Animal Sacrifice and Euergetism in the Hellenistic and Roman Polis1

J. B. Rives Animal Sacrifice and Euergetism in the Hellenistic and Roman Polis1

Abstract

This paper makes the case for the importance of animal sacrifice within a wider spectrum of offerings that Greeks and Romans used to win the favour of the gods. It then traces in more detail the part played by animal sacrifice within the broader phenomenon of euergetism as it developed during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and concludes with a more general consideration of the importance of animal sacrifice for Greek cities during the Roman Imperial period. The paper thus traces out a con- tinuum of practice in which a central feature of ancient religion was inextricably tied with expressions of status and demonstrations of economic capability. Keywords: animal sacrifice, euergetism, priesthood, cities, Oenoanda, Perge

How important was animal sacrifice in the ancient religious tradition? This question may seem pointless, since the answer is surely self-evident: ‘In recent decades it has been increasingly recognised that sacrifice was the most central religious act for the Greeks’. Thus Jan Bremmer opens his very useful chapter on ‘Greek Normative Animal Sacrifice’ in the BlackwellCom - panion to Greek Religion.2 In referring to ‘recent decades’, Bremmer has in mind the work of Walter Burkert, on the one hand, and of Jean-Pierre Ver- nant and Marcel Detienne, on the other, whose theories he goes on to dis- cuss. Although these scholars differed significantly in their emphases and analyses, they certainly all agreed on the centrality of animal sacrifice to the

1 The research for this paper was done while I was a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in 2009–10. I am grateful to the Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their financial support. I also owe thanks to my fellow contributors for their helpful discussion, to audiences at Newcastle and Brown Universities for their comments, to Marc Domingo Gygax and Fred Naiden for their feedback on earlier drafts, and to the two anonymous referees for their suggestions. All translations are my own except where noted otherwise. 2 Bremmer 2007, 132.

Greek religious tradition and for many years their ideas shaped the standard accounts of the significance of that practice. However, in the decade since the appearance of the Blackwell Companion, a few scholars have begun to register disagreement with these views, particularly those of Burkert. In his 2013 monograph, Fred Naiden took these developments to a new level by challenging Burkert, Vernant, and Detienne head on and proposing a new framework for thinking about Greek sacrificial practice. ‘New’ is perhaps not quite the right word, since Naiden’s project is avowedly emic: that is, he reex- amines sacrifice in terms of the issues that receive emphasis in the ancient Greek sources. These issues all concern the relationship between worshipper and deity: the worshipper’s overarching goal was to please the deity and thereby win favour, and, conversely, to avoid doing anything that might dis- please the deity and thereby result in rejection. The worshipper must make a suitable offering, request a suitable favour, and be both physically and mor- ally acceptable to the deity. Accordingly, whereas modern scholars ‘assume that sacrifice is a ritual, . . . the worshipper conceived it as an episode in a relation with a god’. Understood in these terms, it becomes obvious that ‘sacrifice did not depend on an animal as opposed to other offerings, or on an animal’s death. It did not evoke guilt, and it did not depend on a community as opposed to an individual’. All that it really required was ‘a worshipper, a god, and a rule of conduct’.3 To the extent that the interpretations of Burkert, Vernant, and Detienne are not simply wrong, then, they focus on aspects of sacrificial practice that were not of primary concern to the ancient Greeks themselves. If animal sacrifice were simply one way of pleasing the gods, and one whose efficacy depended on a much broader set of considerations, can we continue to characterise it without more ado as the most central act in the Greek religious tradition? Framing the question in such general terms, however, is not particularly helpful, since the response can all too easily devolve into a sort of British pantomime debate: ‘Oh yes we can’ versus ‘Oh no we can’t’. What is needed above all is a more precise formulation of the terms of analysis: we can evaluate the importance of animal sacrifice only with reference to particular contexts. Naiden has rightly reminded us that the interpretations of Burkert, Vernant, and Detienne, which continue to haunt discussions of Greek sacrifice, disregard what contemporary actors apparently regarded as most important, that is, winning the favour of the gods, and that if we follow them in doing so we cannot possibly understand the

