1  Early Rome

1.   Finding the religion of the early Romans

The origins of Roman religion lay in the earliest days of the city of Rome itself. That, at least, was the view held by the Romans – who would have been very puzzled that we should now have any doubt about where, when or how most of their priesthoods, their festivals, their distinctive rituals were established. Roman writers, from poets to philosophers, gave detailed accounts of the founding of Rome by the first king Romulus (the date they came to agree was – on our system of reckoning – 753 B.C.): he consulted the gods for divine approval of the new foundation, carefully laying out the sacred boundary (the pomerium) around the city; he built the very first temple in the city (to Jupiter Feretrius, where he dedicated the spoils of his military victories); and he established some of the major festivals that were still being celebrated a thousand years later (it was at his new ritual of the Consualia, for example, with its characteristic horse races and other festivities, that the first Romans carried off the women of the neighbouring Sabine tribes who had come to watch – the so-called ‘Rape of the Sabines’).1

    But it was in the reign of the second king Numa that they found even more religious material. For it was Numa, they said, who established most of the priesthoods and the other familiar religious institutions of the city: he was credited with the invention of, among others, the priests of the gods Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus (the three flamines), of the pontifices, the Vestal Virgins and the Salii (the priests who danced through the city twice a year carrying their special sacred shields – one of which had fallen from the sky as a gift from Jupiter); and he instituted yet more new festivals, which he organized into the first systematic Roman ritual calendar. Henceforth some days of the year were marked down as religious, others as days for public business. Appropriately enough, this peaceable character founded the temple of Janus, whose doors were to be shut whenever the city was not at war. Numa was the first to close its doors; 700 years later the emperor Augustus proudly followed suit – but it was a rare event in Rome’s history.2

    Roman writers recognized that their religion was based on traditions that went back earlier than the foundation of the city itself. Long before Romulus came on the scene, the site of Rome had been occupied by an exile from Arcadia in Greece, King Evander, who had brought to Italy a variety of Greek religious customs: he had established, for example, rites in honour of Hercules at what was called the ‘Greatest Altar’ (Ara Maxima) and it was because of this, so Romans explained, that rites at the Ara Maxima were always carried out in a recognizably Greek style (Graeco ritu).³ Evander was also believed to have entertained the Trojan hero Aeneas, who had fled the destruction of his own city and sought safety (and a new site to re-establish the Trojan race) in Italy. (Fig 1.1) This story found its definitive version in Virgil’s great national epic, the Aeneid – which includes a memorable account of the guided tour that Evander gave Aeneas around the site of the city that was to become Rome. Aeneas himself had a major part to play in the foundation of the Roman race, bringing with him the household gods (Penates) of his native land to a new home and renewed worship among the Romans. But he did not found the city itself; he and his son established ‘proto-Romes’ at Lavinium and Alba Longa. Only later was the statue of the goddess Pallas Athena that Aeneas had rescued from Troy (the Palladium) moved to the temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum, to be tended by the Vestal Virgins throughout Roman time.⁴

         Fig. 1.1   Terracotta statuette of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises, one of several found in a votive deposit in Veii, fourth century B.C. Aeneas’ escape from burning Troy symbolizes the birth of a new Troy in Italy, a myth widely known in archaic Latium and Etruria – and not at that time restricted to Rome. (Height 0.21m.)

    The kings that followed Numa also contributed – though in a less dramatic way – to the religious traditions of Rome. The rituals of the fetial priests, for example, which accompanied the making of treaties and the declaration of war (part of these involved a priest going to the boundaries of enemy territory and hurling a sacred spear across) were devised under the third and fourth rulers, Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Marcius; the fifth king, Tarquin the Elder, an immigrant to Rome from the Etruscan city of Tarquinii, laid the foundations of the temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva on the Capitoline hill (a temple that became a symbol of Roman religion, and hundreds of years later was widely imitated across the whole of the Roman empire); the sixth, Servius Tullius, marked the new city’s growing dominance over its Latin neighbours by establishing the great ‘federal’ sanctuary of Diana on the Aventine hill, for all the members of the ‘Latin League’. By the time the last king, Tarquin the Proud, was deposed (traditionally in 510 B.C.), and the new republican regime with its succession of annually elected magistrates established, the structure of Roman religion was essentially in place. Of course, all kinds of particular changes were to follow – new rituals, new priesthoods, new temples, new gods; but (in the view of the Romans themselves) the basic religious framework was pretty well fixed by the end of the sixth century B.C.5

There is, then, no shortage of ‘evidence’ about the earliest phases of Roman religion; the Greek historian of Rome, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for example, devotes four whole books of his history (much of it concerned with religious institutions) to the period before the Republic was established, the first two covering only to the end of Numa’s reign.6 The problem is not lack of written material, but how we should interpret and make sense of that material. For all the accounts we have of Rome’s earliest history are found in writers (Dionysius amongst them) who lived in the first century B.C. or later – more than 600 years after the dates usually given to the reigns of Romulus and Numa. None of our sources is contemporary with the events they describe. Nor could their authors have read any such contemporary accounts on which to base their own: so far as we know, there were no writers in earliest, regal Rome; there was no account left by Numa, say, of his religious foundations. Even for the earliest phases of the Republic (in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.), it is very hard to know what kind of information (or how reliable) was available to historians writing three or four centuries later.⁷

    Judged by our own standards of historical ‘accuracy’, these ancient accounts of early Rome and its religion are inadequate and misleading; they construct an image of a relatively sophisticated society, more like the city of the first century B.C. than the hamlet of the eighth century. Projections of the contemporary world back into the distant past, they are more myth than history. It is certain that primitive Rome was under the control of men the Romans called reges (which we translate as ‘kings’, though ‘chieftains’ might be a better term). But many modern historians would now be very doubtful whether at least the two earliest of them – Romulus and Numa – existed at all, let alone whether they carried out the reforms ascribed to them. That, of course, is precisely the point. The writers we are referring to (historians such as Dionysius or Livy; poets such as Virgil or Ovid) set little store by ‘accuracy’ in our narrow sense. For them, the stories of early Rome, which they told, retold and (sometimes no doubt) invented, were ‘true’ in quite a different way or, better, were doing a different kind of job: they were using the theme of the city’s origins as a way of discussing Roman culture and religion much more generally, of defining and classifying it, of debating its problems and peculiarities. These stories were a way in which the Romans (or, in the case of Dionysius and others, the Greek inhabitants of the Roman empire) explained their own religious system to themselves; and as such they were inevitably embedded in the religious concerns and debates of their writers’ own times. As we shall see, for example, stories of the apotheosis of Romulus (into the god Quirinus) were told with particular emphasis, elaborated (some might say invented), around the time of Julius Caesar’s deification in the 40s B.C. Romulus’ ascent to heaven offered, in other words, a way of understanding, justifying or attacking the recent (and contested) elevation of the dead dictator.8

    These images of early Rome are central to the way the Romans made sense of their own religion; and so too they are central to our understanding and discussion of Roman religion. It would be nonsense to ignore the figure of ‘Numa’, the father of the Roman priesthood and founder of the calendar, just because we decided that King Numa (715–672 B.C.) was a figment of the Roman mythic imagination. We shall return to this early history at many points through this book – using (for example) Ovid’s explanations of the origins of particular festivals as a way of rethinking their significance in the Rome of Ovid’s own day, or exploring the way the myths of Aeneas and Romulus were used to define the position of the first emperor Augustus (and were themselves re-told in the process). But this earliest period will not bulk particularly large in this first chapter on the religion of early Rome.⁹

This chapter is concerned with what we can know about the religion of Rome before the second century B.C., when for the first time contemporary writing survives in some quantity. This was the period in which the distinctive institutions of later periods must have taken shape. But how can we construct an (in our terms) ‘historical’ account of that religious world, when there are no contemporary written records beyond a few brief, and often enigmatic, inscriptions on stone, metal or pot? This first section concentrates on that question of method: reviewing particular documents and literary traditions which have been claimed to give a privileged access to accurate information on the earliest phases of Rome’s religion; exploring some of the recent archaeological discoveries from Rome and elsewhere which have changed the way we can talk of particular aspects of that religion; and discussing various theories that have been used to reconstruct its fundamental character.

    One group of documents that has often been given a special place in reconstructions of early Roman religion is a group known (collectively) as ‘the calendar’. More than 40 copies (some of them, admittedly, very fragmentary) of a ritual calendar of Roman festivals, inscribed or painted on walls, survive from Rome and the surrounding areas of Italy, mostly dating to the age of Augustus (31 B.C. to A.D. 14) or soon after.¹⁰ No two of these calendars are exactly the same: the lists of festivals are slightly different in each case; and the additional information on the festivals that is regularly included ranges from terse notes on the god or temple involved to more extended entries of several lines, apparently drawn from antiquarian commentators, describing or explaining the rituals. None the less the calendars are all recognizably variations on the same theme, selecting from the same broad group of festivals. We shall be referring to these calendars in many contexts through the chapters that follow. For the moment, we want to stress one small but significant feature in their layout that they all have in common: some of the festival entries are inscribed in capital letters while others are in small letters. The capital-letter festivals are essentially the same group from calendar to calendar, roughly 40 in all – and including, for example, the Lupercalia, the Parilia, the Consualia, the Saturnalia. It seems virtually certain that they form an ancient list of festivals, preserved within the later documents.11

    But how ancient? We do not know when the characteristic form of time-keeping that underlies these calendars was introduced at Rome – maybe in the course of the republican period, maybe earlier; nor do we know whether its introduction coincided with the fixing of this particular group of capital-letter festivals, or not. It is hard to forget completely the mythic ‘Calendar of Numa’: certainly some of these festivals contain strange-seeming rituals and have often been interpreted as reflecting archaic social conditions; besides, though some of these festivals (such as those we mentioned above) were still very prominent in the first century B.C., some were totally obscure at the time the calendars were being inscribed; and in no case can it be proved that a capital-letter festival was introduced later than the regal period.¹² On the other hand the idea of the ‘Calendar of Numa’ (that is, of a very early canonical group of festivals) could be misleading. Even accepting, as is likely, that the capital-letter festivals do represent some ancient list, the purpose of that list remains quite uncertain: not necessarily the oldest festivals of all; perhaps, the most important at some specific date; perhaps even the most important to some individual on some specific occasion, that has somehow become embedded in the tradition.¹³ We certainly cannot assume that any festival not in capitals must be a ‘later’ introduction into the calendar.

    A list of the names of early festivals on its own, however, tells us little – without some idea of their content and significance. Here we must turn to a variety of later sources which offer details of the rituals of these festivals and of the stories, traditions and explanations associated with them. By far the richest source of all is Ovid’s Fasti, a witty verse account of the first six months of the Roman calendar and its rituals.¹⁴ Ovid, however, was writing in the reign of Augustus and much of what he has to offer does not consist of traditional Roman stories at all, but of imported Greek ones. So, for example, explaining the odd rituals of the festival of the goddess Vesta (one of our capital-letter group), which involved hanging loaves of bread around asses’ necks, he brings in a farcical tale of the Greek god Priapus: once upon a time, he says, at a picnic of the gods, this grotesque and crude rapist crept up on Vesta as she sprawled, unsuspecting, on the grass; but an ass’s bray alerted her to his approach – and ever after, on her festal day, asses take a holiday and wear ‘necklaces of loaves in memory of his services’.15 Some of these stories were no doubt introduced by Ovid himself, in the interests of variety or for fun; some may already have been, before his day, incorporated into educated Roman speculation (or joking) about the rituals. But either way it is certain that Ovid’s stories do not all date back into the early history of Rome, even if some elements may do. As a source of the religious ideas of his own time Ovid is invaluable; as a source for the remote past, he is hard to trust.

    It is not just a question, though, of Ovid being peculiarly unreliable; and the answer does not lie simply in looking for other ancient commentators on the calendar who have not ‘polluted’ their accounts with anachronistic explanations. The fact is that the rituals prescribed by the calendar of festivals were not handed down with their own original ‘official’ myth or explanation permanently attached to them. They were constantly re-interpreted and re-explained by their participants. This process of re-interpretation, found in almost every culture, including our own (the annual British ritual of ‘Bonfire Night’ means something quite different today from three hundred years ago),¹⁶ is precisely the strength of any ritual system: it enables rituals that claim to be unchanging to adopt different social meanings as society evolves new needs and new ideas over the course of time; and it means, for example, that a festival originating within a small community whose main interests were farming can still be relevant maybe 600 years later to a cosmopolitan urban culture, as it is gradually (and often imperceptibly to its participants) refocussed onto new concerns and circumstances.¹⁷ But at the same time it means that the interpretation of the ‘original’ significance of a festival, especially in a society that has left no written documents, is not just difficult, but close to impossible. The fact that we can trace the same names (Lupercalia, Vinalia etc.) over hundreds of years, or even the fact that the ceremonies may have been carried out in a similar fashion throughout that time, does not allow us to trace back the same significance from the first century B.C. to the seventh.

    The calendar is a prime example of how tantalizing much of the evidence for the religion of early Rome is. Again, it is not that there is no evidence at all. Here we have a remarkable survival: fossilized within later traditions of calendar design, traces of a list of festivals whose origins lie centuries earlier; traces, in other words, of an early Roman document itself, not a first-century B.C. reconstruction of early Roman society. The problem is how to interpret such traces, fragmentary and entirely isolated from their original context.

    Other documents and direct evidence from the early Republic, and even the regal period, are almost certainly preserved in the scholarly and antiquarian tradition of historical writing at Rome in the late Republic and early empire. For the Romans, the greatest of their antiquarians was the first-century Varro, who compiled a vast encyclopaedia of Roman religion with the express purpose, he said, of preserving the ancient religious traditions that were being forgotten or neglected by his contemporaries. This extraordinary polymath would certainly have been able to consult many documents (inscriptions recording temple foundations, for example, religious regulations, dedications) no longer available to us and he would no doubt have quoted many in his work. It is hard not to regret the loss of Varro and the fact that his religious encyclopaedia survives only in fragments, quoted as brief dictionary entries or in the accounts of later Christian writers who plundered his work and that of other antiquarians solely in order to show how absurd, valueless and obscene was the religion of the classical world that they were seeking to destroy and replace. On the other hand, some of these quotations are quite extensive, and the substance of Varro’s work may also be preserved in many other authors who do not refer to him directly by name. The loss may not, after all, be as great as we imagine.18

    Thirty-five books of Livy’s History do, however, survive – out of the original 142, which covered the history of Rome from its origins to the reign of the emperor Augustus. Livy’s History is in many respects preoccupied (as we have already seen) with the issues and concerns of first-century B.C. Rome; and more generally the picture we derive from his writing may be very much an artificial historiographic construction, expressing an ‘official religion which reflected little of the religious life of the community, or perhaps only that of the élite. On the other hand, Livy does claim to know many individual ‘facts’ about religious history going back at least to the early Republic, sometimes even quoting ancient documents or formulae. How accurate can this information have been?

    Some of the documents (for example, his quotation of the particular religious formulae used in the declaration of war) are almost certainly fictional reconstructions or inventions, which may have little in common with the formulae actually used in early Rome.19 But many of the other brief records (of vows, special games, the introduction of new cults, innovations in religious procedure, the consultation of religious advisers and so on) are not likely to be inventions. The pieces of information they contain are not obviously part of an ideological story of early religion; and many of them appear (from the form in which they are recorded, or the precise details they record) to preserve material from the early Republic, if not earlier. Perhaps the clearest example of this comes not from Livy himself, but from the elder Pliny. In his Natural History (written in the middle of the first century A.D.), Pliny notes the precise year in which the standard procedure for examining the entrails of sacrificial animals (‘extispicy’) was amended to take account of the heart in addition to other vital organs.²⁰ This information almost certainly comes from some early source: not only does there seem to be no reason for such an odd piece of ‘information’ to have been invented, but it is also dated in a unique way – which it is very unlikely that Pliny would have made up. The date of the change is given by the year of the reign of the rex sacrorum, that is the ‘king of rites’ or the priest who carried on the king’s religious duties when kingship itself was abolished; this makes no sense unless this system of dating continued in use in priestly records even though it was abandoned for every other purpose when the Republic was founded; if so Pliny (or his source) must have found this ‘nugget’ in some priestly context.

    This gives us one hint on how information of this type might have been preserved and transmitted from the earliest period of Rome’s history to the time when the literary tradition of history writing started. Priests in Rome had traditionally kept records to which they could refer to establish points of law; and (as we shall discuss later in this chapter) the pontifices, in particular, were said to have kept an annual record of events, including, but not confined to, the sphere of religion. Writing down and recording was a significant part of the function of priests.²¹ It is certainly possible that Livy, Pliny and other writers (or the sources on which they drew; there was after all a two-hundred year tradition of history writing at Rome before Livy, mostly lost to us) had access to priestly records with information stretching back centuries. If so (and many modern historians have hoped or assumed that this was the case) then many of their points of fact about religious changes, decisions or developments in early Rome may be more authentic than we would otherwise imagine.

    On the other hand, priestly record keeping had (for our purposes) its own limitations. Only changes, not continuities, would have been recorded; and then, presumably, only changes of a particular kind, the ones the priestly authorities noticed and chose to record in their collegiate books. Many other changes will have happened over the course of years without record – through mistakes, neglect, forgetfulness, unobserved social evolution, the unconscious re-building of outmoded conceptions; many of these would never even have been noticed, let alone written down. So even if we could gather together these occasional recorded facts (the foundation of a new temple, the introduction of a new god) and arrange them into some sort of chronological account, it would make a very strange sort of ‘history’. A history of religion is, after all, more than a series of religious decisions or changes. Once again, it is not a question of having no ‘authentic’ information stretching back to the early period; it is a question of having very little context and background against which to interpret the pieces of information that we have.22

    If evidence of this kind offers only glimpses of the earliest religious history of Rome, modern scholars have tried to construct a broader view by setting the evidence against different theories (or sometimes just different a priori assumptions) about the character of early religions in general and early Roman religion in particular, and about how such religions develop.²³ These theories vary considerably in detail, but they have over all a similar structure and deploy similar methods. First, the earliest Roman religion is uncovered by stripping away all the ‘foreign’, non-Roman elements that are clearly visible in the religion of (say) the late Republic. Even in that period, some characteristics of Roman religion must strike us as quite distinct from the traditions of the Greeks, Etruscans and even of other Italic peoples that we know of. The Roman gods, for example, even the greatest of them, seem not to have had a marked personal development and character; while a whole range of ‘lesser’ gods are attested who were essentially a divine aspect of some natural, social or agricultural process (such as Vervactor, the god of ‘turning over fallow land’, or Imporcitor, the god of ‘ploughing with wide furrows’24); there were few ‘native’ myths attaching even to the most prominent rituals; the system offered no eschatology, no explanation of creation or man’s relation to it; there was no tradition of prophets or holy men; a surviving fragment of Varro’s encyclopaedia of religion even reports that the earliest Romans, for 170 years after the foundation of their city, had no representations of their gods.²⁵ These characteristics have been interpreted in all kinds of different ways. Some modern scholars have seen them as simple primitive piety – which seems, in fact, to have been the line taken by Varro (who claimed that the worship of the gods would have been more reverently performed, if the Romans had continued to avoid divine images). But at the same time, the temptation is seldom resisted to summarize all this by saying that the Romans were artless, unimaginative and supremely practical folk, and hence that everything involving art, literary imagination, philosophic awareness or spirituality had to be borrowed from outside – whether from Greeks, Etruscans or other Italians.²⁶

    The second strand of the argument treats the ‘development’ of Roman religion as effectively a ‘deterioration’: the ‘healthy’ period of ‘true’ Roman religion is retrojected into the remote past; the late Republic is treated as a period when religion was virtually dead; the early Republic then provides a transitional period in which the forces of deterioration gathered strength, while the simplicities of the early native religious experience were progressively lost. Among the mechanisms of this deterioration that have been proposed are: (a) the contamination of the native tradition by foreign, especially Greek, influences; (b) the sterilization of true religiosity by the growth of excessive priestly ritualism; (c) the alienation of an increasingly sophisticated urban population from a religious tradition that had once been a religion of the farm and countryside and failed to evolve. In the case of (c), it is hard to believe that any ancient city lost its involvement with, and dependence on, the seasonal cycle of the agricultural year, let alone the relatively small-town Rome of the third century B.C. The other two suggestions are harder to refute, but no less arbitrary. A different approach will be taken in what follows, but we can point out at once that neither foreign influences nor priestly ritualism necessarily cause the deterioration of a religious system; and we will argue too (especially in chapter 3) that it is much harder than many modern writers have assumed to decide what is to count as the ‘decline’ of a religion.²⁷

    But there is an even more fundamental challenge to this simple scheme of development. Recent work, particularly in archaeology, has cast doubt on the idea of an early, uncontaminated, native strand of genuine Roman religion; and it has suggested that, rather than seeing pure Roman traditions gradually polluted from outside, Roman religion was an amalgam of different traditions from at least as far back as we can hope to go. Leaving aside its mythical prehistory, Roman religion was always already multicultural.

