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Interpreting Sacrificial Ritual in Roman Poetry: Disciplines and Their Models 1

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Interpreting Sacrificial Ritual in Roman Poetry: Disciplines and Their Models 1 Interpreting Sacrificial Ritual in Roman Poetry: Disciplines and their Models 1 Denis Feeney The interpretation of sacrificial ritual in Roman poetry is a more pressing and rewarding issue than it might have seemed even twenty years ago, when many would have regarded both Roman ritual and Roman literature as equally formalist and arid. We may now be more prepared to entertain the possibility that Roman poetry and Roman ritual are both capable of doing important cultural work. and to accept that the interaction between the two. in the form of poetic engagement with ritual. might likewise be' doing important cultural work. It remains, however, very difficult to analyse this interaction between what we call literature and what we call ritual. just as it remains very difficult to analyse any case of interaction between what we call text and what we call context. Disciplines and models I. I The need for models It will be helpful to begin by being as explicit as we can about our models, of ritual, and of literature. I take it that we are always using models of one kind or another, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not More importantly, we always need models of one kind or another because the mass of data will defeat us otherwise. The lack of explicit models means that we just flounder in the sea of evidence-to prove the point, you have only to read the old Pauly-Wissowa entry under <Opfer (Sinn)>. And to see that genuine advances have been made since then thanks to the self-conscious importing of models into Classics from other disciplines, principally anthropology, you have only to read ANDREAS BENDLJN's entries in Der Neue Pauly under <Opfer: Theorien> and <Ausblick>. The challenge is to try and clarify what is at stake in the choice of models, and especially what is at stake in the interchange of I lhal\k the company at the Stanford conference for their extremely helpful responses: I am graleful especially to ALESSANDRO BARCHIESI and SUSAN STEPHENS. Other versions of this paper were given in Leeds, Oxford. Rutgers, and at Damien Nelis 's conference on Ovid in Dublin in March 2002: numerous people gave me plenty to think about, but for their highly helpful remarks I must thank above all MONIC" GALE and ANN KUTINER. ANN KUTTNER generously read a first draft, and made me wish that I knew enough about art history to do justice to her suggestions. MIRA SEO also read a first draft, and I owe a great deal to her incisive comments. 2 Denis Feeney Sacrifical Ritual in Roman Poetry 3 models from one discipline to another. We are often told that the boundaries overwhelmingly aetiological. The methodology of the ancients, however, gives no between disciplines are falling away. and that history, anthropology, literary ground for modem foundationalist theories of explanation by historical origin, since. cri ticism and political science are coalescing. However welcome and exciting such as we shall see in this paper, ancient aetiological methods are so often intent 00 developments may be, there is a risk that we will end up in a position analogous to <muddying the waters of the source> and making the origin of sacrifice a problem.s that adopted by people who deny that the distinctions between genres are relevant to For all his scepticism about origins, SMITH does offer, more or less as a jeu the study of Ovid's Fasti or Metamorphoses. As a number of recent studies have d'esprit, an aetiological myth for the origin of animal sacrifice which is far more taught us, the creative transgression of boundaries does not annul the categories, but historically plausible than BURKERT's or GIRARD's, namely. the selective culling of redefines them.2 domesticated animals in breeding. The Roman literary evidence certainly fits I take the problem of sacrifice as a test case partly by way of recantatio for not SMITH's myth, as we shall see, linking sacrifice always with the world of the having talked about sacrifice as an issue in FEENEY 1998; I gestured towards the agriculturalist and his domesticated animals. not with hunting wild animals. It is problem in the chapter on <Ritual> (<To modems, sacrifice is a vital aspect of ritual>, salutary to read the work of JARED DIAMOND, and to learn how bizarre 119). and then went on to say npthing specifically about it. Mainly, however, domestication is. how recent it is as part of our species' history, and how few animal sacrifice appeals as a test case because the role of sacrifice in literature, specifically species have ever successfully undergone it. 6 We may think of the wild animal as the in Virgil's Georgics, has recently occasioned a debate that is highly illuminating for numinous and uncanny, but from an evolutionary point of view the really weird