Animal Sacrifice in the Roman Empire (31 BCE-395 CE)

Abstract

Abstract This book explores the changing socioeconomic, political, and cultural significance of animal sacrifice in the Roman imperial period. Although animal sacrifice was only one of a wide range of offerings to the gods, it was distinctive in being more costly than many others and in generating a valuable consumer good: high-quality meat. As a result, it functioned to reinforce social structures that enabled the smooth operation of the Roman Empire: the socioeconomic hierarchies of Graeco-Roman cities, the normative Graeco-Roman culture that bound together urban elites, and the ideological role of the Roman emperor (Part I of the book). At the same time as the practice of animal sacrifice performed these ideological functions, there were also, from an early date, various discourses about animal sacrifice that relocated its meaning from the social to the conceptual sphere, discourses that a range of freelance experts, from Graeco-Roman philosophers to early Christian leaders, deployed as a means of establishing their own social power (Part II). These two aspects of animal sacrifice, as practice and as discourse, intersected both with each other and with larger economic and political developments in ways that, starting in the mid-third century CE, led to its becoming the object of both imperial and ecclesiastical policy. Over the course of the fourth century CE, animal sacrifice was displaced from its central role in the structuring of the empire, redefined as a marker of “paganism,” and eventually prohibited altogether (Part III).