    Archaeological evidence from the sixth century B.C., for example, has shown that (whatever the political relations of Rome and Etruria may have been)²⁸ in cultural and religious terms Rome was part of a civilization dominated by Etruscans and receptive to the influence of Greeks and possibly of Carthaginians too. A dedication to the divine twins Castor and Pollux found at Lavinium, which uses a version of their Greek title ‘Dioskouroi’, shows unmistakably that we have to reckon with Greek contacts;²⁹ some of these contacts may have been mediated through the Etruscans, others coming directly from Greece itself – while it is perfectly possible that there were connections too with Greek settlements in South Italy. Even more striking Greek elements have been revealed by a recent study of the earliest levels of the Roman forum. From this it has become possible to identify almost certainly the early sanctuary of the god Vulcan (the Volcanal); and in the votive deposit from this sanctuary, dating from the second quarter of the sixth century B.C., was an Athenian black-figure vase with a representation of the Greek god Hephaestus. In other words, there was already in the early sixth century some identification of Roman Vulcan and the Greek Hephaestus, and the Greek image of the god had already penetrated to his holy place in the centre of Rome.³⁰ In a different way, the discovery of a religious phenomenon widespread throughout central Italy has similar disturbing implications for the conventional image of early Roman religion. Several sites have now produced substantial deposits of votive offerings dating back to at least the fourth century B.C., which consist primarily of small terracotta models of parts of the human body (Fig 1.2);³¹ this suggests that there were a number of sanctuaries soon after the beginning of the Republic to which individuals went when seeking cures for their diseases: at these sanctuaries they presumably dedicated terracottas of the afflicted part. This implies not only a cult not mentioned in any surviving ancient account, but also a type of religiosity which the accepted model of early Roman religion seems to exclude: for it implies that individuals turned to the gods directly in search of support with their everyday problems of health and disease. On the accepted model, they would have looked for and expected no such help, practical or spiritual. Another study has suggested that inscriptions discovered at Tor Tignosa near to Lavinium come from a cult in which incubation was practised: that is to say, people came to sleep in the sanctuary in the hope of receiving advice or revelation from the deity in a dream.32 In this case both Virgil and Ovid describe the use of such a technique in early – or rather mythical – Italy;³³ but their evidence was always thought suspect on the grounds that divine communication through dreams was a characteristically Greek practice, not compatible with the religious life of the early Romans and found in Italy only later when specifically Greek incubation-cults were introduced.³⁴

         Fig. 1.2 Votive terracottas from Ponte di Nona, 15km to the east of Rome. They were made in the third or second centuries B.C. for a sanctuary on the site abandoned in the late Republic, but were buried together during building operations in the fifth century A.D. This particular deposit included a majority of feet and eyes, perhaps reflecting the sanctuary’s curative specialities. (Foot, length 0.3m.; eyes, width 0.05m.)

    This much more complex picture of early Roman religion undermines some of those narrative accounts of Roman religious history that have been most influential over the last hundred years. So, for example, it is hard to sustain the once popular and powerful idea – influenced by early twentieth century anthropology – that Roman religion gradually evolved from a primitive phase of ‘animism’ (where divine power was spread widely through all kinds of natural phenomena) to a stage where it had developed ‘proper’ gods and goddesses;35 if we abandon the idea of an original core of essential Romanness, then we must abandon also any attempt to discover a single linear progression in the history of Roman religion. In this spirit, rather than trying to extract a small kernel of primitive ‘Roman’ characteristics from the varied evidence of the first century B.C., a different strategy has been to define the central characteristics of early Roman religion comparatively – that is by comparison with societies with a similar history. In the rest of this section, we shall look in greater detail at the most influential of these comparative approaches, its main claims and its problems.

    The lifetime’s project of the historian Georges Dumézil (1898–1986) was to combine evidence from many different Indo-European societies and traditions in order to discover the internal structure of the systems of mythology that were, he claimed, the common inheritance of all these peoples. His theories were based on the much broader and older idea that the societies which speak languages belonging to the ‘Indo-European’ family (including Greek, Latin, most of the languages of modern Europe, as well as Sanskrit, the old language of North India, and Old Persian) shared more than language; that they had, albeit in the far distant past, a common social and cultural origin.

    Dumézil believed that the mythological structure of the Romans and of other Indo-Europeans was derived ultimately from the social divisions of the original Indo-European people themselves, and that these divisions gave rise to a ‘tri-functional ideology’ – which caused all deities, myths and related human activities to fall into three distinct categories: 1. Religion and Law; 2. War; 3. Production, especially agricultural production. This was an enormously ambitious claim, and at first Dumézil’s theories drew very little acceptance. But in time he convinced some other scholars that this tri-partite structure could be detected both in the most archaic Roman religious institutions and in the mythology of the kings, especially in that of the first four.³⁶ On his view, Romulus and Numa were the symbols of the first function (one a ruler, one a priest); Tullus Hostilius, the third king, and Ancus Marcius, his successor, represented the second and third functions respectively (the inventors of war and of peaceful production).³⁷

    In Dumézil’s perspective, the earliest gods also reflected these three functions – as gods of law and authority, gods of war, gods of production and agriculture. The familiar deities of the Capitoline triad (Jupiter, Juno and Minerva) failed to fit the model; but he found his three functions in the gods of the ‘old triad’ –Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus. Although this group was of no particular prominence through most of the history of Roman religion, they were the gods to whom the three important priests of early Rome (the flamen Dialis (of Jupiter), flamen Martialis and flamen Quirinalis) were dedicated – and Dumézil found other traces of evidence to suggest that these three had preceded the Capitoline deities as the central gods of the Roman pantheon. They appeared to fit his three functions perfectly: Jupiter as the king of the gods; Mars the war-god; Quirinus the god of the ordinary citizens, the farmers.38

    Dumézil’s work has prompted much useful discussion about individual festivals or areas of worship at Rome.³⁹ There are, however, several major problems with his Indo-European scheme overall. If Dumézil were right, that would mean (quite implausibly) that early Roman religion and myth encoded a social organization divided between kings, warriors and producers fundamentally opposed to the ‘actual’ social organization of republican Rome (even probably regal Rome) itself. For everything we know about early Roman society specifically excludes a division of functions according to Dumézil’s model. It was, in fact, one of the defining characteristics of republican Rome (and a principle on which many of its political institutions were based) that the warriors were the peasants, and that the voters were ‘warrior-peasants’; not that the warriors and the peasant agriculturalists were separate groups with a separate position in society and separate interests as Dumézil’s mythic scheme demands. In order to follow Dumézil, one would need to accept not only that the religious and mythic life of a primitive community could be organized differently from its social life, but that the two could be glaringly incompatible.

    This point is reinforced by the character of the gods in the old triad. Even supposing Dumézil were right about their very earliest significance, all three soon developed into the supposed domains of at least one and possibly both of the others. Jupiter, the god of the highest city authority, also received the war-vows of the departing general and provided the centre of the triumphal procession on his return; but he also presided over the harvest in the vineyards.⁴⁰ Mars, the god of war, protected the crops and was hence very prominent in the prayers and rituals of the farmer.⁴¹ Quirinus, who was anyway far less prominent in republican times, was certainly connected with the mass of the population and with production, but also appears as a war god like Mars; while his appearance as the divine aspect of Romulus puts him also into the first (kingly) function.42 Outside this triad even apparently ancient deities do not readily fall into one of Dumézil’s three categories. Juno, for example, who is sometimes very much a political goddess in Rome and the surrounding area, is also a warrior goddess and the goddess of women and childbirth. It is well established in studies of Greek polytheism that the spheres of interest of individual deities within the pantheon were more complicated than a one to one correlation (Venus/Aphrodite = goddess of love) would suggest; and that the spheres of deities were shifting, multiple and often defined not in isolation, but in a series of relationships with other gods and goddesses. It may well be, in other words, that Dumézil’s attempt to pin down particular divine functions so precisely was itself misconceived.⁴³ But, even if that were not the case, it is hard to find any of the main deities at Rome that does not cross some or all of Dumézil’s most important boundaries.

    Dumézil’s theorizing shows us once more how powerful in accounts of early Roman religion is the mystique of origins and schemata. But in the end we are confronted with an imaginary Roman tradition of the history of their early religion; with individual pieces of information preserved in later writing either randomly or (in the case of priestly record keeping) by a process of selection we can hardly guess at; with glimpses of different kinds of information and different kinds of religious experience; and with a variety of theories that attempt to explain the information we have. This is both too little and too much. Probably most important for our understanding of Roman religion is the mythic tradition, with its tales of Romulus and Numa, the origins of customs and rituals, that was one of the most powerful ways of thinking about religion that the Romans devised. But, as we have seen, it was not a ‘history’ of religion in our terms.

    We have adopted a quite different approach for exploring the history of Roman religion. We have not followed the method, so often tried before, of seeking the ‘real’ religion of Rome by stripping away the allegedly later accretions, but rather have used precisely the opposite method. The next three sections (2–5) of this chapter analyse the central structural characteristics of Roman republican religion, very largely based on evidence that refers to the last three centuries of that period. In doing so we have not restricted ourselves to the contemporary first-century B.C. material of Cicero and Varro, but have drawn on the account of Livy (writing after the end of the Republic) for the third and second centuries B.C. We do this on the principle that the structural features of any religion change only slowly, and that the third-century system as described by Livy is recognizably similar to the first-century world we know from contemporary sources. In other words we claim that (for all the early imperial interpretation he cast on his material) Livy understood well enough the functioning of the republican religious system to represent it in its broad outlines.

    We also accept, however, that the further back in time we attempt to project this picture, the more risk there is that it will be seriously misleading. It is virtually certain that some of the features of republican religion that we identify (for example, some of the priesthoods and priestly colleges) stretched back, in some form, into the earliest period of Rome’s history; and that more could be traced back at least to the very earliest period of the Republic itself. On the other hand it is also certain that an overall picture valid for the third century B.C. would be quite invalid for the period of the kings, and in some respects for the early Republic too. There were major breaks in the history of Rome not only at the time of the ‘fall of the kings’ (traditionally put in the late sixth century B.C.) but also in the last decades of the fourth century, when we can detect radical changes in the nature of the Roman state. It may well be, in fact, that the developed institutions of the Republic (which we and the Romans tend to push back to the years immediately following the end of the monarchy) largely took their distinctive shape at that time.

    The risks of assuming too much continuity (religious and political) from the very beginning of the Republic can be well illustrated by considering the tradition about patricians and plebeians. In the late Republic the patricians were a closed caste of ancient clans, while the plebeians were all the other Romans. At that date the patricians had very few political privileges, but some particular priesthoods were restricted to them alone; and in chapter two we shall see how the division applied in the main priestly colleges where places had to be held in certain numbers by patricians and plebeians. It is certainly the case that conflict between patricians and plebeians (and the plebeians’ claim to a share in the privileges of patricians) was a major feature of the late fifth and early fourth centuries B.C. And both ancient and modern historians have tended to assume that the distinction applied in an even stronger form in earlier periods: that in the first years of the Republic and even under the monarchy, all the rich, noble, office-holding families were patrician; all the others plebeian. In fact this assumption is very flimsy: it is very possible that there were more than two status groups in the fifth century B.C.; and quite certain that power was not limited to patricians – for example the recorded names of some of the early magistrates are not patrician; and in fact the kings all have non-patrician names. It seems fairly clear that there were radical changes in Roman society between 500 and 300 B.C., marked in part by the increasing rigidity of the patrician/plebeian distinction; we must reckon with the possibility that religious authority changed radically in its character too.44

    Our argument is that by starting with the developed republican structure we are providing an introduction to the ideas and institutions that will recur throughout this book. At the same time, we are defining a framework within (and against) which to interpret the evidence about earlier Rome, by beginning to assess how similar or different the earliest conditions may have been. Accordingly sections 5 and 6 of this chapter will return to consider the transition from monarchy to Republic, and the character of religious change in the early republican years.

2.   The priests and religious authority

In the late Republic, one of the most distinctive features of the Roman religious system was its priestly organization, consisting of a number of ‘colleges’ and other small groups of priests, each with a particular area of religious duty or expertise. Two underlying principles stand out: first, the sharp differentiation of priestly tasks (priests were specialists, carrying out the particular responsibilities assigned to their college or group); second, collegiality (priests did not operate as individuals, but as a part or as a representative of the group – there was no specific ritual programme for any individual, while any member of the college could properly perform the rituals). This is the basic structure that Roman writers ascribed (mythically) to Numa; and they assumed that it operated in the early republican period too – where, we are told, there were three major colleges of priests: the pontiffs (pontifices) the augurs (augures) and the ‘two men for sacred actions’ (duoviri, later increased to the ‘ten men’ decemviri sacris faciundis);⁴⁵ a fourth college, the fetials (fetiales), was perhaps of comparable importance. These four colleges, whose members normally held office for life, were consulted as experts by the senate within their own area of responsibility, and on those issues the senate would defer to their authority. Other groups of priests had ritual duties, on particular occasions or in relation to particular cults, but were not, so far as we know, officially consulted on points of religious law.⁴⁶

         Fig. 1.3 Heads of two flamines, from the south frieze of the Ara Pacis, Rome (4.3); their religious importance is marked by their leading the procession of priests (behind Augustus as pontifex maximus, but ahead of all the other priests) and they are distinguished by their head-gear, a bonnet with a projecting baton of olive-wood (apex). (Height, c. 0.2m.)

    This general view of the colleges needs some qualification in particular cases. First, the college of pontifices had a far more complex structure than the others. They had a recognized leader (the pontifex maximus), who, from the third century B.C. onwards, was elected publicly from the existing pontifices, not, as before, chosen by his colleagues. The college also contained a number of other priestly officials: as full members, the rex sacrorum and the flamines of the gods Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus; and in some sense associated with the college, even if not ‘members’, the Vestal Virgins, the scribes of the pontifices, and the twelve lesser flamines.47 The fifteen flamines, through the very nature of their priesthood, suggest a different principle of religious organization: each had his own god to whom he was devoted; he had his ritual programme which he himself, individually, had to fulfil; and he was to a greater or lesser degree restricted in his movements and behaviour. It is a reasonable guess that this represents a very old system of priestly office holding; that the flamines had once been independent of the colleges, but were later subordinated to the pontifices.⁴⁸

    The haruspices (diviners) were a second set of priests whose activity diverged from the standard collegiate pattern. One of their main areas of expertise was the interpretation of prodigies. Prodigies were events, reported from Rome or in its territories, which the Romans regarded as ‘unnatural’ and took as dangerous signs or warnings – monstrous births, rains of blood, even strokes of lightning. These had to be considered by the senate, who took priestly advice and recommended action to avert the danger.49 The history of this priestly group is complicated by the fact that ancient writers refer to ‘haruspices’ fulfilling a wide variety of functions quite apart from the interpretation of prodigies; and it is far from clear whether we are dealing with a variety of religious officials (all going under the same name) or a single category.⁵⁰ It is clear, however, that there was no such thing as a haruspical college until the end of the Republic⁵¹ – although this did not prevent their being consulted by the senate much earlier. In fact, some of the reports of such consultations in the early Republic describe them as being specifically summoned to Rome from Etruria to give advice on prodigies.⁵² If those reports imply that the haruspices were literally foreigners, outside experts in a particularly Etruscan variety of religious interpretation, that would of course explain their lack of a Roman-style collegiate organization. But so also would the possibility (as may well have been the case later) that these officials were not literally foreign themselves, but were seen as ‘foreign’ in the sense that they were the representatives of a foreign religious skill. For even if modern archaeology has increasingly come to argue that Etruria and Rome were part of a shared common culture in the sixth century B.C. and even later, Roman imagination in the centuries that followed did not see it that way: for them Etruscan religious traditions were different and alien, and sometimes powerful for that very reason. In this case, a different priestly organization might have been one way of defining and marking as different the religious traditions those priests represented. The ‘Etruscan-ness’ of the haruspices might, in other words, count as the first of several instances we shall discuss in this book where Roman religion constructively used the idea of foreignness as a way of differentiating various sorts of religious power, skill and authority; the first instance of ‘foreignness’ as a religious metaphor, reflected here in priestly organization.⁵³

    These various priestly groups at Rome were not ranked in a strict hierarchy of religious authority. The basic rule, even for those that we think of as the more ‘important’ colleges, was that each group had their own area of concern and of expertise, within which sphere the others never interfered. The pontifex maximus had some limited disciplinary powers, but mostly in relation to the priests and priestesses of his own college – the Vestals, the rex and the flamines; in the Republic he had no authority over the whole of the priestly structure of the city, let alone control more generally over the relations between the Romans and their gods.54 But this raises the question of where such authority did lie, and how priestly power was defined and exercised. In the rest of this section we will show that the capacity for religious action and for religious decision-making was widely diffused among different Roman authorities (not only priests); that there was no single central power that controlled (or even claimed to control) Roman relations with their gods; and that the position of the priests can only be understood in the context of the rest of the constitutional and political system of the city. The first step will be to examine the work of the major colleges.

         Fig. 1.4 Bronze mirror from Vulci, late fourth B.C., with the name Kalchas inscribed next to the figure. Kalchas is the Greek prophet of the Iliad, but is here shown as an Etruscan diviner and – surprisingly -winged: he examines a liver (see 7.4b); other entrails are on the altar. The iconography suggests that Etruscans, as well as Romans, were using foreignness to define their own religious traditions. (Height, 0.18m.)

    The augures were the experts in a variety of techniques used to establish the will of the gods, known as ‘taking of the auspices’ (auspicia).55 The best-known and probably the earliest of these techniques involved observing the flight and activity of particular species of birds, but the augurs also dealt with the interpretation of thunder and lightning, the behaviour of certain animals and so on (one way of discovering divine will was by feeding some special sacred chickens and seeing if they would eat).56 They were not, however, concerned with every kind of communication with the gods: the augurs were not consulted about the interpretation of prodigies; and seem to have had nothing at all to do with the reading of entrails at sacrifices, which was the business of officials known (again) as haruspices. The augures did not themselves normally take the auspices. It was usually the city magistrates who carried out the ceremonies and the observations required in their roles as war-leaders or as political or legal officials; and they passed on the right to take the auspices year by year to their successors.⁵⁷ In normal cases, an augur would be present as adviser, perhaps as witness; and after the event, the augural college would be the source of judgement on the legality of what had been done or not done.

    These procedures were integrally bound up with the definition of religious boundaries and religious space – one of the most technical and complex areas of Roman religious ‘science’. Occasionally signs from the gods might come unasked, in any place and on any occasion;⁵⁸ but normally the human magistrate would initiate the communication, specifically seeking the view of the gods on a particular course of action or a particular question. On these occasions the place of consultation and the direction from which the sign came were crucially important. The taker of the auspices defined a templum in the heavens, a rectangle in which he specified left, right, front and back; the meaning of the sign depended on its spatial relationship to these defined points. These celestial rectangles had a series of equivalents on earth to which the same term was applied. Confusingly, a ‘temple’ in our sense of the word might or might not be a templum in this sense: the ‘temple’ of Vesta, for instance, was strictly speaking an aedes (a ‘building’, a house for the deity) not a templum; while some places that we would never think to call ‘temples’ were templa in this technical sense –such as the senate-house, the comitium (the open assembly area in the forum in front of the senate house), and the augurs’ own centre for taking auspices, the auguraculum.⁵⁹ All these earthly temples were ‘inaugurated’ by the augurs, after which they were said (obscurely to us and probably to many Romans too) to have been ‘defined and freed’ (effatum et liberatum).

    Augural expertise, therefore, concerned not just the interpretation of signs but the demarcation of religious space and its boundaries. They operated as a system of categorizing space both within the city and between the outside world and Rome itself; this categorization in turn corresponded to the different types of auspices. One of their most important lines of division was the pomerium, the sacred and augural boundary of the city; it was only within this boundary that the ‘urban auspices’ (auspicia urbana) were valid; and magistrates had to be careful to take the auspices again if they crossed the pomerium in order to re-establish correct relations with the gods.60

    The realm of the augures provides one of the clearest examples of the convergence of the sacred and the political. All public action in Rome took place within space and according to rituals falling within the province of the augurs. The passing of laws, the holding of elections, discussion in the senate – all took place within spaces defined by the application of augural ritual (the senate, for example, could only meet in a templum); each individual meeting was preceded by the taking of the auspices by the magistrates responsible. It followed that the validity of public decisions was seen as dependent on the correct performance of the rituals and on the application of a network of religious rules, whose maintenance was the augurs’ concern; and in the constitutional crises of the late republican period, their right to examine whether a religious fault (vitium) had occurred in any proceeding of the assemblies gave them a critical role in public controversies. All these augural processes were central to the relations between the city and the gods, and to the legitimacy of public transactions. This is why the augurs were so important politically.

    We get a glimpse, however, of a strikingly different image of the augurs in one of the stories told about Rome’s earliest history. If the records of augural activity through the Republic stress the technical, sometimes legalistic, skill of the augurs, embedded at the heart of the political process, a story told by Livy of the early augur Attus Navius and his conflict with King Tarquin presents the priest as a miracle worker in conflict with the political power of the state (here represented by the monarch).⁶¹ Challenging the power of the king, so the story goes, Navius claimed that he would carry out whatever Tarquin had in his mind; Tarquin triumphantly retorted that he was thinking of cutting a whetstone in half with a razor – which Navius promptly and miraculously did. A commemorative statue of Navius apparently stood in the forum (in the centre of Roman political and religious space) through most of the Republic.⁶² There are many ways to interpret this story and the vested interests that may have lain behind its telling (that it is, for example, a reflection of later conflicts between augurs and a dominant political group; or that it is a surviving hint of a very different type of early priestly activity; and so on); but on almost any interpretation, it is a strong reminder that recorded details of priestly action do not account for the whole of the priestly story; that the historical tradition (in our sense) has its limitations. Priests had a role in Roman myth and imagination, which also determined the way they were seen and operated in the city. In this case, it is not just a question of stories told, or read in Livy. When the republican augur went about his priestly business in the Forum, he did so under the shadow of a statue of his mythical, miracle-working predecessor.

