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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. [58] The gladiator munus was never explicitly acknowledged as a human sacrifice, probably because death was not its inevitable outcome or purpose.
The goddess Juno was imported to Rome from the ancient city of Veii, after Veii fell to the Roman military, following a long period of wars between the two cities, during the time of the Roman Republic. Other gods and goddesses were honored in Rome and added to the Pantheon throughout the Monarchy and Republic periods. See Livy, Books 1–5.
Many of the Romans' own gods remain obscure, known only by name and sometimes function, through inscriptions and texts that are often fragmentary. This is particularly true of those gods belonging to the archaic religion of the Romans dating back to the era of kings , the so-called "religion of Numa ", which was perpetuated or revived over the ...
In the Roman Republic, the pontifex maximus was the highest office in the state religion of ancient Rome and directed the College of Pontiffs. According to Livy, after the overthrow of the monarchy, the Romans created the priesthood of the rex sacrorum , or "king of sacred rites," to carry out certain religious duties and rituals previously ...
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.28 to 1.39 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2024. [4] [5] [9] It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions and has played a prominent role in the history and development of Western civilization.
The vocabulary of ancient Roman religion was highly specialized. Its study affords important information about the religion, traditions and beliefs of the ancient Romans. This legacy is conspicuous in European cultural history in its influence on later juridical and religious vocabulary in Europe, particularly of the Christian Church.
The culture of Rome in Italy refers to the arts, high culture, language, religion, politics, libraries, cuisine, architecture and fashion in Rome, Italy. Rome was supposedly founded in 753 BC and ever since has been the capital of the Roman Empire, one of the main centres of Christianity, the home of the Roman Catholic Church and the seat of the Italian Republic.
On the contrary, "in the East Roman or Byzantine view, when the Roman Empire became Christian, the perfect world order willed by God had been achieved: one universal empire was sovereign, and coterminous with it was the one universal church"; [18] and the church came, by the time of the demise of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, to merge ...