THE DISAPPEARANCE OF BLOOD SACRIFICE IN THE GREEK AND Roman worlds is almost as surprising as the disappearance of the gods. Sacrifice is harder for moderns to think about, for even unbelievers today have met real believers and have some idea what it’s like to believe in a god. It’s harder to understand what awe or anxiety could make a man slaughter a noble animal to honor the gods. Brutality aside, every sacrifice of a quadruped was a willed economic loss, the destruction of a significant asset—something like setting an automobile on fire. There was meat afterward, to be sure, and the sale of sacrificial meat mitigated the economic impact on a routine basis. (When the apostle Paul worries about whether it is permitted to eat meat devoted to idols,1 he’s thinking of the specials he’s seen at the local butcher shop on the day after a festival. Meat was not abundant otherwise.)
We should not assume that humans have gotten beyond blood sacrifice. The Muslim pilgrim on hajj at Mecca still kills—usually by himself, for himself—a sheep, a goat, or even a camel and eats something from it. This marks the end of his period of austerity and pilgrimage and leaves him free to dress normally, cut his hair, and return to modern life. (Saudi authorities have needed to supply bulldozers to handle the resulting mass of carcasses.) Mohammed Atta, boarding the flight he would commandeer on 9/11, left behind notes that are full of the language of purification, ritual slaughter, and the unique suspension of feelings shown by the divinely authorized slayer. In the southern Caucasus and in Cappadocia, the slaughter of a sheep outside the church was still a part of Christian ritual well into the twentieth century and Soviet rule. The most conventional seder meal of Passover has outsourced the slaughtering, but depends on the fundamental idea, as does the even more abstract version of anthropophagy (to be almost polite about it) enshrined in the Christian eucharist.
Most remarkably, every five years in Nepal, at a place called Bariyapur, near the Indian border, what the Guardian newspaper called “the world’s biggest animal sacrifice” is repeated, destroying a quarter of a million animals in honor of the Hindu goddess Gadhimai. Protest from outside did not deter the million or so participants on the last iteration. The number of animal victims is hard to confirm, but we have a report that two hundred fifty knife-wielding locals were put to the task of decapitating more than ten thousand buffalo.
Frightened calves galloped around in vain as the men, wearing red bandanas and armbands, pursued them and chopped off their heads. Banned from entering the animal pen, hundreds of visitors scrambled up the three-metre walls to catch a glimpse of the carnage… . [A] Hindu priest [said], “The goddess needs blood… . Then that person can make his wishes come true.”2
To capture the ancient tradition is harder than we might think, for sacrifice was practiced more than preached, and few explanatory documents survive.3 Our best voice comes very late, from a fourth-century CE scholar/statesman named Sallustius, probably a high official in the administration of the emperor Julian. His book, The Gods and the World, recapitulates the most philosophically sophisticated development of ideas about sacrifice, but he writes when many voices had already been raised to object to the practice.
The divine nature itself is free from needs; the honours done to it are for our good. The providence of the gods stretches everywhere and needs only fitness for its enjoyment. Now all fitness is produced by imitation and resemblance. That is why temples are a copy of heaven, altars copies of earth, images copies of life (and that is why they are made in the likeness of living creatures), prayers copies of the intellectual element, letters copies of the unspeakable powers on high, plants and stones copies of matter, and the animals that are sacrificed copies of the unreasonable life in us. From all these things the gods gain nothing (what is there for a god to gain?), but we gain union with them.
I think it worthwhile to add a few words about sacrifices… . the highest life is that of the gods, yet man’s life also is life of some sort, and this life wishes to have union with that, [so] it needs an intermediary (for objects most widely separated are never united without a middle term), and the intermediary ought to be like the objects being united. Accordingly, the intermediary between life and life should be life, and for this reason living animals are sacrificed by the blessed among men today and were sacrificed by all the men of old, not in a uniform manner, but to every god the fitting victims, with much other reverence.4
His tortured rationalization tries to put philosophical logic around ancient practice. We needn’t imagine that many people attending a real sacrifice could or would have spoken this way. Their wordless assent showed the power of cultural forms that cannot be explained but cannot be given up abruptly.
