Divyanshu67/squad_v2 huggingface dataset:
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Rome had a semi-divine ancestor in the Trojan refugee Aeneas, son of Venus, who was said to have established the nucleus of Roman religion when he brought the Palladium, Lares and Penates from Troy to Italy. These objects were believed in historical times to remain in the keeping of the Vestals, Rome's female priesthood. Aeneas had been given refuge by King Evander, a Greek exile from Arcadia, to whom were attributed other religious foundations: he established the Ara Maxima, "Greatest Altar," to Hercules at the site that would become the Forum Boarium, and he was the first to celebrate the Lupercalia, an archaic festival in February that was celebrated as late as the 5th century of the Christian era.

Question: What mythical figure did the Romans consider to be semi-divine?
Answer: Aeneas

Question: Of what did Aeneas establish the central feature?
Answer: Roman religion

Question: Who were the keepers of Aeneas's sacred objects?
Answer: Vestals

Question: What ancient festival was celebrated until the 5th century?
Answer: Lupercalia

Question: To whom did Aeneas set up an alter in Rome?
Answer: Hercules
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

The myth of a Trojan founding with Greek influence was reconciled through an elaborate genealogy (the Latin kings of Alba Longa) with the well-known legend of Rome's founding by Romulus and Remus. The most common version of the twins' story displays several aspects of hero myth. Their mother, Rhea Silvia, had been ordered by her uncle the king to remain a virgin, in order to preserve the throne he had usurped from her father. Through divine intervention, the rightful line was restored when Rhea Silvia was impregnated by the god Mars. She gave birth to twins, who were duly exposed by order of the king but saved through a series of miraculous events.

Question: What mythical characters were involved in the founding of Rome?
Answer: Romulus and Remus

Question: What type of story was the Romulus and Remus tale?
Answer: hero myth

Question: Who was the mother of Romulus and Remus?
Answer: Rhea Silvia

Question: What god was the father of Romulus and Remus?
Answer: Mars

Question: What type of events saved the twins of Roman myth?
Answer: miraculous
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Romulus was credited with several religious institutions. He founded the Consualia festival, inviting the neighbouring Sabines to participate; the ensuing rape of the Sabine women by Romulus's men further embedded both violence and cultural assimilation in Rome's myth of origins. As a successful general, Romulus is also supposed to have founded Rome's first temple to Jupiter Feretrius and offered the spolia opima, the prime spoils taken in war, in the celebration of the first Roman triumph. Spared a mortal's death, Romulus was mysteriously spirited away and deified.

Question: What type of organization did Romulus establish?
Answer: religious

Question: What religious festival did Romulus found?
Answer: Consualia

Question: According to myth, what god's temple did Romulus found?
Answer: Jupiter

Question: What did Romulus offer to Jupiter in the first Roman Triumph?
Answer: spoils taken in war

Question: Instead of death, what happened to Romulus?
Answer: deified
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Each of Rome's legendary or semi-legendary kings was associated with one or more religious institutions still known to the later Republic. Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Marcius instituted the fetial priests. The first "outsider" Etruscan king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, founded a Capitoline temple to the triad Jupiter, Juno and Minerva which served as the model for the highest official cult throughout the Roman world. The benevolent, divinely fathered Servius Tullius established the Latin League, its Aventine Temple to Diana, and the Compitalia to mark his social reforms. Servius Tullius was murdered and succeeded by the arrogant Tarquinius Superbus, whose expulsion marked the beginning of Rome as a republic with annually elected magistrates.

Question: To what were the first kings of Rome associated?
Answer: religious institutions

Question: To what group of deities did Lucius Tarquinius Priscus  establish a temple?
Answer: Jupiter, Juno and Minerva

Question: Where was the temple to the triad gods established?
Answer: Capitoline

Question: What organization did Servius Tullius found?
Answer: Latin League,

Question: The removal of whom marked the beginning of the Roman Republic?
Answer: Tarquinius Superbus
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Rome offers no native creation myth, and little mythography to explain the character of its deities, their mutual relationships or their interactions with the human world, but Roman theology acknowledged that di immortales (immortal gods) ruled all realms of the heavens and earth. There were gods of the upper heavens, gods of the underworld and a myriad of lesser deities between. Some evidently favoured Rome because Rome honoured them, but none were intrinsically, irredeemably foreign or alien. The political, cultural and religious coherence of an emergent Roman super-state required a broad, inclusive and flexible network of lawful cults. At different times and in different places, the sphere of influence, character and functions of a divine being could expand, overlap with those of others, and be redefined as Roman. Change was embedded within existing traditions.

