Editing Religion in ancient Rome (section)

==== Human sacrifice ====
Human sacrifice in ancient Rome was rare but documented. After the [[Battle of Cannae|Roman defeat at Cannae]] two Gauls and two Greeks were buried under the [[Forum Boarium]], in a stone chamber "which had on a previous occasion [228 BC] also been polluted by human victims, a practice most repulsive to Roman feelings".<ref>Livy 22.55-57</ref> Livy avoids the word "sacrifice" in connection with this bloodless human life-offering; Plutarch does not. The rite was apparently repeated in 113 BC, preparatory to an invasion of Gaul. Its religious dimensions and purpose remain uncertain.<ref>Livy, 22.57.4; Plutarch, ''Roman Questions'', 83 & ''Marcellus'', 3. For further context and interpretive difficulties, see Beard et al., Vol. 1, 81: the live burial superficially resembles the punishment of Vestals who broke their vows. A living entombment assuages the blood-guilt of the living: the guilty are consigned to earth deities. But the Vestals are entombed outside the city limits, not its centre; no sacrificial victims are burned in either case, and the Gauls and Greeks appear to be personally guiltless.</ref>

In the early stages of the [[First Punic War]] (264 BC) the first known Roman [[gladiator]]ial ''munus'' was held, described as a funeral blood-rite to the ''[[manes]]'' of a Roman military aristocrat.<ref>Welch, 18-19: citing Livy, summary 16.</ref> The gladiator ''munus'' was never explicitly acknowledged as a human sacrifice, probably because death was not its inevitable outcome or purpose. Even so, the gladiators swore their lives to the gods, and the combat was dedicated as an offering to the ''[[Manes|Di Manes]]'' or the revered souls of deceased human beings. The event was therefore a ''sacrificium'' in the strict sense of the term, and Christian writers later condemned it as human sacrifice.<ref>For example, [[Prudentius]], ''Contra Symmachum'' 1.379–398; see Donald G. Kyle, ''Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome'' (Routledge, 1998, 2001), p. 59.</ref>

The small woollen dolls called ''Maniae'', hung on the Compitalia shrines, were thought a symbolic replacement for child-sacrifice to [[Mother of the Lares|Mania, as Mother of the Lares]]. The [[Junii]] took credit for its abolition by their ancestor [[Lucius Junius Brutus|L. Junius Brutus]], traditionally Rome's Republican founder and first consul.<ref>The sacrifice was demanded by an oracle during the reign of the last king, the Etruscan [[Tarquinius Superbus]]. See Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1.7 & Lilly Ross Taylor, "The Mother of the Lares", ''American Journal of Archaeology'', '''29'''.3, (July–September 1925), pp 299–313.</ref> Political or military executions were sometimes conducted in such a way that they evoked human sacrifice, whether deliberately or in the perception of witnesses; [[Marcus Marius Gratidianus]] was a gruesome example.

Officially, human sacrifice was obnoxious "to the laws of gods and men". The practice was a mark of the [[barbarian]]s, attributed to Rome's traditional enemies such as the Carthaginians and Gauls. Rome banned it on several occasions under extreme penalty. A law passed in 81 BC characterised human sacrifice as murder committed for magical purposes. [[Pliny the Elder|Pliny]] saw the ending of human sacrifice conducted by the [[druid]]s as a positive consequence of the conquest of Gaul and Britain. Despite an empire-wide ban under [[Hadrian]], human sacrifice may have continued covertly in [[Africa (Roman province)|North Africa]] and elsewhere.<ref>Beard et al., Vol. 1, 233–4, 385.</ref>