Those rationalizations competed with long-established criticisms. Hesiod, at the beginning of the Greek literary tradition, already describes in the Genealogy of the Gods how Prometheus was responsible for inventing sacrifice while cheating the gods out of the best parts of the sacrificed animals. East and west ever after, there were always intellectuals as disdainful as those who object to the Gadhimai sacrifice in Nepal. Isaiah’s YHWH, for example, notably shares that view:
To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts? Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.5
Both Hesiod and Isaiah spoke in societies with many centuries of blood sacrifice still in their future.
When Herod’s great temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman general Titus, sacrifice ceased there permanently. Outraged, violated, and thwarted, Jews still made no serious attempt to restore the ancient practice. Sacrifice does survive to the present day on Mount Gerizim near Palestinian Nablus among the Samaritans, who since ancient times have been close religious cousins of the Jews. Mainstream Jews could easily have decided that, temple or no temple, YHWH needed his public sacrifice, for the good of his people, but they didn’t. In retrospect, the confinement of sacrifice within Judaism to Jerusalem had allowed for the rise of a very large and dispersed community of undoubted Jews whose connection to the sacrifice of the temple was mainly abstract. As long as that business went on in Jerusalem, all was well, and no ritual killing required beyond the Passover lamb needed be done.
Less drastic criticisms of sacrifice survive from the heart of classical times.6 Aristotle’s successor at Athens, Theophrastus, did not oppose the practice, but offered a damning theory: that animal sacrifice had originated as a substitute for cannibalism, to which people had been driven by hard times and shortage of food. In Roman times, fine learned gentlemen like Varro and Seneca thought that thinking well of the gods meant not claiming they were beings who cried for blood.
In the Roman lectisternia and sellisternia that we saw in the case of the ludi saeculares, participants and onlookers could only pretend that the sculptures of gods arrayed for the meal were consuming meat. What reached to the gods on high could only be the smoke. Calling attention to that fact made it easy to make fun of the gods, sniffing hungrily on Olympus. In the second century CE, the wit and satirist Lucian, from Samosata near the Euphrates, painted the necessary picture:
When someone sacrifices, the gods all feast on it, gasping open their mouths for the smoke and drinking the blood poured on the altars—they’re like flies! But when they dine at home, their menu is nectar and ambrosia. Once upon a time, men used to dine and drink together with them—Ixion and Tantalus—but they were full of themselves and talked too much, they are still being punished to this day, and heaven is closed to the mortal race—strictly forbidden.7
Habits of sacrifice were everywhere in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. The most conventional of these was the Greek and Roman practice of killing, butchering, cooking, and eating. Older traditions, many of them, had made do with burning up in sacrifice only choice bits, while the Jewish tradition of that part of the nearer east emphasized “holocaust,” which was the burning up of the whole. Sheep, goats, and cattle were commonly the victims, donkeys and horses much less so, for reasons that attracted speculative but not particularly well-grounded explanation. The second century CE grammarian Festus tells us about this old exception:8
The “October horse” was what they call the animal sacrificed to Mars every year on the Campus Martius in that month. The people of the Subura and their neighbors of the Via Sacra used to fight it out for possession of the head, the Suburans fighting to hang it on the Mamilian Tower in their neighborhood, the Sacra Via people wanting to fix it on the wall at the Regia. Then they took the tail as quickly as possible to the Regia so that its blood would drip into the sacred hearth there in a service for the gods.9
The victim was the lead horse on the winning team in a race, killed with a cast of a spear, then beheaded. The head was served up with loaves of bread, to make clear that the purpose was a good harvest. We may know a few other things; for example, that blood of the horse was saved for six months and used in the ritual of the Parilia festival on April 21. When we look for ancient explanations, we find only clumsy attempts at rationalization, like the one that makes this punishment directed against all horses for being complicit in the fraud of the Trojan horse and thus in the downfall of Troy, Rome’s ancestor. The October horse has the smell of a very old rite, where the two neighborhoods fight it out for control of the pre-Republican kingship.
Not all ancient oddities remain obscure behind their legends. Sometimes we catch them in the act of being invented. Take the “bull slaying,” or taurobolium.10 This ritual attracted the scorn of ancient Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries and so earned a place of odd prestige in the hierarchy of ancient ritual, for all that recent research has now given it a more limited history. Here’s the best ancient account, put in the mouth of a Christian martyr:11
Romanus [the martyr] answered: I’m here and this is really my blood, not that of a bull. You know, don’t you, you wretched pagan, about that sacred bull’s blood you bathe in amidst sacrificial killing? So your high priest goes down into a trench dug deep into the ground to be consecrated, with a strange band around his head and then a golden crown planted there, wearing a silk toga bound up in the Gabinian way for sacrifice.