Question: What type of myth did Rome not have?
Answer: creation

Question: To the Romans who ruled all aspects of heaven and earth?
Answer: immortal gods

Question: What did the Romans do for those deities that favored Rome? 
Answer: Rome honoured them

Question: What did Rome make the myriad various cults?
Answer: lawful

Question: What was basic facet of Roman religious experience?
Answer: Change
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Several versions of a semi-official, structured pantheon were developed during the political, social and religious instability of the Late Republican era. Jupiter, the most powerful of all gods and "the fount of the auspices upon which the relationship of the city with the gods rested", consistently personified the divine authority of Rome's highest offices, internal organization and external relations. During the archaic and early Republican eras, he shared his temple, some aspects of cult and several divine characteristics with Mars and Quirinus, who were later replaced by Juno and Minerva. A conceptual tendency toward triads may be indicated by the later agricultural or plebeian triad of Ceres, Liber and Libera, and by some of the complementary threefold deity-groupings of Imperial cult. Other major and minor deities could be single, coupled, or linked retrospectively through myths of divine marriage and sexual adventure. These later Roman pantheistic hierarchies are part literary and mythographic, part philosophical creations, and often Greek in origin. The Hellenization of Latin literature and culture supplied literary and artistic models for reinterpreting Roman deities in light of the Greek Olympians, and promoted a sense that the two cultures had a shared heritage.

Question: To the Romans who was the most powerful of the gods?
Answer: Jupiter

Question: What did Jupiter personify in regards to Rome's highest offices?
Answer: divine authority

Question: What gods did Juno and Minerva replace in Roman religious practice?
Answer: Mars and Quirinus

Question: From where does the practice of linking various gods into grouping come?
Answer: Greek in origin

Question: Of what did the linking of Greek and Roman deities promote a feeling? 
Answer: heritage
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

The impressive, costly, and centralised rites to the deities of the Roman state were vastly outnumbered in everyday life by commonplace religious observances pertaining to an individual's domestic and personal deities, the patron divinities of Rome's various neighborhoods and communities, and the often idiosyncratic blends of official, unofficial, local and personal cults that characterised lawful Roman religion. In this spirit, a provincial Roman citizen who made the long journey from Bordeaux to Italy to consult the Sibyl at Tibur did not neglect his devotion to his own goddess from home:

Question: What type of religious practices outnumbered the state observances?
Answer: commonplace

Question: To what did the mixture of official and individual religious practices  pertain? 
Answer: lawful Roman

Question: What were the characteristics of state religious observances?
Answer: impressive, costly, and centralised

Question: Who made the choices of personal religious practices in Rome? 
Answer: individual

Question: What type of deities did Roman communities have?
Answer: patron
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Roman calendars show roughly forty annual religious festivals. Some lasted several days, others a single day or less: sacred days (dies fasti) outnumbered "non-sacred" days (dies nefasti). A comparison of surviving Roman religious calendars suggests that official festivals were organized according to broad seasonal groups that allowed for different local traditions. Some of the most ancient and popular festivals incorporated ludi ("games," such as chariot races and theatrical performances), with examples including those held at Palestrina in honour of Fortuna Primigenia during Compitalia, and the Ludi Romani in honour of Liber. Other festivals may have required only the presence and rites of their priests and acolytes, or particular groups, such as women at the Bona Dea rites.

Question: How many religious celebrations did Rome have?
Answer: forty

Question:  What type of day were there more of in Rome?
Answer: sacred days

Question: With what were Roman festivals organized in accordance?
Answer: seasonal

Question: What traditions did the seasonal festivals incorporate?
Answer: local

Question: Instead of the public, what did some religious rites only require?
Answer: particular groups
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Other public festivals were not required by the calendar, but occasioned by events. The triumph of a Roman general was celebrated as the fulfillment of religious vows, though these tended to be overshadowed by the political and social significance of the event. During the late Republic, the political elite competed to outdo each other in public display, and the ludi attendant on a triumph were expanded to include gladiator contests. Under the Principate, all such spectacular displays came under Imperial control: the most lavish were subsidised by emperors, and lesser events were provided by magistrates as a sacred duty and privilege of office. Additional festivals and games celebrated Imperial accessions and anniversaries. Others, such as the traditional Republican Secular Games to mark a new era (saeculum), became imperially funded to maintain traditional values and a common Roman identity. That the spectacles retained something of their sacral aura even in late antiquity is indicated by the admonitions of the Church Fathers that Christians should not take part.

Question: What type of festivals happened when events warranted them?
Answer: fulfillment of religious vows

Question: What is an example of an event organized religious celebration?
Answer: The triumph

Question: In what aspect of the festival did political figures try to out do each other?
Answer: public display

Question: Under what auspices did public displays  come during the Principate?
Answer: Imperial

Question: Who paid for the most lavish of festival events?
Answer: emperors
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

