Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy

Evidence and Experience

Edward Bispham, Christopher Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781579583255
• eBook ISBN: 9781135972653
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

As Rome extended its influence throughout Italy, gradually incorporating its various peoples in a process of Romanization and conquest, its religion was extensively influenced by the cults of religious practices of its new subjects and citizens. It was a period of intense religious ferment and creativity. Roman religion, controlled and determined by religious and political functionaries who mediated between humans, had centred on a select pantheon of gods with Jupiter at its head. It was a religion in the process of becoming the servant of the state, however genuine its priests and votaries might be. Understanding the dynamics of religious change is fundamental to understanding the changing culture and politics of Rome during the last five centuries B.C. Religion in Archaic and Republic Rome and Italy tells that story.

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INTRODUCTION

Edward Bispham

THE PUBLICATION OF ANOTHER volume on Roman religion is justified by the current interest in the subject among scholars and students. Recent important works have come in all shapes and sizes: particularly worthy of mention are the now standard Beard et al. (1998) and Feeney (1998). To these we may add a plethora of studies, especially, in the Italian context, on individual priesthoods, cults and deities.¹ The time has never been more favourable for new material on Roman religion.

This volume tells a number of interconnected stories about Roman religion, which argue in one sense towards a deconstruction of the term ‘Roman’. Rome is viewed in its Tyrrhenian context, not in isolation. The chapters in this volume set developments in Latium, Etruria, central Italy and the Greek world beside those in Rome; without the former the Roman evidence cannot be properly understood. We should try to avoid being seduced into an easy Romano-centrism in our religious outlook.

The historical development of the peninsula, and the nature of most of our evidence, especially the literary material, make a Roman emphasis in practice unavoidable. A principal concern of this volume is, by proceeding from a number of case studies, to stimulate debate on development of Roman religion over time, from the archaic period through into the late republic, and beyond. Notoriously, the Romans were only producing literary accounts of their past for the last two centuries of the period with which we are concerned: archaic, and much of mid-republican, Rome can only be approached directly through archaeological evidence, and a very small number of inscribed documents. The later literary sources, and the rituals they describe, are a curious mixture. Some of the rituals, or their constituent parts, are clearly very old, fossilised elements of archaic religious practice;² yet the contexts in which they survived were dynamic rather than static; the meanings of the rituals were not only re-enacted, but also reconstituted by every generation of participants. Not only were such rituals often first being described only at a relatively late moment in their evolution; to make matters more complex, many newer rituals and cult practices were validated at the time with reference to older religious traditions, which may in themselves be ‘inventions’. Such challenges make the study of archaic, or even mid-republican, religion difficult; they also make it exciting. The student must learn to cross boundaries, but also to deploy a number of theoretical approaches with flexibility, and a number of diverse types of evidence with methodological sophistication. The evolving character of the religious practices also necessitates study over a long timeline, with all its attendant problems. Hence our broad chronological framework.

Eight of the chapters in this volume were first presented at a one-day conference held at the University of Edinburgh in May 1997; the sole addition, after this introduction, is that of a concluding chapter by Christopher Smith. The book thus perpetuates the aim of the conference: to bring together new and established names in the field – archaeologists, historians and anthropologists; and to encourage debate on key issues in the subject, as well as making known and accessible in English new discoveries made, and the lively debates now being conducted, in Italy, France and Germany. Our contributors have risen splendidly to the task.

The subtitle of the volume (Evidence and Experience) needs some comment. Writing recently of approaches to Mithraism, Roger Beck has argued against a trend towards the privileging of supposedly ‘harder’ data (epigraphy and the physical spaces and material culture recovered by archaeology) over the ‘soft’ data of iconography: ‘To do justice not merely to the sociological externals of a religion, but to its dynamics qua religion, one must be inclusive. … The where and when of its physical traces and the who of its adherents are key components of the story … but they should never be mistaken for the story itself. ‘³ We are broadly in sympathy with this almost ‘post-processual’ viewpoint. This volume does not attempt to reconstruct the belief systems or internal psychological states of all, or any, ancient worshippers. Such an attempt would be futile. Nor are we trying to tell a single story; but in a sense this volume is a collection of stories, roughly sequential in time, which focus on the when, the where and the who, but also on the how and the what. All contributors bring their expertise to bear on the literary, epigraphic, numismatic, artistic and archaeological evidence for Roman religion; but this is only one manifestation of their scholarship. The other part consists in using this evidence to suggest what worshippers thought they were doing, and how they thought these ends were going to be achieved. Roman religious experience took place in real locations in real time, and real times, each different from those a generation earlier and a generation later. Roman religion did not exist in some autonomous dimension, unchanging and unchangeable, forcing its devotees through a series of ritual forms that might play on their superstitions, but produced no positive, or indeed conscious, engagement. Rather Roman religious experiences might be routine, formulaic and uninspiring (not unlike some Christian counterparts today), but they might equally be played out, as often in the modern world, against a backdrop of societal tension, of growth and decline, war or pestilence. They required time, and money, and occupied the interstices between the domains of state and individual. What worshippers made of these religious experiences involved them as active participants or observers. We too are implicated as readers of the interpretations of their participation, interpretations that we attempt to recover from the various types of evidence available to us. When we attempt these readings we need to see Roman religion as one form, among many others, of communication, which needs its contexts to be reconstructed before it becomes meaningful, both for the ancient Romans and for us.

