Sacrilege as an archetypal crime: between law and religion in Horace's satire 1.3

Abstract

In sat. 1.3. Horace discusses the theme of whether the law should be applied in a rigid, undifferentiated way – irrespective of the scale, motive and context of the offence – or whether culpability should be evaluated case by case, considering the real gravity of the deed, on the basis of reason, good sense and social utility. He concludes that distinctions must be made between human wrongdoings, a view at odds with the line taken by the Stoics, who admitted no differentiation between misdeeds, applying the same identical severity to them all. Using a quite unambiguous example, Horace makes it clear that reason will never prove that the sin is one and the same to cut young cabbages in a neighbour’s garden and to steal by night the sacred emblems of the gods: the difference between the two acts is glaring, and is specifically intended, in Horace’s argument, to underline that not all deplorable actions should be punished to the same degree. The article explores how Horace in sat. 1.3115-117 (which dates to a period preceding the lex Iulia peculatus et de sacrilegis) seems to conjure up significant connotations regarding crimen sacrilegii, also in the light of other literary sources that are likewise considered. The research draws out certain legal implications of crimen sacrilegii that have not been considered to date in Roman legal studies, showing that sacrilege does not appear to simply constitute the theft of res sacrae but the violation, more in general, of res divini iuris, punished, in the most ancient age, by being made sacer. Elsewhere in Horace (ars 470-472), violation of the father’s ashes and the profanation of the bidental are presented as acts against religio. Triggering the wrath of the gods, they were punished by the infliction of madness on the person responsible for them. As the article shows, this argues in favour of considering such behaviours as juridical offences, lying between ius sacrum and ius civile, and ascribable to the sphere of sacrilege.