Over him they lay a platform made of boards, loosely fitted, then they pierce it some more with a sharp tool so there are many small openings.
Then they bring in a huge bull, fierce and shaggy-browed, crowned with flowers tangled in his horns, his forehead daubed with gold and gleaming, making his fur glow. When the sacrificial beast is in position, they open his chest with the consecrated spear. The gaping wound spews out a flood of hot blood, pouring down a fuming flow running wide on the planks below.
Then the running rain pours down a filthy shower through a thousand yawning passages, which the priest buried inside takes in, putting his head under its full filthy force, the clothes on his whole body a disgusting mess. He even turns his mouth upwards and offers his cheeks to the flow, putting his ears, lips, and nose in its path as well, even bathing his very eyes in the liquid. He does even spare his mouth and wets his tongue until he has completely absorbed the dark blood.
After the carcass is stiff and drained, the priests drag it away from the platform and the pontiff comes out of there, a horrible sight to see. He shows them his wet head, his beard dragging down, the headband sodden and his clothing soaked.
Befouled with such contamination, filthy with the gore of the just-slain victim, all hail him and reverence him—from a distance—just because the vile blood and a dead ox have bathed him while he hid in his hideous hole.
Oh, ick, one may reasonably say. What awful people, what a filthy ritual, who can have done such a thing?
I recommend a pause. Three limitations impose. First, there is no attestation of this rite before the mid-second century CE. Religion had its fads. Second, the concrete evidence includes less dramatic and fainter testimony of the third century, which has the blood being caught in a bowl and handed over to the sacrificing officer, who then very probably used it as a purifying sprinkle, not an inundation. Third, the dramatic sources are too late and too partisan to be given full credit. One we’ve already met briefly, the prototype of the most zealous monotheism, Firmicus Maternus, writing around 350; the other two sources for this story are the Christian poet Prudentius in his poems about Christian martyrs of around 390 and another poem we’ll see in a few chapters, called the Carmen contra paganos, that was written in the same period with the express purpose of mocking, humiliating, and condemning surviving “pagan” practice. These writers make the bull bath out to be a bizarre failed alternative to their own benign and clean baptism.
The preposterousness of this ritual has an eerie forerunner in a story told about Christians. The Christian Tertullian around the year 200 CE wrote an Apology attacking everyone who was not a member of his religious community and defending his own. He describes with outrage just how unjustly his people have been defamed. According to Tertullian’s account of the slander, Christians were said to meet in private orgies, where children were killed and eaten and where, when the dining was done, dogs were tied to candelabra while the Christian faithful looked about the room to be certain they knew where their siblings were seated. On a signal, the dogs were frightened, they leaped into a panic and in so doing overturned and doused the candelabra. In the ensuing darkness, brothers and sisters had sexual intercourse with one another.12
If this story came from a hostile source and spoke of a cult of which we knew little otherwise, we would probably take it all too seriously, even if it were even more flamboyantly exaggerated. As it is, it’s easy for us to identify at least some elements. Christians addressed each other as brother and sister in a way that would surprise and scandalize observers trying to keep track of just who was living as husband and wife. There were secret rituals—for the “Mass” of that period was not open to nonbaptized eyes—in which they spoke of eating the flesh and blood of a god who had been brought into the world as an infant. It would not take much honest confusion to get from reality to that story, and we need not assume that the enemies Tertullian is attacking were only honest. (The dogs—I confess I do not know how the dogs got in the story.) If we doubt that Tertullian’s mockers were describing Christianity accurately because we happen to know much more about that religion, should we not be equally skeptical in the face of Prudentius’s version of what he despised and thought a pale image of true baptism?
If the beheaded horse and the bloody bull bath distract us, we need also to steel ourselves for the cases of human sacrifice of which we know. The topic makes every reader, ancient and modern, nervous. Well and good, it might be, that the ancients slaughtered masses of sheep in a particular way; so do modern farmers, omitting religious ritual. Killing and eating human beings on any grounds is repulsive to imagine. In myth, the examples were few, sometimes horrifying, but clear: Thyestes eating his children or Agamemnon leading Iphigeneia to the altar are presented in drama as outlandish and shocking. The description of Patroclus’s funeral in book twenty-three of the Iliad, where many animals and twelve captured Trojans are sacrificed, is harder to dismiss entirely because the act is presented as falling within reasonable social norms. Their slaughter expresses the wrath of Achilles, but he does not put himself outside the pale by his action.