    The pontifices had a wider range of functions and responsibilities than the augurs, less easily defined in simple terms. As a starting point, we might say that their religious duties covered everything that did not fall specifically within the activities of the augures, the fetiales and the duoviri. Like these other colleges, they were treated as experts on problems of sacred law and procedure within their province – such matters as the games, sacrifices and vows, the sacra connected with Vesta and the Vestals, tombs and burial law, the inheritance of sacred obligations. Their powers of adjudication do not seem at first sight to lie in areas as politically charged as those dealt with by the augurs; but these issues were, as we shall see, of central importance to public and private life at Rome and the pontifices continued throughout the Republic to be as distinguished as the augures in membership.63

    The pontifices were unlike other priestly colleges in several respects. We have already seen that their collegiate structure was rather different from the others; they also differed in having functions that took them right outside the limits of religious action – ‘religious’, that is, in our sense. At its grandest, the role envisaged for them by Roman writers is as the repository of all law, human or divine; Livy suggests that, down to 304 B.C., the formulae, the precise form of words without which no legal action could begin, were secrets known only to the pontifices.⁶⁴ The significance and history of their legal role is a difficult problem. It is certainly possible that there was a specific ‘religious’ origin here; that pontifices were the earliest source of legal advice for the citizen, essentially on matters of religious procedure, such as the rules of burial – but that, since religious and non-religious law overlapped extensively, the range of advice they offered and the area of their expertise gradually widened.⁶⁵ More certainly, the pontificeswere responsible for the calendar; for the supervision of adoptions and some other matters of family law; and for the keeping of an annual record of events.

    Their control of the calendar goes beyond interest merely in the annual festivals, although that would have been part of their task; the calendar also determined the character of individual days – whether the courts could sit, whether the senate or the comitia (assemblies) could meet. The priests were responsible, amongst other things, for ‘intercalation’. All systems of timekeeping face the problem of keeping their yearly cycle in step with the 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes 46.43 seconds (more or less) that it actually takes for the earth to circle the sun. Modern Western calendars solve this problem by adding an extra day to their 365 day calendar once every four years (in a leap year).66 The Roman republican calendar of 355 days needed to add (‘intercalate’) a whole month at intervals that were determined by the pontifices. The college also fixed the celebration of some of the important festivals which had no set date; and the sacred king (rex sacrorum), a member of the college, had the task of announcing the beginning of each month (perhaps a survival from an earlier form of the calendar when months began when the new moon was observed). The everyday organization of public time was pontifical business.⁶⁷

    The pontifices’ concern with adoptions, wills and inheritances inevitably involved some elements of strictly religious interest – since each of these areas affected a family’s religious obligations (sacra familiaria) and raised problems about who would maintain them into the next generation. The college’s duties in this area would very likely have drawn them into wider issues of the continuity of family traditions and the control of property, where conflicts would have demanded adjudication between families or between clans (gentes).⁶⁸ The most (to us) unexpected of pontifical duties was, perhaps, the recording of events. A fragment preserved from the history of Cato the Elder (written in the first half of the second century B.C.) states that they were responsible at that time for ‘publishing’ the great events of the day on a whitened board, displayed in public;⁶⁹ these public reports, according to other writers, formed the basis of a permanent annual record, known to Cicero and, at least allegedly, going back to the earliest times.⁷⁰ We do not know exactly what this record contained, or when it was first kept. Roman writers seem to refer to it, however, as one of the college’s traditional duties.

    We are faced then with a range of what we should call ‘secular’ functions, as well as the ‘religious’ ones. One possibility is that the pontiffs were not an exclusively religious body in early Rome; but, rather than imagine that the ‘priests’ were not wholly ‘religious’, it is more helpful to think that what counted as ‘religion’ was differently defined. In almost all cultures the boundary between what is sacred and what is secular is contested and unstable. One of the themes underlying the chapters of this book will, precisely, be the gradual differentiation of these two spheres and the development, for example, of a religious professionalism at Rome that tried to distinguish itself sharply from other areas of human activity. But for the pontiffs of the very early period, there is no reason to assume that some of their tasks seemed more or less ‘religious’ than others, more or less ‘priestly business’.

    What, however, of the apparently wide diffusion of their responsibilities, from burial to record-keeping, and beyond? Is there any possible coherence in these different tasks? A central focus of interest? Of course, coherence very much depends on who is searching for it. Different pontifices, different Romans, at different periods may have made sense of their combined responsibilities in quite different ways. But one guess is that there was a closer connection than we have so far stressed between their interest in family continuity and their practice of record-keeping; and that many of their functions shared a concern with the preservation, from past time to future, of status and rights within families, within gentes and within the community as a whole – and so also with the transmission of ancestral rites into the future. This gave the calendar too a central role, with its organization of the year’s time into its destined functions, and its emphasis on past ritual practice as the model for the future. The pontifices, in short, linked the past with the future by law, remembrance and recording.

Two other colleges have duties which bring them close to the central workings of the city. The fetials (fetiales) controlled and performed the rituals through which alone a war could be started properly; to ensure that the war should both be, and be seen to be, a ‘just war’ (bellum iustum).71 The most detailed accounts of their activities date from a period when much of their ritual must have been modified or discontinued; but, if Livy is to be believed at all,⁷² they were in early times responsible both for ritual action and for what we should call diplomatic action – conveying messages and demanding reparations. Later on, they could still be called upon by the senate, to give their view on the correct procedures for the declaration of hostilities.73 The duoviri sacris faciundis were the guardians of the Sibylline Books.⁷⁴ The Books themselves will be discussed in a later section,⁷⁵ but it is clear enough that the prophetic verses which they contained, and which the college kept and consulted on the senate’s instructions, were believed to be of great antiquity. When prodigies were reported, one of the options before the senate, instead of consulting the haruspices, was to seek recommendations from the Books. These recommendations repeatedly led to the foundation or introduction of foreign cults, normally Greek and celebrated according to the so-called ‘Greek rite’ (Graeco ritu).⁷⁶ In these cases the priests may have had some continuing responsibility for the new cult; but there is no evidence that the duoviri exercised any general supervision over Greek cults – to match the supervision that the pontifices came to exercise over Roman ones. Both fetiales and duoviri kept within closely defined areas of action.

    All the priests we have looked at exercised their authority within a set of procedures that involved non-priests as well as priests, the ‘political’ as well as the ‘religious’ institutions of the city. Priests themselves were not part of an independent or self-sufficient religious structure; nor do they seem ever to have formed a separate caste, or to have acted as a group of specialist professionals, defined by their priestly role. From the third century onwards, the historical record preserves the names of a good proportion of augures and pontifices; from this it is clear that priests were drawn from among the leading senators – that is, they were the same men who dominated politics and the law, fought the battles, celebrated triumphs and made great fortunes on overseas commands.⁷⁷ Although they were in principle the guardians of religious, even of secret, lore, they were not specially trained or selected on any criterion other than family or political status. The holders of the less prominent priesthoods (such as the Salii or Arval Brothers) are less well known to us; but there is little, if any, sign that they were chosen as religious specialists. That is not to say that priests, or some of them, did not become experts in the traditions and records of their colleges; some of them vaunted the technicalities of their discipline and by the late Republic (as we shall see in Chapter 3) proclaimed themselves expert in the history, procedures and religious law of their colleges. But they were always (and arguably by definition) men with a bigger stake in Rome than narrowly ‘religious’ expertise. Cicero regarded this situation as one of the characteristic and important features of the tradition of Rome and as a source of special strength: that (as he put it) ‘worship of the gods and the highest interests of the state were in the hands of the same men.’78

    There is no doubt that by the middle Republic, the priest-politician was an established figure; whether this situation goes right back to the beginnings of the Republic must be more open to debate – though it is usually assumed that it does. The names of some very early priests of the Republic are handed down in the historical tradition; but we cannot be certain that these names are accurately recorded, let alone whether the men concerned were consuls, or other leading magistrates, as well. (It is only later that we can make such confident identifications of individuals.) In some particular respects, the early republican situation must have been different from the later one: the number of priests in the major colleges was far smaller – two or three, as compared to eight or nine after 300 B.C.; and again, they were almost certainly all members of patrician families – plebeians seem to have become members of the duoviri when they were increased to ten in 367 B.C., and of the pontifices and augures only in 300 B.C.⁷⁹

    But might there have been an entirely different model of priesthood in the earliest Republic (and so also in the regal period)? Might there have been an earlier pattern of office-holding which sharply divided religious from political duties? Even in the later period, some priests were prevented by traditional rules from entering other areas of public life. The sacred king (rex sacrorum) was prevented from holding any office; but – insofar as he was thought to have taken over the religious functions of the deposed king – he is a very special case (to which we shall return in Section 5 of this chapter). The major flamines were sometimes prevented by their duties or by the regulations of their priesthoods from holding or exercising all the duties of magistrates; the flamen Dialis, for example, was forbidden by these rules to be absent from his own bed for more than two consecutive nights – so obviously could not command an army on campaign.⁸⁰ Such restrictions were, step by step, relaxed in the later Republic, until the flamines came to play the normal role of an aristocrat in public life. One speculation is that all the other priests too had originally been excluded from public life and from warfare; but that they had followed the same route as the flamines (towards a mixed, religious-political career) at a much earlier date. On this view, the very early colleges would have represented much more specialized religious institutions; but as time went on the priestly offices (which unlike the short-term elected magistracies gave their holder a public position for life) might have become tempting prizes for the aristocratic leaders of the day – who gradually brought priesthoods within the sphere of a political career.

    It would be difficult to disprove this theory; but on balance the view that the priestly colleges had always been part of political life seems more likely to be right. The fundamental difference between the colleges of priests and the flamines might not, in any case, be best defined by their political activity. The crucial distinction lies rather in their numbers. The flamines, as we have seen, essentially acted as individuals: the flamen Dialis, especially, had a ritual programme that only he could perform – so rules to keep him in the city had a particular point (quite apart from preventing a military or political career). It is a central characteristic of the augures and the pontifices, on the other hand, that they were full colleagues – one could always act instead of another, so that limitations on their movements as individuals would never have been so necessary. If the flamines represent (as they most likely do) some very early pattern of priestly office-holding, that model is distinguished from the later one by its non-collegiality; and the political differences follow from that.81

    The authority exercised by the priestly colleges can only be understood in relation to the authority of magistrates and senate. In general, the initiative in religious action lay with the magistrates: it was they who consulted the gods by taking the auspices before meetings or battles; it was they who performed the dedication of temples to the gods; it was they who conducted censuses and the associated ceremonies; it was they who made public vows and held the games or sacrifices needed to fulfil the vows. The priest’s role was to dictate or prescribe the prayers and formulae,⁸² to offer advice on the procedures or simply to attend. Again, when it came to religious decision-making, it was not with the priests, but with the senate that the effective power of decision lay. To take one example: when a piece of legislation had been passed by the assemblies, but by some questionable procedure, the priests might be asked by the senate to comment on whether a fault (vitium) had taken place; but, subject to the ruling the priests offered, it would be the senate not the priests who would declare the law invalid on religious grounds.⁸³ The procedure for dealing with the annual prodigy-reports suggests much the same relationship; the senate heard the reports and decided to which groups of priests, if any, they should be referred; the priests replied to the senate; the senate ordered the appropriate actions to take place; it was often the magistrates who carried out the ceremonials on the city’s behalf.⁸⁴

    To the modern observer, this procedure makes the priests look rather like a constitutional sub-committee of the senate, but this may be a misleading analogy. It is true that the priests lacked power of action, but on the other hand they were accepted as supreme authorities on the sacred law in their area. Once the senate had consulted them, it seems inconceivable that their advice would have been ignored. And when smaller issues were at stake – such matters as the precise drafting of vows, the right procedure for the consecration of buildings, the control of the calendar – the priests themselves must in practice have had freedom of decision. This follows the pattern we have already seen at several points in this chapter of the close convergence of religion and politics: religious authority in the general sense has to be located in the interaction (according to particular rules and conventions) of magistrates, senate and priests, each college in its own sphere. This implies that, even if they were not sole arbiters, the priests must from a very early period have occupied a critical position in Roman political life, and they must often have been at the centre of controversy over points of ritual and religious procedure with all the political consequences that were entailed. So too, priests must always have been liable to the charge that they were prejudiced in favour of friends and against enemies, that personal or ‘political’ interests were determining their ‘religious’ decisions. The idea that Roman priests had once been quite innocent of politics is only a romanticizing fiction about an archaic society.

3.   Gods and goddesses in the life of Rome

The first characteristic of Roman gods and goddesses to strike us must be the wide range of different types, all accepted and worshipped. At one extreme, there were the great gods – Mars, Jupiter, Juno and others – each having a variety of major functions, traditions, stories and myths; some of these stories originated in the Greek world, but when told, re-told and adapted in a Roman context they became a central part of a specifically Roman view of their gods. At the other extreme were deities who performed one narrowly defined function or who appeared only in one narrowly defined ritual context. As we have seen, even parts of a natural or agricultural process (such as ploughing) could have their own presiding deity;85 and the possibility of still further unnamed or unknown gods and goddesses was sometimes admitted and allowed for in ritual formulae: for example, an inscription on a republican altar found on the Palatine hill in Rome runs, ‘To whichever god or goddess sacred, Gaius Sextius Calvinus, praetor, restored it by decree of the senate.’⁸⁶ The time-honoured way of dealing with this variety in the Romans’ conception of their gods has been to claim that the gods had become ‘frozen’ at different points in their evolution: the functional deities represent an early stage of development, when primitive man worshipped powers residing in the natural world, but did not yet see those powers as ‘personalities’;87 it was only later that the fully-blown, characterful gods and goddesses emerged as well. But whether or not that evolutionary scheme helps to explain the varieties of divine powers we find at Rome, the important fact is that throughout the republican period, all the types seem to have co-existed with no sign of uneasiness – any more than there seems to be any uneasiness about adding to the pantheon by introducing new deities from outside Rome or recognizing new divine powers at home. It may be that the priests did attempt to list and classify the gods; but, if so, this does not seem to have produced any general convergence of the different types or to have produced (as was sometimes the case in the Greek theological tradition) elaborate genealogies of the different ‘generations’ of gods to explain the differences between them.

    There are only a few traces of intermediate categories (like ‘heroes’ in Greece) that lay between gods and men. It may be that the dead should be seen as such a category, since they did (as we shall see) receive cult at the festivals of the Parentalia and Lemuria – not as individuals but as a generalized group, under the title of the di Manes or divi parentes (literally, ‘the gods Manes’ or ‘the deified ancestors’).⁸⁸ And, with the exception of the founders – Aeneas, Romulus and perhaps Latinus (the mythical king of the Latins) – men did not become gods, either when alive or after death;⁸⁹ even these three exceptions are equivocal, because it is not clear how far they themselves became gods, or how far they became identified with gods which already existed (Aeneas with Indiges, Romulus with Quirinus, Latinus with Jupiter Latiaris).⁹⁰ Dramatic interaction, however, between humans and gods did occasionally take place: Mars had sexual intercourse with the virgin Rhea Silvia and so begot Romulus; Numa negotiated banteringly with Jupiter and slept with the nymph Egeria; Faunus or Inuus seized and raped women in the wild woods; Castor and Pollux appeared in moments of peril.⁹¹ But these mythical or exceptional transactions apart, Roman writers represent communication between men and gods primarily through the medium of ritualized exchange and the interpretation of signs – not through intervention, inspiration or incubation. We have already seen that evidence from archaeology can suggest a rather wider picture;92 but for most of this section we shall be concentrating on written material (prayers, vows and formulae), and on the distinctive characteristics of communication between Romans and their gods.

    The Roman historical record preserves a considerable body of texts which claim to be direct quotations of words spoken on particular religious occasions. Though very little survives from the earliest period of the Republic (and what does may largely be later antiquarian invention), there is enough from the third century B.C. on to give us some grasp of the conceptions of divinity and divine behaviour that they embody. Of course, some of these quotations too may be historical fictions or forgeries. But there are nevertheless strong reasons to believe that from this period the accurate formulae of prayers and vows could and sometimes did enter historical accounts. Roman religion placed a great deal of emphasis on the most meticulous repetition of the correct formulae; supposedly, the slightest error in performance, even a single wrong word, led to the repetition of the whole ritual.⁹³ It also emphasized (as we have seen) the keeping of priestly records and the preservation of ancient writings and traditions. If the spoken word was important, it was presumably also written down with care and accuracy. In what follows we have assumed that the quotations and formulae that we find (mostly) in Livy do derive ultimately from this form of priestly record keeping; and that even if they are not exactly what they claim to be (not, that is, the exact words spoken on the particular occasion described) they are at least a more or less accurate version of words used on occasions of that kind. But there are difficulties too. We discussed in the first section of this chapter the problem of using such ‘nuggets’ of information or texts from early Rome out of context. In this case, the preserved texts were originally part of a complex of ritual action, which we can only sketchily recreate and which would almost certainly have modified the meaning of the words in use. Imagine trying to reconstruct the action, atmosphere and significance of any contemporary religious ritual simply on the basis of a text of the words spoken.

    Some of these quotations preserve public vows, which make very precise undertakings to named gods, explaining the help or benefit asked of the god, laying down the conditions under which the vow will be counted as fulfilled and specifying the gift or ritual action with which the help of the god will be rewarded; these rewards take the form of offerings, sacrifices, special games, the building of temples and so on. Vows could be made in special circumstances or crises (asking for help in war, for example); but there were also regular annual vows for the well-being of the state (respublico), taken by the year’s consul. The most elaborate example we have dates from the early years of the Hannibalic War (217 B.C.), though its wording reflects far earlier traditions.94 It is highly unusual in the reward it promises to the gods, but it nevertheless illustrates very clearly one of the characteristic ways the Romans conceptualized the relationship of the divine to their human worshippers. The vow promises the celebration of a so-called ‘Sacred Spring’ (ver sacrum), that is the sacrifice to the gods, in this case Jupiter, of the whole product of a single spring – all the pigs, sheep, goats and cattle that were born. This extraordinary offer (which we otherwise know only from mythical accounts of early Italy) was made subject to a series of reservations: the people were to lay down the dates which would constitute the ‘spring’; if there were to be any error or irregularity in the sacrificial procedure the sacrifice would nevertheless count as properly conducted; if any intended victim were to be stolen, the blame should fall on others than the Roman people or the owner. There is to be no doubt about what will, or will not, count as fulfilment of the vow. The formula also specifies exactly what is asked of the gods: that the Roman people should be kept safe for five years in their war both with the Carthaginians and with the Gauls of North Italy, who had joined Hannibal.

         Fig. 1.5 A selection of coins of the third century B.C., showing some of the earliest surviving representations of Roman deities: (a) Mars (didrachm, 280–276 B.C.); (b) Minerva (litra, c. 269 B.C.); (c) Apollo (as, 275–270 B.C); (d) Jupiter, in a four-horse chariot driven by Victory (didrachm, 225-214 B.C.) (e) Janus (as, 225–217 B.C); (f) Sol (uncia, 217–215 B.C).

    The precise and apparently legalistic formulae of this and other vows has often given the impression that Roman vows were ‘contractual’ in the sense that the gods were seen as laid under an obligation by the mere fact of the taking of the vow. Whatever the individual worshipper may have hoped, in this case (and in general) that is not what the words state or imply. The Romans offered honour and worship in return for divine benevolence; the gods were free to be benevolent or not; if they were not, no obligation arose on either side; no rewards were given. There was, of course, a reciprocity, as in many other religious transactions. If all went well, the humans received the worldly benefits they desired. The gods too benefited in the way that was carefully defined in the original formula: they were bound only in one sense, that is that they would accept as sufficient exactly what they were offered – no more, no less. There are clear analogies here with Roman behaviour outside religion: the Greek historian Polybius, for example, writing in the second century B.C. states that a Roman expected to be paid his debt on the agreed day, not a day later – but not a day earlier either.95 Roman gods, whether or not anthropomorphic in form, were given mentality and behaviour that mirrored those of their worshippers on a larger scale. There is no sense in which the gods should be seen as all-powerful or irresponsible, with humans as their helpless slaves. But nor could they be reliably controlled or predicted. They could, on the other hand, be negotiated with; they were indeed bound to the human community by a network of obligations, traditions, rules, within which the skill of the priests, magistrates and senate could keep them on the side of the city.

    Various forms of vow were used in a wide range of transactions.⁹⁶ In the case of war, the gods of the enemy could be seduced by evocatio, a vow offering them continuance of cult or possibly even a temple in Rome, if they withdrew their protection from their native city. The first known example of this was the evocation of Juno of the Etruscan city of Veii in 396 B.C., who was installed in a temple on the Aventine hill in Rome under the title Juno Regina.97 In the course of the war the general might also pray for aid to any god or goddess and vow a temple, not necessarily a warlike one, in return for the deity’s help. In the most extreme case, in face of a disaster in battle, the general even could dedicate himself and the legions of the enemy to the gods of the dead and to the Earth, in a ceremony known as devotio. In effect, he made himself sacred, the property of the gods (sacer), rather like a sacrificial victim;⁹⁸ he then had to mount a horse and rush precipitately to his death on the enemies’ spears. This is first reported as having happened in 340 B.C., when the consul Decius Mus offered his own life; some accounts have his son and grandson follow his example a generation and two generations later.⁹⁹ Here the consul’s death obviously counted as the fulfilment of the vow, though in that respect the sequence of events was different from usual – since the vow had to be fulfilled before the gods had had the opportunity to do their part. If the consul failed to die, according to Livy, an over-life-size image was buried in the earth, evidently as an attempt to fulfil the unsatisfied vow.¹⁰⁰

    Vows and prayers were regularly recorded in Roman historical writing, manageable to the historian, precisely because they were verbal and hence transmittable. But there were other ways in which important communication took place between men and gods. Livy’s story of Decius in 340, in fact, contains two direct messages from gods to men. The first is almost unique in Livy’s narrative, in that it consists of a dream, warning Decius of what is to come; the second is a type of communication that is reported much more frequently in the literary tradition:

Before leading their men into battle, the Roman consuls offered sacrifice. It is said that the haruspex pointed out to Decius that the lobe of the liver was damaged where it referred to his own fortunes, but that in other respects the victim was acceptable to the gods; Manlius’ sacrifice, though, had been perfectly successful (egregie litasse). ‘All is well,’ replied Decius ‘if my colleague has obtained favourable omens.’¹⁰¹

The crucial word here is ‘litare’ (as a noun ‘litatio’); it can be used simply to mean ‘sacrifice’, but it normally involves the successful completion and acceptance of the victim by the gods. In this case, Decius already knew that he was destined to die for the legions and hence that it did not matter that it should be only his colleague who achieved litatio; in other circumstances, his own failure to do so would have been a disastrously bad sign.

