Sacrifice,an Ancient Mediterranean Ritual

Abstract

Any examination of sacrifice must reckon with the variety and complexity of sacrificial activities and the problems that consequently attend sacrifice employed as an analytical category. Approached as ritual and placed in full context, sacrifice reveals rich connections with the key social structures and cultural values of the ancient Mediterranean world. Sacrifice established and maintained the social status and location of participants in it, and in many situations it defined kinship ties and identities. It also constituted a component in the reciprocal exchange between human beings and their ancestors and god(s), an exchange in which sacrifice signified gift giving. Sacrificial gift-giving sustained the patron-client relations that denizens of the Mediterranean supposed they had with their superiors—ancestors and god(s). It did so by serving as a gesture of gratitude to one's patrons; it was the primary means of honoring them.

Keywords

sacrifice ritual exchange reciprocity gift kinship patron-client honor

Sacrifice lay at the heart of ancient Mediterranean religion and culture. When Socrates explored the notion of piety or holiness with Euthyphro, in Plato's dialogue by the same name, he readily agreed to Socrates' suggestion that service to the gods consisted of sacrifice and prayer (14c). Denizens of the ancient Mediterranean world would have agreed with that proposal, as do most modern scholars of the ancient Mediterranean. Scholarly consensus quickly breaks down from there, however. There is wide disagreement over defining the term, what is essential to it, what activities constitute it, and what can appropriately be characterized as sacrificial.

Modern Theories of Sacrifice

This divergence in scholarly viewpoint has a long history. Comparative theories of sacrifice from the late nineteenth century were universal in scope and evolutionary in approach, typically identifying one feature of sacrifice as original, finding it in most or all human cultures, and assigning other features to later phases of human development. Edward Tylor posited that sacrifice began as gift giving to a deity, grew into a communal meal honoring the deity, then matured into “abnegation,” the surrender of something valuable to benefit the sacrificer (1903 [1871]: 2:375–99). William Robertson Smith, a generation after Tylor, reversed phases one and two, concluding that sacrifice was originally a communal or kinship meal shared with the deity—a sacramental communion. The understanding of sacrifice as gift, according to Robertson Smith, emerged later (1889: 227, 369–77, 381, 418). Another prominent theory, proposed by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss in 1898, made Tylor's third phase primary. To them, it was the consecration and elimination of what was sacrificed that brought the mundane and sacred together. These features—and not others—epitomized sacrifice (1964: 9–13; 97–9). These related but conflicting theories have left their mark on all subsequent scholarship on sacrifice.

Twentieth-century theorists shied away from evolutionary schemes and were more informed by psychology or sociology, but still tended to seize on a single feature as definitive for sacrifice. For Sigmund Freud, in essays that appeared in 1912 and 1913, elimination of the sacrificial victim was indispensable, for it allowed participants in the sacrifice to work through a destructive impulse Freud found intrinsic in humankind. The impulse operated in both the individual and the collective. Freud posited a patricide perpetrated by a primal horde in some distant past, a murder that still haunted humankind. Similarly, Freud's psychoanalysis led him to assert that a child's desire for its mother led, in the male, to a murderous hatred of the father—the Oedipal complex. This claim had religious implications because Freund saw in the deity an exalted father figure. So sacrificial killing or destruction allowed human beings to vent their violent impulse but also to redirect it—from father-god to animal—and thus remediate both group and personal guilt (1961 [1918]: 181–207).

Other important twentieth-century theorists rejected much of Freud's psychology, but agreed with him that sacrifice was linked to violence, even inextricably so. Georges Bataille, for example, found in all organisms an excess production of energy, so that living entailed expenditure beyond what was essential. This meant that dissipation was the natural order of things, such as the squandering of resources on unproductive display, what Bataille labeled ritual prodigality, or the senseless loss of life on the battlefield. He cited the Aztecs' violent sacrifice of war captives as evidence of how this principle came to expression in religion (1988–1991: 1.27–8, 59–61, 64–8).

Another French theorist, René Girard, considered violence inherent in humankind because of mimetic desire, which he defined as the desire for an object prompted by another's desire for it. Rivalry for the same object leads to violence and threatens the social order with dissolution. To avoid chaos, human societies develop a mechanism for redirecting violence between competitors to another party. This is none other than a scapegoat, and it makes sacrifice an essential antidote to the violence that arises from mimetic desire (1977: 8, 145–48). One can see in these three examples, representative of twentieth-century theory, an indebtedness to earlier thinkers, especially Hubert and Mauss. Also, Freud, Bataille, and Girard agree to some extent in their focus on the sacrificial victim and their finding a close connection between sacrifice and violence. Yet unanimity regarding sacrifice remains elusive, for what motivates that violence and what the victim represents is strikingly different in each theory.

