ACERRA. - Two instruments of sacrifice are designated by the ancients with this name: a censer (ascula turaria; turalis) used in sacrifices to the gods, and a portable small altar on which incense was burned, which in funeral rites was placed before the bier of the deceased. This second use was forbidden by a law of the Twelve Tables. Censers are sometimes represented on classical reliefs; as for portable small altars, they are perhaps to be identified with the so-called *arulae* in terracotta, of which about a hundred examples, whole or in fragments, have come down to us.
For art, see TURIBOLO.
Bibl.: P. Habel, s. V. in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencycl. der klass. Altertumskritisch., I, cols. 153-154; E. Vinet, s. V. in Ch. Daermberg-Esaglio, 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.