The meaning and origin of many archaic festivals baffled even Rome's intellectual elite, but the more obscure they were, the greater the opportunity for reinvention and reinterpretation — a fact lost neither on Augustus in his program of religious reform, which often cloaked autocratic innovation, nor on his only rival as mythmaker of the era, Ovid. In his Fasti, a long-form poem covering Roman holidays from January to June, Ovid presents a unique look at Roman antiquarian lore, popular customs, and religious practice that is by turns imaginative, entertaining, high-minded, and scurrilous; not a priestly account, despite the speaker's pose as a vates or inspired poet-prophet, but a work of description, imagination and poetic etymology that reflects the broad humor and burlesque spirit of such venerable festivals as the Saturnalia, Consualia, and feast of Anna Perenna on the Ides of March, where Ovid treats the assassination of the newly deified Julius Caesar as utterly incidental to the festivities among the Roman people. But official calendars preserved from different times and places also show a flexibility in omitting or expanding events, indicating that there was no single static and authoritative calendar of required observances. In the later Empire under Christian rule, the new Christian festivals were incorporated into the existing framework of the Roman calendar, alongside at least some of the traditional festivals.

Question: What did obscure festivals offer Romans the opportunity to do?
Answer: reinterpretation

Question: What did Augustus wish to do for Roman religion?
Answer: reform

Question: What poet wrote a long poem describing Roman religious holidays?
Answer: Ovid

Question: What was lacking in the presentation of religious events in Rome?
Answer: authoritative calendar

Question: Under whose rule were new Christian festivals added to previous Roman holidays?
Answer: Christian
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

The Latin word templum originally referred not to the temple building itself, but to a sacred space surveyed and plotted ritually through augury: "The architecture of the ancient Romans was, from first to last, an art of shaping space around ritual." The Roman architect Vitruvius always uses the word templum to refer to this sacred precinct, and the more common Latin words aedes, delubrum, or fanum for a temple or shrine as a building. The ruins of temples are among the most visible monuments of ancient Roman culture.

Question: Around what aspect did the Romans a lot space?
Answer: ritual

Question: What religious practice did Rome use to determine ritual?
Answer: augury

Question: What Roman word was used to refer to the scared precinct?
Answer: templum

Question: What common Latin words were used to mean a shrine or building?
Answer: aedes, delubrum, or fanum

Question: What monuments were the some of most visible of Roman culture?
Answer: temples
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

All sacrifices and offerings required an accompanying prayer to be effective. Pliny the Elder declared that "a sacrifice without prayer is thought to be useless and not a proper consultation of the gods." Prayer by itself, however, had independent power. The spoken word was thus the single most potent religious action, and knowledge of the correct verbal formulas the key to efficacy. Accurate naming was vital for tapping into the desired powers of the deity invoked, hence the proliferation of cult epithets among Roman deities. Public prayers (prex) were offered loudly and clearly by a priest on behalf of the community. Public religious ritual had to be enacted by specialists and professionals faultlessly; a mistake might require that the action, or even the entire festival, be repeated from the start. The historian Livy reports an occasion when the presiding magistrate at the Latin festival forgot to include the "Roman people" among the list of beneficiaries in his prayer; the festival had to be started over. Even private prayer by an individual was formulaic, a recitation rather than a personal expression, though selected by the individual for a particular purpose or occasion.

Question: What did each offering require to be valid in Roman religion?
Answer: prayer

Question: What did Pliny the Elder think that a sacrifice without prayer was?
Answer: useless

Question: What act alone had power in Roman thought?
Answer: Prayer

Question: What knowledge was of importance in the potency of prayer?
Answer: correct verbal formulas

Question: What was missing in the formulas of prayer in Rome?
Answer: personal expression
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Sacrifice to deities of the heavens (di superi, "gods above") was performed in daylight, and under the public gaze. Deities of the upper heavens required white, infertile victims of their own sex: Juno a white heifer (possibly a white cow); Jupiter a white, castrated ox (bos mas) for the annual oath-taking by the consuls. Di superi with strong connections to the earth, such as Mars, Janus, Neptune and various genii – including the Emperor's – were offered fertile victims. After the sacrifice, a banquet was held; in state cults, the images of honoured deities took pride of place on banqueting couches and by means of the sacrificial fire consumed their proper portion (exta, the innards). Rome's officials and priests reclined in order of precedence alongside and ate the meat; lesser citizens may have had to provide their own.

Question: When did the sacrifices to the deities of the heavens occur? 
Answer: daylight

Question: What color was the sacrifice mandated to be for heaven deities?
Answer: white

Question: What type of sacrifices were offered to gods with earth connections?
Answer: fertile

Question: What event was held after the sacrifice?
Answer: banquet

Question: Who ate the meat of the sacrifice during the after sacrifice  banquet?
Answer: officials and priests
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Chthonic gods such as Dis pater, the di inferi ("gods below"), and the collective shades of the departed (di Manes) were given dark, fertile victims in nighttime rituals. Animal sacrifice usually took the form of a holocaust or burnt offering, and there was no shared banquet, as "the living cannot share a meal with the dead". Ceres and other underworld goddesses of fruitfulness were sometimes offered pregnant female animals; Tellus was given a pregnant cow at the Fordicidia festival. Color had a general symbolic value for sacrifices. Demigods and heroes, who belonged to the heavens and the underworld, were sometimes given black-and-white victims. Robigo (or Robigus) was given red dogs and libations of red wine at the Robigalia for the protection of crops from blight and red mildew.

