<P> Officially, human sacrifice was obnoxious "to the laws of gods and men ." The practice was a mark of the "Other", attributed to Rome's traditional enemies such as the Carthaginians and Gauls . Rome banned it on several occasions under extreme penalty . A law passed in 81 BC characterised human sacrifice as murder committed for magical purposes . Pliny saw the ending of human sacrifice conducted by the druids as a positive consequence of the conquest of Gaul and Britain . Despite an empire - wide ban under Hadrian, human sacrifice may have continued covertly in North Africa and elsewhere . </P> <P> The mos maiorum established the dynastic authority and obligations of the citizen - paterfamilias ("the father of the family" or the "owner of the family estate"). He had priestly duties to his lares, domestic penates, ancestral Genius and any other deities with whom he or his family held an interdependent relationship . His own dependents, who included his slaves and freedmen, owed cult to his Genius . </P> <P> Genius was the essential spirit and generative power--depicted as a serpent or as a perennial youth, often winged--within an individual and their clan (gens (pl . gentes). A paterfamilias could confer his name, a measure of his genius and a role in his household rites, obligations and honours upon those he fathered or adopted . His freed slaves owed him similar obligations . </P> <P> A pater familias was the senior priest of his household . He offered daily cult to his lares and penates, and to his di parentes / divi parentes at his domestic shrines and in the fires of the household hearth . His wife (mater familias) was responsible for the household's cult to Vesta . In rural estates, bailiffs seem to have been responsible for at least some of the household shrines (lararia) and their deities . Household cults had state counterparts . In Vergil's Aeneid, Aeneas brought the Trojan cult of the lares and penates from Troy, along with the Palladium which was later installed in the temple of Vesta . </P>

What were the most influential belief systems in rome