Religion & Classical Warfare: The Roman Empire

Matthew Dillon, Christopher Matthew

• Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781473889484
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

Religion was integral to the conduct of war in the ancient world and the Romans were certainly no exception. No campaign was undertaken, no battle risked, without first making sacrifice to propitiate the appropriate gods (such as Mars, god of War) or consulting oracles and omens to divine their plans. Yet the link between war and religion is an area that has been regularly overlooked by modern scholars examining the conflicts of these times. This volume addresses that omission by drawing together the work of experts from across the globe. The chapters have been carefully structured by the editors so that this wide array of scholarship combines to give a coherent, comprehensive study of the role of religion in the wars of the Roman Empire. Aspects considered in depth include: the Imperial cults and legionary loyalty; the army and religious/regional disputes; Trajan and religion; Constantine and Christianity; omens and portents; funerary cults and practices; the cult of Mithras; the Imperial sacramentum; religion & Imperial military medicine.

Chapter 1

Introduction: New Perspectives on Religion and Warfare in the Roman Empire

Matthew Dillon

Although Rome possessed an empire by the end of the third century BC, the period known as the Roman Empire technically begins when Octavian was transformed into Augustus in 27 BC by a series of senatorial decrees regularizing his constitutional position. He became the first princeps of the many who would reign over the Roman Empire, which endured for several hundred years. As rulers, the emperors believed that they required the unqualified support of the gods in order both to maintain Rome’s rule (its imperium) and to wage war successfully. Rome’s religious traditions in the imperial period with regard to its military forces were largely carried over from the Republic. There were, however, both minor and major shifts in emphasis, and some marked features of Rome’s religious military practices in the Republic faded away, while more emphasis came to be given to others. Roman gods still received their sacrifices before battle and a share of the booty once a successful campaign was concluded, but supplications to win their favour were very much a ritual of the past, and few new temples (albeit important ones) were now built to celebrate military successes and thank the gods’ role in these. Much more emphasis was placed on permanent military monuments for commemorative purposes: the tropaea (victory trophies) and the stone arches celebrating triumphs.

Jupiter and Mars were still the main Roman military deities. But some gods, such as Mars Ultor, received greater emphasis, while ‘new’ gods such as Mithras and Jupiter Dolichenus also emerged as a focus of attention. In the fourth century, the old gods were displaced by a newcomer, the Christian god: yet many traditional features of military religion did not change, or were simply modified rather than abandoned. The emperor and his family, and previous emperors and their families, became objects of veneration during the Roman Empire, and the rituals of the army incorporated rites for them. Soldiers ‘speak’ in increasing numbers in the imperial period through their inscribed offerings to the gods and dedications of cult objects. An eclectic mix of Roman, indigenous and ‘Eastern’ deities (Mithras, Jupiter Dolichenus and Christ) were worshipped. Yet the veneration of any god had the same purposes: the safety of the soldier and victory for the state in battle.

Existing Scholarship on Religion and Roman Warfare in the Roman Empire

This volume aims to make a significant contribution to a topic that has received little examination in English language scholarship. While there are now numerous works on the Roman military establishment, few deal in any significant degree with the religious activities and beliefs of those who served in Rome’s armed forces. Some previous scholarship, however, needs to be noted, to indicate how this field of study currently stands.

For the religion of the Roman armies, Jörg Rüpke’s study on the religious ‘construction’ of war in the Roman Republic and Empire remains a standard guide.1 Some of the topics which it covers are also dealt with in this volume, but purely for the imperial period, such as the military sacramentum (oath), the fetiales, omens, the military calendar of Dura-Europos and the spolia opima. This current volume, moreover, places these aspects of imperial military religion within an overall consideration of the ways in which the Romans venerated the gods and the rituals which they practised to achieve maximum efficacy in their military endeavours.

Chapter-length studies in the English language include the still invaluable contribution of John Helgeland,2 who divided military religion in the Empire into two broad categories: ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ religion. His ‘official’ category refers to the army cultic observances as organized by the state, with the ‘unofficial’ being the private religious life of the army, in terms of their worship of the traditional Roman gods, as well as the indigenous gods of soldiers, who took the deities of their homeland with them to wherever they served. Helgeland’s conclusion that there was a Roman Army ‘religious system’ would probably now not be accepted, with the emphasis in modern scholarship being to stress the heterogeneity of belief within the army, with the official rituals providing a ritual homogeneity helping to create a single Roman Army familiar across the length and breadth of the Empire.