The notorious case of the Persian victims sacrificed at the battle of Salamis is harder still to ignore or minimize because by now we have reached the kind of story most readily taken as factual. Plutarch writing under Roman emperors long after attributes it to the philosopher Phanias of Lesbos, writing one hundred fifty years after the battle itself:
Three prisoners were brought to the commander’s ship as Themistocles was making his prebattle sacrifices for omens. They were very handsome to look at, and they were adorned distinctively by their clothes and gold jewelry… . The prophet Euphrantides saw them and when at the same moment a large and widely seen fire flashed out from the sacrificial victims and someone sneezing off to the right was taken as a sign, Euphrantides grasped Themistocles’ hand and ordered him to sacrifice the young men and to consecrate them all, with a prayer, to Dionysus the Eater of Raw Flesh. For so, he said, there would be safety and victory for the Greeks.13
Themistocles was shocked by this urging, but all who thronged around cried out their support.
Or so the story goes. Herodotus, much closer to the event, makes no hint of such a thing happening and elsewhere expresses his deep disapproval of human sacrifice as something that only the Persians practice. We might observe that the deliberate murder of captives at the outset of a great battle that would send a great many men to their deaths is no huge surprise. What galvanizes debate is the idea that people thought such a thing could be pleasing to the gods. But why should the gods be so fastidious or so kind? A deep embarrassment leaves the subject undiscussed by ancients.
But when Julius Caesar tells us that the Celts of Gaul engaged in widespread human sacrifice, he likely knew it and meant it. The Roman disdain for such practice had its own limits, as when at least the possibility was acknowledged in a story of the killing of a vestal virgin by live burial in punishment for sexual transgression or the rare killing by such burial of enemy prisoners. It was only, the ancient sources tell us, in 97 BCE that the practice was formally banned.14
For cold-blooded killing in the name of the gods, there’s nothing quite like what went on in a spooky place called Aricia and the story is worth dwelling on from its origins to its disappearance.15 Aricia sits about a dozen miles south from Rome along the most ancient of highways, the Appian Way, just where the road passed between the Pomptine marshes (drained since in stages from Augustus to Mussolini) and an extinct volcanic crater on the inland side. A small lake fills the bottom of the crater. On the west side lies the town, on the northeast, down in the crater, the shrine to Diana. The lake was clear and deep—probably a hundred feet, so the water was cool and fresh and animals would come there regularly, and thus also hunters, from long before Roman times.
There was a king there, well into historic times, but not a very happy sort of king. The rex nemorensis, king of the grove, lived among the trees around the sanctuary, not a glorious monarch, but a lurking wild man. At regular ritual intervals, he was challenged by a runaway slave, who fought him to the death, killing the king. Orestes was said to have fled here with the bones of his sister Electra after their revenge for the killing of Agamemnon. Electra’s bones lay here until Augustus had them brought to Rome and placed in an urn that stood in front of the temple of Saturn. The king of the grove, on that reading, was somehow Orestes himself, but of course far more likely the bones were just the remains of some earlier kinglet and a local ritual whose origins no one understood had gotten rewritten into a grander Greco-Roman story.
The site is very old, where people came together for rituals of alliance as far back as c. 500 BCE, about the time the Roman community itself was coming together. It was drawn under Roman sway and its residents given citizenship in 338 and by 300 BCE they erected a monumental building there with a golden roof, when nothing like that had been seen yet at Rome. People left small figurines made out of terra-cotta as offerings from prayers for health, and richer people would give bronze figures of Diana, mirrors (always a luxury item), or other instruments for ritual.
By the last years of the Republic, crowds flocked to the rituals and the terrace built at the center of the site was a square something like 200 meters on a side. The “grove” was no longer a piece of surviving wilderness but a carefully cultivated stand of trees, something closer to theme park than forest primeval.
With the rise of the principate, the site saw more building and development. Augustus’s first successor, Tiberius, seems to have sought support from this god for ensuring a smooth succession. It was a bustling place, its open terrace crowded with statues and shrines and gifts from donors over the years. There was a small theater used in the rituals that we know was rebuilt sometime in the hundred years after Augustus.
