The new conceptualization of molk-style rites shown in Chapter 7 led to shifts in how sanctuaries were structured and in the entailments these new structures had for the communities who used them. While past studies have focused on the movement from open-air stele fields to monumental sanctuaries as evidence of “Romanization” or the creation of “Romano-African” temple-types, this chapter argues that these new built temples instead participated in wider civic-style practices of benefaction and spectacle in ways that sought to foreground sacrificer-benefector figures. At the end of the second century CE, a number of stele-sanctuaries were rebuilt in monumental forms that privileged central altars, the spectacle of animal offering, and dining. This shift in the spatial dimension of worship afforded new possibilities of practice and social ordering that closely resemble those of the wider imperial world, creating a “sacrificial compromise” where local forms of authority were predicated on being central to the pageantry of sacrifice.

Even if the chaîne opératoire of molk-style rites may have changed little between the eighth century BCE and the second century CE, how worshippers and communities wove significance around these ritualized gestures underwent a marked transformation. Focusing on the tophet of Hadrumetum, this chapter shows how stelae shifted emphasis from the molk as part of an individual, verbal relationship between worshipper and deity to a communal act that foregrounded and elevated a single sacrificant at an altar. Although these scenes of sacrifice-at-altar have been seen as simple calques on the iconography of Roman historical reliefs, worshippers in North Africa instead created new imagery that shared social dynamics and priorities rather than iconographies.

Chapter 2 investigates growing competition between the Franciscan (Latin) and Greek Orthodox community over the legal and material possession of altars to understand these as vessels of political and spiritual legitimacy.

A small group of altars to the Lares Augusti, set up by the vicomagistri of Rome’s urban neighbourhoods in the Augustan period, provides examples of imperial imagery produced by patrons of low social status. Their decoration shows the early effects of new Augustan motifs, but they are not merely examples of imagery trickling down from an original, central prototype. The patrons of these altars adapted and even invented images to express their relationship with the princeps for a local audience, and for viewers the altars were themselves sources of imagery, no less ‘official’ than any other source.