Ara

ARA. - It is a limited space, at least ideally, on which sacrifice is offered to the deity, that is, on which the offerings destined for the deity are placed and often consumed. It is the table of bloody and unbloody sacrifice, always distinct from the person and the image of the god. It is therefore of great importance in worship, because an altar can exist without a temple, but not a temple without one. It serves for the worship of the gods or for that of the dead. It takes on a character of holiness, and on this depends the practice of receiving immunity by grasping the altar or taking refuge near or upon it.

It is rarely of wood; sometimes of clods of earth (Rome, for the rural divinities), generally of stone; there have also existed altars of horns (περάττινος βωμός: the altar of Apollo at Delos and at Dreros in Crete). In form it often imitated the table of men: it can be a mat on which bread and drinks are placed (predynastic Egypt), or a flattened boulder in which hollows were made (megalithic civilization, the oldest strata of Canaan), or a cube-shaped block cut from the rock (Phrygia). In general the altar was of bricks or walled stones, sometimes with steps or a platform, so that the crowd might follow the sacrifice. On the altar were sometimes left the ashes of the sacrifice, forming an altar of ashes (the altar of Zeus at Olympia). Peculiar to Italy, especially in Etruria, is the altar with plinths and tori separated by a deep groove. The altar was also used to enclose the ashes of the dead.

Luisa Banti