    Animal sacrifice was the central ritual of many religious occasions; we know enough about it from both literary and archaeological evidence to understand its main stages.102 In structure, though not in detail, the ritual was closely related to the Greek ritual of sacrifice. The victim was tested and checked to make sure it was suitable; precise rules controlled the choice of sex, age, colour and type of victim, in relation to the deity and the occasion. After a procession to the altar and preparatory rites, a prayer was said in which the divine recipient was named; then the victim was made ‘sacred’ by the placing of wine and meal on its head and it was at this moment (so it was believed) that the signs (if any) appeared in the entrails that would imply the gods’ rejection of the offering.¹⁰³ The victim had to be killed by a single blow; its exta (entrails) were examined by the haruspices;¹⁰⁴ assuming that they were acceptable, the animal was then butchered, cooked and eventually eaten by the worshippers. If the exta showed unacceptable signs, further victims could be sacrificed until one was accepted and litatio achieved. The whole process was evidently bound by rules and by traditional lore; any error or misfortune – the victim escaping or struggling, the exta slipping when offered up at the altar – would have been very inauspicious.¹⁰⁵ Even the butchering seems to have involved special knowledge, with a technical sacred vocabulary for the many different kinds of cuts (and sausages) that were offered to the god.¹⁰⁶ The clear separation of the meat between those parts of the animal offered to the worshippers on the one hand and those offered to gods on the other is reminiscent of Greek sacrificial ritual; it implies (to draw on conceptions that have been elaborately developed in the study of Greek religion)107 that one of the functions of the ritual was to represent the division between gods and men by means of the rules and codes of eating and consumption – men being prohibited from consuming the parts designated for the gods. But the ritual offered opportunities for the exchange of messages – prayers from men to gods, warnings and messages of acceptance from gods to men encoded in the entrails.

    Warnings also came uninvited, from outside the ritual process. These warnings were in the form of prodigies, whose interpretation by the haruspices we have already noticed. They were for the most part what we would call natural events and there are relatively few that seem miraculous or supernatural in our terms; mostly they appear to have been events which defied Roman conceptions of normality – in modern anthropological terms, ‘objects out of place’, transgressing cultural boundaries, mixing the categories that nature was supposed to hold apart (such as wild animals penetrating the city’s space).¹⁰⁸ The lists of these prodigies that Livy preserves in the middle years of his history provides us with one of our best indications of the style of Roman religious activity.¹⁰⁹

    Roman writers do not generally regard such prodigies as the result of a direct intervention by the gods (it was not self-evidently the case that a god, for example, directly caused the monstrous birth); rather they see them as an implication that something relating to the gods had gone seriously wrong. Here, then, more than anywhere else, we find a divine irruption into human lives, demanding a response. That response, for the observer of such an event, was to report the prodigy to the senate in Rome; the senate either accepted the prodigy (that is, formally accepted that the event indicated some kind of rupture in the proper relationship of Rome to its gods and hence called for religious action), or it could rule that it had no public significance.¹¹⁰ Once accepted, it could be referred to the duovirioi (as we have seen) to the haruspices for advice, and the appropriate actions (remedid) to be taken by priests, magistrates or even the people as a whole, were determined. The effect of this action was neutralization of the warning. The signs were not taken to indicate fated or irreversible processes; nor were they taken as the opportunity for formal divination of the gods’ will, since traditionally all prodigies were implicitly bad signs – with large numbers, according to Livy, being reported at times of grave danger to the city.111 The crucial thing was that the resources of senatorial and priestly skill and wisdom were used to avert the dangers, even though there was no absolute guarantee of success. From a functional and political point of view, the system has been interpreted as a means of coping with crises, by focussing fears into an area within which the ruling class could claim special inherited expertise; while the remedia might offer an opportunity for holding elaborate ceremonies, sometimes including new festivals or new entertainments, so boosting public morale by civic display.¹¹²

    The overwhelming bulk of the evidence for this system of dealing with the prodigies comes from the later republican period, so the problem once again is whether we are justified in assuming that these practices date back at least to the early period of the Republic. There obviously must have been developments and modifications over the period; if nothing else, as Roman power expanded over Italy, prodigies were recognized throughout the whole peninsula, not just in the immediate area of Rome itself – and this geographical extension alone must have affected the way prodigies were reported, investigated and handled. On the other hand, there is some evidence that has been used to suggest a drastic change in procedures in the mid third century B.C. The evidence comes from the lists of prodigies included by Livy. The first ten books of his history mention occasional prodigies but have none of the regular lists that become common later. The second ten books no longer survive; but Julius Obsequens, who made a collection of Livy’s prodigy-lists in the fourth century A.D., began with the list for the year 249 B.C., from Livy’s nineteenth book.¹¹³ Obsequens’ chosen starting point may well indicate that Livy provided no regular lists until that point. But what kind of change would that imply? It could have been a major change in procedure, that resulted in the lists being publicly available for the first time; but it could have been a change in practices of recording (or even just the chance preservation of a set of documents) that enabled Livy to include that kind of information. Certainly there is no statement in any of our historical accounts that prodigies played a fundamentally different role in the early Republic.

    We have concentrated so far, unavoidably, on particular transactions between humans and gods which have left a mark in the historical record; but the gods, or at least reminders of them in the form of statues and other images, were a constant presence in Roman public and private space. It is not easy to have any very precise idea of the impact of such a presence on a society whose physical environment and experience are known to us only so fragmentarily, but some features still stand out. The early republican city must have been dominated by the great temple of the Capitoline triad, Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, which (as we can judge even from its few surviving traces) seems to have been built on a far greater scale than any of the subsequent republican sacred buildings (Fig. 1.6).¹¹⁴ Other temples throughout the Republic were much smaller; and many of the buildings that later became great temples will have been in the early period simply altars or holy places. None the less, the city’s public centre, the forum, was first laid out and paved as a civic centre before the end of the monarchy and quickly developed so that by the early Republic a series of sacred buildings bounded its southern side – the temples of Saturn, Castor, Vesta and also the Regia, the religious centre of the rex sacrorum and the pontifices.¹¹⁵

         Fig. 1.6 Model of the triple temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Juno and Minerva on the Capitoline Hill overlooking the forum of Rome. The plan, with twenty-four columns in all and eighteen in the grand portico, was supposed never to have been changed from republican times onwards.

    We can assume that, by this time, where there were temples there were also cult images;116 we have no way of telling how far these images would have been disseminated, whether there would have been terracotta reproductions, whether private houses would then, as they did later, have contained their own images of the household gods.¹¹⁷ By the end of the Republic these images of the gods were omnipresent and had their own ceremonial: they appeared before the temples on special couches (pulvinaria) so that offerings could be given them;¹¹⁸ they were carried in procession on special litters and their symbols in carriages (tensae); at the games (ludi) they had their own places from which they watched the racing in the circus; and at the heart of the oldest sets of ludi (the Roman and the Plebeian Games), there was also a ceremony called the epulum Iovis, ‘the feast of Jupiter’, which was presumably the offering or sharing of a meal in the presence of the image of Jupiter from the Capitol.¹¹⁹ There is clear evidence to suggest that all this must have been happening by the third century B.C.; although it is much harder to be sure how much of it goes back to the fifth century, or earlier.

    Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing at the beginning of the empire, gives what he claims to be a description of a fifth-century procession from the Capitoline temple to the Circus Maximus which took place before the ludi Romani (Roman Games).¹²⁰ Dionysius states that he found this account in the history of Fabius Pictor, a Roman senator who was writing in Greek around 200 B.C.¹²¹ If Dionysius is reliably reporting his source, it seems that Fabius himself either claimed or really believed that he was using a fifth-century document or record as the basis of his description. There are good reasons now to doubt that that could have been the case; however, it certainly implies that the ceremonial was well established by Fabius’ own time in the late third century.¹²² In Dionysius’ words:

At the very end of the procession came the statues of all the gods, carried on men’s shoulders – with much the same appearance as statues made by the Greeks, with the same costume, the same symbols and the same gifts, which according to tradition each of them invented and bestowed on humankind.¹²³

         Fig. 1.7 Bowl made in Rome or Latium, with the inscription: ‘Belolai pocolom’ = ‘Bellona’s dish’. The figure on the bowl could be Bellona herself, but it is quite different from later representations (where the goddess is normally portrayed in armour, not – as here – with dishevelled hair). This is one of a series of bowls bearing the name of deities prominent in Rome in the third century B.C. (other deities named include Aesculapius, Minerva, Venus etc.). To judge from their find-spots, they were not dedications (which would have been found in the particular temple of the deity), but may have functioned as temple souvenirs (taken away from the temple, and so found widely dispersed). The exact find-spot of this particular bowl is not known.

The history of the ludi is itself a matter of great controversy; we can do little more than guess which parts (if any) of the ceremonial go back to the early Republic, and so whether this procession of the images was amongst the original elements. We can however say that already by the third century B.C. it was treated as a traditional part of the ritual; that such images of gods were believed to have had a long history of appearance in Roman public ritual.

    Much of the evidence for the early history of the Roman gods remains tantalizing. But it is possible to offer a rough outline of their place in the life of Rome: closely involved in the political and military activity of the city, they are seen as forces outside the human community with whom the man of learning and skill, knowing the rules, traditions and rituals, can negotiate and communicate (and if necessary assuage); the activities of the city’s leaders on the city’s behalf could hardly be conceived except in the context of such a procedure of negotiation and joint action; divine benevolence (secured by human effort) was essential to the success of the state; Rome’s history in other words was determined by the actions of men and gods together.

4.   Religion and action

Much of the vocabulary used by the Romans in discussing their own religion seems to translate into words comfortably similar to those used in religious contexts today – ‘prayer’, ‘sacrifice’, vows’, ‘sacred’; in fact some of our own religious words derive directly from Latin. But translation is always elusive; and this apparent familiarity may be deceptive. It is in considering the relationship between religion and the social organization of republican Rome that the differences become most obvious. The sharpest difference of all is that, at least until the middle Republic, there is no sign in Rome of any specifically religious groups: groups, that is, of men or women who had decided to join together principally on grounds of religious choice. Of course, there were all kinds of groups in which religion played a part: from an early republican date, for example, various associations (collegia), such as burial or dining clubs, associated themselves with a divine patron, and were even called after the deity.124 So too individual citizens might act together with others in carrying out religious duties and ritual – their family, their gens, their fellow craftsmen or senators; but these were communities formed on the basis of birth, occupation, domicile or rank, not through any specifically religious conviction. In fact, to put it the other way round, it is hard to know what religious conviction might mean in a world where no religious affiliation resulted from it.

    This difference has important implications for the character of religious life at both the social and the individual level. At the social level, it means that there were no autonomous religious groups, with their own special value-systems, ideas or beliefs to defend or advocate; hence there was little chance that religion in itself would ever represent a force for advocating change or reform. At the individual level, it means that men and women were not faced with the need to make (or even the opportunity of making) acts of religious commitment; that in turn implies that they had no religious biographies, no moments of profound new experience or revelation such as to determine the course of their future lives. That, of course, is a much stronger claim. We do not want to suggest that religion was not important to any individual in republican Rome: there must have been many who were profoundly grateful to the gods for recovery from illness, others who were deeply impressed by a divine vision; conversely, at every period in Rome’s history, there must have been some who professed themselves thoroughly sceptical about the gods and their supposed activities. In some ways, that is just like today. The crucial difference is that these experiences, beliefs and disbeliefs had no particularly privileged role in defining an individual’s actions, behaviour or sense of identity. We have the notion, which they did not, of an individual having a ‘religious identity’ that can be distinguished from his or her identity as a citizen or as a family member. If asked what we are, we can say ‘a Catholic’, ‘a Moslem’, ‘an atheist’. It is only in a religious context where beliefs determine choices, that believing as such becomes a central element in the system. Religious ‘experiences’, ‘feelings’ or ‘beliefs’ must all have had quite different significances and resonances in early republican Rome.

    When we look, therefore, at the way in which religion and society interacted, we do not find special institutions and activities, set aside from everyday life and designed to pursue religious objectives; but rather a situation in which religion and its associated rituals were embedded in all institutions and activities. As we have already seen, the whole of the political and constitutional system was conducted within an elaborate network of religious ceremonial and regulation which had the effect of bringing the time, space and hence the validity of political action into the divine sphere. It may be true that this area of decision-taking, of elections and of legislation was the one in which (as our historical sources would have us believe) the gods were most interested; but in fact, all important areas of life, public or private, had some religious correlates. In this section we shall explore some of those other areas: notably warfare, agriculture and family life.

    Warfare was already sanctified by the rituals of the old calendar of festivals. In March – which had originally been the first month of the year – there was an interconnected set of festivals, mostly directed towards the god Mars (after whom the month was, and still is, named); and there was a corresponding set in October, somewhat less elaborate.125 On both occasions a central role was played by the priesthood of Salii, founded according to Roman myth by Numa to guard the sacred shields – the ancilia. The priests were all patricians, formed into two groups, of Mars and Quirinus respectively; on their festal days they danced through the streets, dressed in the distinctive armour of archaic foot-soldiers.¹²⁶ Whatever these ceremonies originally meant (and on this there is considerable argument), there can be little doubt that, at least by the fifth century B.C., they represented a celebration of the annual rhythm of war-making: marking the preparation for a new season of war in March; and in October marking the end of the season, and the putting aside of arms for the winter. In early Rome (when Rome’s enemies were still conveniently close at hand) warfare was the summertime activity of a part-time citizen army, fighting under their annual magistrates.

    The actual conduct of warfare was also set within a religious context. Fighting was always preceded by consultation of the gods and by sacrifices, whose rejection by the gods would imply a warning not to join battle.127 Essentially, the participants in the warfare would seek advantage by establishing a better relationship with the gods and greater claims to divine favour. Sacrifices were held, even in expectation of war, in order to obtain confirmation of the divine attitude; at the opening of the campaign, the ritual of the fetial priests was (as we have seen) intended to ensure that the war was acceptable to the gods as a ‘just war’; even in the midst of battle, vows were taken to induce the gods to look favourably or to desert the enemy.¹²⁸ By the end of the third century, the religious part of the whole process had become sufficiently familiar to be parodied by the playwright Plautus:

        The generals of both sides, ours and theirs,

        Take vows to Jupiter and exhort the troops.¹²⁹

But if religion and religious ritual penetrated the area of warfare, warfare and its consequences could penetrate the religious sphere of the city. The vows taken by generals could lead to spectacular war-memorials in the form of temples in the city; and the spoils of war might either find their way into the temples by way of dedications, or finance the building of monuments commemorating the generals’ achievements.¹³⁰ Less permanent, though perhaps even more spectacular, was the triumph, the ancient processional ritual, in which the victorious, returning war-leader paraded through the city’s streets at the head of his troops presenting his spoils and his prisoners to the cheering Roman people.¹³¹ He entered the city by a special gateway, the Triumphal Gate, splendidly dressed and riding in a chariot drawn by four horses; his procession made its way to the heart of the city by a special route leading eventually to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, where he laid wreaths of laurel in the statue’s lap.¹³² He himself was dressed in red and his face painted red, exactly like the statue of Jupiter (though in fact Jupiter’s dress was itself believed to be that of the ancient Roman kings). The name of the triumphator was then added to the special triumphal fasti; the supreme ambition of a Roman noble was achieved. In some sense, the triumphing general had been deified for the day and hence (true or not) we have the story of the slave, who stood at his shoulder and whispered: ‘Remember you are a man.’133 In any case, much of the ceremonial involved the temporary reversal of the usual forms; the general and his army were never otherwise allowed inside the city and the troops were licensed for this one day to shout abuse and obscenities at their general. Dressed as the god, no doubt in the symbolic terms of the ritual he was the god. But at the grand sacrifice of white oxen, with which the procession ended, it was the triumphator who sacrificed, Jupiter who received the victims.

    Agriculture, unlike warfare, was not the direct responsibility of the state. Nonetheless, the religious institutions of Rome were much concerned with agricultural success – on which, inevitably, the security and prosperity of the city rested. The calendar of festivals contains rituals connected with graincrops, with wine-production and with animal husbandry.¹³⁴ Some of these festivals have a clear focus. Thus, for instance, the central element of the Robigalia of 25 April was a sacrifice to protect the growing crops from blight.¹³⁵ Most of the other rituals connected with grain seem clear enough too: festivals marking the sowing of the seed (Sementivae) at the end of January – though sowing would have been taking place from autumn onwards; a cluster of festivals in April (in addition to the Robigalia) accompanying the period of the growing crops – the Fordicidia, which involved the sacrifice of a pregnant cow to Earth (Tellus), and a festival of Ceres, the goddess of corn;¹³⁶ festivals of high summer celebrating the harvesting, storing and protecting of the crops against various dangers.¹³⁷ Others are much less easy to explain; and in some cases their fixed timing in the calendar is hard to relate directly to agricultural activity. The two vine festivals (Vinalia), for example, held on 23 April and 19 August – originally, it was said, in honour of Jupiter¹³⁸ – do not coincide with any likely date for harvesting the grapes; the first was probably connected instead with the tasting of the previous year’s vintage.¹³⁹ The Parilia (21 April), the feast of shepherds, the clearest occasion on which the care of animals was the objective, raises another issue: by the end of the Republic this same festival was also interpreted as the celebration of the birthday of the city of Rome.140 Festivals did not have just a single meaning.

    Much modern discussion of this cycle of festivals has been under-pinned by the assumption that by the third century B.C. at the latest all these festivals were well on their way to becoming antiquarian survivals having no significance for contemporary, urban-dwelling Romans. It is no doubt true that in Roman religious practice, as in many others, rituals were maintained from year to year out of a general sense of scrupulousness, even where their original significance was long forgotten; it is also true that by the last years of the Republic, antiquarian writers occasionally note elements in these festivals that they cannot explain. By their time, it might be argued, Rome had grown so much and its largely immigrant population become so urbanized and so attached to imported religions, that there would have been little meaning left in the old agricultural rituals. This would be a controversial claim even under the empire; for there was probably never a time when the city of Rome ceased to think of agricultural concerns as central to its way of life. For the third century B.C., however, it is clearly misleading. Rome then was still very much open to the countryside; many of its residents would have owned farms or at least worked on them intermittently, others would have had relations who did; and they would all have been totally dependent on the produce of the local agricultural economy for their food-supply.¹⁴¹

    It is probably equally misleading to suggest that the simple fact that the festivals had fixed dates in a calendar made those festivals, or at least some of them, meaningless: for a festival intended to celebrate, say, the harvest would sometimes be late, sometimes early, only occasionally coincide exactly. This argument is often reinforced by reference to the Roman practice of intercalation. The insertion of a whole month every few years would have made the fit between the festival and the natural seasons fairly loose in any case. But when the pontifices neglected (as we know they sometimes did) the proper cycle of intercalation, the festival calendar would have been grotesquely out of step with the agricultural year; so grotesquely that the festival of the harvest could have been taking place before the seed had even sprouted. All this argument rests on misunderstandings. So far as we know, the early Roman calendar worked accurately enough; there is certainly no evidence that anything went seriously wrong with the cycle of intercalations before some mysterious aberrations at the end of the third century B.C. (presumably caused somehow by the troubles of the period of the Hannibalic War).142 Meanwhile, the whole case depends on the assumption that the Romans were very simple-minded in their conception of the relation between religious act and agricultural process; that, for example, a festival designed to ensure divine protection against mildew would be meaningless, unless at that very moment the crop was being damaged. In fact, it is partly the point of a communal, ritual calendar that it should transcend such particular, individual moments, offering a ritual structure that can represent and protect (say) the processes of the agricultural year without being constantly tied to the varied and unpredictable conditions of real-life farming. The Romans would have expected that the gods would stay favourable provided the ritual was properly performed at the time prescribed by the priests, following tradition and rule.

    A more fundamental question, however, concerns those festivals whose meaning appears to have been disputed even by the Romans themselves. We have already seen, in relation to Ovid’s Fasti, how interpretations of individual festivals inevitably changed over time. Nevertheless it has remained a convenient modern assumption that, at least at any one moment, each festival had an unambiguous meaning and a single point of reference; or that (to use the categories we have so far used in the section) a festival can be classified as ‘agricultural’ or ‘military’. The Robigalia provides the model here, for our sources connect it with mildew on the corn and with nothing else. In fact, even this case is questionable: it may well be that the Robigalia appears a simple ritual with a unitary meaning largely because we have so few sources that discuss it, and those we have happen to agree. But in many other festivals we are confronted with a profusion of different interpretations, or clearly perceived ambiguities in the ritual and its meaning. In the case of the Lupercalia, for example, at which a group of near naked youths ran round the city, striking those they met with a goat thong, some sources imply that it was a fertility ritual, others that it was a ritual of purification;¹⁴³ for the ritual of the October Horse (equus October), which involved the sacrifice of a horse to Mars, we read in one ancient writer that it was intended to make the crops prosper, in another that it was a war-ritual, connected with other October ceremonies concerned with the return of the army from its year’s campaigning.¹⁴⁴ How are we to deal with these discrepancies?

