most famously, the one I want to talk about just shortly is the liver. And so we have the Piacenza liver, this famous bronze liver, that's all sectioned out according to Etruscan rite. And in fact, everything is written in Etruscan. And basically, you can imagine the shape of a liver and there can be a great variety in the liver in an animal, right? Different size, different shape. And of course, you know, there's even variety within a given species. So when you you don't know what you're going to get, it's like a it's like, you know, popping open the pinata. What kind of candy did I get? In this case, you open up the the the animal and you go, oh, no, you know, because this one particular organ was rotted or looks sick or it's smaller or it's deformed or whatever. And so they write these things down, bad omen, good omen. Now we have to interpret what we get. It's reading the tea leaves. It's that kind of thing. So essentially, you are really it's like not a Russian roulette, but you do open up that sacrificial victim, hoping that they're going to have a bad science. And if you do get something that's very strange, potentially you even the person officiating could actually say, well, I think it actually means this. So there's a lot of give and take. I mean, in the end, it's I'm giving so that you, the God gives to me and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that my offering is acceptable to you. If something really weird happens or there's some sort of something strange with some of these entrails, you have to interpret it and then you start over again or you proceed. And then, of course, something bad happens to you. Then, you know, obviously you made the wrong decision. You should have done a do over. Right. So we have a lot of flexibility within this kind of system. So hope this is good so far. Got a lot of great questions here. So what happens afterwards? After you have the examination of the entrails, we're talking about the aristocetes, these guys practice the Etruscan rites of examining the liver. You burn some parts like the entrails to the gods. There you go. Enjoy. But what about everything that's edible? That's going to be prepared by the victim. Ari is a great passage in Virgil's Aeneid, and they're making sausages and they're cutting up the steaks and so on and so forth. So it's going to be a very big barbecue. It's going to be a great time for all those people that are attending. And we hear about grand celebrations, the Ludi Romani or triumph and all kinds of great, great festivals. They're killing an enormous amount of livestock for the people. So this could be the one great time of the year that you're going to have meat. And remember, there's a great variety of what could be sacrificed between the chicken, a goat, a pig and so forth. And obviously, the bull is going to be one of the most expensive and rare things that you are going to be sacrificing to the deity. So it's going to be a very special occasion indeed. Keep those questions coming. So then you have, you know, part of the animal entrails are burned for the gods. The rest of the meal is going to be for the mortals. And you're going to have the attendants preparing that as well. And then finally, you have that sacrificial banquet. That's why, again, when we're talking about with some exceptions, one that reference to ISIS or some of these nighttime festivals to the gods of the underworld. Most things are being done in the day and they're being done. They're going to be started early because there's a long process to prepare from living creature to meal. If anyone's ever done that, you know, ordered a pig to roast for a big cookout or something, it takes a while. So you just get some sense of that. Now, again, the significance is to then partake in a meal with the gods themselves. You're burning up their stuff. It goes up to smoke to the to the gods, unless, of course, you're talking about those creatures in the other world. You're pouring it down to the ground, to the underground. And, you know, it's there's an authority here. They get what's theirs and we get what's ours. We're all here together. We're offering this to you. You don't have to offer anything to us. That's this famous do it days. I give so that you give to me. And in their offerings to to remember the gods in the fulfillment of vows, I vow this to you. I win this victory. And now I'm going to give you this sacrifice. Sometimes another kind of sacrifice is self-sacrifice. I am sacrificing my life for the better, for the well-being of the state. So people sacrifice themselves in a war. You're going to have votive contracts to fix. You're going to have conditional consecration. And that's called a Socratico. You can do this during games. You can have sacrificial banquets, which involve this elective stare down. So you have to put the gods on couches and they're literally dining with you in the form of statues. There are supplications, there are expiations. There are lots of things that are going on, of course. But let's keep it real. Let's keep it real and think about for a second. Oh, a lot of questions here. There's smell involved. There's stench. There's the excrement of the animals that are there. No one can say to them, please don't go to the bathroom. So you can imagine the reality of it is a big and then you're slaughtering the animal and there's blood being drained out. So this is a big kind of mess that we're not going to the supermarket and picking out some meat to then offer to the gods. This is real life and this is real loss of life here. And it's going to be something that people are used to seeing. Maybe