4Objects

The Arch of the Argentarii (Figure 4.1) occupies what is today an unassuming position: partly incorporated into the southwestern corner of the church of San Giorgio in Velabro, it is located close to the much larger ‘Arch of Janus’, in the area of the ancient Forum Boarium at Rome, where the attentions of modern tourists are drawn more readily by the visually captivating Round Temple and Temple of Portunus in the nearby Piazza Bocca della Verità. Those who do discover the rectangular piers and horizontal lintel of the Arch of the Argentarii will encounter a monument that was originally dedicated to the imperial family in 204 CE by the argentarii et negotiantes boarii huius loci qui invehent, usually assumed to be a local guild of silversmiths, bankers, or money-changers and the cattle merchants of the local market (CIL VI.1035; Elsner 2005, p. 86). The arch – which brings us forward in time by several centuries from the Republican sanctuaries explored in the previous chapter – is much more well known among scholars of ancient art than tourists, especially for the sculpted relief decoration that covers almost the entirety of its exterior and interior faces (for a full discussion see Elsner 2005). Among the triumphal images of Hercules, Victories with palm fronds and garlands, legionary standards with eagles, and soldiers with captives, other parts of the arch depict animals being driven to sacrifice as part of a procession that includes a victimarius and a popa, and the moment of the victim’s death as a popa prepares to strike a bull. The reliefs in the passageway continue this ritual theme, originally depicting two altar scenes centred on the emperor Caracalla accompanied by Plautianus and Plautilla on the western pier, and on Septimius Severus, Julia Domna, and Geta on the eastern pier. The removal of the images of Geta, Plautilla, and Plautianus as a consequence of their subsequent damnationes has had the result of placing the visual focus firmly on the figures of Caracalla and the veiled Septimius Severus (and his wife Julia Domna), both of whom are depicted in the act of using a patera to pour a libation onto a tripod altar. Beneath these two reliefs, and above a pair of bull-slaying scenes featuring attendants bearing various implements, including incense boxes, are two further short friezes depicting sacrificial implements, or instrumenta sacra, among which can be identified an incense box (acerra), an axe, paterae, a bucranium, jugs or pitchers (urcei), a bucket (situla), a set of sacrificial knives in a triangular sheath, a ladle (simpuvium), an aspergillum, a flamen’s cap (galerus), and a lituus (Figures 4.2 and 4.3).

Figure 4.1

Figure 4.1 The Arch of the Argentarii (Rome) dedicated in 204 CE, as seen in the 1860s

Photo: Artokoloro Quint Lox Limited/Alamy.

The instrumenta sacra friezes are frequently overlooked even in extended discussions of the iconography of the arch and, as a result, are commonly assessed in primarily decorative terms, their role reduced to providing a visual means of underscoring ‘the sacrificial significance of the arch’s subject-matter’ (Elsner 2005, p. 95). According to these arguments, a person encountering images of objects so emblematic of public sacrifice, great state ritual occasions, and the honour associated with the right to wear the cap of a flamen or to bear a lituus could surely not fail to understand what the arch celebrated, or how they themselves were intended to interpret its message of celebratory triumph for the imperial family in both military and religious spheres. In this way, the visually uncomplicated short friezes depicting instruments of sacrifice have been seen as crucial ‘visual symbols (frankly cultural clichés used frequently on coins) that are generally allusive of triumph’ (Elsner 2005, p. 96). As Susan Ludi Blevins (2017, p. 237) has recently noted in her study of similar friezes on other monuments, more complex arguments can and have been made concerning the role of this type of iconography in asserting ‘the social status of the priesthood while conveying the message of piety on the part of some individual or group toward the gods, the res publica, or family’. Laetitia La Follette (2011–12, p. 16) has also suggested that ‘the objects chosen for representation were tailored to their specific cultic context’, and cautions against divorcing them from their ritual functions. It is, for instance, no coincidence that the jug and patera, both essential for the act of libation, appear with regularity on the sides of private altars at which such rituals occurred. Moreover, framing these images as a ‘sacred still life’, La Follette (2011–12, p. 19) observes that reliefs of cult objects are ‘explicitly dynamic’, and that by depicting them ‘as if frozen in mid-action, the implements call attention to their function in ritual’. We can observe, for example, the partially opened acerra and angled axe, urceus, and aspergillum in Figure 4.3 as good examples of objects depicted as if they were in use. La Follette (2011–12, p. 29) concludes that the function of reliefs featuring instrumenta sacra, ‘was to re-present, or reenact, cultic actions rather than people’. This last point, coupled with the location of the two short friezes in the main passageway of the Arch of the Argentarii, where they quite literally provide the ground on which the participants in the two altar scenes stand, as well as the choices that were evidently made about which specific objects to depict (the two friezes are not the same), suggests that they deserve closer scrutiny.

Figure 4.2
Figure 4.2

Figure 4.2 Western (left) and eastern (right) passageway reliefs of the Arch of the Argentarii, showing altar and sacrifice scenes, and friezes depicting cult instruments

Photos: Emma-Jayne Graham.

Figure 4.3

Figure 4.3 Western passageway frieze of the Arch of the Argentarii, depicting instruments used in cult (acerra, axe, patera, bucranium, pitcher, aspergillum, and bucket)

Photo: Emma-Jayne Graham.

In particular, they prompt questions about the materialness of the objects themselves. After all, even if this type of iconography was visually clichéd, it is also certain that no sacrificial ritual could be performed without the objects’ real counterparts. Moreover, while the idealised narrative scenes located above and below the friezes on the arch may have been ‘symbolic simplifications’ of the realities of a sacrificial occasion and never intended to be an accurate account of any single real event (Elsner 2005, p. 83), there can be no question that the cult implements depicted were based on real material objects. Interpreting them as mere symbols of human action diminishes the significance of the physical things to which these sculpted simulacra alluded, disregarding entirely the central role they had in affording the rituals of sacrifice to which the monument as a whole made reference. As Philip Kiernan (2015, p. 45) has argued for miniature objects, archaeologists and art historians too rarely take note of the more complex ways in which signifying objects relate to realia.

In this chapter, it is my aim to bring the real material objects on which these and other similar images were based back into discourse concerning Roman public state rites by exploring their active role as material things in the ritualised assemblages associated with the performance of certain sacrificial activities. Friezes such as those of the Arch of the Argentarii, and others such as those on the Temple of Divus Vespasian and Divus Titus in the Forum Romanum (Figure 4.10), indicate that Romans recognised the centrality of physical objects in the performance of sacrifice (and indeed in relation to particular sacrificial roles, as argued by Ludi Blevins 2017). Moreover, in depicting them in the act of being used they also sometimes chose to draw attention to this fact, pinpointing and celebrating the moment in which these material things combined with human things in order to produce religion (e.g. Caracalla and Septimius Severus are engaged in lived religion by actively pouring from paterae). By focusing on the human figural scenes that often accompany depictions of sacrificial instruments, or in other words assuming that human figures must be more significant for our understandings of how Romans thought about what they were doing during the course of the act of sacrifice, other material things integral to the production of religion have consequently become, at best, a sort of generic ‘symbol’ of sacrifice, and at worst little more than an appropriately ‘ritual-themed’ yet largely generic decorative device. Even recent studies which emphasise how the imagery of relief friezes featuring cult objects might ‘bring the sacrificial ritual to life in the viewer’s imagination, complete with movement, sound, and action’ remain grounded in visual analyses which privilege the ‘mental recreation’ of experience, rather than seeking the role of the material object in creating lived experience itself (Ludi Blevins 2017, p. 254).

This chapter asks questions about how the potential affordances of these material things may have functioned within ritualised assemblages, endeavouring to move beyond a general categorisation of the types of objects used by humans to bring about specific aspects of the ritual process, such as knives to cut, paterae to pour, buckets to hold, or the flamen’s cap and the lituus as symbols of office (e.g. Stewart 1997). To this end, it focuses on the relationships that might be formed when the potential affordances of material things such as these were brought together with humans by ritual, and what happened as a result. In particular, I am concerned with determining the consequences of the agency that was produced by these relationships for the lived experiences of an individual (or, at least, certain types of individual) and in turn its role in the production of personal, deeply proximal forms of religious knowledge. While it is certain that, on a largely practical level, material instruments of cult were necessary for enabling ritual to be performed, the following discussion demonstrates that material things such as those singled out for examination here – incense containers (acerrae) and the distinctive leather cap worn by the flamines (the galerus) – might also be a much more necessary component within the production of religious knowledge than has been previously acknowledged, in some instances being necessary in a host of hitherto unimagined ways. As a result, this examination of the materialness of cult instruments speaks to the new materialist concept that agency is a product of the intertwining of both human and more-than-human things in assemblages, in this case particular types of portable objects and certain types of bodies that were brought together through ritualisation.