3 Naiden 2013, 320 and 4; see further his justification for his emic approach at 317–321 and his summary of his argument at 32–35. 5 (2019) Animal Sacrifice and Euergetism 85 significance of sacrifice in the Greek world. It does not follow, however, that this ancient Greek conceptual framework is the only one within which we can legitimately evaluate its significance. Indeed, it is an essential part of our job as students of past societies to trace patterns of significance of which contemporary actors may have been largely unconscious (see also Moser and Digeser, this volume). In the present case, there is in fact evidence that contemporary actors were aware of other dimensions of sacrificial practice, even if they did not regard them as primary. In this paper, I make a case for the importance of animal sacrifice within one particular frame of reference. I begin with the premise that, theologi- cally speaking, animal sacrifice was not intrinsically unique but was instead part of a wider spectrum of offerings that people used to win the favour of the gods. That is to say, in terms of its efficacy in maintaining a positive relationship between worshipper and deity, animal sacrifice did not differ inher- ently from, say, offerings of flowers or cakes. It is only when we superimpose this vertical dimension of the practice onto its horizontal dimension, that is, the way that animal sacrifice both reflected and shaped human relationships, that we can identify the characteristics that made it distinctive.4 I begin by identifying three distinguishing characteristics and argue that they rendered animal sacrifice, in contrast to other types of offerings, particularly well- suited to structuring socio-political hierarchies within the Greek polis (see Biella, this volume). I then trace in more detail the part played by animal sacrifice within the broader phenomenon of euergetism as it developed during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and conclude with a more general consideration of the importance of animal sacrifice for Greek cities during the Roman Imperial period. The ancient Greeks had an astonishingly rich repertory of practices that were meant to win the favour of the gods. A reasonably complete enumeration would include, along with animal and vegetal offerings, the dedication of durable objects (statues, altars, and shrines, as well as a virtually limitless range of votive offerings) and also various types of verbal and non-verbal performances (prayers, processions, songs, dances, athletic competitions, and theatrical performances). Within this spectrum, animal and vegetal offerings form a fairly discrete category, conceptually marked off from other types of offerings, although in actual practice often combined with them. Yet the range of practices within this category was itself extremely varied, differ- ing in the type of material (animal or vegetal, edible or inedible, solid or liq-

4 On the need for awareness of both the vertical/theological and horizontal/sociological dimensions of animal sacrifice, see succinctly Hitch, Naiden and Rutherford 2017, 3; in more detail, Petropoulou 2008, 28–31. 86 J. B. Rives RRE uid), in the treatment of the material (destroyed wholly or in part, destroyed by burning or pouring onto the ground or being left to decay, consumed in part by human participants), and in the underlying purpose (propitiatory, expiatory, purificatory, divinatory, etc., often more than one at the same time; indeed, it would probably be a mistake to class some of the rituals that involved the slaughter of an animal as ‘offerings’ at all).5 Within this wide range, I am focusing on the practice (or rather the complex of practices) that in modern scholarship is usually designated ‘normative’ or alimentary animal sacrifice and that in the classical Greek world was frequently denoted by the verb thuein and the noun thusia.6 This type of sacrificial practice, I argue, was distinct from other types of offerings in three specific ways. The first concerns its economic aspect. Almost any kind of offering required some economic expenditure but the amounts involved ranged widely (compare Biella and Salzman, this volume). At the low end of the spectrum were vegetal offerings such as flowers, garlands, libations, and little cakes. Offerings of this sort were within the means of a large percent- age of the population. At the high end of the spectrum were temples and monumental altars, statues and costly works of art, elaborate performances and spectacles; only the wealthiest could have afforded offerings such as these and, in many cases, they were funded by communities rather than individuals. Such offerings consequently served as demonstrations of the dedicator’s wealth as much as his or her piety. Animal sacrifices fell some- where in between. We must remember that animals were valuable resources that most people could not have afforded to slaughter on a regular basis, although there was of course considerable variation in cost. Young animals were less valuable than adults; the young of some species (sheep, goats, and especially pigs) were regularly culled, so that at times they would have been available even to the relatively poor. Most male animals were either slaughtered before reaching adulthood or castrated, in order to make them more tractable; only a few were left intact for breeding purposes, and for that reason were less common and more costly than castrated males. Bovines were much more expensive than smaller species, since they required the sort of pasture land that was relatively scarce in many parts of the Mediterranean; consequently, very few people would have owned more than the one or two oxen they needed for labour. Not surprisingly, the less common and more costly the animal, the more prestigious a victim it was, with the bull,

5 For surveys, see Stengel 1920, 88–155; Ziehen 1939, 582–597; Rudhardt 1992, 213–300. 6 The fundamental study of this word group remains Casabona 1966, 69–154; see also Naiden 2013, 278–282, who highlights the lack of a term that designated animal sacrifice exclusively. 5 (2019) Animal Sacrifice and Euergetism 87 an intact adult male bovine, being the most prestigious of all. Expectations regarding quality also mattered, since ideally only perfect specimens were supposed to be used as victims; old, worn-out, and infirm animals, the sort that most people could have afforded to get rid of, were not regarded as suitable. The practice of animal sacrifice, then, was a form of piety that tended to privilege the wealthy and the representation of animal sacrifice as the ideal offering to the gods, so familiar from ancient art and literature, served the ideological purpose of demonstrating that the wealthy were superior in piety as in everything else.7 The second distinctive feature of animal sacrifice is connected with the first. Most types of expensive offerings, such as monumental structures and elaborate performances, did not in and of themselves provide an active role for the person who paid for them; that required some associated ritual such as a procession. Vegetal and animal offerings, in contrast, allowed the person who paid for the offering to present it in person. This is such a familiar aspect of Greek religion that we need to pause briefly and remind ourselves that it is by no means universal practice. In many traditions, ordinary worshippers require the mediation of specialised religious personnel in order to make an offering, especially an animal sacrifice. In the Judaean tradition of the Second Temple period, for example, although any adult male Israelite was ritually able to slaughter an animal, only an Aaronite priest could perform the essential acts of splashing the blood on the altar, flaying and cutting up the carcass, and burning the appropriate parts. This distinction between the person who pays for and receives the benefit of the sacrifice and the person who was ritually required to perform some or all of the actions was canon- ised in theory by Hubert and Mauss’ distinction between the sacrifiant and the sacrificateur.8 This distinction did not exist in Greek religion. There was, of course, a range of cultic personnel whom we conventionally term ‘priests’ in English but they generally functioned as managers of sanctuaries and officiants at public festivals rather than as specialised ritual agents.9 Instead, anyone was ritually able to perform a sacrifice. If the sacrifice was performed on behalf of a group, as they very often were, the person who presided was normally the person with the greatest authority or social prominence: heads of households in domestic contexts; priests, officials, or patrons in public or

