- Simona Rafanelli –
“hostia sacrifi calis princeps” (“foremost sacrifi cial victim”) covered by a domestic species that,
because of its market value and above all the importance derived from its role as a man’s
“companion in work,” expressed in the agricultural activity of the “ox-as-ploughman,”
represented in every respect a type of offering of great value in the context of the sanctuary.
The same value was to be bestowed in funerary spaces, as shown by the analysis of ritual
contexts furnished in the necropolis of Verucchio,^63 where whole animals, cattle, horses and
sheep/goats, were placed to mark the outer limits of the necropolis, or to divide individual
groups of burials; they come to assume the signifi cance of offerings of consecration of the
area. The same objective of consecration probably explains the eighteen heads of cattle, of
which the skulls and jaws are preserved, found along the so-called “alignment” that marked
the northern limit of the sanctuary in the southern area of Pyrgi.^64
The rare fi gural representations of sacrifi ce, with some plausibility related to the
funerary sphere^65 (Fig. 28.4), seem in fact to show a predilection for this victim par
excellence, in which we might recognize one of the “certae hostiae” (“certain victims”)
that were offered in sacrifi ce to “certis diis” (“certain gods”) that allowed the souls of
the dead to achieve immortality (Arnobius 2.62)^66 and to transform them into the Dii
animales (“Spirit gods”) identifi ed by Servius with the Penates and the Viales (they are
the Lares Viales, the gods who protected the country-streets) of the Romans (Servius Ad
Aen. 3.168)^67. On the other hand, when confronted with the abundant bone remains
of domestic species such as cattle, sheep/goats, pigs, furnished by sanctuary areas, it is
more diffi cult to recognize representations of this type of location (sanctuary areas) in the
sphere of fi gural images, where any desire to set a sacrifi cial scene within a sanctuary is
entrusted simply to a few iconic and highly suggestive signs, such as columns or pilasters
surmounted by large vases (Fig. 28.5).^68
The prevalence of one domestic species over another, within a ritual context, would
seem in fact to direct attention toward a different divine recipient of the offering of the
animal victim; on the basis of comparison with the Greek paradigm, it would seem
permissible to recognize this divine recipient, in the case of the so-called “monumental
complex” at Pian di Civita of Tarquinia, wherein the offering of sheep/goats prevails, in
a goddess of chthonic valence, called by the epithet of Uni in the Orientalizing period,^69
capable of assuming eastern values in the guise of Uni-Astarte (the Phoenician Ishtar),^70
also venerated in the northern sanctuary of Pyrgi,^71 to whom the offering of a tortoise
is well suited, the remains of which were also found in the sanctuary of Ortaglia, in the
Volterran countryside, and in that of the Acropolis of Volterra.^72
Figure 28.4 Etrusco-Corinthian krater of the “Gobbi.” Painter of the “Knotted Tails.” Cerveteri,
Museo Archeologico, inv. no. 19539. From Caere. 590–570 bc (after Martelli 1987: 291)