More recently, Oliver Stoll has written an excellent discussion in an edited collection of essays on the Roman Army, with much important information and analysis.3 Its title, ‘The Religions of the Army’, with religion in the plural, points to the multiple cults venerated by soldiers in the Roman Army, and has a strong emphasis on the imperial period. Krzysztof Ulanowski’s edited volume on warfare and religion in the ancient world has three chapters of relevance to this current volume:4 one on the Ara Pacis Augustae, another on the legitimization of warfare under Antoninus Pius and a third, short chapter of particular relevance, on the Army’s experience of official, state religion.5

One publication, arising from a conference, particularly addresses religion in the Roman Army, in the period which its editors describe as the ‘High Empire’. This contains a mixture of English, French and German-language chapters, and especially worthy of note are the chapters on soldiers’ religion in Roman Britain; the role the gods were believed to play in Roman battle; the traditional Roman gods in the military calendar from Dura-Europos; and soldiers and the cult of Mithras. The volume as a whole looks at broad themes as well as soldiers’ religion in particular parts of the Empire.6 In particular, Wheeler’s long chapter in this conference proceedings on the gods in warfare in the imperial period focuses on literary and inscriptional evidence, and is recommended reading.7 Another, recent, conference publication has English and French chapters on religion and war in the ancient world, with a chapter in French by Yann Le Bohec on religion and warfare in ancient Rome.8

Also worthy of mention is Stoll’s monumental study in German on the religion of the Army in the Roman East, in which he examines military religion in this region in terms of how integrated it was with Roman religion as such, and what local tendencies existed, with an emphasis on the Army and its relationship with ‘civilian’, or nonmilitary, cults.9 In another area of the Empire in the imperial period, Georgia Irby has studied the military religion of Britain in detail.10 Her book has a particular focus on the material evidence, making an exhaustive study of the wealth of inscriptions from this Roman province in order to examine key aspects such as the importance of traditional Roman religion and indigenous ritual practices amongst the military stationed in the province.

The Lived Religious Experience of the Roman Military

Such volumes and book chapters are invaluable and of course represent important contributions to the topic. Religion and military practice were intertwined to such an extent that no Roman military activity was in fact possible without corresponding religious activity, and the chapters in this volume will demonstrate this clearly and profoundly. This current volume emphasizes the ‘lived experience’ of religion amongst the soldiers – as well as the generals and emperors – of the Roman imperial period. Contributors focus on individuals’ experiences as revealed in their inscriptions and their dedications of altars and other cult objects. Many individual commanders and soldiers are met in the chapters that follow, and their experiences as military personnel of a rich and varied religious life in the Roman Army constitute an important lens through which Roman beliefs and practices pertaining to war can be understood. Emperors’ conceptualization of their own particular and individual relationship with the gods, as they went off to campaign and into battle, becomes clear through the literary and material record. Chapters in this volume will indicate the rich and diverse religious life which soldiers and their leaders experienced: not just in the official religion of the Roman state that was prescribed, but through their individual and personal devotions.

Sworn by all members of the Roman Army, the Roman military oath – the sacramentum militiae – remained a persistent feature from the archaic Republic to late antiquity. Tristan Taylor, in his chapter ‘The Roman Military Oath: the Sacramentum Militiae', explores how understanding the nature and content of the oath, and its evolution, is complicated by the fact that a full text of the oath does not survive, nor any direct evidence of the subjective view of soldiers concerning the nature of the obligation created by the oath. This chapter surveys what is known of the oath from archaic Rome to the late Empire, including its content, development and effect. The origins of the military oath and its early form remain obscure, but at the outbreak of the Second Punic War (in 218 BC) it comprised a compulsory sacramentum (oath) to assemble at the consul’s orders until permitted to depart, and a voluntary oath (ius iurandum) not to flee or leave the ranks. During the course of the war, the latter became compulsory. This oath also marked a ‘transition’ from citizen (Quiris) to soldier (miles), that had to be renewed each time someone served in the Army, a transition that absolved soldiers of pollution from the act of killing in war. As other social, economic and political factors caused soldiers to become ever more focused on their particular commanders, so the oath – always with a personal element – became an important part of the bond of loyalty between soldier and commander. As the Principate (Empire) followed the Republic, the oath became another performative act in the bond of loyalty between the soldier and the princeps (the emperor). In this period, not only was the oath administered on enrolment in the Roman Ar...