Cult instruments re-materialised

It almost seems unnecessary to state that without portable material things, ancient Roman ritual activities could never have been performed. After all, it should be obvious that any major public festival culminating in animal sacrifice, for instance, depended upon humans manipulating, among other things, incense (and the container in which it was kept), wine (and the vessels used to hold and decant it, including at the very least a jug and patera, and perhaps also a ladle known as a simpuvium), a towel for drying wet hands (mantele), mola salsa (a dry mixture of salt and spelt prepared by the Vestal Virgins, the basket or wooden board on which it was transported as well as a knife used to apply it to the beast), a hammer or axe (of various types: bipennis, dolabra, malleus, scena/sacena, secures/acieris), a knife or set of knives (culter, secespita, clunaculum), and vessels for collecting blood and entrails (e.g. a situla) (for full discussion of each of these see the entries in ThesCRA vol. 5, 2005). The physical realities of these material things sometimes fade into the background in analyses of sacrifice that focus on human actions, but without the particular affordances of certain material things, animal sacrifice could not have happened at all: the bare hands or spoken words of a sacrificant were not sufficient to accomplish ritual killing. If we accept the argument put forward by Celia E. Schultz (2016) that the immolatio, or sprinkling of mola salsa, was the ‘crucial moment’ of any sacrifice rather than the moment of slaughter, this too could not be achieved without humans forming relationships with the physical qualities of more-than-human material things which together enabled a certain type of difference to be made to the world (i.e. the dry salt and flour of the mola salsa, its container, the knife used to transfer it to the victim). This fundamental fact, which as established in earlier chapters is true of the relational qualities of agency much more broadly, often go unnoticed in scholarly accounts of ancient ritual activities in which the actions performed by people take centre stage and are, as such, deemed most crucial to their success.

Thinking about how more-than-human material things were also implicated in ritualised activities nonetheless prompts us to remember that in many instances each of these material objects formed singular relationships with individual participants, producing a series of discrete and highly personal relational assemblages: only the victimarius was permitted to wield a culter to slit the throat of the animal, and only the presiding priest or sacrificant could take a grain of incense from its box and place it on the flames of the altar. In turn, this produces a set of questions about how the discrete relationships within these temporarily sustained and context-specific assemblages produced the necessary agency for the ritual to progress and ultimately to succeed, as well as how the personal lived experiences of the human components of those thingly bundles were affected by the relationships they shared with a restricted range of objects. Indeed, some individuals were even occasionally identified by these relationships: most well known is the simpulatrix, a woman ‘devoted to divine matters’ who was named for her use of a ladle (simpulum) for the pouring of wine at sacrifices (Festus [Paulus] 455L; Schultz 2006, p. 33; Flemming 2007, p. 96). Here we encounter a largely semantic blurring of human and more-than-human things to create an impression of a composite thing that was ultimately responsible for the production of particular religious agency, but it is a linguistic blending that may reflect a broader lived reality.

At the same time, of course, things of all types might also move in and out of differently configured assemblages, their potential affordances offering opportunities for subtly distinct relational experiences with what was ostensibly the same object: an attendant passed the presiding official a dry towel (mantele) upon which to wipe his wet hands after the pouring of a libation and received a damp one in return, and a patera might also move back and forth between attendants and priest, each of whom interacted with it in a different way. These experiences might also be even more complex, as in the case of the sounds produced by the combination of a tibicine and its player, which were heard by all but which were not necessarily experienced in comparable ways depending upon proximity (immediately adjacent to the priest, compared with a distant onlooker) and the differential aural capacities of discrete bodies (Figure 4.4). Simultaneously, the tibicine player felt the movement of their breath and the reverberations of the flute in a uniquely haptic and highly proximal way that was not shared with the others present. These intimately lived relationships between material object and human ritual participant, and the consequences of the agency their combined affordances produced, have tended to get lost in studies of sacrifice. This includes those which have sought to understand its process and the significance of its constituent elements (e.g. Scheid 2003, pp. 79–110, 2005, 2007; Prescendi 2007; Rüpke 2007a, pp. 137–53; Elsner 2012b; Schultz 2016, 2018), and those which aim to identify and classify the ‘instruments’ that were used by people as part of their performance of any ritual act (e.g. Siebert 1999; Aldrete 2014; Siebert 2015; see also individual entries in ThesCRA vol. 5, 2005). In both of these approaches the focus of analysis has been on identifying and interpreting the actions of human participants (and ultimately the rationale for them), leading to statements about how the priest (not the patera) poured the libation, the popa (not the malleus or dolabrum) stunned or incapacitated the ox, and the victimarius (not the culter) slit the animal’s throat.

Figure 4.4

Figure 4.4 Marble relief showing Marcus Aurelius performing a sacrifice outside the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, c. 176–180 CE. The arrangement of figures is artificially compressed, but note the crowd of attendants interacting with various objects and the proximity of the flute player. Musei Capitolini, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Scalone, MC 0807.

Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images.

Human agency therefore remains at the forefront of analyses of ritual activities such as public sacrifice and, it might be argued, rightly so, since it was humans after all who devised these patterns of behaviour and who chose to perform them in certain locations at particular times. After all, these assemblages were ritually generated by the broadly fixed routines that Romans understood were required for the accomplishing of religion (i.e. distal religious knowledge). It was the stability of these routines that ensured that things regularly came together in broadly comparable ways, forming relationships that reinforced these shared distal forms of knowledge. It was, moreover, a human who picked up an axe and moved their body in such a way as to drive it into the neck of an animal (for the practicalities and logistics of this see Aldrete 2014). An axe did not possess the intentional agency required to do that of its own accord. However, rethinking agency as a property emerging from the relations that form between the material things within an assemblage, instead of in terms of intentionality, forces us to question this position. Looking more closely at what it was that afforded the death of an animal victim reveals that the result of the axe meeting its neck can be understood more accurately as the outcome of a relationship between the qualities of a human thing and those of a more-than-human thing: the materialness of the human body could grasp the materialness of the axe and was also able to swing it, but the material characteristics of the axe, including the weight of the metal head and its capacity to be sharpened to a cutting edge, also brought a certain set of affective qualities to that relationship, combining with the swing of the popa in that ritualised context to make a difference to the world that manifested in the form of a ritually slain animal. This result, and the way in which it affected the experience of those involved, was not necessarily always identical due to the level of skill or bodily strength of the popa, as well as the sharpness or tensile strength of the metal that made up the axe’s head: it might glance off, or it might sink in and be difficult to remove.

What is more, despite modern accounts of sacrifice tending towards a sanitisation of the process of killing animal victims (although for the contrary see Weddle 2013; Aldrete 2014), understanding this in terms of the agency produced by an assemblage of things means that the material thingliness of that victim must also be understood to have contributed qualities to the relationships that produced it. In short, the capacity of an animal’s flesh to be cut and its arteries to bleed, even for it to die, affected the sort of relationship between human, axe, and victim which ultimately produced the agency of sacrifice. In this sense the eventual death of the animal was a product of the relational affordances of a set of both human and more-than-human material things that was generated by a ritualised context. In other words, sacrifice, like all of the various other ritualised activities performed in Roman Italy, was not merely about what distal knowledge of religion compelled people to do, but about what ritualisation allowed people and other things to do together. Accordingly, not every participant in the same ritualised event necessarily shared the same lived experience or, as a result, developed identical proximal religious knowledge, since the relationships they formed with the various more-than-human (and indeed other human) things that were implicated in ritualised assemblages were distinctly heterogeneous. These variations in lived experience might arise in part from their designated duties and how they were expected to behave, but they were also closely related to the affective qualities of the material things that this process of ritualised action caused them to form relationships with. Emphasising how all participants in any form of communal ritual event might share distal forms of knowledge concerning its ability to produce broadly religious agency, whilst also experiencing it in ways that produced proximal or personal forms of religious knowledge concerning that agency, offers a way to spotlight the production of multiple lived religions even as a result of a single public ritualised event.