    One answer would stress that it is characteristic of rituals not only that their meanings change over time, but also that they are always liable to be interpreted in different ways by different people, or, for that matter, by the same people on different occasions. Rituals gather significance; though there will always be dominant interpretations, there is no such thing as a single ritual meaning. If only we knew more about the simple Robigalia, we would be bound to find a whole range of different, perhaps idiosyncratic, interpretations clustering around the idea of divine protection for the corn. We should, in fact, expect – rather than be surprised – that different writers explain the same festival in slightly (or significantly) different ways. This plurality of ritual meaning is a feature of almost any ritual system.

    There are, however, other specifically Roman issues at stake – as we can see clearly in the (contested) division between military and agricultural festivals. Our own system of classification rigidly separates those two areas of activity. But, as we have seen, in early Rome agriculture and military activity were closely bound up, in the sense that the Roman farmer was also a soldier (and a voter as well); and many of the most important Roman gods and goddesses reflected the life of the human community, with functions that cross these simple categories. It would then seem particularly unlikely that the festivals and their significance should have remained fixed within categories that applied neither to the gods nor to the worshippers. In the case of the October Horse, for example, we should not be trying to decide whether it is either a military, or an agricultural festival; but see it rather as one of the ways in which the convergence of farming and warfare (or more accurately of farmers and fighters) might be expressed.

    Our final topic in this section concerns the role of the individual citizen in these rituals, and the relationship of public, state religion to private and domestic life. For the most part, the festivals were conducted on their city’s behalf by dignitaries – priests, occasionally priestesses, and magistrates. The only obligation which was generally supposed to fall on the individual citizen was simply to abstain from work while the ceremonies were going on. How far this was obeyed in practice, we do not know. There was certainly some debate, reminiscent of rabbinical debate about the Sabbath, as to what exactly would count as work and what not for this purpose.145 But on no interpretation does the extent of the citizen’s necessary involvement in public ritual go any further. This might in turn imply that these public performances were something quite apart from the individual’s life, offering no personal involvement or satisfaction, only the remote awareness that somebody somewhere was protecting the city’s relationship with the gods. And from that argument it would be a short next step to say that the religion of individuals did not lie in the state cults at all, but in the cults of the family, house or farm to which they did attend personally. The paterfamilias was responsible for maintaining the traditional rites of his family, the worship of the Lares and Penates and the other sacra inherited from his ancestors and destined to be passed on to his descendants (the sacra familiae);146 while on the country estate, as we learn from the agricultural handbook of Cato the Elder, the whole household (familia) including the slaves, would gather together for ceremonies to purify the fields and to pray to the gods for protection and for the fertility of crops and herds.¹⁴⁷ Within the family also the stages of life were marked by religious rituals (rites de passage): the acceptance of the baby into the family, the admission of the child into adulthood, marriage, death and burial all fell within the sphere of family religious responsibility, even if (as we have seen) the pontifices were responsible for some legal aspects of family life and relationships.¹⁴⁸

    It is possible that for some Romans these private cults would have afforded a separate religious world within which they might have found the personal experience of superhuman beings, the sense of community and of their place in it, which the remoteness of the official cult denied them. Certainly a good deal of poetry of the first centuries B.C. and A.D. celebrates the depth of commitment that must sometimes have been felt towards the religion of the home.¹⁴⁹ And, as we saw earlier, the terracotta votives dedicated in healing cults may give us cause to doubt whether the individual’s religious experience was in fact as narrowly bounded as some literary sources have been thought to imply.¹⁵⁰ On the other hand, it is clear that historians have tended to project into this area, about which we really know so little, the elements that they postulate as essential to any religion – personal prayer and contact with the divine, deep feelings and beliefs about man’s relation to universal forces – that seem to be missing from the religious life of the Romans. The argument in its simplest terms goes something like this: Roman religion must have involved some forms of deep personal commitment; there is little or no sign of that in public cult; therefore it must have been found in the ‘private’ religion of home and family. Of course, that is possible. But the argument as it stands rests on the assumption that we challenged at the very beginning of this section: that Roman religion is a relatively familiar set of institutions, obeying roughly the same rules and fulfilling the same human needs as our own. If we accept that the Romans’ religious experience might be profoundly different from our own, then we do not necessarily have to search out a context for the personal expression of individual piety; we do not, in other words, have to find a context in which to imagine the Romans being ‘religious’ according to our own preconceptions of religiosity. But there are other reasons too for questioning the centrality of private as against public cults.

    The separation between city cult and family or farm cult should not be exaggerated. In some festivals, a central ceremony performed in the city was accompanied by rites conducted in families or in the countryside; in others, the only acts reported took place in the family, though it is likely that there was also some corresponding public ritual; other festivals again were celebrated by particular groups of the Roman people – such as the curiae, the 30 divisions of Roman citizens that probably stretched back well into regal times.151 The festivals for the dead (the Parentalia in February and the Lemuria in May) were, for example, essentially domestic festivals focussed on family ancestors, though there was also a public element when, on the first day of the Parentalia, a Vestal Virgin performed the rituals for the dead;¹⁵² at the Parilia in April, our descriptions of what took place clearly refer to individual farms, with the shepherd and even the sheep leaping over bonfires;¹⁵³ at the Saturnalia in December, there were sacrifices at the temple of Saturn to open the festivities, but the feasting, exchanging of roles between masters and slaves, merrymaking and present-giving evidently all took place in the households.¹⁵⁴ There were also quite specifically rural festivals, outside the civic structure of the city – the Ambarvalia (lustration of the fields), the Sementivae (festival of sowing) and the Compitalia (celebration at the crossroads both in Rome and in the countryside); these do not have fixed dates in the calendars, though they were a regular part of the ritual year.¹⁵⁵ On still other occasions, a public festival provided the context and occasion for a family event: so at the Liberalia (17 March) boys who had reached the age of puberty took their toga virilis, the mark of their admission to the adult community.¹⁵⁶ Sometimes the relationship of public and private elements is particularly complicated: at the Matralia (11 June) the public ceremonial took place at the temple of Mater Matuta in the Forum Boarium; at this festival, we are told, the matrons prayed for their nephews and nieces first, not their own children – a prayer, it seems likely, that was repeated by women throughout the city, not just those present at the temple.157 This range of festivals that bring together ritual in the public and private sphere, shows more than the simple fact that a good deal of private ritual accompanied public events; it suggests that one of the functions of the festival calendar was precisely to link public ritual with private domestic worship – to calibrate the concerns of the community as a whole onto those of the family, and vice versa.

    The ritual activities of the Vestal Virgins, the only major female priesthood at Rome, illustrate another aspect of the connections between public and private religion. The Vestals were clearly set apart from the other priestly groups.¹⁵⁸ Six priestesses, chosen in childhood, they lived in a special house next to the temple of Vesta. They had all kinds of privileges, including (unlike other women) the right of making a will without the compliance of a guardian (tutor). They also had unique religious responsibilities and were subject to unique penalties if they failed, either by letting the sacred fire go out or by losing their virginity: unchaste Vestals were buried alive.¹⁵⁹ We know a good deal more about their ritual programme than about that of any other priestly group in Rome; and that is probably not a mere accident in the transmission of information, but reflects the high importance of (and ancient interest in) what they did for Rome. There is also good reason for thinking that they were one of the most ancient religious organizations of the city, embedded in the religious structure of the earliest Latin communities of central Italy; certainly, similar priesthoods under the same name were found in the ancient towns nearby, suggesting that they go back to the very earliest history of this whole group of communities.¹⁶⁰

    The Vestals’ activities included a good deal of what might be called household work: they were responsible for tending the sacred fire, on the sacred hearth of their temple; they guarded their storehouse (penus) and they ritually cleaned it out and expelled the dirt; they gathered the first ears of corn from the harvest, ground and baked them to provide the sacred salted meal (mola salsa) that was used to sanctify the victim at sacrifices.161 There is an obvious parallel between Vesta, the hearth of the city, and the hearths of the houses of individual families – the priestesses of the state apparently representing the women of the household. But which women exactly?

    The simplest hypothesis that has been used to explain their activity takes us right back to regal Rome, with the suggestion that the life of the Vestals was the life of the ancient regal household and that they themselves originated from (and later symbolically represented) the women of the king’s family. The problem is that they do not, in fact, fit the role of either the wives or the daughters of the early kings at all well. The insistence on their virginity makes them very unlikely candidates as wives; while daughters provide an equally unlikely model for a group of priestesses whose legal privileges were utterly different from those of a dependent child (and who in any case wore, as their priestly costume, some of the distinctive clothes of the bride or married woman).¹⁶² Even the links with the king’s household are doubtful: for in terms of ritual, their connections are with the pontifex maximus, not with the rex sacrorum (the priestly successor, as we shall see, of the early kings).¹⁶³

    It may be that the key to the Vestals’ sacred status lies precisely in its ambiguity: they are paraded as sharing the characteristics of both matrons and virgins, with even some characteristics (such as specific legal rights in the making of wills) of men too.¹⁶⁴ It is a pattern observed in many societies that people and animals deemed ‘interstitial’, those who fall between the categories into which the world is usually divided, are often also regarded as sacred, powerful or holy.¹⁶⁵ Here it seems plausible that the intermediate sexual status assigned to the priestesses served to mark their separateness and their sacredness. But they were ambiguous or marginal in other ways too: they mediated the realms of public and private, by carrying on private duties in the public sphere; and their ritual programme involved them in all major aspects of Roman life, so linking parts of life often regarded as separate. The Vestals represented a peculiarly extreme version of the connection between the religious life of the home and of the community: if anything went wrong in their house, the threat was to the whole salus (safety) of the Roman people – not just of the city, but including the health and fertility of the whole community, its animals and its farms.¹⁶⁶ So too their unchastity was not just a domestic offence, it occasioned public prodigies requiring extraordinary measures of expiation.167

    The rituals in which the Vestals were involved emphasize these links. At the Fordicidia, after the pregnant cow had been sacrificed to Tellus (Earth), the unborn calf was taken and burned by the senior Vestal: the calf too was an ambiguous being – living but not born, sacrificed but not capable of being a proper victim; its ashes were then preserved by the Vestals and used, mixed with the dried blood of the previous October’s ‘October horse’, to sprinkle on the bonfires of the Parilia, for the purification of the shepherd and the sheep.¹⁶⁸ The precise implications of this cycle of symbolic acts may not be recoverable; but it does make clear the importance of the Vestals in connecting the fertility of the earth, the health and safety of the flocks, and the city’s security in the military sense; it reminds us too of the links underlying the different rituals of the calendar, symbolized by the recycling, from one ritual to another, of the sacrificial ashes. Human fertility was also involved in the Vestals’ sphere; and here, for once, we have the help of myths which fit with and clarify a set of rituals. The story is told of various founders or heroes of towns in the region of Latium, around Rome, that they were born of a virgin impregnated either by a spark from the hearth or by a phallus which sprang from the hearth.¹⁶⁹ The Roman Vestals were not only responsible for guarding the hearth, the undying flame, but also for keeping a phallus in their temple. The significance of the flame on their hearth must therefore, in at least one of its aspects, lie in its link with the foundation, generation and continuation of the race. The goddess Vesta herself encapsulated all the elements; she was the flame itself, she was the virgin, she was Vesta the Mother.¹⁷⁰

    The Vestal Virgins were themselves withdrawn from all the ordinary activities of life – living together as priestesses, separately from their families, in one of the most public spots of the whole city (at the east end of the forum); but at the same time they linked, at a ritual level, all the different areas of that life. That connection makes it easier to see why there was so powerful an association between them and the survival of Rome as a whole. And it is no coincidence that they provided the home for the various talismans of that survival – as ancient, it was said, as the sacred objects brought by Aeneas from Troy¹⁷¹ In a real crisis, it was these talismans in their care that had to be saved at any cost, even the cost of one’s own family – a truth vividly captured by Livy in his story of a plebeian who (when Rome was facing attack by the Gauls in 390 B.C.) made his own wife and children get out of the wagon that was taking them to safety so that he could rescue the Vestals and their sacred objects.172 Throughout the history of pagan Rome, any suggestion of an irregularity involving the Vestals or their rituals implied a threat to the city itself¹⁷³ – even more profoundly than interruptions to any of the other rituals we have discussed in this section.

5.   Adjusting to the new Republic

The three preceding sections of this chapter have given a synoptic analysis of the religion of the Romans as we believe it to have been under the developed republican system. We have already expressed our doubts about the value of narrative accounts which have traditionally been based on a combination of guesswork and a priori assumptions. We do, however, think that it is possible to identify some moments of change and to make some progress towards establishing the stages by which religion came to be as we have described it. The first of these stages is the replacement of the kingship by the republican regime, dated in our sources to the end of the sixth century B.C., after the expulsion of the last king, Tarquin the Proud. The story of the expulsion is complicated by the fact that Tarquin appears not just as a villain but as an alien villain, of a family originating in the Etruscan city of Tarquinii and later receiving from his Etruscan kinsmen support against the regime that had expelled him.

    Our argument throughout this chapter has been that the religion of later republican Rome reflected closely the ideas and institutions characteristic of the whole republican order. That implies that, despite the Romans’ own belief that the origin of most of their central religious institutions lay with the kings, and despite an undoubted continuity in many particular priesthoods, rituals and sacred sites, there must have been a great deal of change to create the developed republican system after the fall of the monarchy. It is tempting to make the periods of religious history fit neatly with the conventional periods of political change; if so, there should have been radical changes when the kings were overthrown and the Republic began. It is, however, very controversial whether or not this was so. As we stressed earlier in this chapter, it is not at all clear whether the institutions of Rome in the fifth and fourth centuries were yet recognizably ‘republican’; but even on the assumption that they were, there may have been a considerable delay before religion began to reflect the new political order.

    The first problem the founders of the Republic must have had to face was the replacement of the kingship itself. Abolishing kings and replacing them by elected officials was a revolutionary step in its religious implications as well as its political ones, because kings must have taken a leading (if not the leading) role in the religion of the state. Who was to perform their duties, if there was no king any more? and how would the gods react to the new situation? Later Romans, and most modern writers as well, have seen the solution in simple terms. There had still to be one individual who was called the rex (king) and would carry out the religious role. But he would now be quite separate from anyone who held the king’s other powers. So the new king was named the ‘king of rites’ (rex sacrorum); he had to be a patrician, he became a member of the college of pontifices and he was excluded from those who could be elected to positions of power.174 Clearly it would have been a difficult and delicate task to define the position of the new ‘king’ in relation to the old priests, and especially within the college of which he would now be a member.

    Here as so often, the only accounts of this situation come from the late republican period and later. By that time, the rex had become an obscure member of the college, with a largely forgotten range of ritual duties; meanwhile the pontifex maximus, the elected leader of the pontifices, had become the most powerful of the great political priests. The implication in Livy’s account of the foundation of the Republic in Book II of his History is that the subordination of the rex to the pontifex maximus dates back to a deliberate decision taken by the founders.¹⁷⁵ This, then, would be the solution to the problem: the king’s potential threat was neutralized by making him a priest subordinate to the pontifex. But how anachronistic were such accounts? It has been argued that, like the founding myths of regal Rome itself, this story is another retrojection into the fifth century B.C. of reality as it was known to historians writing in the first century B.C. On this view, the king would originally have kept his authority as head of religion and only slowly in the centuries that followed would the pontifex maximus have emerged as the more powerful figure.¹⁷⁶ There can be no certain answer to this question, and the issues take us into the technical details of the college’s organization. But the effort is worth making for two reasons: first, it takes us into the prehistory of the office of the pontifex maximus, who was to become, as we shall see in later chapters, more and more important over the centuries, until he was effectively the ‘high priest’ of Rome; second, the debate about the original power of these two offices provides a good example of how scholars have tried to deploy tiny scraps of evidence to throw some light on the development of Roman religion in this early period.

    The rex sacrorum was subject to two sets of limitations, which are always assumed to go back to the beginning of the Republic and which give the best indication of the intentions of the founders. First, he was absolutely excluded from playing any part in political life – he could not hold political office of any kind and he did not sit in the senate.177 This puts him in a different category from the major flamines, who seem not to have been specifically excluded from political life, but only limited in what they were allowed to do without violation of their sacred duties and taboos.¹⁷⁸ Evidently, the rex was quite deliberately barred from this sphere. The second limitation was that of collegiality: whatever the king’s previous relations with the priests had been, he had almost certainly been set apart from them, perhaps using the different groups of priests as advisers in his active role; now as rex sacrorum, he was to become a member of one college and not of the others, having a share in religious decision-making, but only in the pontifical sphere and only as one member among others, like the flamines and the pontifices themselves.¹⁷⁹ He did, however, retain his own ritual programme of action on certain fixed days: he held a sacrifice on the Kalends (the first day) of each month, announced the dates of the festivals of the month on each Nones (the fifth or seventh day), appeared in the Comitium on certain fixed dates (24 March and 24 May) and sacrificed there.¹⁸⁰

    One way of understanding this whole reform is to see the Romans as making a deliberate separation between religious and political areas of the king’s duties. At the very least, they were taking a step towards having a religious sphere distinct from political power. But, if this is what they were trying to do, they were doing it very partially. The sacred king was stripped of his power to act in everyday life, but he was far from taking over all the religious tasks of the old king. He had, for instance, no part in taking the auspices before political or military action; these were performed by the new elected magistrates (while oversight of them lay with the college of augures of which the rex sacrorumwas not a member). Yet on almost any view, the taking of the auspices must have been one of the old king’s key functions. Again, it must be reasonably certain that the original king would have had some general authority over religion as over other aspects of life; but if so, that authority was not passed to the new rex at all, but to the various priests and other officials.

    A possible view here (and one that has been argued) is that the simple account of the relatively restricted religious powers of the sacred king (an account based largely on Livy) is after all quite wrong: that the new rex was originally set up to be the religious head of Rome, carrying on all the religious responsibility and authority of the real king; but that he later lost that position of dominance to the pontifices and especially the pontifex maximus. In which case our later sources, in giving the rex a subordinate role from the very beginning, are reading back into the remote past a situation with which they were familiar in their own time, for lack of any real understanding of fifth-century B.C. conditions. On this argument, it is a lesser issue whether the rex or the pontifex maximus was originally the designated head of the pontifical college or how exactly the transition from rex to pontifex maximus was made. The more central point is that the seniority of the rex would inevitably have been eroded; that the senior pontifex would sooner or later have emerged as the more important figure, irrespective of anyone’s plans or intentions, simply because he had access to more of the areas into which religious authority was disseminated, especially to the senate. So even if the rex was the senior figure at the start of the Republic, it is inconceivable that he should have maintained that authority, given the disadvantages of his exclusion from the political sphere. On the other hand, if (as this argument supposes) the religious system was quite different in the very earliest phases of the Republic, it would be possible to imagine the original rexsacrorum as a powerful religious leader, quite isolated from political life. This view, then, puts at the minimum the amount of religious authority that was removed from the new king compared to the real king on his first appointment.

    There is, however, one particular area which has been claimed to prove that the religious power of the rex was restricted from the very moment the monarchy fell; this concerns the relationship of the rex and pontifex maximus to the Vestals and their cult. It was, in all the evidence that we have, the pontifex who performed the ceremony of the induction of a new Vestal, using an ancient form of words; he alone, apart from the Vestals themselves, had the right of access to their holiest places of cult; he had the right to whip them when they failed in their obligations and conducted the trial with the college if they were accused of losing their virginity; he also acted ritually together with them on certain occasions.181 In doing all this, the pontifex was exercising power in the most sensitive of all areas of ritual communication between men and gods. What is more, this is the only area in which the pontifex does have special religious authority of his own. In general he acts on behalf of, or as agent of, or simply as one member of the college of pontifices; he had no elaborate programme of rituals that he alone could carry out, as for instance did the flamines. If the pontifices replaced the rex in any area at all from the very beginning of the Republic, then their relation with (and control over) the Vestals seems the promising one: for if the Vestals were really the daughters of the royal household, then they must surely have been within the authority of the king in the regal period and it is hard to imagine any occasion on which the authority could have been transferred other than when the monarchy fell.

    This whole construction is, however, extremely flimsy. As we have seen, there is little or no reason for regarding the Vestals as in any sense the daughters of the king and his special connexion with them is no more than a guess based on a guess.182 More importantly still for the present argument, the idea of a transfer from rex to pontifex in this respect seems to make nonsense of the whole tradition of the origins of the rex sacrorum. The theory of the reform is supposed to be that some of the king–s ritual performances were so specific to that role and so holy that the gods would only accept them from a rex; the name and position of the king had therefore to be preserved; but if the king had immemorial links with the Vestals, as his sometime daughters, and yet his association with them could be instantly handed over to the pontifex maximus, even though the rex sacrorum was available, the supposed reason for preserving that position collapses completely. The simplest view is that the pontifex had his special connexion with the Vestals because he had always had such a connexion, even in the days when the kings were really kings.

