On 29 September 57 B.C. the pontifical college met in Rome to decide the fate of Cicero’s house. Cicero’s savage repression of the conspiracy of Catiline in 63 B.C. (a dastardly revolutionary plot, or a storm in a tea-cup, depending on your point of view) had rebounded on him. Publius Clodius Pulcher, his personal and political enemy, had taken advantage of Cicero’s illegal execution of Roman citizens among the conspirators without even the semblance of a trial; and in 58 B.C. – with his old enemy clearly in mind – had passed a law condemning to exile anyone who had failed to adopt the proper legal procedures in putting a citizen to death. Cicero was forced to leave the city, while Clodius promptly celebrated his victory with the destruction of Cicero’s house and by consecrating on part of its site a shrine to the goddess Liberty, Libertas (a devastatingly loaded, or intentionally irritating, choice of deity, no doubt – for it was the principles of libertas that Cicero was charged with violating). But, in the switchback politics of the 50s, the tables soon turned once more. By 57 Cicero had been recalled, and the senate, faced with the problem of his property, referred to the pontifices the question of whether or not the consecration of the site had been valid; whether or not, in other words, Cicero could have his land back. After hearing representatives from both sides, the college decided that, as the consecration had been carried out without the authorization of the Roman people (and so was invalid), the site could be returned to Cicero. The senate confirmed the decision – and Cicero set about re-building.1
What sets this incident apart from any of the religious events we have touched on in earlier chapters is the survival of the speech that Cicero delivered to the pontifices on the occasion of the hearing. We do not, in other words, come to this piece of priestly business through the formal record of problem and decision, in the few sentences (at most) that Livy would normally choose to allot to such matters; we do not meet it as part of history, business done and decided. Cicero’s speech (even though altered or embellished, no doubt, after delivery for written circulation) takes us right into the uncertain process of religious decision making, into the heart of the contest. It does not reflect or record the discourse of religion; it is that discourse.
Of course, we know (as did ancient readers) that Cicero won the case. And so his words inevitably enlist us as admiring witnesses to the winning arguments in priestly debate, the successful repartee of religious conflict, the clever flattery directed to the priests by this pleader in the pontifical court. For example, when Cicero opens with the impressive lines:
Among the many things, gentlemen of the pontifical college, that our ancestors created and established under divine inspiration, nothing is more renowned than their decision to entrust the worship of the gods and the highest interests of the state to the same men – so that the most eminent and illustrious citizens might ensure the maintenance of religion by the proper administration of the state, and the maintenance of the state by the prudent interpretation of religion,2
we should not forget that this is not only an astute analysis of the overlap of political and religious officials in the late Republic, the interplay of religion and politics. It is also an expert orator’s estimation of how a group of Roman priests would wish to hear their roles defined; as well as, no doubt, a reflection of what a wider readership (of the ‘published’ version of the speech) would be expected to think an appropriate opening in a speech given to the pontifices... All these issues are the subject of this chapter; the formal adjudication of the religious status of Cicero’s property is only one aspect of the religion of the late Republic; equally important is how that adjudication is presented and discussed at every level.
Cicero’s speech On his House is not an isolated survival, a lucky ‘one-off’ for the historian of late republican religion. A leading political figure of his day, the most famous Roman orator ever, and prolific author – Cicero’s writing takes the reader time and again into the immediacy of religious debate and the day-to-day operations of religious business. Another surviving speech, originally delivered to the senate in 56 B.C., deals directly and at length with the response given by the haruspices to a strange rumbling noise that had been heard outside Rome, and attempts (once more in conflict with Clodius) to settle a ‘correct’ interpretation on the enigmatic words of the diviners.3 And in many others, religious arguments (and arguments about religion) play a crucial part, even if not as the main focus of the speech: Cicero’s notorious opponent Verres (one time Roman governor of Sicily, on trial for extortion) is, for example, stridently attacked for fiddling the accounts during a restoration of the temple of Castor in the Roman forum;4 Pompey, on the other hand, gets Cicero’s full backing for a new military command on the grounds that he is particularly favoured by the gods.5 Outside the public arena of forum or senate-house, Cicero’s surviving correspondence (particularly the hundreds of letters to his friend Atticus) gives at some periods an almost daily commentary on all manner of ‘religious’ news: from the discovery of a case of sacrilege and its upshots, to Cicero’s despair at the death of his daughter Tullia and his elaborate plans to build her a ‘shrine’ (fanum) and to achieve her apotheosis.6