Like those proposing a general or universal theory of sacrifice, scholars of the ancient Mediterranean world have tended to privilege one element of sacrifice and make it representative of the whole. In an approach harkening back to the nineteenth century, Karl Meuli found the antecedents of sacrifice in Paleolithic hunting behavior. He compared the archaeological record and ethnographic studies of hunter cultures, on the one hand, with the record for ancient Greek sacrifice, on the other, and he found striking resemblances (1975). Building on Meuli, Walter Burkert argued that the logic that drove hunting behavior—(animal) life must be taken in order to sustain (human) life—operated in sacrifice as well. Moreover, both entailed and channeled human aggression and violence, which generated in turn a remorse and sense of guilt at the death of a living creature. Burkert saw sacrifice as essential for establishing and maintaining social solidarity in ancient Greek society; sacrifices marked all social events (1983: 1–48).

Other scholars of the ancient Mediterranean concentrated on animal sacrifice, too, but they found little emphasis on violence and anxiety about it in their sources. Rather, sacrifice was all about alimentation: the preparation, distribution, and consumption of the sacrificial animal. This aspect of animal sacrifice deserved the most attention, Marcel Detienne and others argued, because the social and political structure of ancient Greek society was most clearly delineated in communal dining (Detienne & Vernant 1989: 3–5). So, while there has been a focus on animal sacrifice among contemporary scholars of the ancient Mediterranean, that shared focus has produced widely divergent interpretations.

Recent Scholarship on Sacrifice

So little consensus about sacrifice has emerged in over a century of theorizing about it that scholars in recent decades have begun to raise questions about the validity of existing approaches and to propose alternatives. By the closing decades of the twentieth century, scholars like Jean-Pierre Vernant were backing away from general theories (1981: 1), and others, such as G. S. Kirk, were identifying the methodological problems that attended abstract theorizing (1981).

More recent scholarship has deepened the critique. Noting the wide variety of sacrificial practices in the ancient Mediterranean world, hence the complexity of the phenomenon, current scholarship has argued that pursuing a single definition of sacrifice is overly simplistic (van Straten 2005: 26–27) and that reducing sacrifice to a key feature or quality is reductionist and misguided (Knust & Várhelyi 2011: 3). The search for sacrifice's origins and essence has largely removed it from its social context, which is crucial for coming to a proper understanding of it, as it is for any ritual (Ullucci 2012: 17–20). The age of grand theories about sacrifice has come to an end, it would appear.

Replacing it is an era of more modest endeavors. Recent studies begin with challenges to widely held claims and assumptions: that the beginning and essence of religion is sacrifice; that sacrifice means animal sacrifice; that sacrifice and violence are synonymous (Kunst & Várhelyi 2011: 3; McClymond 2008: 17, 30; Faraone & Naiden 2012: 1–10). A typical corrective to these assertions and suppositions is to widen the avenue of approach (van Straten 2005: 16). Kathryn McClymond's recent comparative study of sacrifice, for instance, considers not only animal sacrifice but also vegetal and liquid sacrificial offerings (2008: 65–130).

Her approach epitomizes current trends. Setting aside any expectation of finding a “single essential or defining quality,” McClymond begins with this notice: “I approach sacrifice as a complex matrix of varied and interrelated procedures and, instead of defining it, focus on identifying basic activities that characterize sacrificial events” (2008: 2). She associates seven activities with sacrifice:

selection: activities that procure the offering and that inaugurate the sacrificial sequence;

association: the linking of the offering with a recipient, often a deity or deities;

identification: action that correlates the offering with a ritual patron;

killing: the intentional execution of the offering, if it is living;

heating, of what is sacrificed;

apportionment: the division and distribution of the offering; and

consumption, which includes ingesting broadly understood, such as inhaling aroma (29–33).

None of these elements is sufficient in and of itself to be called sacrifice; none is essential to sacrifice. For McClymond, there is no behavior that is inherently or uniquely sacrificial. Rather, actions may be more or less sacrificial depending on their combination and sequence. Because sacrifice is what she calls polythetic, it should be understood as a composite.

Decentering animal sacrifice and abandoning the pursuit of sacrifice's origins and essence frees the scholar to look at sacrifice in broader terms, but it also raises questions about the parameters of the phenomenon and, ultimately, about the utility of the term. If non-animal offerings fall under the rubric of sacrifice, à la McClymond, what about inedible objects, like votive offerings left at a sanctuary? The verbs for sacrifice and setting up a votive are related in ancient Greek (van Straten 2005: 16). A more inclusive approach to sacrifice might make room for considering ancient Christians' understandings of sacrifice, who embraced the discourse of sacrifice but came to reject some, if not all, conventional sacrificial practices. Should one also consider David Sansone's provocative thesis that ancient Greek athletics, and human sport in general, is best understood as the ritual sacrifice of human energy (1988)? Perhaps so, but then the question naturally arises, “What, then, is not sacrifice?”

