Professor J.B. Rives is one of the world’s experts on religion in the Roman Empire.  He is the author of Religion in the Roman Empire (2007) and of Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine (1995).  He is editor, with Jonathan Edmondson and Steve Mason, of Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (2005).  Rives is well-known as a translator; he translated Tacitus’s Germania, with an Introduction and Commentary (1999), and he has revised the Translation, introduction and notes of Tacitus: Agricola and Germania, translated by Harold Mattingly (2009) and Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars, translated by Robert Graves (2007).  Rives is the author of numerous articles, including a  path-breaking Journal of Roman Studies 1999 paper in which he argued that the decree of the Roman emperor Decius (250 CE), requiring all the inhabitants of the empire to offer an animal sacrifice, constituted a turning point in the organization of religion in the Graeco-Roman world, shifting from a system in which public religion was essentially local and voluntary to one in which individuals had specific religious obligations to the imperial government.  In his talk at UCR, he considers why Decius chose animal sacrifice as the particular cult act to make the focus of his decree.   Rives considers the significance of animal sacrifice both in the general socio-economic and cultural context of the Roman empire, and within the particular historical developments of the 3^rd century CE, including its significance for early Christians.