Question: When were the gods below and the dead celebrated?
Answer: nighttime

Question: What type of sacrifice victims were the dark gods offered?
Answer: dark, fertile

Question: How was the sacrifice to the gods below handled?
Answer: burnt offering

Question: What daylight event was not celebrated after the dark sacrifice?
Answer: shared banquet

Question: What feature had importance in sacrifices?
Answer: Color
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

The same divine agencies who caused disease or harm also had the power to avert it, and so might be placated in advance. Divine consideration might be sought to avoid the inconvenient delays of a journey, or encounters with banditry, piracy and shipwreck, with due gratitude to be rendered on safe arrival or return. In times of great crisis, the Senate could decree collective public rites, in which Rome's citizens, including women and children, moved in procession from one temple to the next, supplicating the gods.

Question: What elements had the power of benefit or harm in Roman religion?
Answer: divine agencies

Question: What kind of intervention could be sought to avoid disasters?
Answer: Divine

Question: What was expected when the divine intervention benefited the patron?
Answer: gratitude

Question: What act was decreed in times of crisis in Rome?
Answer: public rites

Question: What was the point of public procession to the god's temples?
Answer: supplicating the gods
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Extraordinary circumstances called for extraordinary sacrifice: in one of the many crises of the Second Punic War, Jupiter Capitolinus was promised every animal born that spring (see ver sacrum), to be rendered after five more years of protection from Hannibal and his allies. The "contract" with Jupiter is exceptionally detailed. All due care would be taken of the animals. If any died or were stolen before the scheduled sacrifice, they would count as already sacrificed, since they had already been consecrated. Normally, if the gods failed to keep their side of the bargain, the offered sacrifice would be withheld. In the imperial period, sacrifice was withheld following Trajan's death because the gods had not kept the Emperor safe for the stipulated period. In Pompeii, the Genius of the living emperor was offered a bull: presumably a standard practise in Imperial cult, though minor offerings (incense and wine) were also made.

Question: What type of circumstances were called for in times of extreme difficulties?
Answer: Extraordinary

Question: What offering was Jupiter promised during the Second Punic War?
Answer: every animal born

Question: From whom was Rome asking for protection?
Answer: Hannibal

Question: What happened to the sacrifice if the god failed to uphold the agreement?
Answer: withheld

Question: What was the offering for the Emperor in Pompeii?
Answer: bull
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

 The exta were the entrails of a sacrificed animal, comprising in Cicero's enumeration the gall bladder (fel), liver (iecur), heart (cor), and lungs (pulmones). The exta were exposed for litatio (divine approval) as part of Roman liturgy, but were "read" in the context of the disciplina Etrusca. As a product of Roman sacrifice, the exta and blood are reserved for the gods, while the meat (viscera) is shared among human beings in a communal meal. The exta of bovine victims were usually stewed in a pot (olla or aula), while those of sheep or pigs were grilled on skewers. When the deity's portion was cooked, it was sprinkled with mola salsa (ritually prepared salted flour) and wine, then placed in the fire on the altar for the offering; the technical verb for this action was porricere.

Question: What were the exta of a sacrifice?
Answer: entrails

Question: How were the exta read in Roman religious practice?
Answer: disciplina Etrusca

Question: What part of the sacrifice were reserved for the gods?
Answer: exta and blood

Question: What part of the sacrifice was shared among humans?
Answer: meat

Question: Into what was the god's portion of the sacrifice placed?
Answer: fire on the altar
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Human sacrifice in ancient Rome was rare but documented. After the Roman defeat at Cannae two Gauls and two Greeks were buried under the Forum Boarium, in a stone chamber "which had on a previous occasion [228 BC] also been polluted by human victims, a practice most repulsive to Roman feelings". Livy avoids the word "sacrifice" in connection with this bloodless human life-offering; Plutarch does not. The rite was apparently repeated in 113 BC, preparatory to an invasion of Gaul. Its religious dimensions and purpose remain uncertain.

Question: What type of sacrifice was rare in Rome?
Answer: Human

Question: What act was repulsive to Romans?
Answer: Human sacrifice

Question: How were sacrifices of humans carried out in Rome?
Answer: buried

Question: Before the invasion of what area was human sacrifice carried out?
Answer: Gaul

Question: When was the invasion of Gaul by Rome?
Answer: 113 BC
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

In the early stages of the First Punic War (264 BC) the first known Roman gladiatorial munus was held, described as a funeral blood-rite to the manes of a Roman military aristocrat. The gladiator munus was never explicitly acknowledged as a human sacrifice, probably because death was not its inevitable outcome or purpose. Even so, the gladiators swore their lives to the infernal gods, and the combat was dedicated as an offering to the di manes or other gods. The event was therefore a sacrificium in the strict sense of the term, and Christian writers later condemned it as human sacrifice.