if we went there and participated, it'd be like, oh, the first time I see an animal killed, it'd be very intense. But there it is. It's more usual for them to see this and intense. Nonetheless, was there a myth that explained why some parts of the sacrificial body were burned to the gods and others were kept by the mortals? Yes, there is a myth. The famous one, I think it's Prometheus. That's kind of making that kind of deal of let's give this to the gods and let's let the mortals keep this. Very intense. Excellent. Never realized how complicated it was. Always thought it was a simple process. As Robert, absolutely. It is intense. It is involved. And of course, in the end, we got to put all of these circumstances to bring us back to the mindset of those people in antiquity. Think about how how how vivid it was, how real it was. And it was something that, you know, you weren't learning a catechism. You weren't being converted to worshiping the gods. They were the gods. They deserved to be honored. This is what our forefathers did. So let's do it, too. There's pageantry, there's music, there's boys, there's girls. Right. There can be a theatrical performance. There can be athletic competitions. Let's go. Let's celebrate. Let's let's go to also go to the sacrifice to honor the gods. It's a big way of participating in society. It's not compartmentalized onto a Friday or Saturday or Sunday. The gods need to be honored throughout your day. We haven't even gotten there yet. Some gods prefer to sacrifice more than others in the Roman Republic. They pay attention to Pluto. Yes, we're talking about some underworld offerings. Was Apollo the most popular? He's quite popular, particularly popular with Augustus. Was Pluto part of the underground immortals or wasn't he an Olympian and sacrifice given to the ground? He's living in the underworld. So it's like down there below. We make those offering to the god below. Would a triumph end in the temple of Jupiter, Optimus Maximus and include a sacrifice? Absolutely. That's the culmination of the whole thing. You go around your ticker tape parade. That's our lecture for next week. Thanks for bringing that up, Dan. And at the end of the ticker tape parade with all your spoils of war and all the troops and all the slaves that you've brought in and the paintings that depict your battles. You go up to the hill. You make the sacrifice. You have a banquet. Do you have a meal? So the same thing that we're still talking about today. Is there evidence of people being uncomfortable about witnessing the killing? Some people, yeah, they didn't really like it. But no one's forcing you to go there. No one's obliging you to do that. Do you know if the bull killing the Mithraic sacrifice was eaten by the adepts or could be used by the people? So Mithras is him killing the bull in the depictions. But when we look at the archaeological evidence, they're eating or finding chicken bones in the drains or finding goats and stuff like that. So it's a ritual meal. That bull is part of another. It's a whole other reference point. Astrological signs. It's not really about they're not having bull sacrifices every meal. We can talk about Mithras another time. Interesting thing about Mithras is you're meeting an indoor space and the altars inside the building, all the other normal temples that the altars in front of the temple in an open piazza. Did people only sacrifice the gods and emperors managed to blur that line? They're going to blur that line. Absolutely. So we're really covering a lot of ground here. I really, really appreciate a lot of the comments and questions. Just again, remember, we keep it real. The smell, the stench, the excrement. This is not like supermarket food here. This is the real deal. Could not the incense being burned then be a way of covering up some of that smell? Remember that we can offer all kinds of things to the gods in antiquity. First fruits, grain, polenta, milk, dried figs, bread, sesame seeds, oil, grain from the first harvest, salt, burning juniper, laurel. That's what you did. And times are simpler. When Rome became the great master of the Mediterranean, then you got incense coming from southern Arabian Peninsula. You're getting myrrh, you're getting saffron, right? You're getting all kinds of exotic things that really up the ante, let's say. It could be quite expensive, actually, in ancient times. Boy, time has really flown here. But I think we can come back and talk more about this. Definitely, though, just to give you a little rundown to the Romans, we're never static. They're meeting new people. They're coming across new ideas. They bring in new practices. So they have, quote unquote, Roman traditions. They bring in foreign gods. They have their own foreign traditions. Of course, the first ones they're thinking about are, what are the Etruscans doing? So we have the Chorispasis is absorbed into the Roman tradition. We have Hercules coming in, Castor's coming in, Apollo coming in, Asclepius coming in. The Greek gods are becoming very Roman, indeed, by the fourth century BCE. By 399, they introduced this idea of bringing the gods on a banquet couch, sitting with you as you have a meal. That's the Lectisterium. The first one is recorded in 399 BCE. You bring out gods from other cities. Come on over. We'll treat you better. Juno from May in 396. So there are many, many examples. New cults in response to the plague. We talked about this on another webinar on Asclepius and Apollo. You know, sometimes you take a local tradition and make it into a state tradition that the cult of the Aramaxima seemed to be. It was first managed