Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke

by the text of a treaty, preserved by the Greek historian Polybios, who wrote in the middle of the second century to explain to his fellow Greeks Rome’s rise to world empire.¹¹ The treaty was arranged between Rome, the regional power, and the Carthaginians, by the end of the sixth century. The latter, descendants of the Phoenicians, who had been sailing the Mediterranean since the late second millennium, not only dominated Sicily and the Western Mediterranean, but were extensively present on the coasts of central Italy, too. The Punic and Etruscan texts on the gold tablets from Pyrgi reveal that the Carthaginians maintained a cult of Astarte in that town, a mere fifty kilometers from Rome.¹²

      Literary tradition as it was preserved and betimes invented by historians of the late second century and after provides a detailed, even hyperdetailed record of early Roman history. Beyond such traditions as could have been attached to and supported by institutional patterns, temples, laws, and genealogical narratives—and hence, for which we can postulate some reasonable mechanism for the transmission of knowledge—skepticism must be acute. Nevertheless, a rough sketch of the political developments of the sixth to fourth centuries is possible. The period of kingship (partly of Etruscan origins) was ended by 509 and replaced by a system of aristocratic government that allotted to assemblies of Roman citizens the power to distinguish between different candidates, especially for the highest office of two annual consuls, and to give consent to “laws.” As regards domestic politics, the literary tradition narrates above all a conflict between a “patrician” nobility (that might have taken shape only in the transition from monarchy) and a new “plebeian” elite: contingent resolutions in this conflict led to specific institutional changes that either co-opted the nonpatrician elite into existing structures of public authority or accorded status to plebeian institutions kindred to that possessed by institutions of the whole; examples of such changes would include experiments in multiple rulership—namely consular tribunes— and full plebeian participation in the consulate. This process closed only around the turn of the third century, with laws on the opening of priesthoods to plebeian candidates (lex Ogulnia) and the acceptance of the binding force of plebiscites (lex Hortensia). Finally, laws were codified by the mid-fifth century, even if the (now fragmentary) text of the so-called Twelve Tables was stabilized only by the commentaries of the second century.

      Regionally, the capture of the Etruscan town of Veii a mere fifteen kilometers from Rome at the beginning of the fourth century and the sack of Rome by the Gauls shortly afterward indicate military vicissitudes. It was rather the decisive defeat of the Latin League in the “Latin Wars” (340–338) that marked the beginning of Roman hegemony over central Italy. With that, the Latin League was dissolved, and the Latins were incorporated into the Roman community. The hegemony of Rome over its neighbors was then expanded to the whole of the peninsula in the centuries to come.

      Approaching Early Roman Religion

      Interest in early Rome is probably as old as the city. Roman mythological narratives express an intensive interest in the city, taking the form of aetiological myth as well as narratives about formative norms and values that eventually assumed the form of “history.” The universalizing—temporally and geographically—grid of Greek and Hellenistic mythology and history was known at Rome as far back as we have any evidence that could bear upon the issue. Nonetheless, as a framework utilized by Romans for situating themselves in the Mediterranean world, it was embraced only from the third century.¹³ From this time onward, efforts in this direction took the form of Greek “historiography,” which is to say, both the literary form and the language in which it was written were Greek. Latin became the language of historical narrative in the second century. Our, and indeed already the imperial, view on early Roman history is dominated by writers of the late Republic and Augustan age—Cicero, Livy, Vergil, the Greek Dionysios of Halikarnassos—who took part in processes of canonization as well as criticism. In narrating the deeds of the first kings, Romulus and Numa, these authors planted the seeds of both civil war and empire: the killing of Romulus’s brother Remus anticipated later civil strife; the binding of expansion and ecumenical recruitment even from the foundation laid the seeds for empire.

      Early Greek attempts to integrate the ascendant city of Rome into their mythological network were not always easily received. Ancestry from Troy, advocated already by the Greek historian Timaios of Sicilian Tauromenion by the beginning of the third century, was not enthusiastically embraced at Rome before the first century. Then, however, the story of the fugitive Trojan prince Aeneas moved into the heart of Roman self-conceptualization. Notwithstanding the massive impact of Greek culture in all areas connected with writing, Roman authors tended to minimize this factor. Instead they stressed differences, despite common ancestry. Rome’s massive reception of Greek culture and religion, whether received directly from Magna Graecia, namely, the Greek settlements of southern Italy and Sicily, or indirectly via the Etruscans or Campanians, is not adequately represented in the literary tradition, for reasons that will become clearer in later chapters.¹⁴ Archaeology demonstrates Greek presence in the temples of the sixth century (as shown above), as well as, for example, the presence of Dionysian imagery in fourth- and third-century Rome.¹⁵

      Given the enormous prominence of religion and religious change in their time, the interest in religion of the authors so far named is understandable. Indeed, we may trace this interest as far at least as Polybios. A Greek statesman and historian who in the third quarter of the second century tried to explain Rome’s ascension to world empire to his Greek contemporaries, a rise to power that they had all witnessed, but whose suddenness nonetheless demanded explanation, Polybios had identified Roman piety, which he characterized as superstition, as a central factor in Rome’s military success.

      Because much of our knowledge about earlier Roman religion rests on these texts—or, as Christopher Smith put it, because “the evidence we have for Roman religion is often ancient interpretation”¹⁶—we must commence by studying the concept of religion these authors entertain. First, it is important to note that they had no coherent concept of “religion.” The existence of the gods and their character, that is, their stance toward humans, were a matter of natural philosophy: physics rather than “metaphysics” or “philosophy of religion” as we would say. Because the existence of the gods was taken for granted, “piety” (pietas) was held as natural and resulted in what could be termed religio: a sense of obligation, the idea that honors should be paid to the gods or to a certain immortal god.¹⁷ These honors took the form of temples, rituals (sacra), and specialists charged to care for these (sacerdotes). Cultus might occasionally be used as an umbrella term. Hence epiphanies (critically reviewed) and divination, the foundations of temples, public rituals, and the foundation and changes in the public priesthoods gained the interest of writers, with special emphasis to ad hoc rites. Exceptional rites in times of crisis gave the opportunity to comment on participation and even on individual ritual activities, an aspect invisible elsewhere. Details of cult, theological speculation, routine rituals, and the daily running of sanctuaries do not figure in the literary tradition. Votive deposits and burial practices, so prominent in the archaeological record, did not enter the tradition of textually transmitted knowledge. More is learned there about the financing of cult than about reflection on divinity, more about institutionalized than embedded or diffused religion.

      Given the available evidence, it seems appropriate to adopt a substantivist, or better, relational definition of “religion,” tying its usage to cultural practices and systems of signs that refer to “gods,” which is itself a class of religious signs comprising both names and images. “Religion” as used in the following refers to an ensemble of practices, institutions, habits, and beliefs, of which no internal coherence or consistence is to be expected, and none is here sought. This definition may suffice because the ambition of this work is to bring the place of religious communication within the wider spectrum of communication and institutions in this early society into relief, for purposes of comparison with the later periods.

      Finally, both emic and etic perspectives on religious competences are informed by gender and social order. That said, the major competences enjoyed by Roman women in the late Republic,¹⁸ matrons in particular, were not systematically retrojected by our late sources into the earlier period. Female religious activities were thought to be concentrated on the Vestals. In respect to gender, therefore,