the current enquiry. HABINEK 1990 and ThOMAS 1991, followed in particular by freaks are all around us, in the shape of the domesticated animals. MORGAN 1999, have turned a searchlight onto the problem of the sacrificial Still, SMITH affects not to care if his origin myth is true or not, because for him dimension to the bugonia at the climax of the Georgics. I advance no new reading of the meaning and work of ritual are contemporary and ongoing, however apparently Georgics 4, and make no claim to solve any of the issues of interpretation. I choose fossilised the forms. According to him, and to ·CATHERINE BELL, whose work this starting point because the debate illuminates with particular clarity what is at develops his in many respects, ritual is not precultural; nor is it foundational. This stake in the confrontati on between disciplines and their models. I shall then take up anti-foundational way of looking at ritual is rather at odds with the traditional the lead provided by FANTHAM 1992, and follow the theme of sacrifice fr-9m assumptions of structuralism or symbolic anthropology, as represented in Classics Virgil's Georgics into Ovid's Fasti, in order to provide another test case of the particularly by such figures as VERNANT, VIDAL-NAQUET, DETIENNE, and, in his interaction between ritual and literature. rather different way, BURKERT.' Now. the impact of structuralism and of symbolic anthropology on the study of ancient religion has been extremely valuable. and will certainly leave its traces in 1.2 Models of sacrifice any imaginable future synthesis. but its main drawback is the way that it posits an Before turning directly to Virgil and Ovid I should give an account of the models overarching holistic and unifying thought-world for any given society, a mentalite. and working hypotheses I am using in the case of sacrifice and of literature, Such an approach almost inevitably ends up seeing ritual as an expression of this although I remain aware that the motivations for an individual's preferences and overarching mentalitl, and especially as underpinning it in a foundational sense. But practices in this regard must, at some level, remain opaque to him or her. Some first such a supposition is very dubious, and MAURICE BLOCH in particular has exposed principles, then, so far as I have access to them, brusquely presented? . its weaknesses. above all its tendency to obscure.the fact that ritual is only one of The meaning of sacrifice is not a question of origin. In the debate over tht~ many mentaliri.J or knowledge-systems in any society, and by no means the question in HAMERTON-KELLY 's Violent Origins between WALTER BURKERT, RENE foundational knowledge-system; ritual is, or can be, extremely self-contained, so GIRARD and JONATHAN Z. SMITH, it is SMITH who clearly emerges triumphant. The that it cannot readily be <read off> as a metaphor for other knowledge-systems or meaning of ritual is not to be found in the survival of some prehistoric trace, whether power-structures' in the society.' WILKINS has recently explored this question in it be neolithic hunting guilt (BURKERT) or a Remus/Abel human scapegoat sacrifice connection with the language of the Iguvine Tablets: <ritual language inhabits a (GIRARD); the meaning of ritual is not. as SMITH puts it, <Somehow grounded in specialised domain even within the subject culture and within the whole context of «brute fact,.>, but instead in what he calls <the work and imagination and intellection the practice and evolution of the social uses of language. Ritual language ... can be of culture.>4 It is always the current work of ritual that matters, not where it might seen to have its own domain, and within that domain, its own rules.>9 According to once have come from. This may appear to be a hard perspective for students of the ancient world to work with, since the antiquarian religious work of the ancients is so 5 To borrow the phrase used of Ovid by BARCHIESI 1997, 218. 6 DIAMOND 1997, 157-75. showing that only five species are really significant in the history of domestication (sheep. goat. cow. pig and hone). 2 Corm; 1986, 100-29; HINDS 1987 and 2000; 8AROUESI 2001a. 7 An overview of the French school in Buxton 1981. 3 For a fuller discussion and documentation of a number of these issues, see FEENEY 1998. 8 BLOCH 1989, esp. Ch. I. 4 SMITH in HAMERTON·KELLY 1987, 198. 9 WILKINS 1994. 164; my thanks to ANN KUTTH'ER for this reference. 4 Denis Feeney Sacrifical Ritual in Roman Poetry 5 these approaches. there is no one mentalite that fits a whole society, whether that with ritual.15 Roman authors know perfectly well that ritual in their texts is not a mentaliti is identified with ritual or anything else.'0 Although BLOCH has his eye on facsimile of ritual in other contexts, just as they know that anything in their texts is anthropology and does not explicitly take account of New Historicism or Cultural not a facsimile of anything in other contexts.
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