A Companion to Roman Religion

Jörg Rüpke, Jörg Rüpke

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444341317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

A comprehensive treatment of the significant symbols and institutions of Roman religion, this companion places the various religious symbols, discourses, and practices, including Judaism and Christianity, into a larger framework to reveal the sprawling landscape of the Roman religion.

• An innovative introduction to Roman religion
• Approaches the field with a focus on the human-figures instead of the gods
• Analyzes religious changes from the eighth century BC to the fourth century AD
• Offers the first history of religious motifs on coins and household/everyday utensils
• Presents Roman religion within its cultural, social, and historical contexts

CHAPTER ONE

Roman Religion – Religions of Rome

Jörg Rüpke

Roman Religion

Why dedicate a book of over five hundred pages to a religion as stone-dead as that of one of thousands of ancient Mediterranean cities?

For the choice of the city, it is easy to find arguments. Rome was one of the most successful cities ever to build an empire, which comprised millions of square kilometers and lasted close to a millennium. It was and is a cultural and religious center, even if the culture was frequently Greek and the religion is known nowadays as Catholic Christianity. Finally, Rome remains a tourist center, a symbol of a past that has succeeded in keeping its presence in school books and university courses. And yet, what has this all to do with Roman religion?

“Roman religion” as used here is an abbreviation for “religious signs, practices, and traditions in the city of Rome.” This is a local perspective. Stress is not given to internal differences between different groups or traditions. Instead, the accent is placed on their common history (part I) and range of media (part II), shared or transferred practices (part III), and the social and institutional context (part IV).

Many religious signs were exchangeable. The fourth-century author of a series of biographies on earlier emperors (the so-called Historia Augusta) had no difficulties in imagining an emperor from the early third century venerating Christ among the numerous statuettes in his private rooms. Gestures, sacrificial terminology, the structure of hymns were equally shared among widely varying groups. Nevertheless some stable systems, sets of beliefs, and practices existed and were cared for by specialists or transported and replicated by traveling individuals. They were present in Rome, effective and affective, but a set of beliefs, a group, or even an organization had a history of its own beyond Rome, too. Here, the local perspective is taken to ask how they were modified in Rome or the Roman period (part V).

“Rome,” the name of the city, finally, is merely a cipher for the Roman empire. In the long process of its expansion and working, the religious practices of the center were exported, in particular the cult of the living or dead emperors and the cult of the dominating institutions, the “goddess Rome” (dea Roma) or the “Genius of the senate” (Genius senatus). This was part of the representation of Roman power to its subjects (see chapter 22), but at the same time it offered space for the activities of non-Roman local elites to get in touch with the provincial and central authorities and to distinguish themselves from their fellow-citizens (chapter 23). As communication between center and periphery – and other attractive centers in a periphery that was marginal in administrative terms only – these activities touched upon the religious practices in the city of Rome, too. “Roman religion” cannot be isolated from the empire, at least for the imperial period, if we take for granted the character of earlier Rome as a Hellenistic city on the margins of Hellenic culture (Hubert Cancik, p.c.). Again, that perspective holds true in both directions. The history of Mediterranean religions in the epoch of the Roman empire must acknowledge the fact that Persian Mithraism, Hellenistic Judaism, and Palestinian Christianity were Roman religions, too. It is the final section of this book that explicitly takes this wider geographical stance (part VI).

An Ancient Religion

Roman religion did not grow out of nothing. Italy, above all in its coastal regions, was already party to a long-distance cultural exchange in the Mediterranean basin in a prehistoric phase. The groups that were to grow into the urbanization of the Roman hills did not need to invent religion. Religious signs and practices were present from the ancient Near East, via Phoenician culture, at least indirectly via Carthage, and via Greece and the Etruscans. Speaking an Indo-European language, these groups shared a religious “knowledge” in the form of names or rudimentary institutions in the area of cultural practices that we call religion. Even if historians of Roman religion do not any longer privilege the distant common heritage of Celts, Romans, Greeks, Persians, and Indians over the intensive cultural exchange of historical times and the immense diffusion of practices from the non-Indo-European Near Eastern cultures, some constellations might find an explanation in those distant areas by comparing cultures more isolated from each other in later times.

Cultural exchange – as said above – was not restricted to the founding phases. It is hard to overestimate the diffusion of religious practices within and from the Latins, Umbrians, and Etruscans. In detail, the range is not clear at all. There are definite similarities, a shared culture (or, to use a Greek term, koine), in votive and burial practices. To say the same for the architecture of sanctuaries is neither contradicted by the evidence nor massively supported. We can suppose that many characteristics of the gods, the fascination of statuary and anthropomorphic representation, were shared. The very few longer non-Latin texts demonstrate surprising similarities in calendrical practices (the Etruscan tegula Capuana from the fifth century BC) or in priestly organization and ritual detail (the Umbrian tabulae Iguvinae from the secondto first centuries BC). Unfortunately, non-Latin Italian languages ceased to be spoken (and especially to be written) in the first century BC and the first century AD as a consequence of Roman domination. Latin antiquarian writers adduce many instances of the borrowing of middle Italian practices and symbols in order to explain contemporary Roman institutions.