Question: During what war was the first gladiator munus held?
Answer: First Punic War

Question: How was the gladiatorial combat described? 
Answer: funeral blood-rite

Question: What was not the ultimate purpose of gladiatorial rites?
Answer: death

Question: In what way was gladiatorial combat considered?
Answer: as an offering

Question: How did later Christians view Gladiatorial combats?
Answer: human sacrifice
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

The small woolen dolls called Maniae, hung on the Compitalia shrines, were thought a symbolic replacement for child-sacrifice to Mania, as Mother of the Lares. The Junii took credit for its abolition by their ancestor L. Junius Brutus, traditionally Rome's Republican founder and first consul. Political or military executions were sometimes conducted in such a way that they evoked human sacrifice, whether deliberately or in the perception of witnesses; Marcus Marius Gratidianus was a gruesome example.

Question: Who was the founder of the Roman Republic?
Answer: L. Junius Brutus

Question: What were stand-ins for child sacrifices to Mania?
Answer: woolen dolls

Question: Who was Mania in Roman religion?
Answer: Mother of the Lares

Question: What leader was the first consul of the Roman Republic?
Answer: L. Junius Brutus

Question: What acts were sometimes arranged so as to be sacrifices?
Answer: executions
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Officially, human sacrifice was obnoxious "to the laws of gods and men." The practice was a mark of the "Other", attributed to Rome's traditional enemies such as the Carthaginians and Gauls. Rome banned it on several occasions under extreme penalty. A law passed in 81 BC characterised human sacrifice as murder committed for magical purposes. Pliny saw the ending of human sacrifice conducted by the druids as a positive consequence of the conquest of Gaul and Britain. Despite an empire-wide ban under Hadrian, human sacrifice may have continued covertly in North Africa and elsewhere.

Question: What act did Romans view as obnoxious?
Answer: human sacrifice

Question: To whom was human sacrifice usually attributed?
Answer: enemies

Question: What did Rome do about human sacrifice?
Answer: banned it

Question: As what  did the law of 81 BC view human sacrifice?
Answer: murder

Question: What ruler banned human sacrifice empire wide?
Answer: Hadrian
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

A pater familias was the senior priest of his household. He offered daily cult to his lares and penates, and to his di parentes/divi parentes at his domestic shrines and in the fires of the household hearth. His wife (mater familias) was responsible for the household's cult to Vesta. In rural estates, bailiffs seem to have been responsible for at least some of the household shrines (lararia) and their deities. Household cults had state counterparts. In Vergil's Aeneid, Aeneas brought the Trojan cult of the lares and penates from Troy, along with the Palladium which was later installed in the temple of Vesta.

Question: Who was the senior priest of the household in Rome?
Answer: pater familias

Question: Which individual in the household was responsible for the Vesta cult?
Answer: wife

Question: Which ancient hero brought the lares cult to Rome?
Answer: Aeneas

Question: From what city did Aeneas bring the lares cult?
Answer: Troy

Question: What was put in the temple of Vesta?
Answer: Palladium
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Religious law centered on the ritualised system of honours and sacrifice that brought divine blessings, according to the principle do ut des ("I give, that you might give"). Proper, respectful religio brought social harmony and prosperity. Religious neglect was a form of atheism: impure sacrifice and incorrect ritual were vitia (impious errors). Excessive devotion, fearful grovelling to deities and the improper use or seeking of divine knowledge were superstitio. Any of these moral deviations could cause divine anger (ira deorum) and therefore harm the State. The official deities of the state were identified with its lawful offices and institutions, and Romans of every class were expected to honour the beneficence and protection of mortal and divine superiors. Participation in public rites showed a personal commitment to their community and its values.

Question: On what kind of system was Roman religious law focused?
Answer: ritualised

Question: What form of religion was atheism considered to be? 
Answer: Religious neglect

Question: What results did proper religious practices produce?
Answer: harmony and prosperity.

Question: What could deviations from proper religious practices cause?
Answer: divine anger

Question: What did participation in public religious rites show about the individual?
Answer: commitment
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Official cults were state funded as a "matter of public interest" (res publica). Non-official but lawful cults were funded by private individuals for the benefit of their own communities. The difference between public and private cult is often unclear. Individuals or collegial associations could offer funds and cult to state deities. The public Vestals prepared ritual substances for use in public and private cults, and held the state-funded (thus public) opening ceremony for the Parentalia festival, which was otherwise a private rite to household ancestors. Some rites of the domus (household) were held in public places but were legally defined as privata in part or whole. All cults were ultimately subject to the approval and regulation of the censor and pontifices.