The end of the cult came on gradually after a landslide damaged the property around 200 CE. We don’t know when the last “king” disappeared. A writer of the late fourth century says that the king had left for Sparta, of all places, but we cannot yet dig behind that to know better the course of events. In this, as in many places, the end must have come by gradual steps when money was short, crowds thinned, and enthusiasm for keeping up the site faded. We don’t have to imagine a religious choice not to worship Diana here. At most, people had other places to go for their religious needs, and the choice not to go to Aricia would be a choice not to go someplace where not much was happening anymore.
There were caves on the shore of the lake at Aricia. Eventually hermits came to live there and there are Christian burials from late antiquity in them. When things were quiet there, Servius, the great ancient scholar of Vergil’s poetry from the late fourth century, made this site the location of the “golden bough” that preoccupied the first modern anthropologists. Vergil’s book six describes the tree in the dark wood with a branch of gold, so Servius links that to Aricia and to the story of Orestes turning up there showing reverence to Diana. Servius’s version runs thus: “In her precinct, after the sacrificial ritual was changed, there was a certain tree, from which it was not permitted to break off a branch. The right was given to any fugitive who contrived to remove a branch thence to contend in single combat with the fugitive priest of the temple, for the priest there was also a fugitive, in commemoration of the original flight.”16
SO WHAT HAPPENED TO blood sacrifice? Ubiquitous, unfazed by philosophical critics, deeply rooted in specific local histories, it had a very long life. What could bring that life to an end?
The old story of “paganism” had a clear narrative here, going back a long way in Christian usage. Sacrifice continued, blood flowed, smoke rose. A few pagan intellectuals like the philosopher Porphyry knew better but had not the courage of their convictions, so it took the intervention of Christian conversion, reinforced benignly or otherwise, by Christian emperors, to make change happen. Despite imperial interventions through the fourth century, it was only finally with the decisive intervention of Theodosius in the year 391, with a law banning sacrifice, that the end finally came. We’ll see in a few chapters how far all this is from the truth.
My last few stories emphasize that “sacrifice” was many things, not just the formal public offerings of magistrates like the ludi saeculares. Change in ritual and practice was constant, for all that every act of sacrifice was thought to be ancient and traditional.
Recall then the criticisms of sacrifice I quoted from early dates and be wary of them. We know that sacrifice ended, so we go looking for such snippets and let them distract us. They seem to offer positive evidence for active opposition to a doomed practice and thus some kind of explanation. There were theorizers of sacrifice throughout antiquity, regularly failing to find a good reason for doing what had anciently been done. Such voices swelled gradually, while other factors came into play. Real life is complicated.17
Public animal sacrifice was messy and expensive and best carried out in stable communities where the wealthiest and most influential people could sponsor and supervise the rituals. Bringing sacrifice with you as you moved was hugely expensive, a privilege for the rich who could endow a temple of their favorite god and people its rituals, as happened during Jupiter Dolichenus’s heyday. Social mobility in the Roman world never achieved modern proportions, but in the middle and upper reaches of society it became more common. Most such people had to trust, as had the Jews in diaspora, that someone back home was taking care of the sacrificial business they had grown up with. Given that various unbloody substitutes for animal sacrifice were available, as modest as placing tiny votive objects before rough-carved images of a god, attachment to the flamboyance of the smoking altars slipped and faded as well.
Those unbloody substitutes, moreover, had been real life for most people for most of Greek and Roman history. The formal public religion of city-state, the kind of thing that got animals slaughtered in abundance, was of little personal concern to individuals of the lower classes—that is to say, 98 percent of the population. For them, religious adequacy had always been found in rites more private, less ostentatious, and less expensive. For sheer quantity of religious artifacts surviving to be found by archaeologists, modest tokens of individual and household worship vastly outnumber the remains of urban and imperial grandeur. The persistence of ancient religiosity, we will see, was through the unostentatious acts of the many.
