474 BOOK REVIEWS amples from modern popular culture and her intention is to explore “the perceived role” of fate and fortune “across various aspects” of Greek “daily life” (153). VASILIKI GIANNOPOULOU University of Oxford,vasiliki.giannopoulou@classics.ox.ac.uk ◊ Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice. Edited by Jennifer Wright KUNST and Zsuzsanna VÁRHELYI . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 330. Hardcover,£45.00/$74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-973896-0. If a reviewer must deal with a volume of essays by fifteen hands, about four societies (Egypt, Israel, Greece, and the Roman Empire), and about five religions (add Christianity to Roman paganism), he may be relieved that, to judge from the title, he has to deal with one period, one sea, and one rite, but this feeling is deceptive: the subject of this book, the rite of “sacrifice,” is controversial. David Frankfurter’s essay, “Egyptian Religion and the Problem of the Category ‘Sacrifice’,” shows that, if “sacrifice” means what Classicists commonly suppose, there was no such thing in Egypt. Frankfurter’s essay is in the first section of the book, entitled “Theorizing Sacrifice,” but the same evangel appears in an essay in the second part, “Negotiating Power through Sacrifice,” for here James Rives, in “The Theology of Animal Sacrifice in the Ancient Greek World: Origins and Developments ,” shows that “sacrifice” was not an important subject for Greek and Roman writers until well into the Common Era, a conclusion that means that early objections to sacrifice, as by Xenophanes, were not objections to the rite, a subject that did not interest these writers, but objections to eating certain foods. At this point, the cautious reader (including the reviewer, sworn to caution) might wonder when or where “sacrifice” is to be found, but this volume has not yet reached its peak or nadir, its third section, “Imaginary Sacrifice,” in which Kathryn McClymond, in “Don’t Cry Over Spilled Blood,” shows how the Mishnah deals with “ritual errors” in the performance of sacrifice, but does so centuries after Israelite sacrificesceased to occur. BOOK REVIEWS 475 McClymond raises the question of what “sacrifice” means. Does it mean animal sacrifice more than, or instead of, vegetal or liquid sacrifice? The ancient evidence says otherwise, and Stanley Stowers, in the lead essay in the “Theorizing ” section, conveys as much through his title, “The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings versus the Religion of Meanings, Essences, and Textual Mysteries.” Stowers is unfair to essences, which include incense, but his attack on meanings and mysteries is polemically understandable. A sacrificial offering was first of all a donative, not a mammal. If an offering need not be a mammal, it need not be violent , a conclusion that raises objections to the two best-known theories of sacrifice , those of Walter Burkert and the French duo of J.-P. Vernant and Marcel Detienne. When acts of violence are nonetheless associated with sacrifice, we ought to interrogate our sources, as emerges from Zsuzsanna Várhely’s “Political Murder and Sacrifice: From Roman Republic to Empire.” In “The Embarrassment of Blood: Early Christians and Others on Sacrifice, War, and Rational Worship ,” Laura Nasrallah does likewise, too, but includes state-sanctioned violence. Roman and Christian writers who associate some killings with sacrifice are playing a prose version of the game that Albert Henrichs has shown that the tragedians play—the gameofrhetorical transgression. Then there is the other stand-by of recent theories—the notion that sacrifice consolidated communities. Once Christian emperors banned public pagan sacrifices, private pagan sacrifices were all that remained, and so a rite that once was sometimes communal (for it was never always so), became private, as noted by Michele Renee Salzman in “The End of Public Sacrifice: Changing Definitionsof Sacrifice in Post-Constantinian Rome and Italy.” If scholars using the term “sacrifice” have been too sure of what it means, they also have been too sure of the attitude of their sources—Henrichs’ lesson, again, illustrated in this book by Fritz Graf’s “A Satirist’s Sacrifices: Lucian’s On Sacrifices and the Contestation of Religious Traditions.” About sacrifice as about other things, Lucian is funny because he is clear-minded. His image of Zeus...
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Mar 1, 2016
Giulia Miller 
Open Access