Sacrifice as Ritual

One way of limiting what is considered sacrifice is to treat it as a ritual. Several considerations lend support to this approach. First, virtually all scholars would agree that sacrifice is a ritual, if nothing else. Second, sacrifice and ritual in general have suffered a similar fate in the hands of scholars, who tend to ignore them as embodied actions and look instead for their “deeper” or symbolic meaning (Gorman 1994: 23). To counteract this tendency, ritual theorists focus on the actual, palpable features of ritual. Doing so in the case of sacrifice would mean setting aside the psychological emphasis and the rather abstract theorizing that typify older studies. Ray Rappaport advocates paying attention to the obvious aspects of ritual (1979), and Ronald Grimes recommends that ritual analysis begin by describing the whole ritual event and the cultural occasion and social circumstances in which it is embedded (1990: 90, 219). Doing so in the case of sacrifice would mean contextualizing it instead of removing it from its immediate social context.

Context is crucial for determining a rite's effects; so it is for sacrifice as well. Catherine Bell has written extensively on the situational character of ritual, noting that

A ritual never exists alone. It is usually one ceremony among many in the larger ritual life of a person or community, one gesture among a multitude of gestures both sacred and profane, one embodiment among others of traditions of behavior down from one generation to another [1997: 171].

Rites do not have fixed outcomes; what they achieve varies according to their circumstances. For example, in the world of African ritual, specifically among the Dinka, animal sacrifice brings about recovery from sickness because it constitutes part of a healing ritual (Ray 1973: 20–30). But this was not an effect expected from sacrifice in the ancient Mediterranean world, because healing did not normally occur in a sacrificial context there.

Where Does Sacrifice Take Place?

If context is determinative for sacrifice, the setting for it deserves close attention. Determining where sacrifice occurs prompts many questions: What is the physical location of the sacrifice? On a mountain or high place? Subterranean? On a battlefield? In a military camp? At the foundation trench of a building? At an entry or exit or threshold? What is the social geography of the sacrifice? Is it in a civic setting, such as the agora or forum or theater or amphitheater or stadium? Or outside the sacred boundary of the city (pomerium)? Is it in a domestic setting, such as in the dining room (triclinium) or at the household shrine (lararium)? Where does the sacrifice take place vis-à-vis a sacred site or sites? Within a sacred precinct (temenos)? At a temple? On an altar? Outside a temenos? At a spring, cave, or grove associated with a deity?

The location of a sacrifice says a great deal about it. One of the fullest accounts of sacrifice in the ancient Mediterranean world comes from Plutarch, who described in detail the annual rites conducted for those who had fallen at the battle against the Persians at Plataea (Arist. 21.2–5). Participants began with a procession from the city to the necropolis led by a trumpeter and accompanied by the chief magistrate carrying a water jar and sword, free-born youths carrying libations of wine and milk and pitchers of oil and myrrh, wagons loaded with myrtle wreaths, and a black bull. The magistrate washed the gravestones and anointed them with myrrh. Then he slaughtered the bull, prayed to Zeus the Deliverer and Hermes of the Underworld, and invited the dead to join the banquet. Plutarch's description concluded with the magistrate pouring out a libation of wine to the fallen. While sacrifice in the ancient Mediterranean world typically marked the interaction between human beings and their deities, in this case, since the context was funerary, the primary interaction was between the living and the dead. The gods were certainly invoked, but the context indicates that the sacrifice was primarily an act of remembering and honoring the fallen.

Funerary sacrifice took place at the family or private level too (Scheid 2007: 270–71). Lucian's essay titled On Funerals mentions libations poured out and burnt offerings conducted at the tomb (Luct. 9; see also his Char. 22). Archaeological data from Roman chamber tombs provide evidence of funerary dining that would have included libations and sacrificial offerings (Rife 1999: 293–95).

When Does Sacrifice Take Place?

Chronological position is as significant as physical location. McClymond considered various activities as steps in the sacrificial sequence, but that sequence should be placed in context—in the series of actions that precede and follow the sacrificial sequence. Does the sacrifice inaugurate a series of actions? Does it fall midway? Or does it conclude the series? Among his many recommendations regarding agricultural practice, Cato the Elder ordered an offering or sacrifice to be made prior to plowing, planting, harvesting, and the thinning of trees (Agr. 131–34; 139). When Dionysius of Halicarnassus described how the Romans conducted games, he noted that they were initiated with a procession in honor of the gods, then sacrifices to them, followed by the games themselves (Ant. rom. 7.72.1–73.1). It was also common to make a sacrifice or offering at the conclusion of an event or sequence of events. While a patient of Asclepius might make an offering as part of the therapeutic program at the god's temple (Aristophanes, Plut. 660–61), what is more in evidence are offerings left by grateful ex-patients. In addition to reliefs and inscriptions, terracotta replicas of limbs and organs were left behind in massive numbers at sites sacred to Asclepius as testimonials to successful healing (Lang 1977: 14–27).

Where sacrifice falls in a sequence or cluster of rites suggests something about its function(s) and effect(s). If early in the sequence, sacrifices have an alerting, anticipatory, preparatory, or prophylactic aspect. If late, they acknowledge what has already transpired and complete a transaction. They often express gratitude and may represent the fulfillment of a vow (ex voto).

