The Romans claimed this about themselves, but I'm not sure they're completely credible, at least about human sacrifice. The Roman Triumphal parade, for instance, included marching captured prisoners of war (often numbering in thousands), who would be led through the triumphal route up to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There, the prisoners would be executed. The Romans may have claimed that they weren't committing human sacrifice, but this seems hard to believe, given that the soldiers were killed on the grounds of the temple of their chief god, literally honored with the title "best and greatest."
On the whole, the Romans were quite enlightened compared to the other brutal civilizations of the ancient world, being governed more by law than superstition, but they still had these quirks that wouldn't be eradicated till Christianity replaced the state religion.
One needs to be very careful about which things to label human sacrifice. It is possible to be very "inclusive" there. One popular example is the expression "sacrificed on the altar of progress", and the works of philosophers such as Adorno and Horckheimer on the topic, who argued that human sacrifice just takes a different form in modern civilisation, but is still present e.g. as victims of car traffic, suicides from depression or industrial accidents. Imho, this only serves to hinder any kind of productive discussion because things tend to be not comparable in any way if terms are _that_ mushy.
I'd define anything as human sacrifice that the culture performing the act would label thus. E.g. we, as a modern civilization, don't call an abortion, war or execution "human sacrifice", so it isn't. The Romans didn't consider executing prisoners as such, because the prisoners were just subhuman and it was just an execution, so it isn't. The Carthagians seemed to think they were doing a human sacrifice, so yes, they were.
> One popular example is the expression "sacrificed on the altar of progress", and the works of philosophers such as Adorno and Horckheimer on the topic, who argued that human sacrifice just takes a different form in modern civilisation, but is still present e.g. as victims of car traffic, suicides from depression or industrial accidents. Imho, this only serves to hinder any kind of productive discussion because things tend to be not comparable in any way if terms are _that_ mushy.
I'm not talking about car (or chariot?) accidents here, I'm talking about literally thousands of people being executed on the grounds of a temple dedicated to Rome's chief god. Certainly people died in the Circus Maximus, and that is just sporting accident. I wouldn't even call gladiatorial combat human sacrifice, since it was mostly an entertainment spectacle in a more brutal time.
We're talking about Romans taking prisoners captured in war, marching them to one of the most significant religious locations within the sacred boundaries of the city, and executing them.
My issue with just trusting the ancients is that they sometimes aren't trustworthy. It's very possible that Rome didn't admit this was human sacrifice because Roman culture condemned human sacrifice, and kind of turned a blind eye to the ethics of this ritual.
No. Human sacrifice, in the definition I have given, has a clearly defined purpose (which I didn't state, because I thought this was implicit): Winning favour with the god(s). That only works in any religion I know of if you declare the purpose of making a sacrifice before the gods in some way.
The Romans did this through the ritual of immolation, where the animal was marked as a sacrifice by spreading mola (wheat spelt) and salsa (salt) on it. No immolation, no sacrifice. If they killed someone without immolation, to them it didn't have the purpose of pleasing the gods and thus wasn't human sacrifice. Edit: "immolation" in this context might be somewhat different in the english meaning. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mola_salsa for what I mean.
A lot of religions (don't know about the Roman in that aspect) also frown upon the intent of a sacrifice being impure: If you do the sacrifice with more than just the goal of pleasing God, e.g. to additionally get rid of that obnoxious goat/cock/person/..., then God won't be pleased.
Why not just kill them on the Campus Martius, then? Or in the middle of the Forum? Or even on the steps of the Senate house, to symbolize the supremacy of Roman state institutions?
It's not the killings of prisoners themselves - those were common throughout the ancient world, alongside slavery. It's the fact that they killed them at the temple to the chief god.
