The Gods, the State, and the Individual

Reflections on Civic Religion in Rome

John Scheid, Clifford Ando

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780812247664
  9780812247664
• eBook ISBN:
  9780812291988
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

Roman religion has long presented a number of challenges to historians approaching the subject from a perspective framed by the three Abrahamic religions. The Romans had no sacred text that espoused its creed or offered a portrait of its foundational myth. They described relations with the divine using technical terms widely employed to describe relations with other humans. Indeed, there was not even a word in classical Latin that corresponds to the English word religion.In The Gods, the State, and the Individual, John Scheid confronts these and other challenges directly. If Roman religious practice has long been dismissed as a cynical or naïve system of borrowed structures unmarked by any true piety, Scheid contends that this is the result of a misplaced expectation that the basis of religion lies in an individual's personal and revelatory relationship with his or her god. He argues that when viewed in the light of secular history as opposed to Christian theology, Roman religion emerges as a legitimate phenomenon in which rituals, both public and private, enforced a sense of communal, civic, and state identity.Since the 1970s, Scheid has been one of the most influential figures reshaping scholarly understanding of ancient Roman religion. The Gods, the State, and the Individual presents a translation of Scheid's work that chronicles the development of his field-changing scholarship.

Chapter 1

The Critique of Polis-Religion

An Inventory

Hegelian dialectic made a profound impression on historians of the nineteenth century, including, where Roman history is concerned, Theodor Mommsen and his successors.¹ This form of thought projected Western religious concepts into the past and on this basis explained the evolution of religion up to and including the Christian religions. It was relatively easy, since (by definition) no great rupture was expected. It sufficed for each generation of humanity to separate the wheat from the chaff before arriving at the enlightened Christianity of the modern age. Many historians took this route, including Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Theodor Mommsen, and from a certain point of view Georg Wissowa, Franz Cumont (who invented the celebrated concept of the oriental cults), and Jules Toutain, to name the most representative figures.² The phenomenology of religion was also inspired by this historical-theological dialectic.³

Against this comparatism or reduction of all religion to a precocious manifestation of some religiosity approaching Christianity, other approaches have emphasized the religious alterity of the ancients. This alterity is, of course, not total. The Romans employed in part the same vocabulary for religious matters as we, and their conduct resembled ours. But if one looks closely, one cannot fail to observe numerous small differences that are, in fact, essential. To begin with, their conception of divinity was fundamentally different. The Romans, too, believed that their gods lived eternally at the heights of heaven and that they intervened in the lives of mortals, but their religion was not concerned in any way with the metaphysical space proper to the gods; it concerned itself solely with relations between gods and humans on a terrestrial plane. The rest was not relevant, so to speak, to the competence of human imagination. The Romans thus appear on one side very near to us, and on another, they are very much unlike us. It is for this reason that I affirmed, in the conclusion of my inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, the necessity to work on details:⁴ not rejecting theories and models, but recommending that one practice one’s research while in continuous contact with the sources, remaining attentive at once to otherness and to that which is difficult for us to understand. It is precisely in the unintelligible that the proper originality of the ancients reveals itself. If we think purely through abstractions, working from syntheses or general studies far removed from the sources, or by means of theories not continually subjected to empirical verification, we inevitably impose ideas and concepts of today on the civilizations of the past. Strongly inspired by what was once called sociology, such as it was understood by Georges Dumézil and Louis Gernet, which has become social anthropology, this project adopts as a fundamental principle the obligation to take the otherness of the ancients as a point of departure—in other words, to refuse to assimilate them to us. Or, if we compare two types of religion, to proceed with great caution, knowing that in matters of religion we are all of us directly or indirectly formed by 1,600 years of Christian thought. We are thus concerned with a method whose relevance extends beyond religion and reaches all other aspects of ancient culture. It calls for caution and the deconstruction of all modern interpretations before returning to the ancient sources.

It has been possible to exaggerate this affirmation of otherness, and it is appropriate to criticize such excesses. At the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth, a certain number of historians of religion were already affirming the alterity of the ancients, when explaining their religious behaviors in light of practices observed in Africa or Australia. Their approach was tied to a grand objective: as philosophers, sociologists, or historians, they aimed to explain the birth of religion. Such was the aim in philosophy, as in sociology or history. The sociologist Émile Durkheim, like the philosopher Hegel before him, or his contemporaries, the so-called Cambridge ritualists⁵ and the historian William W. Fowler,⁶ sought the origin of religion or, at least, of particular religions. The comparativism practiced by Durkheim and Fowler did not differ on this point from the explicit approach of the Romantic philosophers. Notwithstanding numerous useful observations, regarding, for example, collective behavior, their interpretations often resulted in theories of historical evolution necessarily oriented toward Christianity. The celebrated essay on sacrifice of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss is a case in point, as a comparative analysis of sacrificial rites in many types of religions issues in a Christian theory of the rite.⁷

All this is well known. Why, then, this return to an already old method of the history of religions, which was applied under the name of religious anthropology and taught in handbooks and monographs, and which appears to be a scientific achievement? It is of course entirely normal for a given mode of explanation to be criticized, not least one that is today more than fifty years old, if one refers to the works of Louis Gernet, Georges Dumézil, Marcel Detienne, or Jean-Pierre Vernant. Their works, and those they inspired, may contain errors and distortions, notably in their use of structuralism, which is often difficult to handle. The problem is rather that the objections now made to their work do not themselves seem relevant to the data at all and appear merely to recycle very old methods of explaining religious alterity in terms of our own religious categories, instead of seeking to understand it in its historical context.