7 Castration: Ekroth 2014; perfect victims: references in Stengel 1920, 121, and Ziehen 1939, 592–593, with discussion in Jameson 2014 (1988), 198–199, and Naiden 2013, 63–68. On animal sacrifice and wealth, see in general Van Straten 1987 and Jameson 2014 (1988). 8 Hubert and Mauss 1899. 9 See further Pirenne-Delforge 2005 and Chaniotis 2008. Further work in this area would undoubtedly be productive. 88 J. B. Rives RRE group contexts. In many cases, especially when the victim was a larger animal, the person presiding would indeed have used the services of an expert, termed a mageiros in Greek, but this expert was generally of lower social status than the person making the offering; the reason for his involvement was more practical than ritual and his role was closer to that of a hired assis- tant than a priest.10 Animal sacrifices, therefore, more than any other type of offering, allowed non-specialists to take a central role in a performance that was, at times, highly elaborate; for the wealthy, it provided an opportunity to act as the primary agent in an act of piety that was simultaneously a display of wealth (see Digeser and Salzman, this volume). The third distinctive feature of animal sacrifice concerns its association with commensality and the consumption of meat. When people made offerings to the gods, their primary goal, as Naiden has reminded us, was to establish a favourable relationship with the divine. Animal sacrifice, however, was unusual in that this relationship was established by means of commensality, insofar as the animal’s carcass was typically shared among the divine and human participants: burnt on the altar for the former and cooked and eaten by the latter. We must be careful not to overemphasise the con- nection between the practice of animal sacrifice and the consumption of meat, as some earlier scholars did. Marcel Detienne, who took this position to an extreme, declared that in ancient Greece ‘l’alimentation carnée coïn- cide absolument avec la pratique sacrificielle.’11 This was never actually the case. On the one hand, the meat from some sacrificial victims was not consumed. There were numerous rituals involving the slaughter of an animal in which the entire carcass was either burned, termed holocausts, or disposed of in some other way, as in battle‑ and oath-sacrifices.12 On the other hand, a considerable amount of edible meat was available that did not come from sacrifices. A number of animals whose flesh was consumed did not typically serve as sacrificial victims: fish, game, and small mammals. Moreover, it is clear that even meat from animals that typically did serve as victims did not always come from animals that had actually been sacrificed.13 Yet even though animal sacrifice and the consumption of meat did not coincide absolutely, it is nevertheless true that when people sacrificed animals and did not simply destroy their carcasses, they ended up with a great deal of edible meat. If we assume a portion of meat equivalent to that in a Big Mac, which we may take as a standard serving size in contemporary North America, and

10 Berthiaume 1982. 11 Detienne 1979, 10. 12 Rudhardt 1992, 272–287. 13 Ekroth 2007 and Naiden 2013, 232–275. 5 (2019) Animal Sacrifice and Euergetism 89 using even a low estimate of the size of domestic animals in antiquity, an adult sheep would have produced enough meat for 100 portions, a pig 110, and a cow 675.14 The modes of disposing of this meat varied considerably. In many cases, specified parts were reserved as perquisites for priests or other officials. Some sacrifices were followed by banquets in which all attendees took part, while in other cases only a small number of people partook of the victim’s flesh; especially in the latter instances, some or all of the remain- ing meat might be sold to butcher shops for purchase and consumption by non-participants. Decisions about who consumed what kinds of meat in what circumstances provided a complex and subtle means of defining and modeling social relations. In all cases, however, it was through commensality, the sharing of meat among divine and human participants, that animal sacrifices were believed to establish a favourable relationship between the divine and human spheres. These three distinctive features of animal sacrifice, that is, the economic resources that it required, the opportunity it provided for non-specialists to preside over an elaborate ritual, and its inherent potential for commensality, worked together to make animal sacrifice a particularly efficient instrument for structuring socio-political hierarchies. Through participation in a traditional practice that served to win the favour of the gods for a particular community, the wealthy were able to transform their economic control of animal resources into a position of socio-political authority. This is an important aspect of animal sacrifice in the Greek tradition from the beginning of the literary record, as seen, for example, in the sacrifice over which Nestor pre- sides at Odyssey 3.1–9. Nevertheless, I would argue that it took on new force in the Hellenistic period, when public animal sacrifice came to be integrated into the system of unequal exchange that modern scholars conventionally label ‘euergetism’. In the euergetic system, which spread from the Hellenis- tic Greek east throughout the entire Roman empire, local elites expended their private resources on civic benefactions in return for control over public affairs and for public recognition of their superior status within the community.15 Although these benefactions took a wide variety of forms, I will argue that public animal sacrifice provided a particularly potent context in which benefactors could enact their relationship with their community.