The frequency of a sacrifice may also reveal something about its purpose, as it does with ritual generally. Catherine Bell classified sacrifice as a rite of exchange or communion, rites that “invoke very complex relations of mutual interdependence between the human and the divine” (1997: 109). These relations are ongoing and long term; so such rites tend to be frequent and regular. Bell also associated sacrifice with rites of affliction, rituals that rectify a situation that has been disturbed or become disordered, such as rites of healing, exorcism, and purification (115–20). Such rites are typically a response to crisis, so they tend to occur sporadically rather than steadily, as crises arise. Jan van Baal characterizes sacrifices of this type as high intensity, which he distinguishes from regular, or low intensity, sacrifices (1976: 168). So the frequency of rite may indicate whether its purpose is to confirm and maintain or restore and reestablish.

Who Takes Part in Sacrifice?

Contextualizing sacrifice requires not only determining the topography and chronology of it but also its sociology. An individual might conduct a sacrifice privately, but sacrifice is nevertheless an intensely social act normally involving a host of participants, corporate and individual. And the host is not undifferentiated; there are more and less active agents related to one another in multiple ways. So it is essential to ask questions about participation and agency. Who authorizes or sanctions the sacrifice? Who organizes and manages it? Who participates in it? Who provides what is sacrificed? Who conducts the sacrifice? Who manipulates what? Does the sacrificer(s) represent other participants, present or absent, at the sacrifice? Who represents whose interests at the sacrifice? If the sacrifice is apportioned and distributed, who receives a portion of it? Do the portions vary in size and quality? Who is in the audience to the sacrifice? Does the audience include the gods and other supernatural agents? Deceased ancestors? What these observations tell us is which social networks are involved in a given sacrifice and how those networks are structured.

Social relations are established, reinforced, and modified in sacrificial activity (van Straten 2005: 21–24). What Stanley Tambiah says about ritual in general applies to sacrifice as well: “It is necessary to bear in mind that festivals, cosmic rituals, and rites of passage, however prescribed they may be, are always linked to status claims and the interests of the participants” (1985: 125). But rituals are more than linked to status claims. “Ritual practices,” Catherine Bell asserts, “are themselves the very production and negotiation of power relations” (1992: 196). In the report about sacrifice above from Plutarch's Aristides, it is easy to see who sits atop the social hierarchy: the magistrate's dominant role in the sacrifice reflects his social primacy and also enacts it.

Sacrifice's influence extended to kinship relations as well. To bolster their assertion that they were Ciron's grandsons and legitimate heirs, two claimants to Ciron's estate offered the following evidence for themselves, as reported by the Athenian orator Isaeus:

Now there are other proofs which we can bring forward to show that we are the children of Ciron's daughter. For, as was natural, seeing that we were the sons of his own daughter, Ciron never offered a sacrifice without our presence; whether he was performing a great or small sacrifice, we were always there and took part in the ceremony … and when he sacrificed to Zeus Ctesius—a festival to which he attached a special importance, to which he admitted neither slaves nor free men outside his own family, at which he personally performed all the rites—we participated in this celebration and laid our hands with his upon the victims and placed our offerings side by side with his … [On the Estate of Ciron 15–16].

Participation in sacrifice constitutes a kinship claim in this case. Reports about who participates in sacrifice, particularly in special sacrifices, and about the level of participation spell out relations in detail. The sons are equally keen to point out who does not participate.

This quotation from Isaeus alerts us to another variable that should be taken into consideration regarding social relations and sacrifice: the age of participants or, more to the point, their place in the family's lineage. Nancy Jay's scholarship points to a related factor: gender. She argues that sacrifice, which was almost exclusively a male practice, distinguished between men and women. Moreover, to counteract the biological advantage that women had in being able to claim maternal relations, men employed sacrifice as a way of establishing and maintaining patrilineal descent (Jay 1988; 1992). Jay may overstate the case for sacrifice being exclusive to males; evidence from classical Greece challenges this view (Osborne 1990). Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that sacrifice functioned as a kinship-making (and -sustaining) rite and that gender distinction was a by-product of it (Stowers 1995: 300–20).

What Is Sacrificed?

Another type of participant in sacrifice is, of course, the object of sacrifice—that which is sacrificed. As noted above, McClymond challenges scholarly preoccupation with bloody or animal sacrifice by including liquid and vegetal offerings. The synonyms for sacrifice are so varied and numerous as to suggest an even wider rubric: oblation, offering, immolation, libation, holocaust, thanking offering, votive offering, peace offering, sin or piacular offering, hecatomb, donation, dedication, and so forth. To McClymond's triad we could add a host of inanimate and in many cases more durable objects, such as incense, vessels, utensils, figurines, plaques, the anatomical votives mentioned above, and pinakes, votive tablets of painted wood, terracotta, metal, or stone. The list of what could be offered is endless (van Straten 1981: 80; 1990: 248–54), and such objects very likely constituted the commonest type of sacrifice, at least in the ancient Greek world (Antonaccio 2005: 100). Lucian's essay on sacrifice offers a litany of what is sacrificed, including the poor doing nothing more than kissing their own hands to propitiate the gods (Sacr. 12).

