derek-thomas/squad-v1.1-t5-question-generation huggingface dataset:
As the Romans extended their dominance throughout the Mediterranean world, their policy in general was to absorb the deities and cults of other peoples rather than try to eradicate them, since they believed that preserving tradition promoted social stability. One way that Rome incorporated diverse peoples was by supporting their religious heritage, building temples to local deities that framed their theology within the hierarchy of Roman religion. Inscriptions throughout the Empire record the side-by-side worship of local and Roman deities, including dedications made by Romans to local gods. By the height of the Empire, numerous international deities were cultivated at Rome and had been carried to even the most remote provinces, among them Cybele, Isis, Epona, and gods of solar monism such as Mithras and Sol Invictus, found as far north as Roman Britain. Because Romans had never been obligated to cultivate one god or one cult only, religious tolerance was not an issue in the sense that it is for competing monotheistic systems. The monotheistic rigor of Judaism posed difficulties for Roman policy that led at times to compromise and the granting of special exemptions, but sometimes to intractable conflict. For example, religious disputes helped cause the First Jewish–Roman War and the Bar Kokhba revolt.

Question: What did the Romans tend to do with local religions and deities in conquered areas? Question: To the Romans what did them think promoted social stability? Question: What facet of a foreign people did Rome add to itself to promote order? Question: To what areas of the Roman empire did the Romans take their deities? Question: What facet of religion was not an issue for Roman?
In the wake of the Republic's collapse, state religion had adapted to support the new regime of the emperors. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, justified the novelty of one-man rule with a vast program of religious revivalism and reform. Public vows formerly made for the security of the republic now were directed at the wellbeing of the emperor. So-called "emperor worship" expanded on a grand scale the traditional Roman veneration of the ancestral dead and of the Genius, the divine tutelary of every individual. Imperial cult became one of the major ways in which Rome advertised its presence in the provinces and cultivated shared cultural identity and loyalty throughout the Empire. Rejection of the state religion was tantamount to treason. This was the context for Rome's conflict with Christianity, which Romans variously regarded as a form of atheism and novel superstitio.

Question: After the Republic collapsed,  what addition was made to the religions of Rome? Question: Who was the first Roman emperor? Question: For whose well being were public vows made in the empire? Question: What did the Romans use as a means of expanding their rule throughout the empire? Question: As what during the time of the Roman empire  was rejection of the state religion viewed?
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? Question: Of what did Aeneas establish the central feature? Question: Who were the keepers of Aeneas's sacred objects? Question: To whom did Aeneas set up an alter in Rome? Question: What ancient festival was celebrated until the 5th century?
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? Question: What type of story was the Romulus and Remus tale? Question: Who was the mother of Romulus and Remus? Question: What god was the father of Romulus and Remus? Question: What type of events saved the twins of Roman myth?
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? Question: What religious festival did Romulus found? Question: According to myth, what god's temple did Romulus found? Question: What did Romulus offer to Jupiter in the first Roman Triumph? Question: Instead of death, what happened to Romulus?
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? Question: Where was the temple to the triad gods established? Question: To what group of deities did Lucius Tarquinius Priscus  establish a temple? Question: What organization did Servius Tullius found? Question: The removal of whom marked the beginning of the Roman Republic?
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? Question: To the Romans who ruled all aspects of heaven and earth? Question: What did the Romans do for those deities that favored Rome? Question: What did Rome make the myriad various cults? Question: What was basic facet of Roman religious experience?
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? Question: What did Jupiter personify in regards to Rome's highest offices? Question: What gods did Juno and Minerva replace in Roman religious practice? Question: From where does the practice of linking various gods into grouping come? Question: Of what did the linking of Greek and Roman deities promote a feeling?
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 were the characteristics of state religious observances? Question: What type of religious practices outnumbered the state observances? Question: Who made the choices of personal religious practices in Rome? Question: What type of deities did Roman communities have? Question: To what did the mixture of official and individual religious practices  pertain?
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? Question: What type of day were there more of in Rome? Question: With what were Roman festivals organized in accordance? Question: What traditions did the seasonal festivals incorporate? Question: Instead of the public, what did some religious rites only require?
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 is an example of an event organized religious celebration? Question: What type of festivals happened when events warranted them? Question: In what aspect of the festival did political figures try to out do each other? Question: Under what auspices did public displays  come during the Principate? Question: Who paid for the most lavish of festival events?
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? Question: What did Augustus wish to do for Roman religion? Question: What poet wrote a long poem describing Roman religious holidays? Question: What was lacking in the presentation of religious events in Rome? Question: Under whose rule were new Christian festivals added to previous Roman holidays?
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: What religious practice did Rome use to determine ritual? Question: Around what aspect did the Romans a lot space? Question: What Roman word was used to refer to the scared precinct? Question: What common Latin words were used to mean a shrine or building? Question: What monuments were the some of most visible of Roman culture?
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? Question: What did Pliny the Elder think that a sacrifice without prayer was? Question: What act alone had power in Roman thought? Question: What knowledge was of importance in the potency of prayer? Question: What was missing in the formulas of prayer in 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? Question: What color was the sacrifice mandated to be for heaven deities? Question: What type of sacrifices were offered to gods with earth connections? Question: What event was held after the sacrifice? Question: Who ate the meat of the sacrifice during the after sacrifice  banquet?
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: What type of sacrifice victims were the dark gods offered? Question: When were the gods below and the dead celebrated? Question: How was the sacrifice to the gods below handled? Question: What daylight event was not celebrated after the dark sacrifice? Question: What feature had importance in sacrifices?
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? Question: What kind of intervention could be sought to avoid disasters? Question: What was expected when the divine intervention benefited the patron? Question: What act was decreed in times of crisis in Rome? Question: What was the point of public procession to the god's temples?
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? Question: What offering was Jupiter promised during the Second Punic War? Question: From whom was Rome asking for protection? Question: What happened to the sacrifice if the god failed to uphold the agreement? Question: What was the offering for the Emperor in Pompeii?
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? Question: How were the exta read in Roman religious practice? Question: What part of the sacrifice were reserved for the gods? Question: What part of the sacrifice was shared among humans? Question: Into what was the god's portion of the sacrifice placed?
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? Question: What act was repulsive to Romans? Question: How were sacrifices of humans carried out in Rome? Question: When was the invasion of Gaul by Rome? Question: Before the invasion of what area was human sacrifice carried out?