The topic has not only general relevance. It applies also to a specific concept, that of the religion of the city, called polis-religion by those who criticize it. In the pages that follow, I will try to deconstruct this new theory, being unable to criticize ancient religions as the deconstructionists imagine it: one still awaits from them a convincing reconstruction of the religion of the ancients.

To speak frankly, opposition to the model of civic religion has gone on long enough and, at its basis, it consists always of the same arguments, dressed in new clothes. Already in 1912, in the introduction to the second edition of his handbook, Georg Wissowa responded to a critique that had been directed at him on the occasion of the first edition of his book, published in 1902.⁸ Although the author of this review—in all likelihood Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff⁹—recognized the value of the work, he found Wissowa’s presentation excessively juridical: it exteriorized religious concepts and forms in conformity with the point of view of pontifical law; and it betrayed an obvious lack of sensitivity toward religiosity.

In point of fact, Wissowa’s handbook was an important watershed in the historiography on Roman religion. It is not, however, in its historical perspective that Wissowa innovated, because the first part of his book, which his correspondence reveals to have been finished in about 1890, is relatively disappointing. Overall, that part makes only small advances beyond earlier manuals, apart from corrections to references. On one hand, Wissowa finds himself still under the influence of Hegel and his historical dialectic, and on the other, he is indebted to the Romantic notion of popular religion, of Volksreligion, as a pledge of authenticity. He therefore seeks to distinguish in the tradition between that which is originally Roman, which belongs organically to the religion of the Roman people, and that which comes from outside, from Greece. As it happens, Wissowa’s inquiry was less a frantic search for prototypically Roman elements than a reaction against the indistinct commingling of Greek and Roman elements in contemporary treatments of ancient sources, such as was then the rule: Jupiter was Zeus, and Minerva Athena. Basically, Wissowa did not want to speak about Roman religion while citing Greek myths, as one still did in his day. From this point of view, he recovered a more correct picture of Roman religion. Nevertheless, it is true that Wissowa exaggerated in his approach, to the extent that he admitted that there had already been a mixture of “typically” Roman and foreign elements in the reign of King Numa, shortly after the foundation of Rome. Here one sees clearly the influence of Romantic Volksreligion, the religion of the people, a concept dear to Herder, who was followed in this by Hegel.¹⁰ I will not dwell on the influence of these theories, to which I drew attention twenty-five years ago.¹¹ A second disappointing aspect of the first, historical part of Wissowa’s handbook rests in his acceptance of a dominant theory of his day, according to which Roman religion had entered a state of decadence by the dawn of the empire, at the start of our era. This understanding was shared in that era by all specialists and also recalls features of Hegelian dialectic, according to which ancient Rome was characterized by a very impoverished degree of religious thought and at the same time by a fervent religiosity, which was prepared to accept any religious novelty. At the time, religious renewal took the form first of the so-called oriental cults, which were thought to prepare the way for Christianity. Thanks to the opening of the Mediterranean world by the Romans and their deep but “empty” piety, Christianity realized at last a union between the sensual and ecstatic piety of the Orient and the naïve but cool piety of the Greek variety. Apart from technical details, this entire part of Wissowa’s handbook is therefore unsatisfactory, because the dialectical model that undergirds it has long since been abandoned, even if elements that supported that model have not themselves in turn been abandoned by all scholars, as we shall see.

However, Wissowa’s book also contained a second part, which seems to correspond to the term Kultus in the title [Religion und Kultus der Römer (Religion and Cult of the Romans)]. Just as he finished the historical portrait, around 1890, Wissowa had discovered that this way of studying Roman religion could no longer suffice. At the request of Mommsen, Wissowa was reading the proofs of the second edition of the first volume of the corpus of Latin inscriptions, the one that contained the Roman calendars.¹² In doing so he realized that one could not continue to write religious history by confining oneself to speculation about archaic rites whose names are written in big letters on the calendars, relying on the similarly speculative interpretations of poets and mythographers. He appears to have realized that there existed an entire other part of Roman religion that had theretofore escaped study, that of the festivals and rites of the supposedly cynical and decadent era, which were also recorded on the calendars.¹³ A second influence confirmed him in this discovery: his reading of the volumes of Mommsen’s Römisches Staatsrecht (Roman Public Law), which had appeared at regular intervals during the early part of Wissowa’s labors.¹⁴ It was at this time that Wissowa decided to devote more attention to rites, to all rites, and not just those of the archaic period, as well as to Roman sacred law. These studies, which took ten years to complete, effectively shape the second, most innovative part of his handbook, which has ever since constituted the foundation of all expert study on Roman public cults.