This last example contradicts the conventional understanding that a proper sacrifice must meet high standards—an animal must be without blemish (Deut 17:1)—and must be costly or precious. The most memorable were costly indeed: a hecatomb required the slaughter of one hundred cattle (Josephus, Ant. 16.14; Livy 28.38.8); Yahweh commanded Abraham to sacrificed his son Isaac (and only later relented); Agamemnon gave up Iphigenia, his own daughter, to ensure the Greek fleet's safe passage to Troy; and the Enuma Elish describes the sacrifice of the rebellious god Kingu to create humankind (tablet 6, lines 10–35). A variant of ancient Christian soteriology required the sacrifice of the divine son to redeem creation.

Yet a sacrifice could also be something of little or no worth, suggesting that what was important about the object sacrificed did not lie in its intrinsic value. Nor did weighty occasions necessarily demand costly sacrifice. Many sacrificial objects were cheap. Votive pottery recovered from the excavation of ancient sanctuaries includes vast amounts of imitation, miniature, and non-functional pieces that would have been relatively inexpensive to manufacture (e.g., Pemberton 1989: 64–66; Slane 1990: 58–63). The Fountain of Lamps, a late Roman sacred site in Corinth, contained thousands of terracotta lamps, some of which were inscribed and dedicated to supernatural powers (Wiseman 1972; Rothaus 2000: 126–34). Their sheer number suggests that these dedicatory lamps were not costly. It was rather in the presenting and dedicating—in the public gesture—that something substantial and significant transpired. The sacrificer, whatever he or she sacrificed, was acknowledging the other party or parties attending the sacrifice and signaling his or her disposition toward them.

What Happens during Sacrifice?

The vocabulary of sacrifice has not served scholars well in determining what happens in sacrifice. As often occurs with a complex ritual, one activity in a cluster of activities comes to signify the whole, such as Eucharist, which refers only to the act of blessing or giving thanks. The Latin sacrificare, whence the English word sacrifice comes, denotes something conveyed or consecrated to a god (Faraone & Naiden 2012: 4). Immolation derives from the Latin immolare, which refers to the sprinkling of meal, not to killing or destruction by fire, which it currently denotes in English (Anderson 1992: 873). The commonest Greek verb for sacrifice, thyein, refers to making smoke. Synecdoche—using a part to refer to the whole—is linguistically common, but this kind of shorthand tends to obscure multifaceted phenomena like sacrifice.

Expanding on McClymond's list of the activities associated with sacrifice, the following actions may be part of the sacrificial event: appointing or determining a place and time of sacrifice and who will participate; selecting what is sacrificed, presenting it, and preparing and adorning it; laying hands on or touching what is sacrificed; slaughtering, dissecting, and inspecting the sacrifice, if it is animal; pouring, dabbing, spreading, sprinkling, or applying sacrificial material like blood, wine, oil, water, meal, or salt; apportioning and distributing what is sacrificed; burning or sending the sacrifice up in smoke (making the edible inedible); cooking or alimentary preparation of the sacrifice (making the inedible edible); eating or otherwise consuming the sacrifice; driving out or away what is sacrificed; driving what is sacrificed toward a malevolent force or angered supernatural power; throwing what is sacrificed down or into a spring, pit, cave, or chasm; burying what is sacrificed; setting what is sacrificed apart, consigning it to a deity, or abusing and cursing it (sacralizing or desacralizing it). This list is hardly exhaustive, but it does show the wide range of activities that can comprise sacrificial action.

The repertoire of activities may expand further depending on circumstances. Livy reports that the inauguration of two Roman consuls included an animal sacrifice that was used to obtain a favorable omen (41.14.7–15.11). In this case sacrifice became a form of divination, and it was intertwined with the assignment of provinces to the consuls that immediately followed. Romans were influenced by the Etruscan practice of haruspication, prediction based on inspection of animal entrails, and because the first ox's liver was deformed, another ox had to be sacrificed in order to obtain a good omen. The sacrifice became even more complicated:

[One of the consuls] added that, scarcely believing the man in charge of the victims when he reported this, he had himself directed that the water be poured out of the kettle in which the entrails were being boiled and had seen all the rest of the entrails complete, but the whole liver had been consumed by an indescribable wasting. To the Fathers, already terrified by this portent, the other consul brought additional anxiety by reporting that he had failed to obtain a favourable omen after sacrificing three cattle, as the head of the liver had been missing. The senate directed him to continue sacrificing full-grown victims until he received a favorable omen [Livy 41.15.2–4].

A divination gone awry complicated the sacrificial process and troubled the ensuing assignment of provinces to the consuls.

Engaging in certain sacrificial actions presumably precluded the practice of others—one cannot both incinerate a sacrifice and then dine on it—which underscores the complexity of the phenomenon and the problems that attend understanding sacrifice as one essential action or notion. Scholars have accounted for some of the variation in practice by noting the different situations and crises that sacrifice addressed and the difference in audience and recipients. Meuli, for instance, differentiated sacrifices according to whether they were directed to the dead, the underworld (chthonic) deities, or the gods of the (Olympian) upper world (1975: 2.911–62). Peter Herz sorted the feast days of the Roman army into high-ranking sacrifices involving animals and lower-ranking ones involving only wine and incense (2002: 83). Bruce Malina distinguished political sacrifices from domestic ones (1996). Binaries like alimentary versus non-alimentary sacrifice, domestic versus civic sacrifice, or cyclical versus crisis-induced sacrifice help account for sacrificial variation and usefully characterize the multiple pathways in sacrificial systems.