Individuality and family at the Terminalia

Moving briefly away from the public sphere and from large-scale sacrificial events, an example of a smaller scale, family-focused ritual recounted in an ancient written source serves to demonstrate how this worked in practice. In her study of the religious activities of women during the Roman Republic, Celia E. Schultz (2006) highlights Ovid’s account of the annual Terminalia festival (celebrated on 23rd February), describing it as a good example of a domestic ritual in which multiple members of a household might participate. She notes that ‘no one is excluded from the action’ and that different family members each take on different ‘ritual obligations’ (Schultz 2006, pp. 128–9). Commenting on the same passage, Meghan DiLuzio (2016, p. 47) has suggested that such ‘patterns of ritual practice in the household provided structure and meaning to a family’s relationship with the gods and with one another’. Closer examination of the passage in question, however, reveals that as lived experiences these obligations and relationships were predicated on engaging with a range of discrete material objects, some of which are mentioned directly (given in bold here), while others are implied by the actions of each person (added in square brackets):

Although the passage is idealised in its attribution of roles to individuals of particular age and gender, it provides a good example of how the lived sensory experience of a ritualised activity, in this case an imagined celebration of the Terminalia, might be something that was shared and communal, at the same time as it was composed of distinctive personal interactions between different sets of human and more-than-human things. In several instances the gestures described are so similar to one another as to appear to involve much the same sensory experience (e.g. throwing grain, honeycomb, or wine onto the fire; being required to hold a basket or vessel), while the shared sensation of the warmth of the flames and the scent of grain and honeycomb charring in the fire and the collective wearing of white (perhaps special) clothing must have reinforced a sense of communal experience and knowledge. At the heart of this ritualised activity were the flames of the fire, with which all of the participants formed a relationship, each affected by its visual, thermal, aural, and olfactory affordances in broadly similar ways. Nonetheless, in each instance, fire was only one component in a subtly different assemblage of things.

The experiences of each participant must have been affected in some way not only by the different activities that they performed – collecting the fire, nursing the fire, holding a basket – but also by the material properties of the more-than-human things with which they each interacted. Indeed, closer inspection suggests the possibility of very discrete, personal experiences. The young boy’s experiences of casting an offering onto the fire, for example, involved handling a ‘broad basket’. By implication this was held in two hands for much of the rite, the dry, woody, or scratchy wickerwork pressed into his palms, before he grasped dry grains in his fingers, some of them perhaps escaping and flowing smoothly over his hand, the act of clutching them perhaps disturbing a musty yet familiar odour of corn. In contrast, the young girl may have held the sticky, sharp-edged, and sweet-smelling honeycomb in one hand, or perhaps in a vessel (Ovid’s text does not make this clear in the way that it does for several of the other food items which are specifically described in relation to their containers: ‘potsherd’, ‘basket’, ‘vessels’). The enticing sugary sweet scent of the honeycomb, and perhaps some residue of the honey itself, may have adhered to her fingers after she had picked it up and made the offering. Similarly, the old man’s preparation of the firewood and his striving ‘to fix the branches in the solid earth’ implies physical effort that none of the other participants shared, and he alone touched the wood that was to burn on the altar, whereas his wife must have felt the heat of the hearth and the sharp edges of the (slowly warming?) potsherd as she brought the flame with which to light the dry kindling.

Each participant shared in the same broad set of ritualised behaviours, which were performed with the same intent and purpose in mind, and which almost certainly entailed an experience which affirmed their household connections and relationships with one another (including those of a hierarchical nature). And yet, the experiences of the Terminalia as lived by each of the individuals in Ovid’s text was subtly different, in part because of their identities as wife, husband, son, and daughter, but also as a result of their engagement with different material objects, each with its distinctive material affordances. In turn, these lived experiences may have affirmed those individual identities at that moment in time and in relation to the distal knowledge they shared concerning the practice of religion and the religious calendar, even if those identities would ultimately be subject to change as the children became adults and found themselves part of a differently configured ritualised assemblage during subsequent Terminalia celebrations.

It is only very rarely possible to write about the experiences of named or otherwise identifiable ordinary people of the Roman world, but this methodology for scrutinising the potential relationships forged between human and more-than-human things under particular ritualised circumstances suggests that it is possible to identify potentially individualised experiences, even when these took place as part of a communal or public practice that sought to unite participants by means of a common understanding or knowledge. Furthermore, it reveals that when framed as distal and proximal ways of knowing, the relationship between personal and communal forms of knowledge can be shown to be fundamental for the affirmation of particular forms of identity and ways of being in the world. The remainder of this chapter applies this way of thinking to more-than-human things implicated in public or state rituals in the form of two case studies focused on incense boxes and the distinctive spiked leather cap of the flamines.

Incense boxes and the tactility of scent

On the north wall of the Ara Pacis Augustae, the image of a young man clutching a small box emerges from the bustling crowd of a procession scene (Figure 4.5). He is usually identified as a cult attendant for the Septemviri epulones (‘the Priesthood of Seven Diners’), and the box he grasps is an acerra, designed to hold incense for use in sacrifice. The box is ornate, carved in relief with the image of a tripod, flute player, and bull. Ahead of him in the procession stands another figure with a similar casket, this one featuring a scene of a victimarius and a bull (Hölscher 2005, pp. 223–4) (Figure 4.6). On encountering this scene, ancient beholders of the frieze who understood the function of these boxes, and who had perhaps participated in or witnessed the sort of public events that the Ara Pacis celebrated, might be prompted to imagine or recall the scent that would be released as their lids were lifted and the contents dropped onto the altar’s flames. This is commonly assumed to have been frankincense (of the genus Boswellia), but was possibly also myrrh (of the genus Commiphora), or Kyphi, a compound form of incense (Van Beek 1960; Bradley et al. forthcoming). For the modern beholder, identifying the box as an acerra confirms the importance of incense within Roman religious activities, perhaps especially the olfactory powers of burning resins to evoke or signal divine presence (Clements 2015). However, for the attendants who were once responsible for manipulating boxes like these during real ancient events, the experience of interacting with them through the course of the procession and subsequent rites at the altar extended beyond the olfactory and cognitive: it was also a profoundly personal and an intensely haptic experience. For them, the intangible power of the incense within the box was experienced with sensory reference to the material which encompassed it, and which was felt directly and haptically through their bodies. They could clutch it in their hands, feel its dusty residue on their skin, their experiences mediated through the relief decoration of the otherwise smooth, cool, polished ivory, wood, or metal surface of the box digging into their fingers and palms.

Figure 4.5

Figure 4.5 Detail from the north frieze of the Ara Pacis showing a cult attendant for the Septemviri epulones grasping a decorated acerra in his left hand, with a mantele (towel) draped over his forearm

Photo: Emma-Jayne Graham. Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Roma. © Roma, Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali.

To date, studies of the use of ancient incense in religious contexts have, not unreasonably, emphasised its olfactory properties over other potential sensory affordances. After all, the purpose of burning incense was to release and perceive the full potential of the scent of these resinous substances, which, as Susan Ashbrook Harvey (2006, p. 7) reminds us, were smells that were ‘acutely effective in conveying divine presence or absence… . Smells provided concrete encounters that appeared to defy articulation or form, yet necessitated a physically informed mode of understanding’. As anyone who has experienced the use of incense in contemporary religious settings will know, the scent of freshly burned incense might be especially acute during the performance of a ritual but gradually disperses afterwards. The fluctuating intensity of incense might therefore heighten the distinctiveness of a time-limited ritualised assemblage. What if, however, other ‘physically informed mode[s] of understanding’ beyond that of its scent were also associated with the use of incense? What did the materialness connected with these encounters with ritual scent ‘feel like’; for example, who felt it, and why might that matter in the context of this broader study of the ways in which religious knowledge was created through lived experience of ritual, rather than existing only as something to be expressed through ritual behaviours? Thinking about the nature of religious knowledge as a reflexive combination of distal and proximal forms of knowing (as outlined in Chapter 2) can be helpful for addressing these questions and for understanding how a personal individual form of knowledge might emerge in the context of a communal ritual.

