ABSTRACT

Animal sacrifice – killing one or more animals and offering them to the gods – was the central observance of ancient Mediterranean religion, a key symbol of paganism, the pivotal point of the rituals, and a regular feature of Roman life. Greek and Roman alimentary sacrifices were similar to each other in both structure and content. The learned Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who wrote his Roman Antiquities at the time of Augustus, explicitly stresses the similarities between these rituals (7.72), although differences did exist. These differences had more to do with nuances and shades of shared meaning than with basic dissimilarities, and, besides, during the Augustan age and the early Roman Empire differences were often downplayed as part of the development of an imperial religion.1