Inancient Roman religion, a sacellum is a small shrine. The word is a diminutive from sacrum (neuter of sacer, "belonging to a god").[1] The numerous sacellaofancient Rome included both shrines maintained on private properties by families, and public shrines. A sacellum might be square or round.[2]
Varro and Verrius Flaccus describe sacella in ways that at first seem contradictory, the former defining a sacellum in its entirety as equivalent to a cella,[3] which is specifically an enclosed space, and the latter insisting that a sacellum had no roof.[4] "Enclosure", however, is the shared characteristic, roofed over or not. "The sacellum", notes Jörg Rüpke, "was both less complex and less elaborately defined than a temple proper".[5]
The meaning can overlap with that of sacrarium, a place where sacred objects (sacra) were stored or deposited for safekeeping.[6] The sacella of the Argei, for instance, are also called sacraria.[7]Inprivate houses, the sacrarium was the part of the house where the images of the Penates were kept; the lararium was a form of sacrarium for the Lares. Both sacellum and sacrarium passed into Christian usage.
Other Latin words for temple or shrine are aedes, aedicula, fanum, delubrum and templum, though this last word encompasses the whole religiously sanctioned precinct.
Each curia had its own sacellum overseen by the celeres, originally the bodyguard of the king, who preserved a religious function in later times.[8] These were related to the ritual of the Argei, but probably there were other rites connected with these sacella.[citation needed]
A case tried in September 50 BC indicates that a public sacellum might be encompassed by a private property, with the expectation that it remain open to the public. It was alleged that the defendant, Ap. Claudius Pulcher, a censor at the time, had failed to maintain public access to a sacellum on his property.[9]
SacellumordelubrumofMinerva capta, "Captive Minerva", a shrine on the Caelian Hill that contained a statue of Minerva plundered from Falerii when that city was taken by the Romans in 241 BC.[17]
In a manuscript from the Abbey of Saint Gall, sacellum is glossed as Old Irishnemed, Gaulishnemeton, originally a sacred grove or space defined for religious purposes, and later a building used for such.[22]InChristian architecture, rooflessness ceases to be a defining characteristic and the word may be applied to a small chapel marked off by a screen from the main body of a church,[23] while an Italian sacello may alternatively be a small chapel or oratory which stands as a building in its own right.
^The plaintiff was Marcus Caelius Rufus, a curule aedile in 50 and two years later a praetor. Cicero, Ad familiares 8.12.3, and Livy 40.51.8; Michael C. Alexander, Trials in the Late Roman Republic, 149 BC to 50 BC (University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 169.
^Described by Cicero, accurately or with exaggeration, as maximum et sanctissimum ("most holy and great"), Har. Resp. 32; "it may have been nothing more than a Compital shrine," observes Steven H. Rutledge,"The Roman Destruction of Sacred Sites," Historia 56.2 (2007), p. 182.
^The use of the word capta may imply that Minerva was held prisoner, in contrast to deities that were transferred to Rome by the ritual of evocatio, which invited a deity to change sides with the promise of superior cult; Robert Schilling, "Minerva," Roman and European Mythologies (University of Chicago Press, 1992, from the French edition of 1981), p. 137.
^Roger D. Woodard, Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult (University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 254, note 6.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Smith, William, ed. (1875). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. London: John Murray. 
The dictionary definition of sacellum at Wiktionary