Figure 4.6

Figure 4.6 Detail from the north frieze of the Ara Pacis showing a cult attendant grasping a decorated acerra in his right hand

Photo: Emma-Jayne Graham. Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Roma. © Roma, Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali.

To recap, distal knowledge concerns big picture knowledge, in this case the widely shared understanding of how and why Roman religious activities were performed in certain ways, whereas proximal knowledge describes a way of knowing that, whilst connected to this bigger picture, is predicated on context-specific, personal experiences and sensory engagements with religious activities as they were lived by the individual. It is in this context that touch becomes especially significant for the acerrae, since ‘engaging with an object through touch’, according to Douglass Bailey (2014, p. 27), ‘affords a particular, proximal way of knowing that is much deeper than traditional analyses and interpretations which restrict insight to representational knowledge’. These are claims that can be tested in relation to the Roman acerra, an object which was at once a (distal) visual symbol for the olfactory use of incense and its (distal) capacity to ‘construct divinity, and evoke, as well as invoke, divine presence’ (Clements 2015, p. 46; see also the previous discussion of the Arch of the Argentarii), and a tangible object which offered a tactile (proximal) experience for some, but not all, participants in public sacrificial ritual.

Identifying incense boxes

Much of the evidence for the use of incense boxes is iconographic, although the term acerra derives from literary sources (see for example Festus [Paulus] 17L; Horace, Odes 3.8.2–4; Virgil, Aeneid 5.744–5; Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.703–4; Ovid, Ex Ponto 4.8.39–40; Ovid, Fasti 4.933–4; Martial, Epigrams 4.45; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.70; Suetonius, Tiberius 44.2). As already noted, acerrae appear on architectural friezes depicting collections of cult instruments, including those of the Arch of the Argentarii discussed earlier, and three currently in the Sala dei Filosofi of the Musei Capitolini (inv. 608, 609, 611), which originate from one or more unidentified structures perhaps of the late Republic (Stuart Jones 1912, pp. 261–4; ThesCRA vol. 5, 2005, Pl. 18). More frequently they are shown in active use within cult performances on reliefs depicting altar scenes associated with sacrifice and lustration, where an acerra is often shown clasped in the hand or hands of an attendant (examples can be found in Scott Ryberg 1955; Huet 2008, 2017). The identity of these attendants is important, although their precise age and social status is difficult to distinguish from the iconography alone and it is possible that their identity varied depending upon the nature of the occasion itself, such as whether it was public, semi-public, private, or part of a specific festival, as well as in relation to changes to public rites over the course of the imperial period (Mantle 2002, p. 87). In the scenes of public or state cult to which I draw attention here, attendants bearing acerrae are predominantly young males, although girls appear in the same role on private reliefs and in other contexts (see Scott Ryberg 1955; DiLuzio 2016, p. 116). Tonio Hölscher (2005, p. 224) has suggested that the designation camillus, commonly applied to all of these attendants, is inaccurate, preferring to refer to them more generally as ministri. However, the more widely used term camillus is employed here because the reliefs which form the focus of the current investigation do in fact appear to show acerra bearers with the familiar characteristics of camilli: male youths, often with long hair (Mantle 2002). Written sources indicate that camilli (and camillae) must be freeborn, with both parents still alive (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 2.22.1; Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.6.14; Festus [Paulus] 38. 82L). Meghan DiLuzio (2016, p. 72) has suggested that in some cases they might be the children of the priestly couple officiating at a sacrifice, such as those responsible for the public rites of the curiae.

The caskets that are depicted in iconographic form present slight differences. The majority are square or rectangular, sometimes with figured relief decoration comparable to that seen on the Ara Pacis (Figures 4.5 and 4.6) but in other instances entirely unadorned. In many examples the box is shown open, such as on both the so-called suovetaurilia of the Louvre relief dated to the middle first century CE (Scott Ryberg 1955, p. 106, fig. 54a) and a relief in the Museo Nazionale Romano (Palazzo Massimo) perhaps associated with the third century CE emperor Claudius Gothicus (Scott Ryberg 1955, p. 196, fig. 116e; Huet 2008, p. 109) (see also Figure 4.4). Acerrae are also shown half-open, as in the example on the passageway frieze showing cult instruments on the west pier of the Arch of the Argentarii, as well in the scene directly below it, in which a camillus carries a clearly different acerra (Figures 4.3 and 4.7). Reliefs such as these and others suggest that the lids of acerrae could be hinged. Sometimes, as on the Ara Pacis (Figures 4.5 and 4.6), the Louvre suovetaurilia relief, scene CIII of Trajan’s Column (early second century CE; Scott Ryberg 1955, p. 113, fig. 57), and a panel on the Arch of Constantine depicting a scene of the lustration of troops that may originate from a monument associated with Marcus Aurelius (Scott Ryberg 1955, p. 114, fig. 59), they are shown clasped in one hand, usually cupped from beneath using either the right or left hand, with the fingers curled around the base and over the front face. Elsewhere they are shown held in two hands, gripped from below and the side, the box usually held in front of the body (Figure 4.7). Among others, examples include the Claudius Gothicus relief mentioned earlier, as well as the Marcus Aurelius altar scene in Figure 4.4, in addition to scene XX of the Column of Marcus Aurelius (late second century CE; Scott Ryberg 1955, p. 114, fig. 58) and a column base of Diocletian recovered from the Roman Forum (Scott Ryberg 1955, p. 118, fig. 61b). The two acerrae shown on the north frieze of the Ara Pacis both have small, circular button-like protrusions on the base that probably indicate feet and which are not dissimilar to the square feet shown on the instrumenta sacra frieze of the Arch of the Argentarii. Rarely, however, are incense boxes in altar scenes depicted with the high and sometimes very elaborately curved feet that feature on examples from friezes such as those of the Musei Capitolini (Stuart Jones 1912, pp. 261–4). It is possible, therefore, that some were designed to be more portable than others.

Figure 4.7

Figure 4.7 Detail of the passageway relief scene beneath the frieze of cult instruments on the western pier of the Arch of the Argentarii showing a long-haired camillus with an acerra

Photo: Emma-Jayne Graham.

Only one example of an object likely to be part of an acerra has been identified archaeologically (Antiquarium Comunale inv. 17321; Angelucci and La Rocca 1976). Of unknown provenance, and uncertain date (it is commonly assigned to the Augustan period), all that remains is a small ivory sheet (7 × 11.2 × 1 cm). One side is unworked, while the other bears the relief image of a togate figure in the act of placing something (possibly incense) onto a tripod altar. This central figure is accompanied by others, including what appears to be a second sacrificant standing to the left of him with his hand extended back towards a shallow dish, possibly to wash or purify his hands. This is held by a shorter attendant who, at the same time, pours into it from a pitcher. To the right of the scene stands an additional short attendant, with a wide dish balanced on his upturned left hand held up at shoulder height, and an unveiled adult male figure standing immediately behind the tripod. Hypothesised reconstructions by Eugenio La Rocca suggest that the plaque was originally set within a deep frame as the front panel of an ivory incense container with a total width of around 15 cm (Angelucci and La Rocca 1976, figs. 7–8). This is comparable with iconographic evidence for acerrae which have been estimated to range between 15 and 30 cm, with a height of around 5–15 cm (Hölscher 2005, p. 223). Although wooden and marble acerrae are sometimes implied by the ancient texts cited earlier, La Rocca reasons that since ivory is known to have been widely used for small caskets it is likely, in this case, that the whole container was manufactured using this material (Angelucci and La Rocca 1976, p. 13, n.37). Moreover, it seems highly unlikely that boxes intended to be carried in procession were made from heavier materials such as marble.