14 I have used the calculations of the amount of meat available from ancient domestic animals that are made by Naiden 2013, 252–253 and 258–259. 15 Fundamental works include Veyne 1976; Gauthier 1985; Quass 1993; and Domingo Gygax 2016. Salzman, in her contribution to this volume, analyses the same phenomenon in the context of late ancient Rome. 90 J. B. Rives RRE

In the Greek poleis of the classical period, the norm, or at least the ideal, seems to have been that the expenses of public festivals, including the animal sacrifices featured therein, were met with public funds. This was true above all in democratic Athens, where the role of public sacrifices in affirming the bond between community and deity and in articulating the structure of the community made it ideologically problematic to allow any private individual to fund them. Athens was, of course, exceptional, both in the rigour of its egalitarian ethos and in the scale of its resources, but to the extent that the limited evidence allows us to draw any conclusions, public funding for public sacrifices seems to have been the norm throughout the Greek world.16 However, starting in the late fourth century bce, we begin to find cases, even in Athens, in which benefactors stepped in and met the expenses for public sacrifice from their own private resources. An inscription from c. 300 bce records a public resolution made by the deme of Eleusis to extend various honours to a local notable named Euthydemos because as demarch, ‘deme-president,’ he had, among other things, ‘offered the sacrifice to Dio- nysos on behalf of the health and well-being of his fellow demesmen at his own expense and displayed his love of honour towards them and increased the public revenue’. Similarly, at some point in the late fourth century bce, the deme of Lamptrai honoured a man named Philokedes, who had moved there from Acharnai, because of the ‘love of honour’ (philotimia) that he showed ‘with respect to the sacrifices and the public affairs of which he has a share in the deme’. As a result, they voted him ‘freedom from public duties’ and a share in public sacrificial meat equal to that of the demesmen. It is likely that philotimia here was a euphemistic reference to a substantial financial contribution, so that, in effect, as Timothy Howe observes, ‘this Acharnian used his animal resources to gain acceptance in his new deme’. Other references to philotimia in similar contexts suggest that by the end of the fourth century bce it was becoming relatively common in Athenian demes for the wealthy to contribute directly towards the cost of the victims for public sacrifices.17 The practice seems to have become more widespread in the following century. As one example, taken more or less at random, we may consider the case of Epinomides, a wealthy citizen of Minoa on the island of Amorgos sometime in the mid‑ to late-third century bce. The major festival in this city was in honour of Athena Itonia and, like all such festivals, it centred on a

16 On Athens, see especially Rosivach 1994; for other cities, see Migeotte 2014, 360–372. The sources of public funds for cults could, however, include liturgies: Migeotte 2014, 286–291. 17 Euthydemos: Threpsiades 1939, with quotation from ll. 8–12. Philokedes:IG II2.1204, with quotation from ll. 3–7. Quotation from Howe 2008, 122. 5 (2019) Animal Sacrifice and Euergetism 91 procession and a sacrifice. Traditionally, this sacrifice had been funded by the interest on property belonging to the goddess. When Epinomides presided, however, ‘keen that the goddess’ sacrifice and procession be as splendid as possible’, he turned that income over to the cult’s managing board, so that they could spend it on construction work in the sanctuary. Epinomides himself, out of his own resources, paid for the sacrificial victim, in this case a cow, and covered all the other expenses as well. Moreover, those who took part in the sacrificial banquet that followed had in the past bought a ticket to help defray the cost. Epinomides forfeited this contribution and again absorbed the full expense, even though the number of attendees amounted to 550 people. It is not surprising that the cult’s managing board voted to honour Epi- nomides ‘for his excellence and philotimia’ by presenting him with a garland and publicly proclaiming this honour.18 In this case, although there was already an established source of public funding for the sacrifice and banquet, Epinomides chose not make use of it. Instead, he redirected one part of it to other needs of the cult and remitted another part to the participants. By the Roman period, this sort of thing had become well established practice: it was not at all uncommon, although it is of course impossible for us to quantify the frequency, for benefactors to fund public festivals and the associated sacrifices out of their own private funds. I will provide just two examples.19 The first concerns Apollonios, a distinguished citizen of the small and undistinguished city of Kalindoia, not far from Thessalonica. An honorific inscription dating to the year 1 ce records that Apollonios had voluntarily assumed the priesthood of Zeus, Rome, and Augustus, and in that office had demonstrated such magnanimity (megalophrosyne) ‘as to omit no excess of expenditure on the gods and his native city’. First, he used his own resources to fund a monthly sacrifice to Zeus and Augustus, treating the populace on each occasion to a lavish feast. Secondly, he oversaw the annual festival for Zeus and Augustus, which involved a procession and competition, as well as additional sacrifices and banquets. Although these sacrifices normally took place at public expense, Apollonios made a special request that he be allowed to cover their expenses himself. Lastly, as a permanent memorial ‘of the beneficence(euergesia) of Augustus to all mankind’, he also paid for a statue of the emperor. In return, ‘in order that other citizens might be ren-