The most methodological discussions frame the volume. Nicole Bourque begins from the anthropologist’s perspective, by asking how we should study that cornerstone of Roman religious activity, the ritual (and also, what makes an action ritual). The competing approaches to ritual form a thought-provoking backdrop to what follows. Vedia Izzet investigates what an archaic Etruscan sanctuary might have meant, or rather what meanings it might have implicated its worshippers in, by looking at the form and decoration of the archaic sanctuary. She asks what was being codified and negotiated in this new spatial form in sixth-century Etruria. Fay Glinister considers what happened to the same terracottas on which Izzet focused, during and after the life of a sanctuary, using some striking and seemingly deliberate ritual depositions to construct a sort of dia-chronic commentary on the life of sanctuaries, which forces us to confront how the Romans defined and considered the sacred.

Olivier de Cazanove moves us on into the middle republic, and the period of Rome’s conquest of Italy. How did that conquest impact on existing religious structures and experiences? He notes the continuity inherent in the creation of municipalia sacra, which allowed the persistence of certain cults in the incorporated towns, but he focuses on particular aspects of change in Italy, linked to Roman colonisation and settlement. He examines the material record of votive deposits in and near Latin colonies, and argues for a high degree of homogeneity in approaches to healing divinities. This seems to derive from a Roman context, and to have spread though Italy along with other forms of romanisation, but subject to its own particular rules. Emmanuele Curti looks at Rome in this period, focusing on the ‘struggle of the orders’, and asking how the introduction of new gods, divinities of abstract concepts, should be related to political and social change. He argues that nothing less than a conceptual reorganisation of a new plebeian state was at issue in these religious changes, which in turn can only be understood in relation to broader developments in the Mediterranean world in the fourth century.

The next two chapters deal with two missing passages in the history of middle and late republican religion. J. A. North asks how common prophecy was, in terms both of individual expertise and of the production of prophetic texts, between the third and first centuries BC. For North the Livian tradition seems to be interestingly dissonant when set beside the fragments of other Roman literary traditions, and of indigenous Etruscan tradition. Prophecy seems to have been more important, more widespread and more wide-ranging than our central narrative account would suggest; North looks at the corresponding dilemmas facing the state authorities in the face of these multiple forms of communication with the divine. T. P. Wiseman brings us into the first century BC, arguing for the brief existence in the period after Sulla of games of Hercules of considerable importance, and searching for possible motives for their demotion from state management to a locally controlled context: we are reminded not only that state religion was a multi-layered edifice in itself, but also of how political change inevitably and necessarily had religious consequences, which were a matter of some nicety to negotiate (more so in one sense than political change).

With the final two chapters we once again turn to the modalities of confronting and understanding Roman religious experience. Andreas Bendlin presents an eloquent combination of Forschungsbericht and original thinking to challenge existing models of Roman religion which exclude concepts of belief and religiosity as anachronistic imports. Bendlin exposes the contradictory pedigree, and the erroneous assumptions, of current orthodoxies, and argues that a ‘free market’ model would allow us to see competition for worship (and its economic concomitants) between cults as dictating their relative popularity or even survival, in contrast to a dirigiste interpretation of Roman religion whereby the masses moved blindly, in droves, from festival to festival in accordance with the dictates of an elite-constructed calendar. In such a context, choice, coherent internal motivation, and private concerns may be written back into accounts of Roman religion.

Christopher Smith concludes the volume with a chapter on the cult of Mater Matuta, which in fact forces us back on earlier readings, rather than simply ‘closing’ the book. Smith applies the idea of intertextual criticism to Mater Matuta, to permit the liberation from the tyranny of the dedicating ‘author’ of a variety of religious meanings. These were available to worshippers over time and space, within Rome and Latium (and permeable by influences from further afield). For Smith the multiplicity of meanings can be deduced from a matrix of ritual, the evidence of depositions, the associations with other deities, place and time; furthermore, such associations can be read as helping to construct literary writings on Mater Matuta, which in turn become intertexts themselves. It is a nice touch that an idea from literary criticism allows such a liberating contextual reading of literature and archaeology side by side.

This volume seeks to encourage debate, and to open dialogue in new interdisciplinary areas within and outside the classics. The readings given by the contributors are just that. If they succeed in stimulating new approaches to the subject, that will be more than enough. Those who have some experience in the field may want to turn to the evidence at this point. What follows is an essay written largely for the benefit of students approaching the subject with little prior knowledge. It is by no means an introduction to Roman religion, but it aims rather to hold a dialogue with the chapters that follow. It does not attempt to seek an arbitrary and false coherence between them. What it does do, I hope, is present a reading of their concerns and methodologies against a wider background of current issues in Roman religion, and above all of the potential range of religious experiences available in Roman society. Readers may find it useful to read this first, to situate themselves; or better, after reading the rest of the volume, as a sort of commentary.