Then an important contributing development. More and more as time passed, people paid attention to philosophers who would argue that right doctrine and right conduct were more important that religious observance per se. The practice of right thinking and right conduct, described by recent scholars with the provocative label “spiritual exercises,” could include rite and ritual, but as an expression of what was essential, not as something essential itself.18
Even as people argued increasingly that getting the teaching right was essential to getting right with the divine, this more holistic approach was being pressed. Philosophers and preachers of different stripes could agree on this point even when they disagreed on all else. Augustine in the late fourth century CE wrote a groundbreaking book called True Religion (de vera religione). To a modern reader, the choice of topic seems obvious, but to an ancient the juncture of the two words was a striking anomaly. It was novel to think that the things that a religious authority said had to be true, in a way philosophers could approve, and therefore that one had not only to hear them and be pleased by them but also believe them and draw conclusions for action from what they said. The old ways of sacrifice were gradually ceasing to be relevant to such people.
If we look to what went on in the ancient Mediterranean world over the several centuries after Augustus, sacrificial ritual was everywhere practiced but almost nowhere reinforced or strengthened. Many ordinary people had long found that their interests were personally best served by a milder ritual. These rituals often took the form of a common meal, often taken at a place where family members were buried. Modest offerings of food to the divine protectors in such settings were commonplace and one could even say sensible, symbolic of a respect to hidden powers rather than in any sense a formal feeding. They could leave cookies out for Santa Claus without expecting Santa Claus to eat them.19
There were wise men on all sides of the conversation. Lucian in the second century was a performer and his satirical writings were easy to approach, but serious philosophers had their reservations as well. The highly influential Porphyry, disciple, biographer, and editor of the great Platonic sage Plotinus in the third century, wrote forcefully on behalf of abstinence from animal flesh—which meant a fortiori abstinence from sacrifice. He himself thought that some traditional cult came from demons not gods—though he attacked Christianity, he agreed with Christians in this—and his account of Plotinus had the sage decline an invitation to attend sacrifice with the rejoinder, “The gods ought to come to me, not I to them.”20 Porphyry had a contemporary argument to make, but his language and content were still influenced by Theophrastus from long before. He fell in with other fastidious practitioners from a variety of traditions who held that the best sacrifice was the most delicate and symbolic—a grain of incense burned for the god was held by many to be more than adequate.
Similarly in the third century, Philostratus, biographer of the sage Apollonius, had his hero staying away from sacrifice and making his own peace with the gods otherwise. He is credited with writing a book On Sacrifices that criticized cities that were hotbeds of sacrifice. That view relies on the reasonable belief that there were variations from place to place already. Variety only increased as new forms of worship short of bloody sacrifice were introduced.
By the late third century, disdain emerged in odd places. Didyma was a great and ancient religious site not far from flourishing Miletus on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. There were oracles there from before the time there were Greeks there, but by the third century CE, there was no question it was Apollo who spoke: “What concern have I with bountiful hecatombs of cattle and statues of rich gold and images worked in bronze and silver? The immortal gods have no need…”21 This god preferred to hear his faithful singing hymns.
Disaster reinforced this growing disdain. Alexander Severus, the last of the dynasty that had patronized Jupiter Dolichenus, was killed in 235 CE. For the next fifty years, the Roman world knew calamity on calamity.22 The politics, diplomacy, and warfare of this period are all important for the future. In the middle of it, the first of only two real attempts to attack Christianity and check its growth and spread took place, but that was not the most important event in the religious history of the third century.
The crisis of empire and government ended when Roman government and wealth were at last concentrated in imperial hands and local wealth and power began to fade. Under the emperor Diocletian, who took power in 284 and succeeded in stabilizing the world after fifty years of turmoil, the size of the imperial military and civil service grew enormously, while taxes were imposed to support them. In many cities of the Roman world, the old wealth was no longer there and the power of the old aristocracy was sharply checked by the new imperial authoritarianism.23 Given what we have seen about the lack of enthusiasm for the old, expensive sacrificial ways, it is at least no surprise that when and where old rituals had ceased to be practiced, because of disruption, distress, or lack of money, there was little impulse to bring them back. The best modern historian of late antique Athens thinks that the sack of that city traditionally dated to 267 CE and assigned to a roving band of attackers called Heruls gave the city a blow from which it never recovered.24 Leaving aside the melodrama of barbarian brutality, the fact of the fading of Athens, like that of Rome three centuries later when Roman forces gutted the city in order to make it part of the Roman Empire again, seems unavoidable. Altars, in such a moment, were destroyed or—almost as damaging—merely neglected.
Changing tastes, changing fashions, changing social structures: it would have taken a lot to keep the altar fires burning.