As it happens, it is precisely this part of the book that shocked, and not the historical one, which was extremely conventional, as I have emphasized. The common reproach was that he had reduced Roman religion to cult, and public cult at that. In so doing, ran the critique, Wissowa’s manual came to describe collections of priestly rules, of festivals conducted by magistrates and the elite, but presented nothing truly religious. One detects in this reproach the odor of secularist criticism against small-minded, small-town religion of the sort that Mommsen had identified with Rome in its decadence: a religion of a people devoted to (one might even say “lost in”) the counting of rites to be observed and benefits sought and received, but deprived of true religiosity. We will return to this point, because the attack is in itself revealing. Let it suffice for now to study Wissowa’s reply, which is in my view excellent: he responded that he claimed the right to pose the question whether the concept of “religiosity” was indeed “a concept wholly fixed and constant for all times and peoples.”¹⁵ For his part, he thought that the reproach directed at the book should in fact be directed at the object of study, which is to say, at Roman religion, as if to signify that it was itself responsible for this quality of his portrait. In so writing, he did not specify exactly what he thought in petto of Roman ritualism. According to the first part of his handbook, decline had already commenced by the dawn of the empire. Like his teacher Mommsen, he was compelled to render a rather negative judgment on the ritualistic and self-interested piety of the Romans, even if he also tendered them a little more indulgence. For Mommsen, who was agnostic, Roman religion strongly resembled the Catholicism that he encountered during his travels in Rome and Italy. Because of his education in the Lutheran tradition, he abhorred this type of religion. The Catholic Wissowa ought to have been less radical, although, at the base, he had to share Mommsen’s opinion. He nevertheless claimed the right to study Roman religion and piety in their historical context, even as he thought that all people had a right to their own beliefs. Perhaps his Catholic conscience had been affronted by the Lutheran bent of the critique. We will return to the confessional subtext, to Wissowa’s choice, and to the critiques leveled against his work, and to those that are still leveled today against his wish to emphasize the alterity of Roman religion and against those who defend the same position.

Beyond the possibility that “religiosity” did not have the same form everywhere and always (the quotation marks are Wissowa’s), and bracketing his desire to separate out the influences exerted on Roman religion and place them in historical sequence, the major contribution of Wissowa consists in his description of Roman religion under the republic, from the fifth to the first century BCE. He basically describes public religion, because it is about this above all that the ancient sources speak and which in any event deserves closer study. At times, when the sources permit, Wissowa remarks equally on private rites. Overall, he recuperates a description of the religion of the Roman people under the republic in the same terms as Roman historians, orators, and thinkers, by seeking to reconstitute the rules and behaviors that can still be reconstituted. The imperial era does not concern him except insofar as it still adheres to this normativity, at least in the first century of the empire. Moreover, it is important to observe that Wissowa did not align himself with the ethnographic comparativism developed by Wilhelm Mannhardt or James G. Frazer, who proposed an alterity of a different type.¹⁶ I cannot say whether Wissowa imagined a different form of comparativism, or if he rejected for whatever reason the way in which Anglo-French ethnology of that era analyzed ethnographic material, but the overall tone of his handbook appears to invite such an explanation.¹⁷

The Main Objections to the Theory of Polis-Religion

What are the modern criticisms of polis-religion? A first fact surprises. The term in question is always Greek polis, a surprising fact, and not the Latin term civitas. The explanation for the use of this terminology surely lies with the criticisms directed at an article written by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, published in 1990 in a collective volume, that summarized the chief aspects of the religion of the Greek polis as it had been analyzed in Paris and Great Britain over the previous two decades.¹⁸ The strange neglect of the term (and concept) of civitas and also of the Romans is due to the fact that, according to conventional representation, the polis was dead by the third century BCE and the Roman civitas had already been left behind by the political, institutional, and demographic developments of the imperial republic. In any case, to apply the term polis-religion to a religious domain that was in fact much larger and which underwent an important evolution after the birth of the Greek polis is reductive and would seem to imply that historians of Roman religion who use this approach implicate themselves in an archaic model of limited chronological applicability.

A first criticism addressed to the works of such people concerns the social context of the rituals of public cult.¹⁹ Polis-religion is described as a “civic compromise” that sought to establish a close link betwe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Critique of Polis-Religion: An Inventory
• Chapter 2. Polis and Republic: The Price of Misunderstanding
• Chapter 3. The Individual in the City
• Chapter 4. Civic Religion: A Discourse of the Elite?
• Chapter 5. Civic Religion and Identity
• Chapter 6. For Whom Were the Rituals Celebrated?
• Chapter 7. Religious Repression
• Chapter 8. Civic Religion, a Modality of Communal Religion
• Chapter 9. Emotion and Belief
• Chapter 10. Why Did Roman Religion Change?
• Chapter 11. The Gods, the State, and the Individual
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments