A Place at the Altar

Priestesses in Republican Rome

Meghan J. DiLuzio

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780691202327, 9780691169576
• eBook ISBN: 9781400883035
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

A Place at the Altar illuminates a previously underappreciated dimension of religion in ancient Rome: the role of priestesses in civic cult. Demonstrating that priestesses had a central place in public rituals and institutions, Meghan DiLuzio emphasizes the complex, gender-inclusive nature of Roman priesthood. In ancient Rome, priestly service was a cooperative endeavor, requiring men and women, husbands and wives, and elite Romans and slaves to work together to manage the community's relationship with its gods.

Like their male colleagues, priestesses offered sacrifices on behalf of the Roman people, and prayed for the community's well-being. As they carried out their ritual obligations, they were assisted by female cult personnel, many of them slave women. DiLuzio explores the central role of the Vestal Virgins and shows that they occupied just one type of priestly office open to women. Some priestesses, including the flaminica Dialis, the regina sacrorum, and the wives of the curial priests, served as part of priestly couples. Others, such as the priestesses of Ceres and Fortuna Muliebris, were largely autonomous.

A Place at the Altar offers a fresh understanding of how the women of ancient Rome played a leading role in public cult.

CHAPTER ONE

The Flamen and Flaminica Dialis

In the midst of the notorious Sullan proscriptions in late 82 BC, Rome’s new dictator L. Cornelius Sulla (cos. 88, 80 BC) ordered a young C. Julius Caesar (cos. 59 BC) to divorce his wife, Cornelia, the daughter of Sulla’s bitter enemy, L. Cornelius Cinna (cos. 86, 85, 84 BC). Caesar refused the demand and was promptly added to the list of the proscribed.¹ He fled Rome, took refuge in Sabine territory, was discovered and arrested by Sulla’s henchmen, but managed to escape by bribing his captors.² Even though Sulla eventually granted his fellow patrician a pardon, Caesar remained in a self-imposed exile until the dictator’s death in 78 BC.³ Roman historians have generally focused on the political implications of Caesar’s decision not to divorce Cornelia.⁴ In the civil wars that rocked the decade of the eighties BC, Caesar presumably sympathized with the allies of his uncle Marius and his father-in-law Cinna. His refusal to renounce his affiliation with the Cinnan faction can be read as a sharp, if somewhat foolhardy, rebuke of Sulla and his new regime.

Without diminishing the political implications of this episode, we should consider the possibility that Caesar denied the dictator’s request for religious reasons as well. Evidence suggests that he had been serving as flamen Dialis since 84 BC at the latest.⁵ The flamonium Diale was a prestigious priesthood dedicated to Jupiter and open only to patricians married by a ritual known as confarreatio.⁶ The occupant of this office was bound by a number of cumbersome social and religious sanctions, including one that was directly related to Caesar’s situation in 82 BC. The marriage of a flamen, Aulus Gellius tells us, could not lawfully be dissolved except by death (matrimonium flaminis nisi morte dirimi ius non est, N.A. 10.15.23).⁷ If Caesar had renounced Cornelia, he would have forfeited his position as flamen Dialis as well.

Caesar’s dilemma illuminates a central, defining feature of the priesthood under consideration in this chapter. The flamen Dialis was not permitted to divorce his wife. But why was divorce prohibited? It was not primarily a legal or even a moral issue; the Romans regarded divorce as improper and even irresponsible, but it was never strictly forbidden and occurred often enough among the elite.⁸ The answer to this fundamental question lies instead in the sophisticated and characteristically Roman structure of the priesthood. A flamen could not dissolve his marriage because the flaminate of Jupiter did not belong to him alone, but to his wife the flaminica as well.

As I show in this chapter, the flamen and flaminica Dialis served the gods together as priest and priestess of Jupiter. Until fairly recently, however, modern scholars have either denied or heavily qualified the official priestly status of the flaminica Dialis, describing her instead as the Roman equivalent of the pastor’s wife.⁹ This analogy is inappropriate in light of the ancient evidence for her status and religious activities. Though modern ministry wives are expected to fulfill a wide variety of informal roles within their religious communities, they lack a title or official status within the religious hierarchy. Sociologists tend to describe this phenomenon, in which a wife gains vicarious achievement through her husband’s professional position, as a “two-person single career.”¹⁰ The flaminate, on the other hand, was closer to the “coordinated career” model, or what is sometimes known as the “two-body problem” in academic circles.¹¹ The flaminica was the wife of a priest and a priestess in her own right, a dual role that is aptly captured by an excerpt from Paul the Deacon’s epitome of the lexicon of Festus:

flammeo vestimento flaminica utebatur, id est Dialis uxor et Iovis sacerdos, cui telum fulminis eodem erat colore. (82L)

The flammeum was a garment used by the flaminica, that is, the wife of the flamen Dialis and the sacerdos of Jove, whose thunderbolt was the same color.

In this passage, Paul explains that the flaminica, whose veil mimicked the hue of Jupiter’s lightning bolt, was not only the wife (uxor) of the flamen Dialis, but also the priestess (sacerdos) of Jove.

The flaminate of Jupiter was a joint priesthood shared by a husband and a wife and as such it requires an entirely different interpretive model from the one traditionally applied to male priests at Rome. It is the aim of this chapter, therefore, to reconstruct the flaminica’s ritual activities and to establish a new framework for understanding them. The ancient evidence, though often intractable, demonstrates that the flaminica Dialis was a religious official in her own right with her own role, both in separate rituals that she was responsible for independently and in rituals that she shared with her husband the flamen. A fresh consideration of household religion at Rome and the role of women within domestic cult also suggests, moreover, that joint priesthoods like the flaminate were the product of a characteristically Roman preference for cooperation between men and women in the practice of public and private religion. The religious realm not only allowed women to exercise an unusual degree of autonomy, but actually required them to do so on behalf of their households and, in the case of elite priestesses like the flaminica Dialis, on behalf of the community as a whole.

Ritual practice constituted Roman women as agents.¹² At the same time, however, it reinforced the proper gendered identities to which they were expected to conform. The flaminica Dialis may have had her own title and official role within public cult, but she was still subordinate to her husband. The final section of the chapter explores this tension, analyzing how the flaminate participated in the social and historical construction of gender categories and gender ideologies.

Becoming the Flamen and Flaminica Dialis

During the historical period, the pontifex maximus chose a new flamen Dialis from a list of three nominees that had been prepared in advance by the members of the pontifical college.¹³ Before making his selection, the pontifex maximus presumably scrutinized each candidate’s qualifications in order to ensure that he and his wife were fit to serve. The flamen, like his fellow flamines maiores and the rex sacrorum (king of the sacred rites), was required to be a patrician and the child of a confarreate marriage.¹⁴ Above all, however, the flamen and flaminica themselves had to be living in a marriage concluded by the rite of confarreatio.¹⁵ The ceremony took its name from the cake of far (emmer wheat) that was offered to Jupiter Farreus and then shared by the bride and groom. The antiquarians tell us that this sacrifice created manus (the controlling hand). In Roman law, the term manus expressed a relationship between a husband and wife based on the power of the former over the latter.¹⁶ A woman who entered manus left the patria potestas (paternal power) of her paterfamilias (male head of the household) and entered the legal authority of her new husband.¹⁷ She became a member of his kinship group and was granted the same legal rights as a daughter.¹⁸

For the flaminica Dialis, the religious implications of marriage by confarreatio may have been even more significant than the legal consequences. A woman married with manus was a member of her husband’s religious community and a full participant in his family rites (sacra familiaria). The transfer of a new wife’s allegiance from her natal cult to that of her husband’s family began on her wedding day. During the procession to the groom’s house (domum deductio), the bride offered a coin at the local compital shrine announcing her presence to the Lares compitales and indicating her intention to join the local religious community of which her husband was already a member.¹⁹ When she arrived at her new home, she placed a coin for the Lares familiares on the hearth and offered prayers to the household genius.²⁰ The creation of manus, therefore, ensured that the flamen and flaminica Dialis belonged to the same community of worshippers in every sphere of religious activity.

Though the popularity of confarreatio waned during the late Republic, it remained a requirement for the flamen and flaminica Dialis well into...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One ❧ The Flamen and Flaminica Dialis
• Chapter Two ❧ Priestly Couples
• Chapter Three ❧ Salian Virgins, Sacerdotes, and Ministrae
• Chapter Four ❧ The Vestal Virgins
• Chapter Five ❧ The Costume of the Vestal Virgins
• Chapter Six ❧ The Ritual Activities of the Vestal Virgins
• Chapter Seven ❧ The Vestal Virgins in Roman Politics
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index