A less negotiable rift lies between sacrifices identified as common, communal, dedicatory, or ordinary and those considered piacular, expiating, propitiatory, and atoning, a distinction that goes back to the beginning of modern scholarship on sacrifice. Hubert and Mauss believed they belonged together, because they thought the sacrificial victim conveyed holiness, hence communion with the divine, but also bore impurities away (1964: 52–60). Jay found the same action in communion sacrifices and atoning ones: both marked and confirmed the collective identity of those participating in the rite (1992: 17–29). Yet Bell's ritual classification suggests that these two actions amount to rather different types of ritual. As noted above, she regarded sacrifices as rites of exchange or communion. On other hand, sacrifices that eliminated pollution or illness and brought about purification were rites of affliction (1997: 108–20). The former maintain and confirm, the latter restore and even transform. They stand in tension with each other (Robbins 1998: 285), and some scholars treat them as different activities (Finlan 2005: 11–38). Joseph Henninger, for instance, contrasted them in articles on sacrifice (1987a) and scapegoat (1987b) he contributed to the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion.

Cultures other than the ancient Mediterranean exhibit a similar tension within their sacrificial systems. Andrew Strathern and Pamela Stewart distinguish two kinds of sacrificial exchange or gift giving in) Papua New Guinea (2008). One, which they characterize as do ut des (I give so that you may give) involves sacrifices to ancestral spirits, who are regarded as the source of everything in the world. But there is also gift as compensatory payment for offense, what they label do ut abeas (I give so that you may go away). This sacrificial tandem resonates with some Mediterranean ritual pairings. In Israelite tradition a Passover lamb was prepared and eaten communally, but its blood was used to ward off a punishing supernatural agent (Exod 12). In the Roman festival of Parentalia, sacrificial offerings were provided for the dead, but it concluded with the Feralia, a ritual that sought protection from them (Belayche 2007: 287–78).

In the Mediterranean world, the difference between the two kinds of sacrifice could be quite sharp, as indicated by the difference in activity. In the Greek pharmakos rite and its Hebrew counterpart, the scapegoat rite (Lev 16:6–10, 20–22), the goal was to eliminate pollution, so the person or animal subjected to the rite was more vehicle than gift and there was not necessarily any recipient (DeMaris 2008: 95–107). The pharmakos, typically a human being, or scapegoat was driven out of the community, carrying the contaminant with it. Driving what is sacrificed away is strikingly different from offerings that are transferred to a recipient—sending up smoke to a god, pouring out a libation to the dead—or consumed—inhaled and/or eaten—by recipient(s) and/or donor(s). The offering, even if very modest, was a positive token. In contrast, the pharmakos underwent rites of degradation before being expelled.

Unless we treat sacrifice narrowly, which this essay has not done, we are faced with a composite, even disparate, phenomenon, whose incongruities are not easily reconciled. Correspondingly, some scholars find the term sacrifice so problematic that they avoid it (Lambert 1993; Leichty 1993).

This ritual analysis of sacrifice underscores its complexity. The many contexts for sacrifice point to its adaptability and protean nature. Nevertheless, the following elements or features commonly attend sacrificial situations: Chronologically speaking, sacrifice could have the prospectival properties of alerting, anticipating, or preparing and the retrospectival properties of acknowledging, memorializing, commemorating, and thanksgiving. All these actions were responses to interaction or a relationship with some other agent or agents thought to be party to the sacrifice. Denizens of the ancient Mediterranean were contacting and communing with their ancestors, with their god(s), and with each other. This communing required establishment and maintenance, which sacrifice enabled. It also sometimes required rectification and restoration, which sacrifice accomplished via purification and elimination. Among human participants, sacrifice gave voice to their interests, status claims, and social locations. At the family level, it established and maintained kinship ties and identities. In every case the situation determines which features are present and which are prominent.

Sacrifice in Cultural Context

To locate sacrifice even more fully in ancient Mediterranean society requires the scholar to consider its place or function in the hierarchies that defined that world, for a key feature of it was its high degree of stratification. Of course, sacrifices established and maintained those very hierarchies, as noted above. But sacrifices must also be considered as actions that facilitated interaction between the parties in those hierarchies; they were an act of exchange or a transaction.

What sort of exchange or transaction? To return to the Platonic dialogue that opened this essay, after Euthyphro agreed that service to the gods consisted of sacrifice and prayer, he also endorsed Socrates' definition of sacrifice and prayer as a giving to the gods and asking them to give, respectively (Euthyphr. 14c–15a). So sacrifice, according to Plato, was a form of gift giving.