Question: What organization payed for the maintenance official cults?
Answer: state

Question: Who funded non-official religious cults?
Answer: private individuals

Question: What group benefited from non- official cults? 
Answer: own communities

Question: What group presented the opening ceremonies of the Parentalia festival?
Answer: Vestals

Question: What individuals had the right to regulate all cults?
Answer: censor and pontifices
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Rome had no separate priestly caste or class. The highest authority within a community usually sponsored its cults and sacrifices, officiated as its priest and promoted its assistants and acolytes. Specialists from the religious colleges and professionals such as haruspices and oracles were available for consultation. In household cult, the paterfamilias functioned as priest, and members of his familia as acolytes and assistants. Public cults required greater knowledge and expertise. The earliest public priesthoods were probably the flamines (the singular is flamen), attributed to king Numa: the major flamines, dedicated to Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus, were traditionally drawn from patrician families. Twelve lesser flamines were each dedicated to a single deity, whose archaic nature is indicated by the relative obscurity of some. Flamines were constrained by the requirements of ritual purity; Jupiter's flamen in particular had virtually no simultaneous capacity for a political or military career.

Question: What was lacking as to the profession of a priest class in Rome?
Answer: separate priestly caste

Question: What authority in a community sponsored religious rites? 
Answer: highest

Question: What type of religious participants were available for consultation?
Answer: Specialists

Question: Which member of a family functioned as priest?
Answer: paterfamilias

Question: What were the earliest priesthoods? 
Answer: flamines
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

In the Regal era, a rex sacrorum (king of the sacred rites) supervised regal and state rites in conjunction with the king (rex) or in his absence, and announced the public festivals. He had little or no civil authority. With the abolition of monarchy, the collegial power and influence of the Republican pontifices increased. By the late Republican era, the flamines were supervised by the pontifical collegia. The rex sacrorum had become a relatively obscure priesthood with an entirely symbolic title: his religious duties still included the daily, ritual announcement of festivals and priestly duties within two or three of the latter but his most important priestly role – the supervision of the Vestals and their rites – fell to the more politically powerful and influential pontifex maximus.

Question: Who supervised sacred rites during the era of kings?
Answer: rex sacrorum

Question: What type of authority did the rex sacrorum lack?
Answer: civil

Question: What group's power increased after the rise of the Roman Republic?
Answer: Republican pontifices

Question: What individual became more powerful during the late Republic?
Answer: pontifex maximus

Question: By the late Republic, what position had become largely symbolic?
Answer: rex sacrorum
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Public priests were appointed by the collegia. Once elected, a priest held permanent religious authority from the eternal divine, which offered him lifetime influence, privilege and immunity. Therefore, civil and religious law limited the number and kind of religious offices allowed an individual and his family. Religious law was collegial and traditional; it informed political decisions, could overturn them, and was difficult to exploit for personal gain. Priesthood was a costly honour: in traditional Roman practice, a priest drew no stipend. Cult donations were the property of the deity, whose priest must provide cult regardless of shortfalls in public funding – this could mean subsidy of acolytes and all other cult maintenance from personal funds. For those who had reached their goal in the Cursus honorum, permanent priesthood was best sought or granted after a lifetime's service in military or political life, or preferably both: it was a particularly honourable and active form of retirement which fulfilled an essential public duty. For a freedman or slave, promotion as one of the Compitalia seviri offered a high local profile, and opportunities in local politics; and therefore business. During the Imperial era, priesthood of the Imperial cult offered provincial elites full Roman citizenship and public prominence beyond their single year in religious office; in effect, it was the first step in a provincial cursus honorum. In Rome, the same Imperial cult role was performed by the Arval Brethren, once an obscure Republican priesthood dedicated to several deities, then co-opted by Augustus as part of his religious reforms. The Arvals offered prayer and sacrifice to Roman state gods at various temples for the continued welfare of the Imperial family on their birthdays, accession anniversaries and to mark extraordinary events such as the quashing of conspiracy or revolt. Every January 3 they consecrated the annual vows and rendered any sacrifice promised in the previous year, provided the gods had kept the Imperial family safe for the contracted time.

Question: What group selected public priests in Rome?
Answer: collegia

Question: What was the term of office for a priest in Rome?
Answer: lifetime

Question: What limited an individual's access to religious offices?
Answer: law

Question: Because of the lack of pay, what was the type of honor in being a priest?
Answer: costly

Question: What did a priesthood in the Imperial cult gain a provencial?
Answer: Roman citizenship
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

The Vestals were a public priesthood of six women devoted to the cultivation of Vesta, goddess of the hearth of the Roman state and its vital flame. A girl chosen to be a Vestal achieved unique religious distinction, public status and privileges, and could exercise considerable political influence. Upon entering her office, a Vestal was emancipated from her father's authority. In archaic Roman society, these priestesses were the only women not required to be under the legal guardianship of a man, instead answering directly to the Pontifex Maximus.