    In the face of the complex and shifting arguments and counter arguments, it is possible to take a still more radical view: that there was no transfer of authority or any remarkable change at this stage: the rex sacrorum, it can be argued, was not a new invention of the Republic at all, but simply the continuation of a priesthood that had already existed in the regal period. So there had originally been two kings, one concerned with the world of action and war, one with matters of religion and cult. According to this argument, at the end of the monarchy, the rex sacrorum simply continued to do what he had always done.¹⁸³

    There are two conclusions to this discussion. The first is to stress how tantalizing, but elusive, the evidence for this period of Roman history is; it is clear, for example, that within the regulations for the Vestals and their relations with other members of the pontifical college, there are preserved some hints of the earliest powers of the different priests in Rome – but it is extremely controversial how we should extract from those hints any clear story of those early conditions or their change and development. Secondly, Livy’s version, though the subject of much criticism, does seem as plausible as any of the alternatives on offer. This is perhaps not as paradoxical as it might seem. For, after all, Livy was engaged in exactly the same arguments as we are today, knowing no more than we do – or not much – and seeking, just as we do, to find an explanation that makes sense both of the few secure bits of information and of the later institutions still in existence in his own day.

    On any of these views, the purpose underlying the detailed arrangements was that whoever bore the title rex should never again be in a position to threaten the city with tyranny. There was also a religious penalty established in the early law code against any aspirant to tyranny: he could be declared sacer, that is to say dedicated to the gods, meaning that he could be killed without the killer incurring retribution.184 In many other respects though, the continuities between regal and republican Rome seem more surprising than the immediate changes. The most striking continuity of all concerns Jupiter Capitolinus and his grandiose new temple. The tradition is that the temple was built by the last Tarquin, finished by the time of his fall, dedicated by the very first college of magistrates of the Republic.¹⁸⁵ However unlikely this story may seem to us now, it does at least encapsulate the ambivalent standing of the cult between monarchy and Republic. The position of Jupiter within the triad, the dominant position and scale of the building, the nature of the cult-practice, all suggest that the king had designed the temple as a grandiose expression of his power and that of his regime. It would perhaps have been going too far to expect that the temple would have been razed to the ground when the Tarquins fell; but it is still surprising that what happened was the precise opposite – the cult became central to the new republican era. It was the focus of the religious activity of the annual magistrates; the god was accepted as the fount of the auspices upon which the relationship of the city with the gods rested; the victorious generals of Rome returned to Rome to lay their laurels at the feet of Jupiter Capitolinus. The ceremonial of the triumph and the related ceremonial of the procession before the games (pompa circensis) illustrate the point vividly; the celebrator in each case was actually dressed up – and made up – in the guise of the statue of Jupiter, as he appeared in the Capitoline temple, which was (as we have seen) also the guise of the king. This can hardly be understood except as the retention of consciously regal ceremonial under the new régime.

    This is not the only example of the survival into the Republic of symbols of power belonging to ancient monarchic practice, though it is perhaps the most dramatic one.186 It seems comprehensible only on the assumption that what is now thought of as royal ceremonial was perceived by the Romans, first and foremost, as Roman, certainly not as an arbitrary imposition upon them – whether monarchical or Etruscan. For another factor that might have played a part in the religious conflicts of this period is the apparently ‘foreign’ Etruscan origins of the last kings and the religious institutions associated with them. In fact it was probably as difficult then as it is now to define the boundaries between Etruscan and Roman elements in religion. Although some particular practices (such as haruspicy) would forever remain linked to Etruscan roots, the ‘Roman’ religious world had become saturated with influences from their Etruscan neighbours which had merged with and transformed the Latin culture of their ancestors. Jupiter was, after all, an ancient Latin deity with an ancient Latin name – and at the same time the focus of what we may choose to classify as (in part at least) Etruscan religious forms (such as the ceremonial of triumph or the Capitoline temple). Meanwhile, there was no alternative high culture, or vocabulary of ceremonial to which Romans could turn. It is unlikely that the early republicans ever conceived of isolating, let alone outlawing, the ‘Etruscan’ religion in their midst.¹⁸⁷

    There is a different sense also in which the tradition about the changeover from monarchy to Republic is surprisingly muted. As we have seen, the tradition is that most of the major features of the constitution and the religion of Rome were devised and put into effect by the kings, who are presented in our first-century sources as successive founders of the different areas of public life.¹⁸⁸ Little credit is given to the leaders of the republican period. In the form in which we have this tradition, it is a literary construction put together in the late republican period. It incorporates far earlier myths, legends and conceptions about the deeds of the founders and the early kings, but it would be very hazardous to assume that its general message would have been recognizable to Romans of the fifth century B.C. All the same, there does seem to be a shortage of information and storytelling of this kind that refers to the early Republic; and unless all these traditions about the contributions of the monarchs are to be written off as sheer invention of a later period, they must at least have been transmitted through the early Republic. If the early republicans were themselves deeply hostile to any suggestion of monarchy or of monarchic practice, it is very hard to see how that could have happened. Again, we seem to have to reckon with strong continuities as well as a sharp disruption, if sense is to be made of the tradition which has come down to us.

    The overall result of the events that we have considered in this section might be called the ‘republican religious order’. We have seen earlier that one of the most remarkable characteristics of this order was that authority over religious matters was widely diffused. The result was that no individual or family could construct a monopoly of religious, any more than of political, power. It can hardly be altogether an accident that the religious and political aspects of the system should reflect one another in this respect. But the situation is not one of straightforward imitation: priests were not, like magistrates, officials elected for one year only; they were chosen by the surviving members of the college for life; besides, the differentiation of the priestly groups, which is one of the most remarkable features of Roman religious organization, almost certainly (as the tradition implies) goes back to the time of the kings – it pre-dates, that is, the republican organization of which it becomes a part. The similarity between the political and the religious institutions of the state must then have resulted, not from the same decisions being taken at the same time, but by similar overall objectives being aimed at. If it is assumed that the king in the regal period acted as the central religious authority co-ordinating the advice of the different colleges, then his subordination, whether by planning or not, would have produced a diffusion of authority; if that is the right way to look at it, then the steps considered in this section – hazy though they now are to us – were indeed the first moves towards a republican type of religion.

6.   Innovation and change

In the early centuries of the republican period (fifth century to third century B.C.) there were many changes and innovations – new temples and cults, new or revised ceremonies, changes of procedure or decisions about the rules concerning membership of the priestly colleges; there was another type of change too that we might infer or guess at, not special moments of decision, but long-term shifts – for one of the implications of the system we have outlined was that social, political or economic changes, or changes in Rome’s relations with other states, would all have had religious repercussions. This second type of change is likely to have had profounder effects in the long run, but it is the first type that our sources tell us about, the ones that are noticed by contemporary recorders. The most serious distinction (which may but does not necessarily correspond to the two types of change) is between changes that could be assimilated to the overall structure and those that threatened to transform it.

    Innovation in one form or another is certainly a central feature of Roman religion and the new gods, goddesses and rituals were for the most part assimilated without difficulty to the existing complex of old cults. Sometimes, they were definitely recognized as non-Roman, but accepted through evocatio, through the vows of generals or through the recommendations found in the Sibylline Books.189 More and more as time passed, and especially in the third century B.C., new deities came in the form of personifications – for the most part personifications of desirable qualities or virtues, such as Concord, Victory, Hope, Faith, Honour and Virtue.¹⁹⁰ In some cases, it may be that such an abstraction gradually took on a more specific personality; it has even been suggested that the Roman goddess Venus started out as an abstraction and only later came to be identified with the Greek Aphrodite.¹⁹¹ But whatever the detailed history of these developments, the third century saw an intensification of the process of innovation, as Rome’s frontiers and contacts widened and as her military successes brought in new resources to be invested in building projects.

    Many innovations were inspired by the Sibylline Books, the collections of oracles, kept and consulted by the duoviri sacris faciundis, which served both to initiate change and to provide legitimation for what might otherwise have been seen as deviations from the ancestral tradition. The story of the purchase of these Books dates their arrival to the late regal period, when King Tarquin the Elder bought them from an old woman who offered him nine for a certain price; when he refused to buy, she destroyed three of them and offered him the remaining six for the same price; he refused again, so she destroyed three more and offered him the last three, still for the same price. Impressed at last, he paid the price and these three were the books kept by the college.¹⁹² In other accounts, and regularly in the later tradition, the books are called Sibylline and connected with the Sibyl of Cumae; they were believed to contain the destiny of the Romans.¹⁹³ The anecdote and the connection with the Sibyl of Cumae may all be late accretions to the tradition; but it is clear enough that the Romans did have a set of oracles in Greek verse, that they regarded as of early origin, though not so early as the foundation of the main institutions in the time of King Numa. The many consultations of the Books recorded in Roman writers suggest that they mainly contained sets of remedia, rituals through which the threatened harm implied by the prodigies might be averted. It was in this context that the Books suggested new cults and rituals, legitimating innovation by their very antiquity – while suggesting too that the Romans saw the Greeks as sources of inspiration and wisdom. Our evidence does not suggest that they contained very much that we should call ‘prophetic’; but the silence may be misleading, since this may very well be a case where the nature of our evidence and the preoccupations of the Roman writers on whom we depend are effectively ‘censoring’ our information and obscuring the variety of religious life in the period. It is certain that a tradition of prophetic skill survived amongst the Etruscans and that they still possessed it in the late republican period.

    All kinds of agents were involved in the process of innovation, in different relations to the senate. But whatever the particular role of the senate’s various advisers, there is no doubt that the introduction of new deities and forms continued throughout the period. This is not just a phenomenon of religious life. At the same time, the Romans were establishing their practice of admitting new citizens from the surrounding area into their community as full citizens; these open boundaries at the human level are surely inseparable from open boundaries to foreign gods.194

    To say that innovation was a normal model of the functioning of this religious system, and hence supportive of it, not threatening to it, is not to say that successive introductions did not bring with them new attitudes or ideas, enshrined in the new cults. The problem is to assess which were the new attitudes or ideas, given that we have such an inadequate grasp on what religious forms were available to the early Romans. Thus, the lectisternium ritual celebrated for the first time in 399 B.C. has often been seen as a great turning-point: not only did this involve bringing out statues of deities and offering them a meal (an apparent step on the road to seeing the gods and goddesses as sharing human forms and appetites) but the gods and goddesses chosen for the ritual (including, for example, Apollo and his mother Latona) demonstrate clear Greek influence. However it is unclear how radically new this was. Greek influence, we now know, goes back to the sixth century B.C.; and even the meal seems likely to have had a precedent in the epulum Iovis, celebrated at the games in September and November, where Jupiter himself was offered a share in the feast.¹⁹⁵

    The obvious direction to look for religious change of deep significance would be the area of social conflict, more particularly to the conflicts that produced the oligarchy of the third century B.C., composed of the dominant plebeian as well as the traditional patrician families. This compromise followed a long series of conflicts, reported by Livy and our other sources, in which the great clans of patricians sought to defend the inherited privileges of their class. It is implicit in the conception of religious life proposed in this chapter that any such long-standing division in society would eventually find some religious expression, since any kind of continuing, coherent action would have had to be put into some relation with the gods and their involvement in Roman life. To a limited extent, it may be possible to detect the lines along which this might have happened, both in the great struggle between the plebeians and the patricians and in the even more obscure struggle between the power and influence of the great clans (gentes) and the interest of the city as a whole. The recorded information about plebeian religion and the religion of the gentes is, however, very limited; and since, particularly in the early stages, we have only the haziest idea of events or their significance in the history of Rome, any reconstruction of the religious effects of the conflict must be even more tentative.

    It seems to be beyond dispute that the patrician families claimed special authority in relation to the community’s religious life. The strong form of that claim – that only patricians could communicate with the gods through the auspices196 – can never have been established, since there were apparently non-patrician senior magistrates at least intermittently in every period and these men must have taken the auspices in order to fulfil their offices; but the patricians did control the priesthoods, or at least the most important ones, as they easily could through the system of collegiate co-option. The tradition is that plebeians attained priesthoods only when specially reserved places were created for them in the colleges: this is reported in 367 B.C. for the duoviri (at that point increased to ten), and in 300 B.C. for the augures and pontifices, increased to eight or nine.¹⁹⁷ Other priestly places, including reserved places in the major colleges, continued to be a patrician preserve. To this extent, the religion of the city in the fifth century B.C. was controlled by the patricians.

    It is an important question how far the plebeians developed their own religion, distinct from state religion, in the fifth century B.C. They certainly adopted the temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera (founded in 496 B.C.) as their religious centre and as the storehouse of their records. The plebeian aediles (aediles), who probably took their title from the temple (the aedes)¹⁹⁸ may possibly have acted as the priests of the plebeian organization, though there is no clear evidence; certainly later on they, like the plebeian tribunes, became established as magistrates of the Republic.199 The plebeian associations of Ceres, Liber and Libera suggest also contacts between the Roman plebeians and the Greeks of South Italy, where the corresponding Greek cult (of Demeter, Dionysus and Kore) was strong.²⁰⁰ It is also possible that other temples too show both the influence of Greeks and the effect of plebeian initiatives; for instance, Mercury, corresponding to Greek Hermes, was said to have had his temple dedicated by a plebeian and had strong associations with trade and traders.201 The temple of the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) is another, but more problematic, case: we know that the cult of the Dioscuri in thoroughly Greek form existed at Lavinium, which had such close links with Rome; but the Roman cult shows its own very characteristic forms, especially its emphasis on Castor to the exclusion of Pollux.²⁰² However we interpret this particular example, it is possible that there was (for whatever reason) a regular connection between South Italian religious influence and a specifically plebeian religious life. We should remember, though, that for any knowledge of this we depend ultimately on information preserved in the priestly, that is, patrician tradition. If plebeian cults did begin as part of a political enterprise in opposition to the patricians, it seems unlikely that we should hear about their existence earlier than their acceptance in the state religion. Perhaps most interesting of all is the strong suggestion that even in the fifth century B.C., when Roman power was at a low ebb,²⁰³ there was such a variety of religious influences at work.

         Fig. 1.8 Female terracotta figure seated on a throne, near life-size, from Aricia in Latium; almost certainly the goddess Ceres. Dated to c. 300 B.C., the figure is reconstructed from several fragments. (Height, 0.94m.)

There are other areas in which it is at least a possibility that the plebeians made a distinctive contribution. One of the most famous and characteristic institutions of later Rome were the ludi, the Games, which were days, or series of days, of entertainments and competitions, held in honour of and in the presence of particular gods or goddesses, preceded by a great religious procession. They included racing in the circus from an early date and later animal fighting and dramatic performances of various kinds.204 The festivals of the early calendar do not include whole days of specially marked ludi, though various competitions and races do feature in other festivals. One of the very early sets of games was called the ‘Plebeian Games’ and indeed Cicero calls these the oldest of all; they have at their heart one of the two celebrations of the epulum Iovis (feast of Jupiter), the other being at the ‘Roman’ games (the other claimant as the oldest set).205 It is a distinct possibility that days of Games were another plebeian element later adopted by the Roman state.²⁰⁶

    Finally, on the view of the close connection between religion and politics argued in this chapter, it is inevitable that there was a religious element to some of the political activities of the plebeians in this period: they were, for example, holding their own assemblies, passing their own laws (plebiscita) and electing their own magistrates on the model of the city’s procedures – but excluding the patricians. It seems inconceivable that they should have done these things without involving the gods in their decisionmaking. If little reflection of this survives, this must mean their procedures were rejected as invalid by the rules of the patrician priests and never properly recorded. We know at least that later republican tribunes of the plebs claimed powers to report omens and to perform consecration and impose curses;²⁰⁷ there were also oaths that guaranteed the position of these tribunes as plebeian representatives.²⁰⁸ All these rights must once have been resisted and subsequently accepted by the priestly colleges.

In some ways, the religion of the great Roman gentes presents an even more acute problem of interpretation. These were families or groups of families (clans), sharing a common name, whether patrician or plebeian, such as the Claudii, the Cornelii or the Caecilii. We do not hear of cults maintained in such gentes until the late Republic, most famously that of the Julii (from which Julius Caesar and, by adoption, Augustus were descended) who maintained a cult of the god Vediovis outside Rome.²⁰⁹ Of other such gentile cults, however, we hear little or nothing, though the clans in question remained powerful and in other ways preserved their traditions and identities. Even the cult of the Julii we know of only through the chance find of a single inscription. One theory of the early history of republican Rome suggests that at first the central power of the state was very weak and that power in the Latin area lay with clans based on great families and their clients, with only a loose attachment to any particular city. A glimpse of this different social and religious organization is perhaps offered by an inscription from Satricum in southern Latium, about 50 kilometres south-east of Rome.210 This text records a number of clients of a member of the clan Valeria (a man called, in archaic Latin, Poplios Valesios), making a dedication to the god Mars – though we do not know how clearly defined or permanent this group of clients was, or how characteristic this religious activity was. In some ways the lack of information about the cults of the gentes is surprising. Perhaps we should think that the growth of the power of the state between 500 and 300 B.C. involved the breaking down of the power of these great clans, and that the disappearance of their own religious traditions was not accidental but a deliberate policy of the priestly colleges.²¹¹

    Some of these issues might have been raised and resolved in the last few years of the fourth century, where our tradition offers at least hints of conflict. The censorship of Appius Claudius Caecus in 312 B.C. saw the control of a major cult – that of Hercules at the Ara Maxima – transferred from the gens Potitia to the state; this is the only record of the removal of gentile control of a cult, but it may not have been so isolated as it now seems.²¹² The same period is said to have seen two separate conflicts between Appius’ freedman Cn. Flavius and the college of pontifices over the publication of some of their secrets and also over the correct procedure for dedication of temples.²¹³ Then in 300 B.C., as we saw, the plebeians gained access to the two major colleges under the Lex Ogulnia; finally it is probably in the early decades of the third century that the very important but unreported reform was carried which transferred the choice of the pontifex maximus from the members of the college to a specially devised form of popular election.²¹⁴ There seems to be enough here to make it quite certain that major religious issues were under debate. It is not so easy to see the trend of events or their significance. One element is the attack on the patrician monopoly; another is the limitation of the power and independence of the priestly colleges; a third is the centralization of religious control in the state institutions. This may all help to explain the succession of authoritative priestly figures, several of them plebeians, which characterizes the third and second centuries B.C. If there is any substance in the speculation that early priests might have been more isolated from public life, this would be the point where the priest-politician emerged as a characteristic figure. Whether or not that view is right, we are certainly witnessing here a development of priestly roles within the political sphere; which would suggest that in or around the late fourth century, social conflict was having a marked influence on the character of the Roman religious tradition itself.²¹⁵

    It may be that even more profound changes were being brought in by the stream of new cults so characteristic of the period. In at least one case we can plausibly trace the impact of events outside the Roman area, because the cult of Victoria, not an old Roman cult, was apparently derived from an awareness of Greek Victory cults in the late fourth century and especially of the conquests and the far-famed invincibility of Alexander the Great. Victoria received a temple in 294 B.C.; at the same period other Roman war gods began to attract the title Victor or Invictus. Before long, as the early Roman issues of coinage show, the new goddess was playing a prominent role in the Roman imagery of war.216

    The coming of Aesculapius is the next example. Livy’s story is that the god was introduced direct from Epidaurus in the Peloponnese, the most famous centre of the cult, after the Sibylline Books had been consulted in 293 B.C. as the result of an epidemic.²¹⁷ Legates were sent to Greece and returned with a manifestation of the god in the form of a sacred snake which had willingly migrated and now willingly went to the new site of the cult on the island in the Tiber.²¹⁸ The epidemic promptly ceased and a new temple was duly dedicated in 291 B.C. The cult certainly acquired some of the features present in the Epidaurian cult, including the custom of incubation and the keeping of snakes and dogs by the priests;²¹⁹ there is therefore no doubt that these events did represent the arrival of an avowedly Greek cult.

    It is not so easy (here as in other contexts) to establish at all precisely what would have been new to the Romans about the cult. We have already seen that the resort to sanctuaries for help in illness was a long-established tradition in Central Italy;²²⁰ sure enough, a very large deposit of such terracottas of republican date was found in the bed of the Tiber, presumably associated with Aesculapius’ temple-site.²²¹ Again, there is good reason to think that the practice of incubation was not entirely new either.²²² Finally, the Latin form of the god’s name may well have been established before the 290s B.C., or at least it derives from an older form of the Greek name;223 given the extent of Roman contacts with Greece in the archaic period, this may suggest that the god, as well as the rituals associated with him, was known to the Romans already. So the picture seems to be that the temple to Aesculapius was indeed a gesture of recognition towards the Hellenistic culture that the Romans were now meeting in the south of Italy (and it is interesting that it pre-dates the arrival of the first Greek doctor in Rome);²²⁴ but the innovation is mediated not only by the Sibylline prophecy, but also by previous experience and the religious traditions in central Italy.

Such mediation is frequently associated with Roman ‘innovations’. Narrative accounts deriving from literary sources can easily suggest that some radical break in religious life has occurred, but in the ancient world all religious changes had to be negotiated carefully; the idea of openly abandoning the practice of the ancestors or of changing what they had regarded as adequate was scarcely to be tolerated. In some cases that meant finding or emphasizing mythical connections, or situating the new cult amongst associated cults; perhaps sometimes it involves reconstructing the past or re-interpreting rituals.