18 IG XII.7.241, with the discussion of Delamarre 1896, 75–76. 19 Since the purpose of the present paper is simply to sketch out a way to think about the interconnection between civic euergetism and public animal sacrifice, I have not attempted a complete enumeration of examples, although this is a desideratum for future work. For now, see the discussion of Petropolou 2008, 75–86, and her collection of material at 111– 115. 92 J. B. Rives RRE dered eager to seek honour and to contribute generously to their native city’, the people of Kalindoia voted to crown him with a garland (prominently depicted in the middle of the inscription) and to erect statues of Apollonios and his father and mother in whatever place he chose.20 The second example is an inscription from the city of Thyateira in Asia, some 60 kilometres southeast of Pergamon, dating probably to the 130s ce. The council and the people honour Dionysios son of Menelaos, a boy(pais) , first agonothete of the first Augustan and Tyrimnean festival to be held by the city, piously and magnanimously. In all things he enacted his love of honour (philotimia) for his native city: he produced from his own resources the prizes of the contests and the honoraria for those putting on displays; he accomplished the pious sacrifices for the god, public and splendid, for the auspicious feasts, the very first ones; he provided a banquet for the council and the people.21 An agonothete was the civic official charged with the oversight of athletic or musical competitions (agônes); since these were always held in honour of some deity, agonothetes typically also presided over the public sacrifices that accompanied them. Hence it was that the responsibilities of Dionysios the agonothete were not much different from those of Apollonios the priest, although the latter extended over the entire year rather than being confined to a single event. Dionysios had the particular honour of being the first person to preside over a newly established festival, one dedicated both to the Roman emperor and to the traditional patron god of Thyateira, Apollo Tyrimnos. Tyrimnos was apparently a native Lydian sun god who became identified with Apollo in the Hellenistic period; coins depict him with the long hair and garland of Apollo, carrying a laurel branch in his left hand and a double axe in his right.22 What is particularly striking is that Dionysios held this position while still a boy, a pais, presumably no older than his early teens. Since he could hardly have earned this honour by his own merits, we may reasonably assume that it was due instead to the social position and wealth of his family. Cor- roboration comes from another inscription, which reveals that it was, in fact, Dionysios’ paternal uncle, Markos Ioulios Attikianos, who funded the early benefactions of Dionysios and also of his brother. This Attikianos was

20 SEG 35 (1985) no. 744, with Bulletin Épigraphique 1987 no. 688. 21 IGR IV.1270, republished in corrected form by Robert 1948, 73. The date can be extrapo- lated from the fact that Dionysios’ son, M. Ioulios Menelaos, was strategos sometime before 180 ce and hosted the emperor Caracalla in 215 ce (OGIS 516; see further Buckler 1913, 308–309). 22 Tyrimnos: Schmidt in RE VII A 2 (1948) 1867–1868 and Lambrinudakis in LIMC II.1 (1984) 245–246; festival: Keil and von Premerstein 1911, 33–35; duties of the agonothetes: Robert 1948, 72–79. See also Digeser, this volume. 5 (2019) Animal Sacrifice and Euergetism 93 clearly both wealthy and also prominent enough to have obtained Roman citizenship by the first decades of the second century ce. He was, in addition, obviously ambitious for his family, using his wealth to ensure that his nephews had an early and impressive entrance into public life; he may also have adopted them, thereby extending Roman citizenship to them. At any rate, it was as Markos Ioulios Dionysios Akylianos that Dionysios went on to have an extremely distinguished career both in his home town and beyond, eventually holding the highest position in the province as high priest and Asiarch. Over the course of his career, he must have presided over, and no doubt funded, many sacrifices and public banquets. In this respect, his first public position, as agonothete of the newly established festival of Apollo Tyrimnos and the emperor, set the pattern for all that would follow.23 Major civic festivals, like the ones mentioned in these inscriptions, constituted dense networks of associations. First, they involved the worship of the city’s chief deity, one whose associations with that particular community were unique and extended back into its distant past; they thus evoked a strong sense both of the community’s unique identity and of its continuity through time (see Digeser, this volume, for similar communal continuities). Secondly, by the Imperial period most festivals also honoured the Roman emperor and thus balanced a city’s sense of its own unique identity with an equally strong sense of its participation in the wider community of the empire. Thirdly, many festivals involved competitions that showcased the physical and intellectual skills crucial to Greek cultural identity, and thus also served to affirm a city’s claim to that identity. The symbolic dimensions of these festivals were powerfully reinforced by their social aspects. The fact that people of every social status took part would have reinforced their sense of community and their affective bonds with their fellows. Furthermore, the good spirits that naturally accompany a break from day-to-day life, the plea- sure taken in the performances and spectacles, the sense of physical well- being that comes from the sort of meal that one does not regularly enjoy, all these provided a powerful psychological reinforcement for the evocation of civic identity that I have been delineating. And at the very centre of this rich and complex network of symbolic and affective associations was the figure of the euergetes presiding over the sacrifice: it was his beneficence and his wealth, embodied quite literally in the expensive animal about to be slaughtered and shared out among the people and their gods, that made the whole thing possible.