Question: How many Vestals were there in Rome?
Answer: six

Question: Of what was Vesta the goddess?
Answer: hearth

Question: Of what were the Vestals protectors?
Answer: vital flame

Question: What was the benefit of being a Vestal?
Answer: political influence

Question: To whom did the Vestal answer?
Answer: Pontifex Maximus
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

A Vestal's dress represented her status outside the usual categories that defined Roman women, with elements of both virgin bride and daughter, and Roman matron and wife. Unlike male priests, Vestals were freed of the traditional obligations of marrying and producing children, and were required to take a vow of chastity that was strictly enforced: a Vestal polluted by the loss of her chastity while in office was buried alive. Thus the exceptional honor accorded a Vestal was religious rather than personal or social; her privileges required her to be fully devoted to the performance of her duties, which were considered essential to the security of Rome.

Question: What vow was required of Vestals?
Answer: chastity

Question: What was the punishment for the loss of a Vestal's chastity?
Answer: buried alive

Question: What was a Vestal expected to be to her duties?
Answer: devoted

Question: How were the Vestals' devotion to Rome's security viewed to be ?
Answer: essential

Question: What was the honor granted a Vestal ?
Answer: religious
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

The Vestals embody the profound connection between domestic cult and the religious life of the community. Any householder could rekindle their own household fire from Vesta's flame. The Vestals cared for the Lares and Penates of the state that were the equivalent of those enshrined in each home. Besides their own festival of Vestalia, they participated directly in the rites of Parilia, Parentalia and Fordicidia. Indirectly, they played a role in every official sacrifice; among their duties was the preparation of the mola salsa, the salted flour that was sprinkled on every sacrificial victim as part of its immolation.

Question: Where could a householder rekindle the home's flame?
Answer: Vesta's flame

Question: For what state artifacts did the Vestals care?
Answer: Lares and Penates

Question: What was the Vestal festival called?
Answer: Vestalia

Question: To what part of official state sacrifices did the Vestals attend?
Answer: mola salsa

Question: What was the nature of the role of the Vestals in state sacrifices?
Answer: Indirect
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Augustus' religious reformations raised the funding and public profile of the Vestals. They were given high-status seating at games and theatres. The emperor Claudius appointed them as priestesses to the cult of the deified Livia, wife of Augustus. They seem to have retained their religious and social distinctions well into the 4th century, after political power within the Empire had shifted to the Christians. When the Christian emperor Gratian refused the office of pontifex maximus, he took steps toward the dissolution of the order. His successor Theodosius I extinguished Vesta's sacred fire and vacated her temple.

Question: What group's status was improved by Augustus' religious reforms?
Answer: Vestals

Question: What advantage was there in being a Vestal at games?
Answer: seating

Question: For whose cult were the Vestals appointed as priestesses?
Answer: Livia

Question: Until what time did the Vestal retain their social distinctions?
Answer: 4th century

Question: Which emperor disbanded the Vestals?
Answer: Theodosius I
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Public religion took place within a sacred precinct that had been marked out ritually by an augur. The original meaning of the Latin word templum was this sacred space, and only later referred to a building. Rome itself was an intrinsically sacred space; its ancient boundary (pomerium) had been marked by Romulus himself with oxen and plough; what lay within was the earthly home and protectorate of the gods of the state. In Rome, the central references for the establishment of an augural templum appear to have been the Via Sacra (Sacred Way) and the pomerium. Magistrates sought divine opinion of proposed official acts through an augur, who read the divine will through observations made within the templum before, during and after an act of sacrifice. Divine disapproval could arise through unfit sacrifice, errant rites (vitium) or an unacceptable plan of action. If an unfavourable sign was given, the magistrate could repeat the sacrifice until favourable signs were seen, consult with his augural colleagues, or abandon the project. Magistrates could use their right of augury (ius augurum) to adjourn and overturn the process of law, but were obliged to base their decision on the augur's observations and advice. For Cicero, himself an augur, this made the augur the most powerful authority in the Late Republic. By his time (mid 1st century BC) augury was supervised by the college of pontifices, whose powers were increasingly woven into the magistracies of the cursus honorum.

Question: In what area did public rites take place in Rome?
Answer: sacred precinct

Question: What person marked the religious area ritually?
Answer: augur

Question: What was the original meaning of the templum in Latin?
Answer: sacred space

Question: Who designated the first boundary of Rome?
Answer: Romulus

Question: What did augers seek to understand through observances?
Answer: divine will
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Haruspicy was also used in public cult, under the supervision of the augur or presiding magistrate. The haruspices divined the will of the gods through examination of entrails after sacrifice, particularly the liver. They also interpreted omens, prodigies and portents, and formulated their expiation. Most Roman authors describe haruspicy as an ancient, ethnically Etruscan "outsider" religious profession, separate from Rome's internal and largely unpaid priestly hierarchy, essential but never quite respectable. During the mid-to-late Republic, the reformist Gaius Gracchus, the populist politician-general Gaius Marius and his antagonist Sulla, and the "notorious Verres" justified their very different policies by the divinely inspired utterances of private diviners. The senate and armies used the public haruspices: at some time during the late Republic, the Senate decreed that Roman boys of noble family be sent to Etruria for training in haruspicy and divination. Being of independent means, they would be better motivated to maintain a pure, religious practice for the public good. The motives of private haruspices – especially females – and their clients were officially suspect: none of this seems to have troubled Marius, who employed a Syrian prophetess.