Other writers in the ancient Mediterranean world identified sacrifice as gift giving too. Among New Testament documents, the commonest Greek noun for sacrifice, thysia, occurs with greatest frequency in Hebrews. There it is regularly paired with gift (dōron), as in the phrase “gifts and sacrifices” (5:1; 8:3; 9:9; cf. 11:4). Commentators have concluded that the author regarded the two terms as synonyms or as a fixed expression for sacrifice generally (Koester 2001: 285; Attridge 1989: 143). Hence, in the New Testament document that articulates Jesus' activity in sacrificial terms more than any other, the equating of sacrifice with gift is the most explicit.

Sacrifice and gift giving also coincided in the language of the Hebrew Bible. One of the commonest terms for an offering to Yahweh, be it vegetal or animal, was minḥâ (Anderson 1992: 873). In exchanges between human beings, it denoted a gift or present (e.g., Gen 33:10; 43:15, 26; Judg 16:18). In Israelite thought, then, sacrifice and gift overlapped.

Gift giving to a deity was not of the sort that expected an immediate and quantifiable return. The satirist Lucian mocked such a mercantile understanding mercilessly:

So nothing, it seems, that [humans] do is done without compensation. [The gods] sell men their blessings, and one can buy from them health, it may be, for a calf, wealth for four oxen, a royal throne for a hundred, a safe return from Troy to Pylos for nine bulls, and a fair voyage from Aulis to Troy for a king's daughter! Hecuba, you know, purchased temporary immunity for Troy from Athena for twelve oxen and a frock. One may imagine, too, that they have many things on sale for the price of a cock or a wreath or nothing more than incense [Sacr. 2].

Sacrifice in the ancient Mediterranean was not a mechanical or commercial exchange.

Sacrifice understood as gift giving has had a mixed reception from theorists, but in recent years scholars of the ancient Mediterranean have embraced the notion. Tylor originated the idea, as noted at the start of this essay, but it was heavily criticized and largely dismissed. Van Baal felt that critics rejected gift theory because Tylor had misrepresented gift as a bribe (1976: 163). The critics included Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, but in a study appearing decades after their Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, Mauss explored gift giving as the basis of offering and sacrifice. He noted the complex and obligating nature of it: in gift-giving societies, one was required to give gifts, to accept gifts, and to give gifts in return (Mauss 1967 [1925]: 37–41). Mediterranean specialists like Kirk (1981: 73–75), van Straten (2005: 17–19), and Sheid (2007: 267) find reciprocal gift giving between human beings and their gods to be a fruitful way to comprehend ancient Greco-Roman sacrifice. As Robert Parker notes, “Almost the whole of Greek cultic practice is in fact founded—not merely by implication, but through numerous explicit statements—on the belief or hope that reciprocity of this kind is a reality” (1998: 105).

The ancients were acutely aware that this reciprocity took place between unequal parties. Whether they sacrificed to their gods or their ancestors, their status was lower than that of the recipients. So calculating the value of a sacrifice as though it determined the counter-gift was laughable—the very point of Lucian's parody. If the parties to an exchange were relatively equal, we might expect to find what Marshall Sahlins calls balanced reciprocity, where the gifts exchanged are commensurate, as in an exchange of goods between trading partners (1972: 194–95). But exchange between unequal parties is asymmetrical, for superiors have more resources than their inferiors and can be more generous. Consequently, denizens of the ancient Mediterranean counted on divine liberality, even if what they sacrificed might have only token value, as noted earlier in this essay.

The kind of reciprocity that the ancients practiced with their ancestors or gods can be characterized as generalized, following Sahlins (1972: 193–94). Such reciprocity assumes a long-term relationship in which goods and services are freely provided as needed with no reckoning of debt. Such reciprocity typically operates within the family and kinship network, including with one's ancestors, and in relations with gods, whether they were regarded as symbolic kin or as patrons.

In the highly stratified society of the ancient Mediterranean, the sizable social gap between elite and non-elite was bridged by the establishment of patron-client relationships. Patronage facilitated the exchange of goods and services between the haves and the have-nots (Stewart 2010: 156). The gods had high status, too, so the ancients understood their relations with them in patron-client terms (Crook 2004: 76 – 88). This overlap between human and divine patronage came to clearest expression in the ruler cult, where the emperor merited divine honors because of the benefits he had bestowed on humankind:

Because men addressed him as Augustus in view of his claim to honour they revere him with temples and sacrifices over all the islands and continents, in cities and tribes requiting him for the magnitude of his virtue and his benefactions towards them [Nicolaus of Damascus, FGH 90 F 125; ET: Price 1980: 28].

Thus, sacrifice is best understood as an exchange or transaction in the patron-client relationship the ancients had with their betters—their ancestors and gods.

