ACERRA. - The ancients designated by this name two implements of sacrifice: a casket for incense (ascula turaria; turalis), used in sacrifices to the gods, and a small portable altar on which incense was burned and which, in funeral ceremonies, was placed before the bed of the deceased. This latter use was forbidden by a law of the Twelve Tables. Incense caskets are sometimes depicted on classical reliefs; as for the portable altars, they are perhaps to be identified with the so-called terracotta arulae, of which about a hundred examples, whole or fragmentary, have come down to us.
For art, V. TURIBOLO.
BIBL.: P. Habel, s. V. in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencycl. der Mass. Altertumswiss., I, cols. 153-54; E. Vinet, s. V. in Ch. Daremberg-E-Saglio, Dict. des antiquités, I, p. 22. - The arulae are listed by E. D. van Buren, Terracotta arulae, in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 2 (1918), pp. 15-33, pls. 16-22.