Question: What process did haruspicy use to divine the will of the gods?
Answer: examination of entrails

Question: Which of the entrails was especially important to augury?
Answer: liver

Question: To which group can haruspicy to traced?
Answer: Etruscan

Question: What type of private  individual had several generals and politicians used to validate their actions?
Answer: diviners

Question: What type of diviners did the armies use to determine the will of the gods?
Answer: public haruspices
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Prodigies were transgressions in the natural, predictable order of the cosmos – signs of divine anger that portended conflict and misfortune. The Senate decided whether a reported prodigy was false, or genuine and in the public interest, in which case it was referred to the public priests, augurs and haruspices for ritual expiation. In 207 BC, during one of the Punic Wars' worst crises, the Senate dealt with an unprecedented number of confirmed prodigies whose expiation would have involved "at least twenty days" of dedicated rites.

Question: What were considered to be natural transgressions by the Romans?
Answer: Prodigies

Question: What did prodigies show the Romans?
Answer: divine anger

Question: Of what were prodigies predictors?
Answer: conflict and misfortune

Question: What did the expiation of a prodigy impose?
Answer: dedicated rites

Question: What group determined the truth of a prodigy?
Answer: Senate
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Livy presents these as signs of widespread failure in Roman religio. The major prodigies included the spontaneous combustion of weapons, the apparent shrinking of the sun's disc, two moons in a daylit sky, a cosmic battle between sun and moon, a rain of red-hot stones, a bloody sweat on statues, and blood in fountains and on ears of corn: all were expiated by sacrifice of "greater victims". The minor prodigies were less warlike but equally unnatural; sheep become goats, a hen become a cock (and vice versa) – these were expiated with "lesser victims". The discovery of an androgynous four-year-old child was expiated by its drowning and the holy procession of 27 virgins to the temple of Juno Regina, singing a hymn to avert disaster: a lightning strike during the hymn rehearsals required further expiation. Religious restitution is proved only by Rome's victory.

Question: What author wrote of disaster prodigies?
Answer: Livy

Question: Of what did the greater prodigies require in sacrifice?
Answer: greater victims

Question: What type of sacrifices were required to expiate the minor prodigies ?
Answer: lesser victims

Question: What is the only proof of religious success over prodigies?
Answer: Rome's victory

Question: Of what did Livy think the prodigies proved about Roman religion?
Answer: widespread failure
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Roman beliefs about an afterlife varied, and are known mostly for the educated elite who expressed their views in terms of their chosen philosophy. The traditional care of the dead, however, and the perpetuation after death of their status in life were part of the most archaic practices of Roman religion. Ancient votive deposits to the noble dead of Latium and Rome suggest elaborate and costly funeral offerings and banquets in the company of the deceased, an expectation of afterlife and their association with the gods. As Roman society developed, its Republican nobility tended to invest less in spectacular funerals and extravagant housing for their dead, and more on monumental endowments to the community, such as the donation of a temple or public building whose donor was commemorated by his statue and inscribed name. Persons of low or negligible status might receive simple burial, with such grave goods as relatives could afford.

Question: From what source does information of Roman thought about the afterlife come?
Answer: educated elite

Question: What type of practices were those affecting the care of the dead?
Answer: archaic

Question: What did the ancient Romans expect after death?
Answer: afterlife

Question: With whom did the  early Romans expect to associate?
Answer: gods

Question: What did later Romans invest in rather than grave offerings?
Answer: monumental endowments
Religion_in_ancient_Rome

Funeral and commemorative rites varied according to wealth, status and religious context. In Cicero's time, the better-off sacrificed a sow at the funeral pyre before cremation. The dead consumed their portion in the flames of the pyre, Ceres her portion through the flame of her altar, and the family at the site of the cremation. For the less well-off, inhumation with "a libation of wine, incense, and fruit or crops was sufficient". Ceres functioned as an intermediary between the realms of the living and the dead: the deceased had not yet fully passed to the world of the dead and could share a last meal with the living. The ashes (or body) were entombed or buried. On the eighth day of mourning, the family offered further sacrifice, this time on the ground; the shade of the departed was assumed to have passed entirely into the underworld. They had become one of the di Manes, who were collectively celebrated and appeased at the Parentalia, a multi-day festival of remembrance in February.

Question: What type of rites varied in accordance with status and religion?
Answer: Funeral and commemorative

Question: What was the grave sacrifice in Cicero's time?
Answer: sow

Question: What class gave only wine and food as a grave offering?
Answer: less well-off

Question: What was the multi day of remembrance for the dead? 
Answer: Parentalia

Question: What goddess was an intermediary  between the dead and the living?
Answer: Ceres