Roman Empire and Roman Emperor: Animal Sacrifice as an Instrument of Religious Convergence

Abstract

I analyze the ways that animal sacrifice functioned to construct the figure of the emperor as a point of religious convergence in the Roman Empire. Two types of practice are important. First, the emperor was widely represented in visual media as the officiant at an animal sacrifice. The ideological significance of this imagery was grounded in economic aspects of animal sacrifice, which made it an effective tool for structuring socioeconomic hierarchies. Presented visually as the ideal sacrificant, the emperor became understandable to anyone in the urban culture of the empire as the apex of the sociopolitical hierarchy. Second, the emperor was himself the recipient of actual animal sacrifices. These sacrifices involved deliberate ambiguity: those in the Greek East were more often offered “on behalf of” the emperor than “to” him, while those in the Latin West were more often directed to deceased emperors or to the emperor’s genius or numen than to the living emperor. In all cases, however, the emperor was the beneficiary of offerings that created a relationship of asymmetrical reciprocity: those who offered the sacrifices provided gifts meant to benefit the emperor, while the emperor in turn provided the benefits of peace, stability, and prosper- ity. I conclude by identifying two reasons why animal sacrifice played so significant a part in constructing the figure of the emperor as a point of convergence. First, it was a universal- izing practice shared by both Greek and Roman tradition and indeed by many other tradi- tions within the Roman world. The second reason is its flexibility: the wide range of ways in which animal sacrifice was able to structure the relationship of the emperor to his subjects meant that it provided a language that virtually all the people of the empire, regardless of their particular cultural allegiances, could employ.