23 Attikianos: Buckler 1913, 307–310, no. 7; adoption: Robert 1948, 74 n. 1; for Dionysios’ further career, see also Buckler 1913, 315–316, no. 10, and OGIS 516. 94 J. B. Rives RRE

The ideological importance of animal sacrifice in the euergetic system thus did not depend on the extent to which it was an essential element in any single act of euergetism: not all public benefactions involved animal sacrifice, nor in fact did all public meals and distributions of food.24 It was, rather, the unique place of animal sacrifice in the dense nexus of associations that I have mapped out that endowed it with its ideological weight. Public animal sacrifice, which had always helped reaffirm communal bonds, came in the Hellenistic and Roman periods also to define the unique role of benefactors: their economic prominence as the ones who made these civic events possible took on concrete form in their ritual prominence as the ones who presided over the sacrifice and the distribution of meat. In important ways, therefore, animal sacrifice could serve to encapsulate the entire euergetic system.25 By the imperial period, the euergetic system had become integral to the socio-political organisation of the Greek polis and public animal sacrifice, as I hope to have shown, had become tightly integrated into the euergetic system. Two further developments in the late Hellenistic and Roman periods meant that the sort of euergetic animal sacrifice that I have been sketch- ing here became much more widely and much more frequently practiced. First, the institutions of the Greek polis became more and more widespread in the course of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Alexander the Great had instituted the practice of founding Greek poleis in areas where they had not previously existed, a practice maintained by the Hellenistic monarchs who succeeded him. The Romans, if anything, accelerated the practice and actively promoted the establishment of new Greek-style cities in areas that had previously lacked any significant urbanisation. Given that public animal sacrifice had become an integral element of the Greek polis, it necessarily became more widespread along with the polis itself. The second phenomenon has less to do with the policies of the Roman overlords and more with the rivalry and ambitions of the poleis themselves. With the incorporation of individual cities into the larger polities of first the Hellenistic kingdoms and then the Roman Empire, the military and political spheres lost much of their earlier importance as sites for competition, whether between elite citizens within cities or between different cities. Almost in compensation, social and cultural forms such as monumental urban centres and public festivals gained in importance. There was, thus, constant pressure to increase the frequency and lavishness of public festivals and, correspondingly, of the animal sacri-

24 For the range of public benefactions, see the works cited in n. 15 above. Banquets: Schmitt Pantel 1992, 261–289 and 334–355. 25 My exploration of the relationship between animal sacrifice and euergetism was inspired by Gordon 1990. 5 (2019) Animal Sacrifice and Euergetism 95 fices that were so central to them.26 As a result of these two developments, the practice of what I call sacrificial euergetism not only became much more widespread but even penetrated into rural areas. Two examples will give some sense of its spread. The first is the well-known inscription recording the establishment of a new festival in the Lycian city of Oinoanda. In 124 ce, one of its wealthy citizens, Gaios Ioulios Demosthenes, made a formal promise to his fellow citizens that he would fund a quadriennial festival, to be called the Dem- ostheneia in his honour, involving an extensive series of musical and literary competitions. Demosthenes’ family had long been among the elite of the city; his name suggests that over a century and a half previously one of his ancestors had been granted Roman citizenship by Julius Caesar. Dem- osthenes himself had by this time already had a career in the Roman imperial service, serving as a military officer in Syria and as Trajan’s procura- tor in Sicily. Rather than continuing with his imperial career, however, he returned to his hometown to hold local and provincial office. At the time of his gift to Oinoanda, he was serving as a magistrate and secretary to the town council, and would go on to be provincial priest of Lycia. Not surprisingly, Demosthenes was no stranger to euergetic practice, having provided annual subsidies to his home town to maintain a low price for grain and having spent 15,000 denarii on a public building complex that comprised a food market and three porticoes. His funding of a new festival was presumably meant to cap his career as a benefactor and, as we have seen with other such gifts, to function at the same time as an ongoing commemoration of his own benevolence.27 The long inscription that records his gift consists of five separate docu- ments, including both the original promise made by Demosthenes and the preliminary proposal for its implementation. It is interesting to note that Demosthenes’ original promise, although including very detailed instruc- tions for the competitions themselves, provides no details at all about the sacrifices that were normally so central to this kind of event: although two days are set aside for sacrifices to ‘ancestral Apollo’, nothing is said about funding, types of victims, or public banquets. The city council’s immedi- ate response to Demosthenes’ offer was to set up a committee to formulate