by a number of families. So it says Lydie. And then eventually the state says, no, we'll take over this cult ourselves. We'll take over the the worship of Hercules ourselves. Sometimes you refer to the Sibylline books, which help you interpret, you know, all kinds of strange goings on, gives you prophecies, you know, and that's going to be subject to interpretation with the passing of time, even rewritten by the time of when you get it going back to the regal times, according to the Romans, recomposed after a fire in the Republican times, refurbished again in the second century BCE, and then finally even moving from the Capitoline Hill over to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill in the reign of Augustus. And then let's not keep it. Let's keep in mind that also the Romans could be desperate and do strange things, like even human sacrifice during the second Punic War. Those were desperate times indeed, like 228 and 216 BCE. So, you know, you're trying to figure out, trying to strike a balance between understanding who the gods were, what the gods did and trying to get on their on their good side. So what do you do? You make sacrifices. You try to sweeten the deal to obtain what you want. Goodness knows that you want the gods on your side. And when something strange happens in society, you try to make up for it. So when the sacred grove gets struck by lightning, there are real brethren will make sacrifices. When a statue is struck by lightning, you make sacrifices. You make offerings. So you're always trying. The Romans are trying to appease all these deities. And with the passing of time and creating a huge empire, there are even more deities. And of course, a lot of local traditions will make their way into Rome. And then those few words about the imperial cult, of course, the emperor is going to be another god that you're going to be appealing to, immensely popular in the provinces, particularly in the east. These are deities. If you worship, you'd be able to get tax benefits. You'd be able to get relief. You'd be able to get funds. So we got to think of the ways in which people are because the gods, even the new gods, the Roman emperors. Last questions, and I think we'll wrap it up. How often did the Romans make such pompous sacrifice in a year? Besides the triumphs? Oh, so many. By the time, by the time, by the time we get to the empire, they take in local traditions and they've added 10, 20 days on it. So it's something like I can't remember what the exact number is. But if you put it in our terms, everyone in Rome, there's just so much. It's like a welfare state. I think you almost have like three or four day weekends every week. There's like a lot of partying, a lot of festivities. Please tell us again where the relief in your background came from. This is actually it's from Rome somewhere, but it's in the Uffizi. And it was just on display in Rome for the Raphael show. That's where I thought I had a camera where we know exactly more specifically than that, where it was located. I apologize, but it's definitely from the Uffizi and then originally from Rome. I wonder about the human sacrifice. How were those sacrifices made? Something like the Aztecs? I think what happens is they tended to bury them alive. There's no splitting of the throat or anything like that. Burying alive. And in fact, when the excavations took place in the 19th century, revealing the Roman form, the Roman form Piazza underneath the Roman form Piazza, they found the remains of a number of humans where they interpreted being human sacrifices as well from, I'd say, early regal, if not earlier. But but definitely this one, the Romans and their imperial period really puzzled about that and said, why, why do they kill people in the time of the second Punic War? I just don't get it. That's what Pliny's asking. But honestly, it was desperate times and your sacrifices aren't working. So. Let's try it. Of course, it wasn't a Roman, it was a foreigner. You know, a foreigner was sacrificing a Gaul and a Greek. That was OK for the Romans at that time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Who got to attend the sacrifices? Pretty much anyone. They're open to the public when they're in front of a an altar, in front of the Pantheon, in front of the Temple of Antoninus Pius and Bustina, in front of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The main thing is that there is going to be a hierarchy. So the more important people, the senators, the Vestal Virgins, we people have choice of seating or positions to stand. That's a dedicatory disc there, like a like a shield, that there'd be some information written on it. But I think this one here, it's probably painted. And so it's not on here. So that's what we have. Thank you guys so much for joining me. This is fantastic. Great questions. It's getting better than ever. I really appreciate it. And I really appreciate your comments. I think I got to pretty much all of them from all the places around the world that you are attending. I do enjoy this very much. I hope you get something out of it. And of course, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. We Dig Rome. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. And, you know, just rewatch these videos, share them with your students, share them with your friends on our YouTube channel. And I have a couple that I'm behind uploading. We'll get to them real soon. Thank you guys very much. Coming up this Wednesday, the kids seminar. It's the walls of ancient Rome from Romulus to the Serbian walls to the Iridianic walls, holding the barbarians at bay. Thanks a lot.