The continuous presence of self-conscious Greek writers is not the only reason to pay an ever-growing attention to Greek influences and their (frequently deeply modifying) reception. From the beginning of the great “colonization” – that is, especially from the eighth century – onward, Greeks were present in Italy and served as translators of the achievement of the earlier civilizations of Egypt and the “fertile crescent” of Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine. Anthropomorphic images, temple building, and the alphabet came by this route. Influences were extensive and continuous. Despite the early presence of the alphabet it was not before the third century BC that Rome started to adopt Greek techniques of literary production on a larger scale. Many of the rivalries of Italian townships of the second century BC – frequently resulting in large-scale temple building – were fought out in terms of Greek cultural products. Competing with Roman elites meant being more Greek. Much of what provincials thought to be Roman and adopted in the process of Romanization during the following centuries stemmed from Greece.

The “Greece,” however, of this intensive phase of cultural exchange – intensified by Roman warfare and plunder in Greek territories – was Hellenistic Greece, a cultural space that faced large territories. In the aftermath of the expansion by Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC) and on the basis of the earlier establishment of Greek ports and trading centers on Mediterranean coastlands, this Hellenistic culture had developed techniques of delocalization, of universalizing ancient Greek traditions. It offered grids of history, a mythic geography that could integrate places and societies like Rome and the Romans. Greeks thought Romans to be Trojans long before Romans discovered the usefulness of being Trojans in talking with Greeks.

Religion for a City and an Empire

Roman religion was the religion of one of hundreds of Mediterranean cities. It was a Hellenized city and religion. Yet it found many a special solution, for reasons of its geographic location, local traditions, immigrants. The most important contingent factor, certainly, was its military success. At least from the fourth century BC onward, Rome organized an aggressive and efficient military apparatus, managing hegemony and expansion first within Italy, then within the Mediterranean basin, finally as far as Scotland, the northern German lowland plain, the southern Carpathians, the coast of the Black Sea, Armenia, Arabia, and the northern edge of the Sahara. Preliminary to that was the orchestrated growth of the Roman nobility through the immigration of Italian elites.

These processes had consequences for the shape of religion at Rome. There is a strong emphasis on control, of both centralization and presence (see chapters 21 and 16). Public rituals were led by magistrates, priestly positions filled by membersof the political elite, mass participation directed into temporary and then more and more permanent architectural structures in the center of Rome. At the same time, religion remained independent in a peculiar sense: gods could be asked to move, but not ordered to do so; priesthoods could be presented with candidates, but co-opted them in their own right; the transfer of public property to imported gods was the subject of political decisions, but their rituals were not. Being not directly subjected to political decision, religion offered a powerful source for legitimizing political decisions; it remained what Georg Simmel called a “third authority.”

The dominant Roman model for religion was not expansionist; it was rather absorbing. Numerous “gods” – that class of signs the centrality of which within a set of social interaction makes us term these practices a “religion” – in the forms of statues, statuettes, images, or mere names, were imported, and – what is more – stories about these gods, practices to venerate them, molds to multiply them, knowledge about how to build temples for them, even religious specialists, priests, accompanied them or were invented on the spot.

For the ancient metropolis, a city growing to the size of several hundred thousand inhabitants, maybe close to a million by the time of the early empire, the usual models to describe the religions of Mediterranean cities do not hold. Surely, publicly financed cult – sacra publica, to use the ancient technical term – held an important share. The large buildings of public temples did provide an important religious infrastructure. So did the publicly financed rituals. Yet the celebrations of many popular rituals were decentralized. This holds true for the merrymaking of the Saturnalia (not a public holiday in the technical sense!) lasting for several days, and for the cult of the dead ancestors and the visits to the tombs during the Parentalia. We do not know how many people fetched purgatory materials from the Vestal Virgins for the decentralized rituals of the Parilia, the opening of the “pastoral year.” Many “public” rituals might have remained a matter of priestly performance without a large following. The life-cycle rituals – naming, leaving childhood, marrying, funeral – might utilize public institutions, but were neither spatially nor temporally coordinated. In times of personal crises, people often addressed deities and visited places of cult that were not prominent or were even outside of public ritual. Indeed, the growing importance of the centralized rituals of the public games – to be witnessed especially from the second half of the third century BC onward – were meant to compensate for these deficits of “public religion.” Hence the “civic cults” (or “polis religion”) does not form a sociologically useful category.

