The sacrifices perpetrated in private were much longer practised. They
were connected with the most secret mysteries of the mythology; were
concealed from the supervision of government; and lasted probably until
the general extinction of heathen superstition in Italy and the
provinces.
Many and various were the receptacles constructed for the private
immolation of human victims in different parts of the empire--in its
crowded cities as well as in its solitary woods--and among all, one of
the most remarkable and the longest preserved was the great cavity
pierced in the wall of the temple which Ulpius had chosen for his
solitary lurking-place in Rome.
It was not merely as a place of concealment for the act of immolation,
and for the corpse of the victim, that the vault had been built. A
sanguinary artifice had complicated the manner of its construction, by
placing in the cavity itself the instrument of the sacrifice; by making
it, as it were, not merely the receptacle, but the devourer also of its
human prey.
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