The thingliness of acerrae

The potential tactile and haptic affordances associated with these objects, and their subsequent impact on proximal forms of knowledge, can be investigated by adopting a broad understanding of touch such as that advocated by sculptor Rosalyn Driscoll (2011, p. 108), who extends it beyond ‘contact with something by the skin’ to encompass ‘kinaesthesia, proprioception, balance, temperature, pain, and pleasure – indeed the whole body’. As we have seen, iconographic evidence suggests that in many instances acerrae were grasped from beneath using a single hand. This was a gesture which compelled the bearer to twist their hand and arm into a position which, although natural, is potentially uncomfortable if held for long periods of time, even more so when bearing weight. Neither the relief images nor the ivory panel from Rome suggests that incense boxes were large or cumbersome items, and the resins they contained also could not have contributed much weight. However, when combined with this slightly awkward grip, the material substance of the box itself – perhaps wood or ivory, but possibly also bronze or other metals – will certainly have been sensed by the muscles of anyone who held it in this way for any length of time. Of course, monumental reliefs provide only an abbreviated impression of real events (see Elsner 2005, 2012b), so it remains unclear how far this form of grip was merely a device intended to place the visual spotlight on the box rather than its bearer, or in the cases of decorated acerrae like those of the Ara Pacis, to avoid obscuring their decorative features. Nevertheless, real examples may have been held in this way for precisely the same reasons. What is more, supporting evidence for this manner of carrying objects as part of ritualised activities can be found in reliefs illustrating other portable cult objects, such as the lares and other small statues that were sometimes incorporated into ritualised processions. Brian Madigan (2013, p. 8) has pointed out that small statues are also shown carried in one hand and supported from underneath, and he notes that ‘the regularity in the appearance of these gestures argues for their following a ceremonial decorum’, going on to suggest that there may even have been accepted ways in which objects connected with cult were to be held. Since attendants are repeatedly shown holding acerrae in one hand in both procession and altar scenes, it can therefore be assumed with a reasonable degree of certainty that at least some camilli carried or held them like this, and were perhaps even expected to do so.

It required concentration for the camillus to grip an angular acerra in one hand while moving his body as part of a procession, with all of its attendant solemnity, formality, and need for watchful movement. He had to retain his balance in a bustling crowd without dropping the precious cult object, even as his hand perhaps became increasingly sweaty through nervousness and (in the case of ivory or metal) contact between his skin and an organic material that warmed to the touch. This also involved deeper haptic experiences concerning specific muscular exertions in his shoulder, arm, wrist, hand, and fingers, and more general proprioceptive experiences of his body as a whole. Even the movement and gait of any camillus who grasped the box more securely in two hands will have been affected by the haptic influences afforded by interaction with its material properties, compelling him to walk and stand in a particular way. Carrying an acerra could consequently have a significant impact on the bearer’s awareness of his body in space, compelling him to move in a way that was markedly different not only from other members of the assembled group but from the way in which he moved, and therefore haptically perceived the world, during other activities. The relationship between his material body and the material object therefore produced a particular way of being in the world at that moment that was intimately connected to the specific role that he was playing, a way of being that both characterised it and signalled to him that it was different from other activities. In short, this was a relational assemblage at work, producing lived religion and, in turn, proximal religious knowledge.

And what about the incense container as a material thing itself? As hinted already, the raw materials from which acerrae were probably manufactured possessed their own potential material affordances, with ivory, wood, or metal presenting the hand that grasped them with particular sensory feedback. This might include differential experiences of temperature, which may even have varied as the heat from the bearer’s hands was reflected or absorbed, potentially also leading to the production of sweat and an increasingly slippery surface. Its smoothness (ivory, metal) or friction (wood), potentially affected still further how readily it could be grasped, with those affordances possibly even changing throughout the duration of the procession and ritual as an increasingly clammy hand combined with a damp surface. The exterior of the box may also have gathered residue from its contents because pieces of frankincense produce a fine white dust when they are rubbed together, as they would be if collected together in an acerra that was moved around (Van Beek 1960, p. 71). Although most of this was probably confined to the interior, repeated use (including refilling prior to any major ritual) may have caused some of this dust to escape, and if not to coat the exterior at least to settle in exposed areas, perhaps concentrating around the front edge of the rim and lid. When the camillus used his free hand to open the lid, his fingers would have contacted any residue, putting him discreetly and (since it was known only to him) entirely privately alongside the presiding official as one of only two participants in the ritual to come into direct tactile contact with the unburned incense: a potentially empowering experience given its degree of secrecy and potential subversion of ritual expectations.

Returning to the idea that proximal knowledge is the product of discrete assemblages of things formed by active ritual performativity, it should also not be forgotten that touch is inherently dynamic and explorative in nature, that it involves motion not just of the whole body but of the fingers, which may seek to discover what it is that they come into contact with. Public sacrificial rituals in Rome could be protracted events, so we might imagine a restless youth waiting for his cue to offer the incense at the crucial moment, his fingers idly – or perhaps purposefully – exploring the materialness of the box that he grasped, its contours affording that exploration as he followed what he could reach of the lines of its edges and decorative elements, detecting the object’s own biography as revealed by its dents, cracks, repairs, or areas of heavy wear, and situating himself as a new part of that narrative. Clasping it in front of his body, its primary relief image turned away from him and his visual appreciation of its contents restricted when the lid was opened, and with other visual and auditory distractions surrounding him, ensured that any personal tactile exploration took place at least partially unsighted (even if the box’s decoration had been seen before and would be again afterwards), leaving interpretation of its tactile affordances quite literally in the hands that grasped it. Such explorative touch might be particularly powerful in cases where the box bore figurative decoration reminiscent of the scene in which the camillus currently found himself: even if it wasn’t entirely identical, he might feel and probe with his fingers a miniaturised version of the very activities that he was living at that moment, subversively touching the sacrificial victim, the altar, the priest.

Tactile knowledge

The capacity of miniaturisation to lend itself to particular forms of tactile empowerment and knowledge are manifold, as Douglass Bailey (2014, p. 29; see also Bailey 2005; Foxhall 2015), advocating what he terms as a ‘cheirotic approach’ to prehistoric figurines, explains:

Moreover, miniaturisation is frequently described as actively ‘inviting’ human touch, its ‘seductive properties’ becoming ‘particularly alluring when miniatures represent animal, human or supernatural beings that are usually more powerful’ (Langin-Hooper 2015, p. 68). These statements are especially useful for thinking about the miniaturised decoration on an acerra such as that seen on the Ara Pacis frieze or on the ivory plaque from Rome, since each had material affordances that encouraged tactile exploration and affected particular sensory and cognitive experiences. For example, stroking the back of the animal victim or the outstretched arm of the priest as he made an offering was unthinkable in reality, but sensory engagement with an acerra might facilitate just that, offering its bearer an illicit yet at the same time very public, temporary subversion of social and religious norms that placed him in a position of (imagined) power. Similarly, the real altar standing not far from his body was forbidden to him, but he possessed complete tactile freedom to explore the miniaturised version that he held in his hands. In this way, the real and the small-scale worlds were brought into dialogue with the in-the-moment experiences of the camillus himself. As Stephanie Langin-Hooper (2015, p. 65) has suggested for figurines from Hellenistic Babylonia, ‘to imagine one’s body entering the small-scale world of the miniature is an act of dramatic play, to which the outside world is a constant referent (for without the real-scale world, the efficacy of the miniature disappears)’. Tactile exploration of an acerra might therefore lend itself to very profound proximal knowing that emphasised the subversion of the real social world, at the same time as the nature of what was being touched rather crucially situated that knowledge back into the context of the shared, distal knowledge of the wider context of the ritual performance in which the box was being manipulated. Through this mutually reinforcing dialogue, the individual camillus thus produced or confirmed a personal understanding of his identity, role, or place within Roman religion as a shared cultural phenomenon.

It is clear from iconographic evidence that not all acerrae were decorated, and therefore not all offered the potential for the experiences that I have just described. Nonetheless, the absence of deeply textured miniaturised scenes undoubtedly contributed equally, yet differently, to the production of a particular form of proximal religious knowledge when it was combined into a similar ritualised assemblage. This knowledge was not necessarily, or even at all, at odds with that produced for a camillus who interacted with a highly decorated box; it was simply different from it because the thingliness of one of the components within the assemblage was dissimilar. In this way, there could never be a single, identical experience shared by all those who were ever responsible for carrying an acerra as part of a Roman ritual performance: personal embodied experience and the religious knowledge that it produced was closely entwined not just with the body of the individual but also with the material nature of the things which combined into assemblages on these particular occasions. Even the same young man might experience subsequent ritual events differently if he interacted with another container, or indeed if his role required him to carry an alternative item, such as the soft fabric mantele, a pitcher of liquid, or a small statue. In this way he would come to understand the significance of an occasion not only in relation to the relatively fixed-by-custom or distal ritual activities being performed – which he experienced via sight, sound, and smell – but in relation to the unfixed proximal tactile and haptic affordances of the material objects with which he interacted at each moment. Such subtle distinctions are obscured by traditional approaches which privilege the visual and olfactory experience of communal ritual performance.