26 On the increase of festivals in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, see Chaniotis 1995. Biella, Moser, and Digeser, this volume, also allude to the increasing significance of festivals. 27 Inscription: Wörrle 1988, 4–17 (with German translation); see further Mitchell 1990 (with English translation) and Rogers 1991. Citizenship: Wörrle 1988, 57; career: IGR III.487 and 500 II, ll. 52–60, with Wörrle 1988, 55–63; earlier benefactions: ll. 9–11. 96 J. B. Rives RRE a more detailed proposal. In this case, the process took almost a year; in the end, they presented a proposal that elaborated on Demosthenes’ original promise in some significant ways. Some of their additions ensured a heightened presence for the Roman emperor, whose role was now apparently to be equal to that of ancestral Apollo, while others expanded on the brief references to sacrifices. All the officials of the city were now to take part in an elaborate procession, each accompanying one or more bulls as offerings for a joint sacrifice. In addition, all the villages (kômai) in the city’s outlying territory were also to contribute assigned numbers of bulls; village leaders (kômarchai), appointed the previous year by the agonothete, were to be responsible for providing the victims, just as were their civic counter- parts. All these officials were apparently expected to pay for the victims out of their own pockets. Although the inscription does not spell this out, it is clearly implied by the following provision that anyone who refused to take part in the joint sacrifice would have to pay the city a fine of 300 drachmas. Nothing is said even in this expanded proposal about banquets but we may reasonably assume that they followed the sacrifice as usual and were on an unusually large scale: at least twenty-seven bulls were slaughtered, enough for some 8,000 portions of meat.28 Two things are worth stressing about the sacrifices of the Demostheneia. One is that they were not funded by the benefactor but were instead added to his original proposal, presumably at the insistence of the council and people of Oinoanda. The elite of the city evidently regarded them as important enough that they were willing to take on the burden, as future office-holders, of paying for the expensive victims themselves. In this way, the large-scale voluntary euergetism of Demosthenes prompted a smaller-scale obligatory euergetism on the part of the elite as a whole. The importance of sacrifices for civic self-presentation, and undoubtedly the accompanying banquets as well, could hardly be made clearer. The second striking thing is the incorporation of the surrounding villages into this civic festival. Just as the procession gave visual expression to the social and administrative hierarchy of the city, so too it enacted the unity of the urban core and its rural territory.29 It is impossible to say whether the impetus for the inclusion of the villages came from the city or from the villages themselves but, in either case, the result

28 Original promise: ll. 6–46, with the sacrifices to Apollo at ll. 42–43; proposal by the committee: ll. 46–102, with the involvement of the civic and village officials in ll. 68–85; con- sultation: Rogers 1991; portions of meat: Wörrle 1988, 254–255. The victims are described simply as boes, ‘cattle’, but evidence for the cult of Apollo elsewhere suggests that Mitchell 1990 and Rogers 1991 are surely right to translate as ‘bulls’. 29 Or perhaps more accurately the domination of the former over the latter: see Ando 2017. 5 (2019) Animal Sacrifice and Euergetism 97 was the extension of sacrificial euergetism from a Hellenised urban context into a possibly much less Hellenised rural context. Of course, the villagers participated in that practice in an urban context, in Oenoanda itself and not back in Elbessos or Nigyrassos. But a pair of inscriptions from the territory of Perge, a city of Pamphylia just to the east of Lycia, indicate that sacrificial euergetism could also be enacted in villages themselves. The inscriptions were carved on the wall of a stone tower some 8 to 9 km northwest of Perge, in what was evidently the village of the Lyrbotai. One of them is prefaced with a dedication to the emperor Hadrian and to Apollo of the Lyrbotai, thereby providing a date: I Mouas, son of Stasias, son of Trokondas, being alive and of sound mind, bequeath to my mother for the duration of her life the individual farm (monagrion) in the place Baris and 600 mature olive trees and olive shoots at the place Three Olive Trees and in another place called ‘by Kallikleis’ Armax’; and after my mother’s end I bequeath them to the god Apollo of the Lyrbotai, on condition that the annually chosen village leaders (kômarchai) make provision that the aforementioned properties be leased out and that the annual income from them be used for Apollo’s sacrifices and the purchase of wine and bread, so that days of contests be held for me every year on the third of the ninth month and that, while all the inhabitants of the village (kômê) enjoy the banquet on that day, they remember me and my brother Kotes son of Stasias and my mother Kille daugher of Mouas. The second inscription concerns a very similar bequest, made by Menneas son of Timotheos son of Menneas, of 1,500 denarii for the purchase of a piece of land to be used for the very same purposes, a bequest carried out by Les, his sister and heir.30 The first point I want to make about these inscriptions is that they provide a good example of the way that sacrificial euergetism came to be incorpo- rated into the practice of establishing foundations. We may broadly define a foundation as an institution established by a private individual during his or her life in such a way as to secure its continuity over time: generally speaking, the founder bestowed a certain amount of capital, which was used to generate an annual income and thus fund the institution in question. Foun- dations eventually came to serve a wide variety of purposes: to maintain the funerary cult of the founder, to provide support for public offices, to endow various public amenities, such as oil for the gymnasium or education for the young. As Pauline Schmitt Pantel has perceptively observed, commemorative foundations like this constituted a distinctive form of euergetism. All acts of euergetism served in part to perpetuate the memory of the

