In A.D. 495 (or thereabouts) the Bishop of Rome sent a stern letter to some of his fellow Christians in the city, denouncing those who continued to celebrate the ancient ritual of the Lupercalia.1 Almost two hundred years after the emperor Constantine had started the process of making Christianity the ‘official’ religion of the Roman state, in a city that must in some ways have seemed a securely Christian environment (with its great churches – old St Peter’s, St John Lateran – rivalling in size and splendour the most famous buildings of the pagan2 past), Bishop Gelasius was faced with the problem of an old pagan ritual that would not die. Many members of his flock watched eagerly, it seems, as every 15 February a group of youths, very scantily clad, rushed around the city (as similar groups had done for more than a thousand years), lashing with a thong anyone who came across their path. But these Christians were not just eager, interested or curious spectators. It was even worse than this from Gelasius’ point of view; for they claimed that it was vital to the safety and prosperity of Rome that this ancient ritual should continue to be performed – a claim that had always been one of the most powerful, and most commonly repeated, justifications of the traditional (pagan) gods and their cult. Proper worship of the Roman gods ensured the success of Rome: that was an axiom not easily overthrown, even by Christians in the late fifth century A.D.
In mounting his attack, Gelasius looked back over more than a millennium of Roman history to the very origins of the Lupercalia – and to the prehistoric inhabitants of the seven hills, who invented the ritual (so Roman myths claimed) generations before Romulus arrived on the scene to found Rome itself. Gelasius may have publicly set himself against the traditions and mythologies of his pagan predecessors; but he knew his enemy and confidently appealed to the history of the institution he was attacking, spanning the centuries between Christian Rome and the earliest years of traditional Roman paganism. These are precisely the centuries that we explore in this book: the millennium or more that takes Rome from a primitive village to world empire and finally to Christian capital.
The history of Roman religion (our history, Gelasius’ history...) is a history of extraordinary change; it is nothing less than the story of the origin and development of those attitudes and assumptions that still underlie most forms of contemporary religious life in the West and most contemporary religions. This is not just a question of the growth of Christianity. In fact, as we shall emphasize at many points in what follows, early Christianity was a very different religion from its modern descendant – much less familiar in its doctrines, morality or organisation than we might prefer to imagine. Nonetheless in the religious debates and conflicts of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. we are in a world that is broadly recognisable to us: we can see, for example, issues of religious belief being discussed by both pagans and Christians; we can observe religious communities, with their own hierarchy and officials, representing a focus of loyalty and commitment quite separate from the political institutions of the state; we can see the range of religious choices available (between different communities or different beliefs), and how those choices might have an impact on an individual’s sense of identity, on their ambitions, and their view of their place in the world.
So far as we can tell, the religious world of the earliest periods of Roman history was quite different, and much less recognisable in our own contemporary terms. Of course, a lot hangs on ‘so far as we can tell’. Before the third century B.C. (already centuries after the origins of some of the city’s most important religious institutions) no Roman literature of any sort survives – let alone any direct comments on the gods or the city’s rituals. We have to reconstruct early Roman religion from discussions in much later authors and from a variety of archaeological traces: temple remains, offerings made to the gods, occasionally texts inscribed on bronze or stone recording such dedications. It is a tantalizing, tricky and often inconclusive procedure. But one thing does seem clear enough: that many of our familiar categories for thinking about religion and religious experience simply cannot be usefully applied here; we shall see, for example, how even the idea of ‘personal belief’ (to us, a self-evident part of religious experience) provides a strikingly inappropriate model for understanding the religious experience of early Rome. Part of the fascination of these early phases of Roman religion is their sheer difference from our own world and its assumptions.
The importance of this difference is one thing that lies behind our decision not to provide any formal definition of ‘religion’ at this (or any) point in the book: what we have written is the product of a necessary compromise between our own preconceptions, our readings in cross-cultural theory and the impact of the Romans’ own (changing) representations of religion and religious life, their own debates about what religion was and how it operated. We have not worked with a single definition of religion in mind; we have worked rather to understand what might count as ‘religion’ in Rome and how that might make a difference to our own understanding of our own religious world.3
The book focusses on the changes in religious life at Rome over the millennium that separates the origins of the Lupercalia from Gelasius’ spirited (and learned) attack. It is not a matter of tracing a linear development, from primitive religious simplicity in the early city to something approaching modern sophistication a thousand years later. In fact our reconstructions will suggest that, as far back as we can trace it, traditional Roman paganism was strikingly complex – in its priestly organisation, in its range of divinities and in its relations with the religious systems of its neighbours. It is a question much more of exploring how religious change could be generated in Rome. How was religion affected by the political revolutions that defined Roman history? Could religion be untouched by the transition from monarchy to (quasi-democratic) ‘republic’ around the beginning of the sixth century B.C.? Or untouched again by the civil wars that brought autocracy back, first under Julius Caesar, finally under his adopted son, the first emperor Augustus? How again was it affected by the enormous expansion of Rome’s empire? What happens to the religious institutions of a small city state, when that city state grows (as Rome did) to control most of the known world? And what happens to the religion of the conquered territories under the impact of Roman imperialism? How far did the cultural revolution of the first centuries B.C. and A.D. prompt specifically religious changes? When philosophy, science, history, poetry and visual imagery were all offering radically new ways of conceptualizing the individual’s place in the cosmos, was religion to be left behind telling the same old story?