Extending this further, it is possible that the specific task of ‘holding things ready’ also contributed to the construction or affirmation of a particular identity for a young camillus. These discrete haptic experiences potentially produced a reassuring feeling of belonging or of importance; perhaps they were evoked during later experiences or when he was older and no longer performing the same role, or when he encountered relief friezes featuring his counterparts, or when his role in a subsequent event was to hold something else; perhaps they contributed to an affirmation of status in contrast with others in the community who were excluded from that experience. Regardless, investigating the acerra as a material object, with physical properties and varied forms, reveals that any experience in which the human body and material things combined within ritualised assemblages were largely temporal and situationally specific. Lived religion was therefore an experience of agency that was of the here and now, while the resulting religious knowledge that this produced was correspondingly personal and subject to change. In effect, this makes it possible to understand how the lived experience of ritual as a camillus, and the religious knowledge that it produced, was distinct from that of, say, the sacrificant himself to whom we shall turn next.

Experiencing priestly headgear: the galerus and apex

At the centre of the passageway frieze of cult instruments on the eastern pier of the Arch of the Argentarii is the image of a distinctive leather cap (galerus) with disk and olive-wood spike (apex), the spike itself (birga) wrapped with a woollen filament (apiculum) (Ludi Blevins 2017, p. 242) (Figure 4.8). This was a combination which was permitted to be worn by only a restricted number of adult male citizens: the flamines. The three most important of these figures (flamines maiores), selected by the pontifices to serve a single divine figure in perpetuity, were the flamen Dialis (Jupiter), flamen Martialis (Mars), and flamen Quirinalis (Quirinus). After 42 BCE a fourth was added to their group, charged with serving the cult of the deified Julius Caesar (flamen Julialis), and further flamines were subsequently assigned during the imperial period to the cult of successively divinised emperors (e.g. the flamen Augustalis) (Várhelyi 2012, pp. 2691–2; Rehak 2001, p. 285). The titles of a further ten traditional flamines minores of slightly lower status are also attested, and Festus indicates that there were originally perhaps 15 flamines in total, although by the late Republic the currency of some of these roles may have diminished or changed (Festus [Paulus] 144L; DiLuzio 2016, pp. 53–4; also Vanggaard 1988).

Figure 4.8

Figure 4.8 Eastern passageway frieze of the Arch of the Argentarii, depicting instruments used in cult (lituus, urceus, patera, galerus with apex, bucranium, aspergillum, simpulum, and knives in a triangular case)

Photo: Emma-Jayne Graham.

The conduct and lifestyle of the flamines, especially that of the flamen Dialis, were the subject of strict regulations, summarised in the second century CE by Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights 10.15). These rules are commonly interpreted in light of their need to maintain a much higher level of purity compared with other priestly officials, and this extended even to their dress. The flamen Dialis was expected to wear the toga praetexta when he went out in public, but all of the flamines donned a heavy woollen cloak (laena) and a galerus with apex when sacrificing (other lower ranked priests might wear a galerus topped with a small knob: Cleland et al. 2007, p. 77). In both ancient sources and modern scholarship the ensemble of cap and spike is sometimes referred to simply as an apex, although since this downplays the role of the cap in favour of the spike alone, in what follows I will more commonly refer to it as the galerus or galerus/apex.

The galerus itself was a close-fitting leather cap with straps (offendices) that were fastened under the chin, presumably to ensure that it stayed in place at all times (Esdaile 1911, pp. 215–9; Festus 23L). Valerius Maximus (Memorable Deeds and Sayings 1.4), writing in the early first century CE, noted that when the cap (which he refers to using the term apex) slipped from the head of Q. Sulpicius when he was offering sacrifice sometime around 223 BCE, he was subsequently stripped of his office. A few decades later, Plutarch (Marcellus 5) recounts the same story, indirectly signalling that it must have been deemed by members of Roman society to have been a not untrivial incident. How the straps of the galerus were fastened remains uncertain (Esdaile 1911), but the persistent suggestion that they were ‘tied under the chin’ (Rehak 2001, p. 285) is difficult to reconcile with the specific statement by Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights 10.15.9–10) that the flamen Dialis must have ‘no knot (nodum) in his head-dress (apice), girdle, or any other part of his dress’. Possibly a form of button and loop system was used, since the details of the chin straps of the flamines depicted on the Ara Pacis certainly appear to suggest the presence of a fairly substantial fastening that the wearer must have been conscious of against their throat (Figure 4.9). Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights 10.15.32) also notes that the cap of the flamen Dialis was distinguished from those of the other three flamines by being made of white leather (consequently known as an albogalerus).

Figure 4.9

Figure 4.9 Detail from the south frieze of the Ara Pacis showing three of the four flamines (from the left, S-22, S-23, and S-24), each wearing a galerus with apex

Photo: Mrs. G. Fittschen-Badura.

If the cap fits: wearing the galerus/apex

It is clear that part of the significance of the cap and spike, and its visual representation on monuments and coins, was as a symbol of high religious office and of the concomitant social status that went with it (e.g. Ludi Blevins 2017). Meanwhile, scholarship has also debated how its appearance on the heads of figures in the Ara Pacis procession frieze might be used as a source of historical information concerning which particular flamen roles were occupied at any one time (Rehak 2001). To the best of my knowledge, however, no study has ever considered what it was like to actually wear one of these remarkable pieces of headgear, an item which the flamen Dialis at least was expected to don whenever he went out in public, perhaps even at all times in earlier centuries (Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 10.15). Indeed, it can be argued that the galerus/apex not only signalled that a flamen was actively performing sacrifice, but that its combination with the ritualised action of the priest’s body was also responsible for affording religious agency.

Appearances of the galerus/apex on friezes depicting cult objects regularly show it on its own, unworn, and sometimes with the straps represented as slack cords (see Ludi Blevins 2017) (Figure 4.10). However, as with the acerrae discussed earlier, the Ara Pacis provides a useful iconographic starting point for assessing the potential material and sensory affordances of the galerus/apex and for considering the ways in which its materialness may have combined with the thingliness of the human body as part of a ritualised assemblage. Importantly, this relief showing men wearing the caps reminds us that the galerus/apex was more than the symbol or visual signifier of office that it has become in modern scholarship. Indeed, it was a real material thing, with a host of potential qualities that might enter into relationships with other things when it was worn by the body of a flamen who actively engaged in the performance of sacrifice. This is what can be seen at the centre of the procession frieze on the south wall of the Ara Pacis, where the images carved in relief show four flamines, distinguishable from the other figures by their boots, laena-draped shoulders, and most clearly by their leather caps with disk and spike (Rehak 2001; Gawlinski 2015, p. 101) (Figure 4.9). The relief suggests that the cap was worn very tightly to the head, covering the wearer’s hair. Nonetheless, it also clearly shows strands of hair escaping from beneath the cap at the nape of the neck and the forehead, suggesting that it was not considered necessary to cover, control, or otherwise contain all of the hair of the flamen. The ears are also left exposed, with straps extending from either side of the ears to meet under the chin. This was also observed by Katharine Esdaile (1911) in relation to several other iconographic representations of the galerus depicted in isolation and in the act of being worn (despite using the term apex, her study is clearly concerned with the leather cap in that it pays close attention to the form of the cheek pieces and fastenings). On the Ara Pacis relief, the olive-wood apex is shown fixed to a disk which sits towards the back of the crown of the head, in much the same position as a modern Jewish kippah would be worn. The disk is entirely flat and is not moulded to follow the contours of the head. Perhaps when combined with the projecting spike this caused it to rock slightly as the bearer walked or moved. Indeed, the apex disc worn by the flamen figure commonly referred to as S-24 – who Paul Rehak (2001, p. 286) notes is distinguished only from S-20 (not shown in Figure 4.9) by the fact that he holds in his right hand a wooden comoetaculum (a wand used to prevent him from coming into physical contact with other people) – clearly stands proud of the curvature of his head, and when the head is held upright it projects slightly backwards rather than presenting a vertical spike.