    In some cases, however, the innovation explicitly took the form of developing an ancient cult. At some time in the middle of the third century, the ancient Italian goddess Ceres, who had had a home in Rome at least since the fifth century and who had been specially associated with the plebs, was offered what seems to have been a separate cult, known to the Romans as the ‘Greek rites’ of Ceres.²²⁵ To make the situation still more confusing, it is clear that the character of the older Ceres had in fact been influenced by knowledge of the Greek Demeter, as had Ceres in other parts of Italy²²⁶ but it is possible to distinguish some new elements that belong to the third-century rites. A series of priestesses was regularly brought in from the south of Italy and there were rituals in which women played a particularly prominent part. So, we hear for the first time of groups of matrons and of girls taking part in processions and singing and bringing gifts in honour of Ceres and Proserpina, the mother and the maiden.²²⁷

    In this case, what seems at first sight a development of old practices turns out to have been a real change in the religious life of Rome. Apart from the Vestals, who seem to have been an exception to most rules of Roman life, women of any class seem to have played only a limited role in the ancient Roman public cult. All the priests and religious officials, as well as all the magistrates who took part in rituals, were invariably men. The leading role in family religious action was always the paterfamilias. There were specific ancient festivals in which women played a central role, certain cults which focussed on childbirth, and of course women may have been present as members of families at almost any city, family and rural ritual.228 But the presence of separate groups of women in festivals, normal practice in Greek civic festivals, seems not to have been the normal Roman way at any date. It is only in this period that we begin to find such processions and the fact that the Sibylline Books were so prominently connected with the innovation strongly supports the idea that it was Greek influence that lay behind the change.

Proserpina occurs again in what is perhaps a related development, since it involves Dis Pater who is the third member of the fatal mythic triangle: Proserpina is the Daughter; Dis Pater, the King of the Underworld who snatched her away to his Kingdom; Ceres, the Mother who searched for her.²²⁹ This was the introduction of a new set of games called – at least from the time of Augustus, when they were celebrated very elaborately – the ‘Saecular’ Games.²³⁰ It is not certain what this name meant originally, but it came to imply that the games should be celebrated once every century (the Latin word is saeculuni).²³¹ Later antiquarians made up sequences of hundred-years in order to justify holding these games in particular years in which the current emperor wished to have a celebration. There are, however, rather good reasons to think that only two of the reported republican games ever in fact happened – once in the 140s (as we shall see in the next chapter) and once in 249 B.C., which on this view was the start of the series. Varro’s notice of the games of 249 B.C. connects them, by implication, with the First Punic War, then in its bitterest phase; the sacrifice was to the underworld powers (Dis Pater and Proserpina) as the black victims imply and was celebrated at an altar in the Campus Martius called the Terentum.²³² The games of the imperial period seem to retain some elements at least from the republican ones, including sacrifices to the ancient Italian fates – the Parcae – and perhaps also the choirs of boys and girls, which are very likely to be connected with the groups of the Ceres cult discussed above; but the underworld character of the republican rituals seems to have been almost totally transformed. The ludi Saeculares of 17 B.C. that we shall discuss in chapter 4 are yet another example – on a massive scale -of the Augustan reinvention of early Roman religion.²³³

 

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    1   Roman accounts of early Roman history: Miles (1995); Fox (1996). Among many ancient versions of the stories, note, for example, Plutarch, Romulus 11.1–4 = 4.8a (pomerium); Livy I.9 (Sabines); I.10. 5–7 (the first temple). Connections also between Jupiter Feretrius, Numa and the dedication of spoils: Festus p.204L = 1.3.

    2   Note, for example, Livy I.19.6 – 20.7 =1.2 (Numa’s reforms); Plutarch, Numa 10 = 8.4a (Vestal Virgins); Macrobius, Saturnalia I.16.2–6 = 3.1 (calendar). Augustus’s closure of the temple of Janus: Augustus, Achievements 13.

    3   Ara Maxima and Evander: below, pp. 173–4. Other religious foundations of Evander: Plutarch, Romulus 21.3–8 = 5.2a (Lupercalia). The Greek style of ritual was most clearly marked by the dress of the officiant at sacrifice: in Roman style the toga was drawn over the head; in Greek style the head was left bare. Scheid (1996) emphasizes the ‘Romanness’ of even this so-called ‘Greek style’.

    4   Guided tour of Rome: Aeneid VIII.306–58 (with pp. 171–4 below, for the religious importance of the site of Rome). Alba and Lavinium: 1.5; Map 5. Images of Aeneas’ flight and arrival in Italy: 9.2b(i) (coin of 47/6 B.C., showing Aeneas with the Palladium); 4.3c (sculptured panel from Augustus’ Ara Pacis, showing his landing in Italy). Palladium in the temple of Vesta: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities II.66.5–6 (though Dionysius admits to some uncertainty about the precise contents of the temple).

    5   The fetiales. Livy I.24 and I.32.6–14 = 1.4a. The Capitolium: Livy I.55.1 = 1.9b; for Capitolia outside Rome (from Cosa in Italy and Sufetula in N. Africa), see 10.2c. Servius Tullius and the sanctuary of Diana: Livy I.45 = 1.5d; Map 1 no. 19. Cornell (1995) 156–9 and 165–8 discusses how far ancient writers saw the Tarquins as a specifically Etruscan dynasty.

    6   Gabba (1991).

    7   Cornell (1995) 1–30.

    8   One version of the story is given in Livy I.16 = 2.8a. Earlier roots of the cult of Romulus and other ‘founders’: Liou-Gille (1980); Capdeville (1995).

    9   Below, pp. 171–6 and ch. 4 passim.

  10   The inscriptions are collected in Degrassi (1963), who also gives (388–546) a selection of other important sources for each festival, with bibliography and notes. Discussion and additional fragments in Rüpke (1995) 39–188. The most accessible account in English is Scullard (1981). The calendar itself is discussed, with a selection of extracts at 3.1–3.

  11   Mommsen in CIL I.1, 2nd edn. (1893), 283–304.

  12   Michels (1967) 93–144.

  13   Michels (1967) 13–44; radical scepticism in Rüpke (1995) 245–88, esp. 283–6.

  14   Below, pp. 174–6; 207–8.

  15   Fasti VI.319–48 = 2.5 (cf. I.337–53 = 6.4a).

  16   Of course, the conspiracy to blow up the Houses of Parliament, whose detection is celebrated on 5 November, construes in many ways: from a dastardly plot against the crown by Catholic traitors to a popular uprising against the ruling class. Compare the varied significances of Christmas, discussed in Miller (1993).

  17   We examine the Roman festival of the Parilia in this light below, pp. 174–6; see also 5.1.

  18   The fragments of Varro’s Divine Antiquities are collected (with a commentary) in Cardauns (1976); see also Cardauns (1978). Many are drawn from the Christian writers Augustine (particularly from The City of God) and Arnobius (Against the Gentiles). It is clear that both authors exploit Varro’s material without any concern (or maybe capacity) to be fair to the pagan author – the last thing on their minds; for examples of Augustine’s use of Varro, see The City of God IV.31 = 1.1a; VI.5 = 13.9. Other works of Varro do survive more fully: 6 books out of an original 25 On the Latin Language; a complete work On Agriculture, in 3 books. Among other antiquarian writers, the dictionary of Festus (ed. Lindsay, 1913) preserves some of the Augustan antiquarian Verrius Flaccus (on whom Dihle (1958); Frier (1979) 35–7), whose work underlies the notes in the calendar from Praeneste (Degrassi (1963) 107–45; extract = 3.3b).

  19   The formula of the fetiales at the beginning of war: Livy I.32.6–14 = 1.4a; see Ogilvie (1965) 127–9 , for strong suspicions that it is based on later antiquarian reconstructions.

  20   Natural History XI.186.

  21   Moatti (forthcoming). The various records of the pontifices in particular: Wissowa (1912) 513; Rohde (1936); Frier (1979); below, pp. 25–6.

  22   So, for example, without such a context we can make little sense of the change in the ritual of extispicy noted by Pliny: it could be an indication of a major shift in Roman conceptions of the internal organs of the body; equally a sign of some technical and long running priestly dispute; or both. For further discussion of early documents preserved by later writers, see below, pp. 32–4.

  23   Among the most influential versions are Warde Fowler (1911); Rose (1926); Latte (1960a); for criticisms of various of these, Dumézil (1970); for their place in the history of the study of Roman religion, Scheid (1987); Durand and Scheid (1994). A quite different approach to the character of the religion and its history is taken by Scheid (1985a) 17–57.

  24   Note the list of such deities in Servius, On Virgil’s Georgics. I.21; cf, Augustine, The City of God VI.9 = 2.2c. We cannot be certain that these ‘godlets’ represent a survival of the most primitive Roman conception of divinity; they could equally well be a much later priestly (or antiquarian) construction. For different views, Bayet (1950); Dumézil (1970) 35–8.

  25   Varro in Augustine, The City of God IV.31 = 1.1a; in Tertullian, Apology 25.12 = fr. 38 (Cardauns).

  26   For instance, in relation to extispicy, Schilling (1962)

  27   Discussion of innovation and foreign influence in religion: North (1976).

  28   Whether or not, that is, Rome was ever under the direct political ascendancy of Etruria. Some scholars have seen such direct Etruscan control lying behind (among other things) the stories of the Etruscan origin of Tarquin the Elder. Cornell (1995) 151–72 reviews the question.

  29   Inscription: ILLRP 1271a = 1.7b. Discussion: Weinstock (1960) 112–14; Castagnoli (1983); Holloway (1994) 130–4.

  30   Coarelli (1977b); for a reconstruction of the shrine and the fragment of pottery, 1.7c; for the Volcanal, Capdeville (1995).

  31   Maule and Smith (1959); Fenelli (1975); Comella (1981); and below, n. 221.

  32   Palmer (1974) 79–1 71; Map 5.

  33   Virgil, Aeneid VII.81–106 = 4.11; Ovid, Fasti IV.649–72.

  34   It is worth noting how the Roman myths (with which we started this chapter) themselves stressed the ‘foreign’ elements that made up ‘Roman’ traditions – the Greek Evander, the Trojan Aeneas etc.; see below, pp. 171–4.

  35   Warde Fowler (1911); Rose (1926); further discussion at 1.1.

  36   Dumézil himself wrote copiously on Rome from the 1930s onwards and provoked more discussion as time went on – some hostile, some supportive. Dumézil (1941–5) is an early statement; (1974) his fullest account of Roman religion – (1970) is the English translation of the first edition; (1968–73) gives the latest version of the mythology of the Roman kings. Discussion: Momigliano (1983); Scheid (1983); (1985a) 74–94; Belier (1991).

  37   Tullus as a great warrior: for example, Livy I.23–9; Ancus, at least by inclination, as a more peaceful ruler: for example, Livy I.30 (though see, I.32.6–14 = 1.4a). Above, pp. 1–4.

  38   Further discussion at 1.3.

  39   Dumézil (1975) is itself a notable attempt to investigate some of the least understood Roman festivals.

  40   Jupiter and the triumph: Versnel (1970) 56–93; Jupiter and the vines: Montanari (1988) 137–62; below, p. 45.

  41   It is essential to Dumézil’s whole position to interpret Mars as the War God, the God of the second function: Dumézil (1970) 205–45. But a good deal of evidence will not fit this view: for example, Cato, On Agriculture 141 = 6.3a, where Mars is clearly protecting farmers; see also on the October Horse, below, pp. 47–8. Different interpretations: Warde Fowler (1911) 131–4; De Sanctis (1907–64) IV.2.149–52; Latte (1960a) 114–16; Scholz (1970); Rüpke (1990) 22–8.

  42   Latte (1960a) 113–14; Koch (1960) 17–39; (1963); Brelich (1960); Gagé (1966); Dumézil (1970) 246–72; Liou-Gille (1980) 135–207.

  43   For an introduction to studies of Greek polytheism, R. L. Gordon (1981) 1–42; note also the classic study of the relationship of Hestia and Hermes, Vernant (1983) 127–75.

  44   Historical development in general: Cornell (1995) 242–71.

  45   The changing number and title of this priesthood causes problems of terminology: technically they were duoviri until they became decemviri in 367 B.C. (below, p. 64); they were increased to fifteen (quindecimviri) by 51 B.C. – and they retained that title thereafter, even when their numbers were further increased. Broadly following this chronology, we normally call them duoviri in chapter 1, decemviri in chapter 2 and quindecimviri in the rest of the book.

  46   Roman priesthood in general: Scheid (1984); (1985a) 36–51; Beard (1990); Scheid (1993).

  47   The structure of the pontifical college: Wissowa (1912) 501–23; De Sanctis (1907–64) IV.2.353–61; Latte (1960a) 195–212, 401–2.

  48   The flamines: Vanggard (1988); the flamen Dialisr. Simón (1996); below, pp. 28–9.

  49   Bloch (1963) 77–86, 112–57; 7.3; and below, pp. 37–9.

  50   Haruspices in general: Thulin (1910); Wissowa (1912) 543–9; Bloch (1960) 43–76; Latte (1960a) 157–60; MacBain (1982) 43–59. Several haruspical activities are illustrated at 7.4 (including the examination of entrails of sacrificial victims; 7.4a is a reconstruction of the text of a haruspical response); for apparently low-level, ‘street-corner’ haruspices, see (for example) Plautus, Little Carthaginian 449–66 = 6.3b.

  51   Torelli (1975) 119–21 argues for a middle republican date for the creation of the ordo of haruspices; but see MacBain (1982) 47–50; North (1990) 67. Second-century developments, below, p. 113.

  52   For example, Livy XXVII.37.6.

  53   Below, pp. 245–7 (for foreignness as a metaphor in so-called ‘Oriental cults’ in the Roman empire). A Roman attack on haruspical skill as foreign and therefore barbarous: Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods II.10–12 = 7.2 (but the point of this anecdote is, in the end, to confirm the power of haruspicy).

  54   Wissowa (1912) 509–11; Bleicken (1957a); Guizzi (1968) 141–58.

  55   Augures in general: Warde Fowler (1911) 292–313; Wissowa (1912) 523–34; Dumézil (1970) 594–610; Catalano (1960); (1978); Linderski (1986).

  56   Wissowa (1912) 231–2; Linderski (1986) 2226–41; for examples of conflicts over the sacred chickens, Livy X.40–1; Cicero, On Divination I.29.

  57   If for any reason there was a gap in the succession of magistrates, the auspices were said to have ‘returned to the patres’, that is to the patrician members of the senate, who held them in turn until the proper succession was restored. Magdelain (1964).

  58   These are now often referred to as signa oblativa (though the term is not attested in surviving Latin sources before the fourth century A.D.).

  59   Weinstock (1934); Linderski (1986) 2256–96; the form of words used by the augures in creating a templum is recorded by Varro, On the Latin Language VII.8–10 = 4.4.

  60   The pomerium: below pp. 177–81, with evidence collected at 4.8. The consequences of failing to re-take the auspices on crossing the pomerium are illustrated by Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods II.10–12 = 7.2.

  61   Livy I.36.2–6 = 7.1a; Beard (1989).

  62   Livy I.36.3 (with Ogilvie (1965) 151).

  63   See the lists in Szemler (1972) 101–78.

  64   Livy IX.46.5.

  65   Livy 1.20.6–7 leaves no doubt that the pontifex was expected to be available to advise the individual citizen; see also Pomponius in Justinian, Digest I.2.2.6, which suggests that one in particular was nominated each year for this purpose, at least in the fourth century B.C.; see Watson (1992). Their role in regulating burial at a later period: Pliny, Letters X.68 & 69 = 10.4d(iii) & (iv); ILS8380 = 8.3.

  66   This leap-year system derives from the calendar reforms of Julius Caesar at the very end of the Republic; Bickerman (1980) 47–51.

  67   Degrassi (1963) 314–16; Michels (1967) 3–89; Scullard (1981) 41–8; R. L. Gordon (1990a) 184–9; a surviving copy of a republican calendar, from Antium: 3.2.

  68   Cicero discusses at length in On the Laws 11.47–53 the conflict that could arise for a pontifical lawyer between the rules over the inheritance of sacra in pontifical law and the ordinary rules of civil law.

  69   Origins fr. 77 (Peter) = fr. IV.1 (Chassignet) = Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights II.28.6.

  70   Cicero, Orator II.52; Servius Danielis, On Virgil’s Aeneid I.373. Discussion, Frier (1979); Cornell (1995) 13–15.

  71   The fetiales: Samter (1909) 2259; Wissowa (1912) 550–4; Bayet (1935); Latte (1960a) 121–4; Rüpke (1990) 97–117. Their mythical origins, above pp. 3;9, drawing on Livy I.24 and I.32.6–14 = 1.4a. Later changes: below, pp. 132–3, with Servius, On Virgil’s Aeneid IX.52 = 5.5d, 194 n. 98.

  72   Above, pp. 8–9.

  73   For example, Livy XXXI.8.3.

  74   The general role of this priesthood: Wissowa (1912) 524–43; Gagé (1955) 121–9, 146–54, 199–204, 442–4, 465–7; Radke (1963); Parke (1988) 136–51.

  75   Below, pp. 62–3.

  76   Above, n. 3.

  77   The most famous examples are such men as Caesar, Pompey and Antony, but the lists in Szemler (1972) show how widespread was the practice of combining major political and religious office.

  78   Cicero, On his House 1 = 8.2a; below, pp. 114–15.

  79   Below, pp. 68–9.

  80   Below, pp. 105–8.

  81   Relations between pontifices and other priests: Wissowa (1912) 505–8; Rohde (1936) 112–13. Changes in the latest phase of the Republic (and a striking example of the interchangeability of flamen and pontifices): below, pp. 130–2.

  82   For example, Livy VIII.9.1–10 = 6.6a.

  83   For example, Asconius, Commentary on Cicero’s On Behalf of Cornelius p. 68C; the character of these incidents is discussed further below, pp. 105–8.

  84   For example, Livy XXXI. 12.8–9, where the final action is clearly the magistrate’s responsibility; procedures in handling prodigies are discussed below, pp. 37–9.

  85   Above, p. 11.

  86   ILS 4015 = ILLRP 291. The formula: Appel (1909) 80–2.

  87   This early phase of religion is sometimes termed ‘animism’; the divine ‘powers’ have been given the title numen (pl. numina) – as in Ovid’s description of Terminus, the god of boundary stones, which has been thought, by many scholars, to be a classic case of the survival of such a divine power: Fasti II. 639–46 = 1.1b; see Piccaluga (1974). For a critique of these views: 1.1.

  88   Wissowa (1912) 238–40; De Sanctis (1907–64) IV.2.2.43–5; Latte (1960a) 98; Weinstock (1971) 291–6; J. M. C. Toynbee (1971) 34–9; and below, p. 50.

  89   Though see below, pp. 44–5; 143, for the ‘impersonation’ of Jupiter by the Roman general in the ceremony of triumph.

  90   Liou-Gille (1980).

  91   Rhea Silvia: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities I.76–9; Livy I.3–4. Egeria: Livy 1.21.3. Inuus: Livy 1.5.2. Castor and Pollux: Livy II.20.10–13; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities VI. 13.

  92   Above pp. 12–14.

  93   For example, Pliny, Natural History XXVIII. 10–11 = 5.5a; Köves-Zulauf (1972) 21–34; North (1976).

  94   The text is from Livy XXII.10 = 6.5. Discussion: Eisenhut (1955); Heurgon (1957) 36–51; North (1976) 5–6; below, p. 80.

  95   XXXI.27, especially 10–11.

  96   Vows in a variety of private contexts: (for example) ILS 3411 & 3513 = 9.5a & b.

  97   Juno of Veii: Livy V.21.1–7 = 2.6a; a version of the formula is preserved by Macrobius, Saturnalia III.9.7–8 (see below, pp. 111 and 132–4, with 10.3b – a late republican inscription, probably documenting a new form of the ritual in the first century B.C.). General discussion: Wissowa (1912) 383–4; Dumézil (1970) 424–31; Le Gall (1976).

  98   We say ‘like a sacrificial victim’ advisedly; the general was not literally immolated and made part of a ritual sacrificial meal (see below, pp. 36–7). The ceremony of devotio was reminiscent of animal sacrifice, but not an identical ritual.

  99   Livy VIII.9–11.1, part = 6.6a (the fullest account, 340 B.C); X.28.12–29.7 (295 B.C.); Cicero, On the Ends of Goods and Evils II.61; Tusculan Disputations I.89; Cassius Dio X in Zonaras VIII.5 (279 B.C); full analysis of the major text: Versnel (1981b).

100   Livy VIII. 10.12.

101   LivyVIII.9.1 = 6.6a.

102   See the images collected at 6.1; for various records of animal sacrifice (including some republican examples), 6.2 & 3. Further images from sculptured reliefs (mostly of imperial date) are collected in Ryberg (1955); Torelli (1982). The literary evidence for sacrifice is plentiful, but extremely scattered; the only coherent accounts are the attack on sacrifice by the Christian Arnobius, in Against the Gentiles VII (see, for example, VII.9 = 6.8a) and the comparison of Greek and Roman practices in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities VII.72.15–18. Modern discussion: Warde Fowler (1911) 176–85; Wissowa (1912) 409–32; Dumézil (1970) 557–9; Scholz (1981); Scheid (1990b) 421–676.

103   Cicero, On Divination II.37 = 13.2b.

104   For a model liver, presumably a guide to the interpretation of the victim’s organ, see 7.4b (the ‘Piacenza Liver’); for a sculptured relief, showing the examination of entrails, 7.4d. Also above, fig. 1.4. Among many literary references, note Livy XLI.14.7 and 15.1–4 = 7.4c; Plautus, Little Carthaginian 449–66 = 6.3b.

105   Servius, On Virgil’s Aeneid II.104; Festus (epitome) p. 351L; Suetonius, Julius Caesar 59 (where Caesar ignores the omen).