30 Mouas: I. Perge 77; Menneas: I. Perge 78; cf. the epitaphs of Kille and Les, I. Perge 421–422. The place name ‘Baris’ (which may also be either ‘Baros’ or ‘Barios’) designated a fortified place, and thus presumably referred to the area of the tower: see Sahin 1995, 20–22. 98 J. B. Rives RRE benefactor but, in a foundation, the act of benefaction and the perpetua- tion of memory coincided exactly: the benefactor himself, through his gift, determined the conditions in which the community would remember his piety and benevolence. At the same time, the fact that the founder was com- memorated precisely in his quality as benefactor ultimately redounded to the community’s benefit, since it served to encourage others to emulate the benefactor’s generosity, which, as we have already observed, was a key concern for the community.31 The second point I want to make about these inscriptions is that they illustrate the way that sacrificial euergetism, a practice that was originally closely tied to the structures of the polis, came to spread into rural areas as well. The obviously indigenous names of the people involved, the non-standard spelling and grammar of the Greek (e. g., nominative used for accusa- tive), the way that Mouas identifies the properties, all these suggest that we have here some not-very-Hellenised members of the rural well-to-do. Yet there is rather more to their story. The genealogical information included in the inscriptions allows us to identify these two benefactors as members of one of the most distinguished families of Perge. Without elaborating on the details, I will simply note that this family seems to have had its home base among the landed elite of the village of the Lyrbotai; some members bore Greek names and pursued public careers in the urban centre, whereas others bore indigenous names and apparently focused on their home village. Elite families like this were in a perfect position to import the sorts of euergetic activities that had become common in Hellenised urban contexts into less Hellenised rural contexts.32 Let me now sum up the case I have developed here and elaborate on the significance of animal sacrifice in the Greek cities of the Roman Empire. Although the primary purpose of animal sacrifice was the same as that of any other offering, namely, to win the favour of the gods, it also had sev- eral features that distinguished it from other types of offerings: it required a significant economic outlay and was thus a form of piety that privileged the wealthy; it provided non-specialists with the opportunity to play a lead- ing role in an elaborate and impressive performance; and it, to some extent, inevitably involved commensality and the distribution of a highly desir- able foodstuff. All these distinctive features rendered it a highly effective

31 Schmitt Pantel 1982 provides essential analysis of commemorative foundations as a form of euergetism; see also Schmitt Pantel 1992, 295–303. 32 For the activities, relations, and origins of this family I rely above all on the careful study of Sahin 1995. 5 (2019) Animal Sacrifice and Euergetism 99 instrument for the construction of socio-political hierarchies. Those wealthy enough to afford large-scale sacrifices could use them not only to establish their superior piety but also to enact their superior social status. It was, thus, perhaps inevitable that animal sacrifice would play a part in the euergetic system as it developed from the fourth century bce onwards. When benefactors presided over public animal sacrifices and the subsequent distribution of meat, they were enacting in a particularly vivid and concentrated form their general relationship with their fellow citizens. It was their wealth and their willingness to use that wealth for public benefactions that entitled them to act on behalf of the community as its magistrates and priests. In a public animal sacrifice the members of the community could see, and sometimes even taste, that wealth as it was embodied, quite literally, in the sacrificial victim. It was in this respect that public animal sacrifice became so integral to euergetism. But if by the Imperial period public animal sacrifice had become an integral element of the euergetic system, the euergetic system had also become integral to the socio-political organisation of the Greek polis, and the polis, in turn, had become integral to the organisation of the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean. As is well known, the Romans were able to gov- ern their empire only because of their cooption of local elites, who took on themselves much of the business of local governance. The type of socio- political organisation that the Romans most favoured was naturally that to which they were themselves accustomed, that of an urbanised civic community in which political and religious power was concentrated in the hands of a socio-economic elite, as Digeser and Salzman also illustrate in this volume. In the eastern Mediterranean, accordingly, they followed the precedent of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic kings by actively promoting the foundation of Greek poleis in areas where they had previously not existed. The practice of public animal sacrifice, by helping to structure the social and political role of local elites in these cities and their surrounding territories, thus contributed to the structuring of the Roman Empire as a whole. Let us now return to the question with which I began. How important was animal sacrifice in the ancient religious tradition? I have tried to demon- strate that, considered within one particular frame of reference, animal sacrifice played a distinctive and highly important part. It is crucial to remember, however, that my argument about its importance is not absolute but relative. If we shift the frame of reference, we must also adjust these claims about the importance of animal sacrifice. In terms of its efficacy in maintaining the favour of the gods, what I describe above as the vertical dimension, we could in fact argue for the relative unimportance of animal sacrifice. After 100 J. B. Rives RRE all, a large-scale public sacrifice was something that most people would have experienced a few times a year at the most, and smaller-scale private sacrifices not much more frequently. In terms of their day-to-day interactions with the gods, the ongoing project of maintaining divine good will, simpler and less costly offerings and practices must have been vastly more important. Likewise, if we consider only the horizontal dimension, and treat public animal sacrifice as simply one of the many tools whereby the economic elite transformed their wealth into socio-political power within their communities, we would probably conclude that its importance was, at best, only moderate. As noted above, euergetism took a wide range of forms, many of which did not involve animal sacrifice at all. It is only when we analyse the practice of animal sacrifice with reference to both its vertical and its horizontal dimension, that is, to both religion and economy, that we can identify the characteristics that endowed it with a distinctive importance.

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J. B. Rives University of Chapel Hill