Figure 4.10

Figure 4.10 Detail of the frieze of cult instruments on the Temple of Divus Vespasian and Divus Titus in the Forum Romanum showing a patera, securis, malleus, galerus (without apex but with the filium to which it could be attached), and a (damaged) bucranium. Late first century CE.

Photo: Emma-Jayne Graham.

Wearing one of these caps for the purpose of sacrifice as a flamen, rather than as a regular priest or sacrificant, will have prompted a subtly different sensory experience, one that the wearer will undoubtedly have been aware of because of his previous experiences of performing sacrifice before he was elevated to flamen. It seems improbable, given the status of the role of flamen, that the men who were appointed had never before performed sacrifice, but they will almost always have done so capite velato (‘with covered head’), that is whilst veiled with a part of the toga pulled up over their head (Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2.10; Festus 142.20L; Livy 1.18.3; 8.9.5; 10.7.10; Varro, On the Latin Language 5.130; Rüpke 2007a, p. 95; Glinister 2009). Indeed, this is such a common image on altar scenes of all types that it is used as the primary means of identifying the man or woman who is officially presiding, as well as serving as a more generic synonym for pietas within Roman culture (Gawlinski 2015, p. 102; Rothe 2019, pp. 46–9). As Fay Glinister (2009, p. 195) observes, iconographic evidence shows that ‘only the person sacrificing covered his or her head; other participants or onlookers might be crowned with a wreath, or entirely bare-headed’. Covering the head with material was an embodied gesture which set the performer of a sacrifice apart from everyone else, but which also brought with it the potential for a different lived experience of the religious agency that their actions produced. Although both forms of head-covering – sacrificing capite velato or wearing a galerus/apex – must have produced an experience that was hot and possibly rather stifling in the heat of the Roman summer, there were also important differences between these experiences which arose as a consequence of the materialness of the head-covering itself. First, we must consider the lived experience of sacrificing capite velato, as one that was shared by everyone who acted as the principal official in such ritual acts.

When draped over the head, the heavy woollen toga would have been felt in the form of pressure on the head, perhaps becoming increasingly heavy on wet days as rain soaked into the material and stretched the wool, dragging it downwards. As the veiled figure moved, the fact that the veil was part of the already cumbersome toga they were wearing may also have been evident, a raising of the arm potentially shifting the veil or even threatening to pull it off entirely (on the very real difficulties of wearing a toga correctly see Rothe 2019, pp. 55–9). Moreover, the fabric almost certainly smelled. It may have shared the same odour as the toga that covered the rest of the man’s body, something dependent upon whether or not the wool was damp and how recently it had been laundered (although it is unlikely that it smelled of the urine used in this process, as has often been assumed: see Flohr 2017), but this was a scent that was heightened and potentially more palpable when it enclosed the head and was brought much closer to the nose and mouth. Some may even have smelled slightly ‘fishy’ as the result of the dye used to produce the toga praetexta’s distinctive purple border (although how long this scent was retained by woollen fabric remains uncertain) (Bradley 2015, p. 141).

Perhaps most significantly, sacrificing capite velato served to bring these proximal sensory experiences of lived religion into dialogue with the person’s distal knowledge by mediating all subsequent sensory experiences of the wider proceedings of the ritual. Although the porous woollen veil certainly would not block out all sounds (in the same way that the hood on a modern hoodie or coat does not stop the wearer from hearing), it will have muffled or distorted them, particularly any sounds emanating from behind them (as anyone will know if they have ever worn a hood when walking in the rain and been surprised when an unheard person has approached them from behind). As noted earlier, iconographic evidence suggests that the flute-players (tibicines) involved in public rites were stationed for the crucial moments of the ritual close to and often behind the principal officiating figure (Figure 4.4). The affordances of the woollen veil, including its capacity to absorb sound waves, will have worked to distance the officiant from the sounds produced by the flute, potentially reducing their volume. What is more, any veil covering the sides of the head will more than likely have blocked the tibicine from view, so that the source of the sound was also obscured. Similarly the veil, like a modern hood, will have limited peripheral vision, causing the visual attention of the sacrificant to become focused on the people and objects most directly in front of them. Of course, as noted earlier, iconographic representations of altar scenes necessarily abbreviated proceedings, and space restrictions on relief panels compelled the sculptor to arrange the figures in a way that may not reproduce historical realities (see Elsner 2012b; Huet 2015). Nevertheless, it seems very unlikely that as a mere attendant of low social status a flute player would ever be positioned directly between the sacrificant and the altar, or indeed between them and the onlooking public audience of spectators.

It has been noted many times that sacrificing capite velato may well have been one of several strategies intended to cut the priest off from any potential surrounding distractions that might cause a ritual to be disrupted or performed incorrectly (e.g. Rüpke 2007a, p. 95; Glinister 2009, p. 198; Rothe 2019, p. 48). This is confirmed by ancient sources such as Pliny the Elder (Natural History 28.11), who asserted that ‘a piper plays so that nothing but the prayer is heard’, the sound produced by the tibicine and his flute effectively masking other noises, whilst ‘pulling the toga over their ears’, suggests Plutarch (Roman Questions 10), was ‘a precaution lest any ill-omened and baleful sound from without should reach them while they were praying’ (see also Fless and Moede 2007). However, these ancient explanations are rarely associated with the materialness of the veil itself, instead being connected by modern scholars merely with the act of covering the head and an acknowledgement that it was important to block out the wider world in order to ensure an appropriate level of concentration and focus. The diverse lived experiences of this gesture were, however, also important and were a product of the combination of the thingliness of the sacrificant’s body and its capacity to see and hear, with the materialness of the toga. Together these allowed (or afforded) an uninterrupted ritual, but they also suggest that the sounds made by the tibicine may have been directed primarily at other participants rather than the presiding official, allowing those without veiled heads to perform their roles without aural distractions. What is more, while the veil acted as a visual focusing device, by diminishing even the sounds of an adjacent tibicine it also enclosed the priest within their own restricted space for the period of time that they were performing prescribed ritual acts, almost certainly texturing their proximal sensory experience and the sense of empowerment that came with the special status that such a configuration of garments brought. It quite literally afforded the sort of direct, personal connection that was demanded of them. However, at the same time, the porous woollen toga allowed for a certain amount of continued connection and communication between the world within the veil and that outside. It mediated between distal and proximal experiences, helping to place emphasis on the significance of the proximal experiences of the sacrificing official whilst actively drawing attention to the fact that this was taking place in relation to a much bigger picture, in terms of both the sacrifice itself and the broader role of sacrifice within Roman religion.

This discussion has taken us away from the galerus/apex with which this section began, but looking closely at the affective qualities of the use of a veil within ritualised activities makes it possible to highlight quite how different might have been the experience offered by a tight-fitting leather cap, held in position with chin straps, which left the ears exposed and peripheral vision unaffected. Leather is porous, but despite being breathable it is not able to absorb and dispel moisture to the same extent as wool, meaning that on a warm day the tight-fitting galerus will have caused the head of the flamen to feel hot, the contact between body and leather potentially leading to the production of a rather sweaty and uncomfortable sensation as hair, scalp, and leather were pressed closely together. On cooler days this sensation may have been diminished and, unlike the veiling loop of the toga, a water-resistant leather cap will have provided more protection from the rain, even if the result was for rainwater to drip off it onto the clothing. The galerus also undoubtedly had a distinctive odour, a combination of ingrained sweat from repeated use (in the case of the flamen Dialis, it was perhaps worn every day) and the rich earthy fragrance of leather joined with the residual scent of the vegetable and other biological agents used to tan the animal skin (see van Driel-Murray 2009). It should not be forgotten that the capacity to sweat is a potential material affordance of the human body which, under certain conditions (including when the skin makes contact with certain less breathable materials), makes a difference to other things. It can make fabrics damp, for example, and as noted for the acerrae, surfaces can become slippery and the friction between hand and material object can be reduced. These effects are produced only when things combine.

