Animal Sacrifice and Graeco-Roman Culture

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores animal sacrifice as a key element in the common Graeco-Roman culture that local elites used in negotiating a place for themselves in the empire-wide network of social power. As a cult practice existing from time immemorial in both Greek and Roman tradition, Greeks and Romans alike could regard it as a normal, natural way of demonstrating piety. At the same time, because individual cults had their own particular procedures, there was flexibility in what counted as proper animal sacrifice. Thus, when new peoples were incorporated into Roman hegemony, their elites could adapt native traditions of animal sacrifice, highlighting similarities and downplaying differences with Graeco-Roman procedure, in order to employ it as a tool for cultural and political negotiation. Two case studies illustrate the forms these negotiations could take. In northern Gaul, offering animal sacrifices to ancestral gods allowed local elites to maintain a distinctively Gallic identity, even as they brought Gallic sacrificial practice and structures of social power into conformity with Graeco-Roman norms. Although Judaean sacrificial practice differed from the Graeco-Roman norm more than Gallic practice, there were enough similarities that Judaeans and non-Judaeans were able to employ it to forge and maintain positive relations with each other.