We dedicated part of the lecture to comparison and mythology, to which we dedicated a book in 2014 with J. Svenbro(La tortue et la lyre [1]). A first theme we examined concerned the exploitation of the "myth" of the term Capitolium, which illustrated the flexibility and inventiveness of Roman mythological art. Secondly, we compared two rites linked to a plague or epidemic, the Roman rite of the nail regularly driven into the wall of the Capitoline temple and Jeremias Gotthelf's famous short story The Black Spider, in which a rite of the same type is reported. The exercise highlighted the many differences between the two stories, which at first glance appear similar.
We then drew a comparison between the Roman suovétauriles and the "great sacrifice"(tailao) attested in China since the Han period. Georges Dumézil and Émile Benveniste considered that suovétauriles, trittyes and sautrâmanî made this sacrifice one of the features of Indo-European ritualism. Dumézil even considered that the Greeks had "forgotten" this tradition, noting that the choice of the three victims was somewhat inconsistent with Indo-European ritual grammar. He also interpreted the lustrum or lustratio that served as the setting for the suovetauriles as a purificatory ceremony. But this interpretation, as we demonstrated two years ago, was forced. It was in fact a rite of foundation and protection. In China, where tailao is attested from the 11th to the 3rd century B.C., before becoming part of imperial practice from the Han period onwards, the rite involved all farm animals, including dogs, and was by no means a purificatory rite, but a complex one that came to represent the most appropriate offering for paying homage, giving thanks and praying to ancestors and gods. In any case, the Chinese testimony calls into question the narrowness of the Indo-European framework of analysis, and invites us to take a different approach to the testimonies of Greek countries and Vedic India.
In China, sacrifice is addressed to dynastic ancestors, to the gods of soil and agriculture, to the nuptial deity and, more generally, to all cultural and historical ancestors. In Rome, on the other hand, the sacrifice of the three suovetaurile victims concerned only one god, Mars. In Greece, on the other hand, it involved various deities, including heroes. In India, several deities associated with Indra were involved. In China, the consecutive banquet is important, whereas in the Western world we never hear of a banquet of flesh from a suovetaurile. Finally, the purpose of the sacrifices is not at first sight the same across the continent.