But these questions inevitably raise the bigger question of what constitutes religious change and how we can recognise it. When Gelasius reprimands his fellow Christians for continuing to support the Lupercalia, in what sense should we understand the festival of the late fifth century A.D. as the same as the Lupercalia that was being celebrated back when Rome was a primitive village? To judge from Gelasius’ description, many of the ritual details were pretty much identical to those we can attest at least five hundred years before: the whipping, for example, and the running about the town. But what of the significance, the ‘meaning’? As we will discover, the Lupercalia was and is one of the most disputed festivals in the Roman calendar: Roman writers argued about its aims (a ritual of purification? of fertility?); they disagreed even about the exact course taken by the runners (was it up and down, or round and round the city?).4 But one thing is certain: no ritual could mean the same when it was performed in a Christian capital, under a Christian emperor and the shadow of disapproval of a Christian bishop, as it had five hundred or a thousand years before – whether in the great imperial capital of the Roman empire or in the (as yet) small hamlet by the Tiber. And the claim to which Gelasius particularly objected – that the safety of Rome depended on the gods’ rituals being properly performed – was inevitably different, even more loaded perhaps, when uttered in a world in which there was a choice of god(s) in which to believe. The paradox is that some of the biggest changes in Roman religion lurk behind the most striking examples of outward continuity, behind exactly the same phrases repeated in wildly different contexts. Throughout this book we shall be alive to just this kind of problem: how to write a history of Roman religion that is not merely a history of outward form.
This book starts with Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, in chapter 1 and ends with Bishop Gelasius himself in chapter 8; the chapters in between tell the story of religious change through the growth of the city of Rome and the expansion of its empire; through the political changes from monarchy to democracy and back to monarchy (for that is effectively what the rule of the Roman emperors, the so-called ‘principate’, was). It is a history written in dialogue with ancient writers, most of whom were as partisan as Gelasius in his Letter against the Lupercalia (if less openly so): no one, after all, writes objectively about religion; and no literature is written simply to be a ‘source’ for later historians. Some of these writers were even engaged in a project similar in certain respects to our own: the reconstruction of the earliest phases of Roman religion and the history of its development. As we shall see in Chapter 1, our own understanding of the religious changes that coincided with the expulsion of the early kings of Rome is inextricably bound up with the analysis of Livy – who (five hundred years after the events) was posing exactly the same question as we shall pose: what difference did the fall of the monarchy make to the religious institutions of Rome? Writing the history of Roman religion, in other words, is to join a tradition that stretches back to the ancient world itself.
The history we have written in this volume depends on the ancient texts that are signalled in its footnotes. Though they are rarely quoted here at length, a large number of the passages we refer to are to be found in our companion volume, Religions of Rome 2: A sourcebook (from here on, all cross-references to Volume 2 are given by number in bold type, e.g. 4.3a). This sourcebook is concerned with the same thousand years of Roman history, but it focusses specifically on ancient documents (extracts from literary texts, inscriptions, coins, sculpture and painting); and these are arranged not to tell a chronological story (as in this volume), but thematically across the centuries – to highlight some of the ideas and institutions that serve to unify Roman religion through its long history. It also includes some reference material (a glossary of Roman religious terms, a list of epithets given to Roman deities) that is directly relevant to this book also.
Each of these volumes can be used independently. But we hope that the reader will explore them together. Some of the many voices of the Religions of Rome are to be heard best in the dialogue between the two.
1 Gelasius, Letter against the Lupercalia; extract (ch.16) = Religions of Rome 2, 5.2e; Hopkins (1991); and below, p. 388.
2 Throughout this book we have used the word ‘pagan’ or ‘paganism’ to refer to traditional Roman religion. We do this fully aware that it has been derided by some historians as a loaded term, in origin a specifically Christian way of describing its enemy (below, p. 312). No doubt an ideologically neutral term would be preferable; but we have found ‘traditional civic polytheism’ (and similar alternatives suggested) more cumbersome and no less – if differently – loaded.
3 For this ‘open textured’ approach, Poole (1986).
4 A number of different ancient accounts are collected at Religions of Rome 2, 5.2.