The odour associated with the galerus then, in the context of a public sacrifice, was only ever directly experienced by the flamen who wore one (although it was perhaps to some degree detectable to those who stood very close by). It was also distinct from what they and others experienced when sacrificing capite velato. It may, nevertheless, have stirred memories of other experiences, certainly if the flamen had ever worn a close-fitting military helmet lined with leather, even if these memories were rendered dissimilar by the weight of the metal of a helmet compared with the comparatively lightweight galerus. Despite the fact that the galerus was probably less cumbersome in comparison with the veil of the toga, the restrictive strap beneath the chin, the fastening perhaps chafing against the throat, and the gentle unbalancing motion of the swaying apex which drew constant attention to its presence, ensured that the wearer could not easily forget that they were wearing a form of headgear that was quite unlike that of any of their peers and the other participants in the same ritual event, including perhaps the camilli with their long, free-flowing loose locks of hair. Indeed, a flamen who had once served as a camillus may even have been prompted to recall their former experiences, comparing them with those of the present moment, reinforcing their in-the-moment sense of identity and social or political standing. In addition, while the flamen Dialis may have been required to wear the galerus/apex most of the time, silence on this detail for the other flamines, coupled with the fact that perpetual wearing of the cap was one of the things that marked the flamen Dialis out as the most important of all of them, suggests that they were permitted to remove them after the performance of their ritual duties. At this moment, the wearer’s senses would have detected a change from one status to another, as the close-fitting cap was removed and cooler air was felt on the scalp and in the hair as the flamen moved from a specifically ritualised assemblage of things into a non-religiously ritualised one that incorporated the everyday mundane world.

Whereas sacrificing capite velato ensured that the visual and aural senses were at least blunted if not substantially altered, the galerus ensured precisely the opposite. The design of the cap intentionally left the ears of the wearer uncovered, as can been seen on the Ara Pacis and those depicted on friezes (see Esdaile 1911), bringing about no change to their personal aural capacities. Similarly, peripheral vision was entirely unaffected by the galerus. The flamen was therefore potentially able to engage fully with the distal experience of the ritual as it was shared by all of those present: to hear the tibicine and to see, smell, and hear all of the attendants and the animal victim(s). Even though the cap fitted closely to the head of the flamen, the materialness of the galerus did not enclose them within their own highly proximal world – indeed, it actively prevented that from occurring, a situation certainly not without a degree of irony, given the long list of things that Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights 10.15) informs us the flamen Dialis must not see or hear in order to be able to sacrifice successfully. Evidently whatever lay behind the original adoption of the galerus/apex as ritual clothing for the flamines, it was never intended to contribute towards the upholding of these prohibitions, indeed it appears to have placed the onus firmly on the flamen himself to ensure that he did not inadvertently come into contact with forbidden things. It seems odd, then, that if the flamines were as important as ancient sources tell us they were, that precautions were not taken to prevent them from being disturbed even at the crucial moments of the ritual. Maybe part of the honour and responsibility of the role was afforded by knowing that these men were tried, tested, and reliable, the galerus acting as proof that they were infallible, that they did not require an artificial means of imposing focus since they were already completely devoted to the deity they served. This would have made it an even more significant portent when the galerus/apex of Q. Sulpicius fell off as he was performing his duties.

In this way, and much like the acerra, the galerus/apex demonstrates how the relationship between the thingly properties of the human body (in this case its sensory capacities) and other material things could be important for creating dialogue between distal (shared) and proximal (personal) experiences that served to produce personal narratives which affirmed a person’s place in the world at that moment, shaping their understanding – or, that is, their knowledge – of ways of being that were connected with religion. Indeed, the potential of headgear to affirm particular types of identity and ways of understanding religious activities from certain standpoints might be extended to a consideration of the many other types of headwear known to have been worn by particular groups, including those associated with women: the veils of the flaminicae (rica, ricinia) or the suffibulum of the Vestals. Indeed, the experience of the flamen Dialis compared with that of the flaminica Dialis is especially striking: she wore an elaborately high hairstyle (tutulus), a woollen mantle, and a wreath of pomegranate twigs perhaps derived from a cushioning device used to support the carrying of vessels on the head (arculum: Festus 15L; DiLuzio 2016, pp. 26–7), all covered with the brightly coloured diaphanous gauze-like veil of the flammeum (Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 10.15.28). Together these must have served to shut her off from the distal world of religious action, enclosing her within her own highly personal sensory world derived from the physical sensations of the complex hairstyle and potentially uncomfortable wreath, warming woollen veil, and restricted peripheral vision caused by the flammeum. The latter may even have been pulled over her face (Petronius, Satyricon 26.1), entirely enveloping her head and obscuring or at least distorting her vision (for a full discussion of the symbolic significance of all aspects of the dress of the flaminica Dialis see DiLuzio 2016, pp. 36–42 and p. 50).

Conclusions

This chapter has shown that proximal religious knowledge produced by engaging with the thingly qualities of objects always took place in relation to the wider sensory and ideological framework of any ritualised activity or assemblage. Indeed, it was the very ritualisation of activities, such as the public rites which have been the focus here, that not only brought sensing human bodies and other material things into a relationship but which also served to determine which of the potential affordances of each might become significant, ultimately resulting in a lived experience of agency that was rationalised as religion. Carrying an incense box may have put the camillus at the heart of the action and offered him a singular personal experience of major public ritual that was his alone, but he also shared elements of a broadly comparable sensory experience with all of the other active participants and spectators who were present at that moment. He was, in effect, engaged in moving in and out of multiple, interconnecting, and overlapping ritualised assemblages of different scale, simultaneously living religion on both a personal and communal level, prompting dialogue between these multi-scalar experiences that reinforced both his proximal and distal knowledge of religion. The same was true for the flamen Dialis, whose experience of wearing the galerus/apex made his personal experience highly distinctive and proximally embodied at the same time, as it allowed him to remain fully cognisant of and engaged with the wider communal experience of a public sacrifice. As Valérie Huet (2015, p. 145) points out, ‘Taking part in ritual in Rome is about identity, acknowledgement of belonging to a community’.

It can therefore be argued that the lived experiences identified in this chapter help us to understand how the different aspects of this process were actually lived, including those that emphasise both personal and communal forms of identity (on individual and group experiences see also Arnhold 2013). The place of an acerra bearer in this religious context was intimately connected not only with the olfactory capacities of the incense it contained which were to be shared with everyone, but also with the feel of the box he carried in his hands and how he experienced it via his body and its movement, including his curious fingertips, aching muscles or joints, and his awareness of the motion of his own body in space. For a flamen Dialis, his actions as part of the ritualised behaviours of a public sacrifice reinforced his authoritative position as well as the community’s knowledge of how the world should be. Yet, on an individual level, his experiences of sacrificing as a flamen rather than as a private individual or less senior priest were sensed as distinctly different from other ritualised moments when he had sacrificed capite velato, affirming the particular agency that his actions had to make a very particular type of difference to the world.

The engagements between human and more-than-human things that I have singled out here demonstrate first how assemblages of particular things can create broad-based understandings of the religious world in which an individual played an active part, reinforcing the extent to which this was something shared by everyone within the community, and not least the ways in which their actions enacted one of the ordering principles of that community and its shared knowledge about how the world worked. These understandings were a form of distal religious knowledge: lived religion reproduced the ordered, hierarchical way of doing things that provided stability and commonality. Secondly, however, they also show how more-than-human things had a crucial role to play in producing religious knowledge for individual participants, in this case knowledge that was predicated on lived religion involving personal and primarily sensory experiences. Accordingly, instrumenta sacra were more than clichéd symbols and did much more than merely facilitate human intentionality when it came to the performance of ritual. By becoming enmeshed in ritualised assemblages, their discrete qualities combined with those of individual humans to enable the very production of religious agency itself. Communal ritual could therefore also be lived in such a way as to produce proximal forms of religious knowledge that were based on deeply personal experiences – experiences which for most participants related not only to a cognitive recognition that they had a specified role to play or possessed a certain status, but also to the potential material properties of the objects with which that ritualised behaviour compelled them to engage. The implications of these observations are explored further in the next chapter, which asks what happens within assemblages when the material things that living human bodies interact with in the course of ritualised activities are in fact also bodies. What are the consequences when the ontological boundaries between human and more-than-human objects become blurred?