Neither does “pantheon.” The idea of “pantheon” as a concept for the history of religion derives from the analysis of ancient Near Eastern and especially Greek mythological text. These seem to imply the existence of a limited group of deities (around ten to twenty) that seem to be instituted in order to cover the most important needs of the polity. Internal coherence is produced by genealogical bonds or institutions by analogy to political ones: a council of the gods, for instance. For Greece, the omnipresence of the Homeric poems gives plausibility to the idea that local deities were thought to act within or supplement the circle of the around twelve most important gods, even if these were not present in the form of statues or individually ownedtemples. For Rome and Italy this plausibility is lacking. The aforementioned centralizing rituals might further the idea of such a “pantheon” – technically, by the way, a term to denote the exceptional case of a temple owned by “all the gods.” In contrast to the frequently used term di immortales, designating the gods as an unstructured ensemble, the circus processions would present a definite number of gods. Yet we do not know whether the order of the gods was fixed or subject to situational and individual decisions. Even if tradition – that is, precedent – had its share, there was no codified body of mythological tales that would constitute an order of gods or even an inner circle of divine figures. The multitude of gods venerated in the city of Rome was always increased by individual decisions – those of generous members of the nobility and victorious generals investing parts of their booty, as well as those of immigrants with a foreign ethnic background. Likewise the decrease in number was due to individual neglect of cultic performances or lack of interest in maintaining and repairing sanctuaries.

These findings corroborate the earlier characterization of Roman religion. Of course, Roman religion was an “embedded religion” (see the introduction to chapter 25 for further methodological considerations). That is, religious practices formed part of the cultural practices of nearly every realm of daily life. Banqueting usually followed sacrifice (chapter 19) and building a house or starting a journey implied small sacrifices and prayers, as did meetings of the senate, parades, or warfare. Religion, hence, was not confined to temples and festivals; it permeated, to repeat this point, all areas of society. Yet politics – to concentrate on the most interesting realm in this respect – was not identical with religion. Many stories, the huge number of non-public rituals, individual “superstitions” (doing or believing more than is necessary), the complicated procedures for installing priests: all this demonstrates the independence of the gods and the possibility of distinguishing between religion and politics, between res sacrae and res publicae, in everyday life. It was religion thus conceptualized, thus set apart, that could be used as a seemingly independent source of legitimization for political action. This set the guidelines for liberty and control and explains the harsh reaction to every move that seemed to create an alternative, a counter-public, by means of religion. To define these borders of religion – one might say, from without – the technique of law was employed, developing a body of regulations that finally appeared as an important part of the law collections of late antiquity (see chapter 29) and were of the utmost importance for the history of religion in Europe.

If the Romans did not export their religion, they certainly exported their concept of religion. Of course, the outcome varied from area to area. The impact of particular Roman religious signs (names and images of deities, for example) and practices (rituals, festivals) was small in the Hellenized territories of the Hellenistic east, even if Mishnaic Judaism can hardly be imagined without the impact of Roman law and administration. Yet for parts of northern Africa and the more northern European provinces of the empire, the diffusion of stone temples and plastic images, of writing and permanently individualized gifts to the gods, the permanent visibility of votives, and the self-representation of the elite by means of religious dedications – these traits (by no means exclusively Roman practices) fundamentally changedthe shape of religion and its place in provincial societies, shaping Christianity no less than paganism. Roman religion became an inseparable strain of the history of religion in the Mediterranean world and what much later came to be termed “Europe.”

Religion

In terms of the history of religion the afore-mentioned process is no “history of reception” or Wirkungsgeschichte. For reasons of disciplinary traditions and political history, the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century offer an easy borderline for this book. Publicly financed polytheistic religion was ended, and non-Christians (with Jews as a special, frequently not privileged exception) were discriminated against for the filling of public offices. Yet cultic practices continued for centuries, Christians being perhaps not willing or able to stop them or to destroy the architectural infrastructure on which they were the performers. As transmitted by texts, ancient – that is, Greek and Roman – religion, together with the polytheistic practices in Judah and Israel described in much less detail in the Bible, offered the typological alternative to Judaism and Christianity and formed an important pattern on which to describe and classify the practices of “heathens” in the colonial expansion of Europeans. Thus, “religion” could be coined as a general term encompassing Christianity and its illegitimate equivalents: Asian, American, African, and Australian idolatries.

The latter process, to be dated to early modern times, implied that our perspective on religion is informed by Christianity, a religion that developed from antiquity onward, and furthered by centuries of theological faculties within European and (in this perspective) lately non-European universities, a complex and well-ordered theory to reflect on its beliefs and practices: theology. Yet the ancient history of religion is no field to be analyzed within the framework of the standard topics, the loci communes, of Christian dogma, even if many of them found their counterpart (and origin) in ancient philosophy. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the independent discipline of “comparative religion” or “history of religion” tried to supplant this scheme with series of topics like gods, beliefs, temples, rituals, priests. These are helpful as appealing to common sense, but ahistorical if applied as a system.

What is described as “Roman religion” in this book is of an astonishing variety. Various are the phenomena, from Mithraic caves to hilltop Capitolia, from the offering of paid services by divinatory specialists (harioli) to colleges of freedmen whose members met on a monthly basis. Various are the social functions, from the pater familias who led the sacrifice to his own Genius, and thus underlined his position as head of the family, to neo-Pythagorean convictions that informed the preparation of one’s own burial and offered the prospect of a post-mortal existence.

For the purpose of a historical analysis, “religion” is conceptualized by the authors of t...