106   We have to rely on a very hostile (and hilarious) account by Arnobius, Against the Gentiles VII.24.

107   For example, Detienne and Vernant (1989).

108  This type of boundary crossing is the major theme of Douglas (1966).

109  Bloch (1963) 77–86, 112–57; MacBain (1982). An example of a list of prodigies and their handling (217 B.C.): Livy XXII. 1. 8–20 = 7.3a.

110  The senate ruled in 169 B.C. that certain of the prodigies reported to it that year were not acceptable for public purposes, according to Livy XLIII.13; this is the only time that such a decision is mentioned in our sources, but presumably represents the regular procedure (discussed in MacBain (1982) 25–33). For a Roman officer persuading his soldiers not to see an eclipse as a prodigy, Livy XLIV.37.5–9 = 7.3c.

111  Livy’s attitudes and principles of selection: Levene (1993) 17–37. He argues that Livy was using prodigies in particular as a literary device, placing his accounts of these events at dramatic moments, when he wanted to heighten the tension or evoke a mysterious dangerous atmosphere. Against this view we might note that Livy’s lists are generally spare and factual in style, and strikingly not elaborated into the horror stories that they could have been. It certainly remains possible that Livy incorporated material from ancient records relatively unchanged, even if, as Levene proves, the placing in his account is manipulated. The origin of Livy’s material on prodigies: Rawson (1971); for a different view, North (1986) 255.

112  This function of prodigies and divination is stressed by Liebeschuetz (1979) 7–29 – though it is probably much less specific an argument than it appears. After all almost anything that a community does together at a time of crisis can have the effect of boosting morale.

113  The date comes from the title in the first printed edition; a translation of Obsequens is available in the Loeb Classical Library, Livy vol. XIV.

114  Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities IV.61; Livy 1.55.1 = 1.9b; Grande Roma (1990) 7–9; Cornell (1995) 96 and n. 48, contra Castagnoli (1979) 7–9; Map 1 no. 25; and above, p. 3.

115  Coarelli (1983–5) I; Cornell (1995) 108–9, 239–41; Steinby (1993–) II. 313–36, 4.7, for the Roman forum.

116  Even Varro in Augustine, The City of God IV. 31 (fr. 18 (Cardauns)) = 1.1a only claims that the gods went without images for the first one hundred and seventy years of the city’s history. Images from the third century, see above, fig. 1.5.

117  (Later) images of the Lares: see 2.2a.

118  A pair of goddesses on a pulvinar are illustrated, 5.5c.

119  The ritual of the ludi: below, pp. 66–7. The epulum Iovis: p.63; Warde Fowler (1899) 216–34; Wissowa (1912) 127, 423, 453–4; Degrassi (1963) 509, 530; Scullard (1981) 186–7.

120  Roman Antiquities VII.70–2, part = 5.7a.

121  Fabius Pictor: Frier (1979) 255–84; Momigliano (1990) 80–108.

122  Piganiol (1923) 15–31, 81.

123  Roman Antiquities VII.72.13 = 5.7a. Part of Dionysius’ aim here, and throughout his work, is to show that Rome was in origin a Greek city.

124  The inscribed regulations for a later burial club, the ‘society of Diana and Antinous’, ILS 7212 = 12.2 and below, 272; 287. In general, see Kloppenborg and Wilson (1996).

125  Warde Fowler (1911) 96–7; Wissowa (1912) 144–6; Degrassi (1963) 417–19; Scullard (1981) 85–7, 193–5.

126  Wissowa (1912) 555–9; Latte (1960a) 114–19; Ogilvie (1965) 98–9; Rüpke (1990) 23–7. The rituals and costume of the Salii: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities II.70.1–5 = 5.4a. Their hymn: Quintilian, Education of an Orator I.6.40–1 = 5.4c; the ancilia are illustrated on a gemstone, 5.4b.

127  There was a special type of military auspices taken by the consuls as generals on campaign.

128  A vivid account of various religious proceedings taken in expectation of war (in 191 B.C.): Livy XXXVI. 1–3.

129  Amphitryo 231–2.

130  Harris (1979) 20–1, 261–2; Pietilä-Castrén (1987).

131  The triumph in general, see Ehlers (1948); Versnel (1970); Weinstock (1971) 60–79; Scullard (1981) 213–18; Künzl (1988); Rüpke (1990) 225–34. A description of a lavish triumph: Plutarch, Aemilius Paullus 32–4 = 5.8a. Images of a triumphal procession on a silver cup: 5.8b.

132  The route: Coarelli (1983–5) I.11–118, (1988) 363–437.

133  Epictetus, Discourses III.24.85; Tertullian, Apology 33.4.

134  Olive growing (which was introduced from Greece to Italy in the sixth century B.C.) did not find any place in the calendar of festivals. This may be an indication that the central series of rituals was fixed before that time; but it still remains puzzling (given the general flexibility of the calendar) why nothing on this theme was added later.

135  Latte (1960a) 67–8; Degrassi (1963) 448–9; Scullard (1981) 108–9; for calendar entries, see 3.3a & b; with Ovid, Fasti IV.905–32 = 2.2b.

136  Sementivae (late January, but not fixed): Wissowa (1912) 193; Bayet (1950); Scullard (1981) 68. Fordicidia (15 April): Latte (1960a) 68–9; Degrassi (1963) 440–2; Dumézil (1970) 371–4; Scullard (1981) 102. Cerealia (19 April): Le Bonniec (1958) 108–40; Latte (1960a) 68; Dumézil (1970) 374–7; Scullard (1981) 102. Calendar entries referring to April festivals: 3.3a & b.

137  Dumézil (1975) 59–107.

138  Varro, On the Latin Language VI.16; above, p. 15.

139  Wissowa (1912) 115–16, 289–90; Schilling (1954) 98–155; Latte (1960a) 75–6, 184; Degrassi (1963) 446–7, 497–9; Scullard (1981) 106–8, 177; 3.3a & b.

140  Wissowa (1912) 199; Latte (1960a) 87–8; Degrassi (1963) 443–5; Dumézil (1975) 188–203; Scullard (1981) 103–5; Beard (1987); below, pp. 174–6. Different ancient interpretations: Ovid, Fasti IV.721–806 = 5.1a; Plutarch, Romulus 12.1 = 5.1b; Athenaeus, Table-talk VIII.361 e–f = 5.1c; note also Propertius IV.4.73–80; Tibullus II.5.87–90.

141  North (1995).

142  Michels (1967) 145–72; on the state calendar in the middle republican period, Briscoe (1981) 17–26.

143  Modern interpretations of the Lupercalia: Harmon (1978) 1441–6; Scholz (1981); Ulf (1982) (with survey of earlier views, 83–9); Hopkins (1991); Wiseman (1995) 77–88. Ancient interpretations: Plutarch, Romulus 21.3–8 = 5.2a; Varro, On the Latin Language Vl.34 = 5.2c; Augustine, The City of God XVIII.12 = 5.2d; for Julius Caesar and his supporters, it could evidently be re-perceived as a coronation ritual, Plutarch, Julius Caesar 61.3–4 = 5.2b (with Dumézil (1970) 349–50).

144  The problem of the October Horse: Warde Fowler (1899) 241–50; Latte (1960a) 119–20; Degrassi (1963) 521; Bayet (1969) 82–3; Scholz (1970); Dumézil (1975) 145–56; Scullard (1981) 193–4. Ancient discussions: Polybius, History XII.41.1; Festus p.190L; Plutarch, Roman Questions 97.

145  Scullard (1981) 39–40.

146  Statuettes of the Lares, see 2.2a; a household shrine from Pompeii is illustrated at 4.12.

147  On Agriculture 141 = 6.3a.

148  Above, pp. 24–6. For a general discussion of the role of private religion, Dorcey (1992) esp. 2–6.

149  For example, Horace, Odes III.8; IV.11; Tibullus II.2.

150  Above, pp. 12–13.

151  The role of the curiae at (for example) the Fornacalia: Ovid, Fasti II.527–32; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities II.23; with Latte (1960a) 143; Scullard (1981)73.

152  Parentalia (13–21 February): Latte (1960a) 98; Degrassi (1963) 408–9; Scullard (1981) 74–5. Lemuria (9, 11 and 13 May): Latte (1960a) 99; Degrassi (1963) 454–5; Scullard (1981) 118–19.

153  Above, pp. 45–6 with pp. 174–6, below.

154  Latte (1960a) 255; Degrassi (1963) 539; Scullard (1981) 205–7; Versnel (1993) 136–227. Private aspects of the festival: Macrobius, Saturnalia I.24.22–3 = 5.3a; Pliny, Letters II.17.23–4 = 5.3c; and the illustration from a fourth-century A.D. calendar, 5.3b. For the public rituals, see Livy XXII. 1.20 = 7.3a.

155  Sementivae: above, p. 45. Compitalia (December/January): Latte (1960a) 90–3; Scullard (1981) 58–60; see also below, pp. 184–6. Ambarvalia (May): Latte (1960a) 41–2; Scullard (1981) 124–5.

156  Ovid, Fasti III.771–90.

157  Warde Fowler (1899) 154–7; Latte (1960a) 97; Degrassi (1963) 468–9; Dumézil (1970) 50–5 (introducing parallels from Vedic India). The sixth-century B.C. temples of Mater Matuta and Fortuna: Castagnoli (1979); Cornell (1995) 147–8; Steinby (1993-) II.281–5; Map 1 no. 23 (with statues surviving from the temple of Fortuna, 1.7a(ii)). The temple of Mater Matuta at Satricum: 1.6b.

158  In general, Wissowa (1912) 507–12; Koch (1958) 1732–53; (1960) 1–16; Latte (1960a) 108–11; Ampolo (1971); Pomeroy (1976) 210–14; Radke (1981b); Scheid (1992b) 381–4. The myth of the origin of the Vestals: Plutarch, Numa 10 = 8.4a. Inscriptions in honour of leading Vestals: 8.4b.

159  Plutarch, Numa 10 = 8.4a emphasizes the punishment of Vestals; see also Plutarch, Roman Questions 96; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities II.67.4; with Koch (1960) 1–16; Guizzi (1968) 141–58; Cornell (1981).

160  Vestal priestesses at Alba Longa and Lavinium: Wissowa (1912) 520–1; Weinstock (1937b) 428–40; Alföldi (1965) 250–65; Dury-Moyaers (1981) 220–6; Radke (1981b); below, pp. 57–9, 323.

161  Latte (1960a) 108–10.

162  The Vestals’ legal condition and privileges are the subject of Guizzi (1968).

163  The different suggestions and their problems are reviewed by Beard (1980). For the relations between Vestals and pontifex maximus, below, pp. 57–8.

164  Beard (1980) – with critique in Beard (1995).

165  See Douglas (1966); this is another aspect of the ‘boundary crossing’ we discussed in the context of prodigies, above, p. 37.

166  Koch (1960) 11–16.

167  Cornell (1981) 31–3.

168  For example, Ovid, Fasti IV.731–4 = 5.1a (for the purificatory material used at the Parilia).

169  Romulus: Plutarch, Romulus 2.3–5. Caeculus of Praeneste: Servius, On Virgil’s Aeneid VII.678. Servius Tullius: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities IV.2; Pliny, Natural History XXXVl. 204; Ovid, Fasti VI.627–36; Plutarch, Fortune of the Romans 10; on all these traditions, Capdeville (1995) 1–154.

170  Ovid’s interpretation of the goddess: Fasti VI.249–348, part = 2.5.

171  Above, pp. 2–3.

172  Livy V.40.7–10; with Ogilvie (1965) 723–5.

173  For example, Cicero, On Behalf of Fonteius 46–8.

174  Wissowa (1912) 504–8; De Sanctis (1907–64) IV.2.355–7; Latte (1960a) 195–6; Dumézil (1970) 576–93; Momigliano (1971); cf. Ampolo (1971) and, for a different view, Cornell (1995) 232-8. The known reges are listed by Szemler (1972) 68, 174–5. None of them is known to have achieved any political distinction; below, pp. 106–7.

175  II.2.1.

176  The argument is most fully developed by Latte (1960a) 195–212. The most interesting piece of evidence is a list of the order of priests preserved by Festus p.299L: first the rex, then – in second to fourth place – the three flamines, fifth the pontifex maximus. This order must reflect some archaic ‘reality’; but what kind of reality and whether it is early republican rather than regal is quite obscure.

177  This emerges quite clearly from Livy XL.42.8–10, reporting a conflict in the second century B.C. between a potential rex sacrorum and the pontifex maximus of the time, who wanted him to abdicate a junior magistracy that he was then holding. The outcome was that he kept his magistracy and did not become rex.

178  See, for example, Livy XXXI.50.7; the point was established by C. Valerius Flaccus who had become flamen against his will (Livy XXVII.8.4 = 8.2d); he later rose to be praetor in 183 B.C. See also below, p. 106.

179  Cicero, On the Response of the Haruspices 12 gives a list of the members of the college of pontifices present at a particular meeting of the college; the rex sacrorum of the time is listed like the others, that is, in order of co-optation into the college.

180  His ritual programme: Degrassi (1963) 327–30 (Kalends and Nones); 415–16 (24 February); 430 (24 March); also 538 (15 December); Weinstock (1937a); Momigliano (1971).

181  Appointment of new Vestals (and flamines): Guizzi (1968) 100–5; Dumézil (1970) 582–3, 587–8. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights I.12.10–14.

182  The only evidence that gives colour to a special family/religious relationship between the Vestals and the rex is the formula quoted by Servius, On Virgil’s Aeneid X.228: ‘vigilasne, rex? vigila.’ (‘Are you on the watch, King? Be on the watch.’) But this shows the Vestals in their role as the defenders of the safety of Rome; it is not necessary to explain it as a survival of their primitive family life.

183  Cornell (1995) 235–6.

184  Livy II.8.2.

185  The tradition of dedication in republican times: Livy II.8 (cf. I.55.1 = 1.9b); Cicero, On his House 139; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities V.35.3; Tacitus, Histories III.72; above, p. 3.

186  Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities III.61–2; for a vigorous statement of the case, Alföldi (1965) 200–2.

187  The ‘myth’ of Etruscan Rome: Cornell (1995) 151–72; above, pp. 54–5.

188  Above, pp. 2–3.

189  Above, p. 35; note especially the evocatio of Juno of Veii, Livy V.21.1–7 = 2.6a.

190  Axtell (1907); De Sanctis (1907–64) IV.2.295–303; Latte (1960a) 233–42; Weinstock (1971) 168–9 (Fides = ‘Faith’); 260 (Concordia = ‘Concord’); 230–3 (Honos/Virtus = ‘Honour’/’Virtue’); on these below pp. 88n.55; 105. The special case of Victoria (Victory): below, p. 69. Note also the coin illustrating Honos and Virtus, shown at 2.3b; and Cicero’s explanation of these abstractions, On the Nature of the Gods II.60–2 = 2.3a. Map 1 no. 4 (Honos/Virtus); no. 25 (Fides).

191  Schilling (1954) 87.

192  The story of Tarquin: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities IV. 62 = 1.8. The Books themselves: Diels (1890); Hoffmann (1933); Gagé (1955) 24–38, 196–204, 432–61, 542–55, 677–82; Latte (1960a) 160–1; Radke (1963) 1115–28; Parke (1988) 190–215. An extract from the books is apparently preserved in Phlegon of Tralles, On Wonders 10 = 7.5a.

193  The origins of the connection, Radke (1963) 1138–9.

194  North (1976) 11.

195  The lectisternium of 399 B.C.: Livy V.13 = 5.5b (with the statues of goddesses as if being brought out for a banquet or procession, 5.5c). See Warde Fowler (1911) 261–5; Bayet (1926) 260–3; Gagé (1955) 168–79; Latte (1960a) 242–4; Ogilvie (1965) 655–7. The epulum Iovis: above, p. 40; below, pp. 66–7.

196  Livy IV.2.

197  367 B.C: Livy VI.37.12; 42.2; Wissowa (1912) 534–5. 300 B.C. (Lex Ogulnia): Livy X.6–9; Wissowa (1912) 492; Hölkeskamp (1988).

198  De Sanctis (1907–64) IV.2.194–5; Le Bonniec (1958) 348.

199  Sabbatucci (1954); J.-C. Richard (1978) 580–4. Of course, this uncertainty raises the question of what would count as a ‘priest’ in early Roman society, particularly among a group of plebeians outside the central structures of the state.

200  Ceres, Liber and Libera: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities VI.17 (who gives the tradition that the temple was founded on the recommendation of the Sibylline Books). Discussion: Le Bonniec (1958) 236–42; Latte (1960a) 161–2; Steinby (1993–) I.260–1. For the suggestion of South Italian connections, see Momigliano (1967) 310–11; with discussion of J.-C. Richard (1978) 503–12. Map 1 no 18.

201  Livy II.27.5–6. See Ogilvie (1965) 303–4; J.-C. Richard (1978) 513–19; Combet-Farnoux (1980) 18–35; J.-C. Richard (1982).

202  Livy II.42.5 (location, 4.7). The problems of the origins of the cult: Latte (1960a) 173–6; Ogilvie (1965) 288–9, 347; J.-C. Richard (1978) 510–11; the Roman character of the cult is discussed by Schilling (I960). In the Greek world the Dioscuri were traditionally patrons of the cavalry: at Rome the cavalry was not specially associated with the patricians – but it was not apparently specially plebeian either (J.-C. Richard (1978) 484–7).

203  Cornell (1995) 293–313.

204  The ritual of the ludi: Wissowa (1912) 449–67; Piganiol (1923); Piccaluga (1965); Versnel (1970) 258–70; Weinstock (1971) 282–6; above, pp. 40–1; below, pp. 262–3.

205  Cicero, Against Verves II.5.36; Le Bonniec (1958) 350–7; J.-C. Richard (1978) 118–24. The epulum Iovis, above p. 63.

206  The argument would be that, although we have no dated record of a performance of the Plebeian Games earlier than the earliest known performance of the Roman Games, Cicero was in fact right to give priority to the Plebeian Games; we have no early dated record precisely because such plebeian rituals were not recognized by the ‘official’ institutions of state religion and so did not enter the traditions of recording associated with the priestly colleges.

207  Bayet (1960).

208  Festus p.422L.

209  ILS 2988 = ILLRP 270 = 1.6a; Weinstock (1971) 8–12 and below, p. 89.

210  AE (1979) 136 = 1.6b; Versnel in Stibbe et al (1980); (1982).

211  Momigliano (1967) 305–12; Versnel in Stibbe et al (1980) 112–21.

212  Livy IX.29.9–11 = 1.6c. The cult: Bayet (1926); Latte (1960a) 213–21. A different view of the events of 312 is given by Palmer (1965). Map 1 no. 21.

213  Livy IX.46.

214  Below, pp. 135–6.

215  Above, pp. 27–30 (where we expressed considerable doubt about any clear split between religious and other public roles, even in early Rome). The first influential pontifex maximus known to us was Ti. Coruncanius (Münzer and Jörs (1901)), who was also the first plebeian to hold the office (Livy, Summaries XVIII), probably by the 250s B.C. It seems likely, but not certain, that election had been introduced earlier than this.

216  Weinstock (1958) 2504–6; (1971) 91–3; above, p. 62.

217  Livy X.47.6–7 = 2.6c; Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings I.8.2; <Aurelius Victor>, On Famous Men 22; Orosius III.22.5; Besnier (1902); E. Simon (1990) 19–26; Ziolkowski (1992) 17–18; Steinby (1993-) I. 21–2.

218  Map 1 no 27. The snake: Ovid, Metamorphoses XV. 736–44; Pliny, Natural History XXIX.16; 72; Plutarch, Roman Questions 94.

219  Livy, Summaries XI; Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings I.8.2; Ovid, Metamorphoses XV.622–744; Latte (1960a) 225–7. Incubation: Palmer (1974a) 145–9. The Greek cult of Asklepios: Edelstein and Edelstein (1945); Latte (1960a) 226–7; Nilsson (1961–7) I.805–8; Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel (1992) 128–32.

220  Above, pp. 12–13.

221  Besnier (1902) 229–38; Pensabene et al. (1980). Other collections of republican votives: Mysteries of Diana (1983) 46–53; Gatti lo Guzzo (1978) with Hauber (1990) 54–9; above, n.31.

222  Above, p. 13.

223  Radke (1987) 38–41.

224  219 B.C.: Cassius Hemina fr. 26P = Pliny, Natural History XXIX.12 (a doctor from the Peloponnese).

225  Arnobius, Against the Gentiles II.78, dates the introduction of the cult ‘just before’ that of Magna Mater in 205 B.C.; Le Bonniec (1958) 381–400; J.-C Richard (1978) 504–6; for the older form of the cult, above, pp. 64–6.

226  Le Bonniec (1958) 248–53.

227  Livy XXVII. 11.1–16; XXVII.37.4–15; Obsequens 34, 36, 43, 46, 53; Diels (1890) 54–6; A. Boyce (1937); MacBain (1982) 127–32; Spaeth (1996) 103–13. The Greek cult is very clearly reflected in the Sibylline oracle of 125 B.C.: Phlegon of Tralles, On Wonders 10 = 7.5a.

228  Scheid (1992b); below, pp. 95–6, 296–7.

229  The Roman explication of the myth: Le Bonniec (1958) 404–23.

230  Below, pp. 201–6.

231  Weinstock (1932).

232  Varro in Censorinus 17.8. Map 1 no 37. Nilsson (1920) outlines the issues; cf. Taylor (1934) 108–10.

233  Below, pp. 201–6.