We begin not in Rome, but in the Andes. Nicole Bourque has spent some time studying rituals in the village of Sucre in the Ecuadorian Andes: Sucre, and two of its festivals, provide the test case in which Bourque explores the validity of a number of different approaches to ritual. Many ancient historians nowadays approach religion in the ancient world with increasingly sophisticated models for explaining ritual, models derived from anthropology, especially from anthropological studies of ‘pre-modern’ societies. Undoubtedly this has been fruitful: but Bourque’s chapter gives us cause to reconsider what it is that we think we are doing in utilising this cross-disciplinary fertilisation. One important point for us to consider as ancient historians or historians of religion is that our own work cannot directly parallel that of the anthropologist. We cannot carry out fieldwork; we cannot directly interrogate the participants as to what they thought they were doing in Roman rituals. In a sense, we can make up for that owing to the interpretative or exegetical accounts of some literary sources: we at least have eyewitness accounts of some rituals, made by intelligent individuals, who were interested in what the ritual meant, and why it was being done. A good example is Plutarch’s account of the Lupercalia.⁴ Nevertheless, we are at best listening to an echo of observation, fieldwork only of a sort; and not all of our sources are as valuable as Plutarch. Much of the important information originally collected by Varro is, for instance, relayed to us through Christian commentators like St Augustine, or Arnobius of Sicca, whose account is more polemical than objective.

Despite the growing sophistication of modern approaches, ancient historians often use anthropological approaches without two of Bourque’s key elements in approach to ritual. One, as we have seen, is fieldwork. Since we cannot interrogate the actors or participants in a ritual, it is easy for us easy to lose sight of an important characteristic flagged by Bourque. She points out that there is often disagreement among participants and observers about what they are doing or trying to achieve in the ritual. To some degree this is because the ritual action has subsumed and suppressed the intentions which normally govern our individual actions. Thus while the Etruscan entrail-readers (haruspices) probably had a shared belief that their ritual activity was grounded in their priestly lore (see also North), for observers their activities and the ritualised nature of their calling provoked differing reactions, which varied according to their context. That Roman culture hero M. Porcius Cato (the elder) made great play of traditional piety and correct observance (even going so far as only to embrace his wife when it thundered (Plut. Cat. Mai., 17); but Cicero reports another comment, presumably from a context less central to Cato’s public image: ‘[he] used to say that he was amazed that one haruspex could catch sight of another without bursting out laughing’.⁵

The other characteristic of anthropological research that assumes an a priori status is, as Bourque says, the need to understand ritual with regard to its wider context. We do know something about the wider context of Roman rituals (when they happened, for example); and we can make educated guesses about other aspects (who took part); but we should not deceive ourselves that we can know as much as the anthropologists who employ these same techniques on living societies.

Despite the clearly multi-vocal and fluid evidence available to us in the written sources and the material evidence (Smith), the fact that the objects of our enquiry cannot answer us back directly means that we often approach ritual in a way that leads us to elide unconsciously some of the possible interpretations or responses at the margins, or even at the core, of our enquiry. We often tend to make rather one-dimensional and Durk-heimian assumptions about ritual: that it is integrative, that it stabilises and re-enforces existing social structures. Those social structures were, however, disputed and fought over as much as given and fixed (one thinks at once of the patricio-plebeian conflict: Curti). Bourque’s chapter reawakens us not to the answers, but to the questions that we ask of ritual. Instead of expecting one meaning, or of concentrating on performance, say, or communication in ritual, we need to be prepared to admit that competing interpretations of ritual (and by extension of religion too) were available to those who participated, and that beyond core principles (the need to participate; the ideal of correct participation),⁶ we need not privilege any one reading above another. Bourque’s other contention is also salutary: ritual can be the locus of contested meaning and conflict; participants, observers, and thus we, need to listen for conflicting voices (Curti, Smith).

The need to see in religion, as in ritual, the presence of multiple meanings presupposes a range of conceptual problems associated with constructing and interacting with the divine. Negotiation of these problems was all-important, for worshipper and priest alike, for those who built, controlled and used the sanctuaries. Vedia Izzet’s chapter looks at archaic Etruscan sanctuaries, which she presents as best understood as transmitting a deliberate nexus of interlocking and interdependent meanings. For Izzet, the sanctuary must be viewed through the eyes of the visitor or worshipper, entire, in its form, and in its decoration, all of which form an interplay within which a meaning can be constructed. Elaborating previous work on Etruscan sanctuaries, Izzet argues for th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• List of figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 An anthropologist’s view of ritual
• 3 Tuscan order: the development of Etruscan sanctuary architecture
• 4 Sacred rubbish
• 5 Some thoughts on the ‘religious romanisation’ of Italy before the Social War
• 6 From Concordia to the Quirinal: notes on religion and politics in mid-republican/hellenistic Rome
• 7 Prophet and text in the third century BC
• 8 The games of Hercules
• 9 Looking beyond the civic compromise: religious pluralism in late republican Rome
• 10 Worshipping Mater Matuta: ritual and context
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index