Further contextualizing sacrifice should dispel the puzzlement that some scholars have expressed over an exchange that, because of its asymmetry, appears paradoxical or aneconomic (Robbins 1998: 289). That the gods get shortchanged in the exchange is not a conclusion drawn by modern scholars alone. The ancient Mediterranean world could raise the question, too, such as in the story that Prometheus attempted to trick Zeus into accepting the undesirable parts of the sacrificial animal: the bones wrapped in fat (Hesiod, Theog. 535–57). But what mattered was not how much wine was poured out to the ancestors or how much flesh went up to the gods in smoke. What mattered were the actions of the participants in the sacrifice, which were identified above: alerting, anticipating, preparing, acknowledging, memorializing, commemorating, and thanksgiving. These were all public expressions of disposition, of paying attention and showing regard.

All were forms of public acknowledgment, and had great value in the ancient Mediterranean world. For that world's chief pursuit was honor, a claim to status that was publicly recognized (Rohrbaugh 2010: 111; Barton 2001; see also Gilmore 1987; Peristiany 1966). Communities and families could bolster their own status by sacrificing in honor of their dead. The gods, of course, had the highest honor ranking of all, but even their status needed to be regularly confirmed. Accordingly, when Socrates asked Euthyphro what the gods got from their exchange with human beings—what gifts could human beings give to those who bestowed all good things?—the answer was obvious: honor (Euthyphr. 15a). This seems to have been a fundamental aim of sacrifice in Roman society as well (e.g., Cato the Elder, Agr. 132).

Likewise in the ancient Israelite world, sacrifice had strong associations with giving honor. As noted earlier, one of the primary Hebrew terms for an offering or sacrifice, minḥâ, could denote a gift or present in some circumstances. It could also refer to the tribute one gave to those of higher status and was thus a gesture of homage (e.g., 1 Kgs 10:25; 2 Chr 17:5; see Marx 2005: 7). In a world where patrons, living, divine, or deceased, met the practical needs of their clients, the only appropriate response was high praise and gratitude. Paying homage represented a key moment in the ongoing exchange between the human and the divine.

The Persistence of Sacrifice

Because sacrifice was considered crucial for the interaction between human clients and divine patron(s), it comes as no surprise that sacrificial language, logic, and practice lived on even as temple sacrifice declined. Jonathan Z. Smith marvels at its prominence over time in an arena distant from the public altar: “Of all the documents from late antiquity, I know of none more filled with the general and technical terminology and the praxis of sacrifice than those texts collected by modern scholars under the title Greek Magical Papyri” (Smith 1995: 23). Spells and incantations were redolent with sacrifice. Smith notes that sacrifice moved from civic temple to private household in these texts, and that animal sacrifice was rare. Still, sacrifice persisted.

Such was also the case in emergent Judaism and Christianity, traditions that crystallized after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the end of public animal sacrifice in Judean life. The Mishnah is replete with instructions regarding animal sacrifice, including explicit directions for sacrifice at the temple, even though it reached completion well over a century after the temple vanished. McClymond argues that sacrifice continued as an authoritative category in Judaism because the material procedures of sacrifice were successfully reinvented in metaphoric and symbolic ways (2008: 146). This is undoubtedly the case, but what prompted the reinvention? If sacrifice enacted right relations with one's patrons and kin, then the language of sacrifice would have been indispensable for expressing the gratitude and honor that was so crucial to maintaining those relations. Thus, sacrifice continued, though largely in verbal and textual form in this instance.

Christian rhetoric, too, was replete with sacrificial language, even though the tradition criticized the sacrificial practices of its polytheistic neighbors and Christians largely refused to participate in them. George Heyman has argued that this embrace of sacrifice was more than rhetorical:

Just as Roman social identity and political loyalty were expressed through sacrificial practice and imperial benefaction, Christian identity was structured around a similar sacrificial environment located first in the New Testament's interpretation of Jesus' death and then extended to the martyr [2007: xxiv].

Moreover, Heyman finds sacrifice at the crux of the conflict between Christianity and Rome: “The ritual of sacrifice then became the discursive marker in the power struggle between Rome and the followers of Jesus” (46; emphasis original). If Heyman is right, then the conflict was ultimately not over whether to sacrifice or not. Since sacrifice was how one maintained right relations with one's patron(s), it was a given. Instead, the conflict turned on how one properly sacrificed and to whom one sacrificed. With regard to the latter, the actual dispute was over who the genuine patron of humankind was.

With regard to the former, Jesus' death came to be understood as the proper sacrifice that made things right between client and patron, between humankind and the divine. Christian martyrdom, too, was interpreted in sacrificial terms. The apostle Paul's metaphorical language—”present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1, NRSV)—became literal to those accounting for the execution of Christians in the amphitheater. The martyr's death imitated Jesus' death.

If, as this essay has suggested, sacrifice was a mechanism for honoring one's superiors, then ancient Christian martyrdom entailed honor. Martyrs did not understand themselves as victims of the Roman state; they were practicing self-sacrifice and thereby honoring their god. Their willingness to die, their valor and endurance in the face of torture and death, also testified to their own honor in the face of degradation, much as it did to the gladiator who died nobly in the arena (Barton 1994).

The Christian refusal to burn incense to the emperor, therefore, did not mean a rejection of sacrifice. It signaled instead a redefinition and adaptation of it, for living in the ancient Mediterranean meant inescapable immersion in a world of sacrifice.

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