We shall look in more detail in the following sections at many of these examples; but we shall look too at Cicero’s theoretical analysis of the religion of his own time. For he was not only a major actor on the political scene and a vivid reporter of day-to-day events (in religion, politics or whatever sphere); he was also the leading philosopher, theologian and theorist of his generation – which was itself the first generation at Rome to develop an analytical critique of Roman customs and traditions. Of course, many Romans from as far back as the foundation of their city must have wondered about the existence or character of the gods, or the reasons for their worship; but it was the late Republic that saw the transformation of that speculation (partly through the influence of Greek philosophy) into written, intellectual analysis. Cicero himself wrote carefully argued treatises On the Nature of the Gods and On Divination (where he put all kinds of Roman divinatory practice, from prodigies to dream interpretation, under a sceptical microscope); and in his book On the Laws (inspired by Plato’s work of the same name) he even devised an elaborate code of religious rules for an ideal city – not so very different from an idealized Rome. This new tradition of explicit self-reflection is another factor that sets the history of late republican religion apart from earlier centuries.7
Cicero’s writing dominates the late Republic, and inevitably focusses our attention onto the years from the late 80s to the mid 40s, the period of his surviving speeches, letters and treatises. In most of his arguments (such as that over his house, or on the response of the haruspices) the view of ‘the other side’ is lost to us, except as it is represented (or mis-represented) by Cicero himself. There is, for example, no surviving trace of Clodius’ speech to the pontifices in which he must have made his counter-claims in favour of the shrine of Liberty; and we have only Cicero’s allusions to Clodius’ rival interpretation of the haruspical response. So, in what follows, we shall on occasion be prompted to wonder what these religious debates as a whole might have looked like, not just Cicero’s side of the argument.
But Cicero, though dominant, is not the only surviving witness of late republican religion; not the only surviving author of the period to define, debate and write late republican religion for us. Even without Cicero, the list of relevant contemporary material far outstrips anything we have found in earlier chapters of this book: from Lucretius’ philosophical poem On the Nature of Things (which attempts to remove death’s sting with a materialist theory of incessant flux)8 to Catullus’ poem on the self-castration of Attis, the mythical consort of the goddess Magna Mater (whose introduction to Rome was discussed in chapter 2);9 from the surviving fragments, quoted in later writers, of Varro’s great encyclopaedia of the gods and religious institutions of the city (the work of a polymath who outbid even Cicero in antiquarian learning)10 to two long autobiographical accounts from the pen of the pontifex maximus himself (better known as Julius Caesar’s Gallic War and Civil War).11 It is in all this writing that we can glimpse for the first (and arguably the only) time in Roman history something of the complexity of religion and its representations, the different perspectives, interests, practices and discourses that constitute the religion of Rome.
In the light of this apparent prominence of religious concerns in the writing of the first century B.C., it may come as a surprise that the religion of this period has so often appeared to modern observers to be a classic case of religion ‘in decline’, neglected or manipulated for ‘purely political’ ends. If (as we have already seen) intimations of decline have been an undercurrent in the modern accounts of almost every period of republican religious history, here in the first century B.C. those intimations are horribly fulfilled; here the scenario offered us is not merely that of a few sacred chickens unceremoniously dumped overboard, but of whole temples falling down, priesthoods left unfilled, omens and oracles cynically invented for political advantage...12
Many factors have worked together to make this grim picture seem plausible. In part, religion has been conscripted into a narrative of political decline in the last century of the Republic: over the hundred years of (more or less) civil war from the Gracchi to the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., in which rival Roman generals battled it out for control of most of the known world, the traditions of the (free) Republic sank into autocracy; and religion, predictably, sank with the best of them.13 But there is more underlying the view of religious decline than simply a convenient model of the collapse of republican Rome. One of the reasons that decline has entered the analysis is precisely because several ancient writers themselves chose to characterize the religion of the period in this way. The poet Horace, like other authors writing under the first emperor Augustus, looked back to the final decades of the Republic as an era of religious desolation – at the same time, urging the new generation to restore the temples and, by implication, the religious traditions:
You will expiate the sins of your ancestors, though you do not deserve to, citizen of Rome, until you have rebuilt the temples and the ruined shrines of the gods and the images fouled with black smoke.14
And this view of neglect is apparently borne out not only by Augustus’ own claim (in his Achievements) that he had restored 82 temples in his sixth consulship (28 B.C.) alone, but also by various observations in late republican authors themselves. Varro, for example, explained his religious encyclopaedia as a necessary attempt to rescue from oblivion the most ancient strands of Roman religious tradition – offering a baroque (and grossly self-flattering) comparison of his project with Aeneas’ rescue of his household gods from the burning ruins of Troy.15
The first two sections of this chapter will explore further the apparent contrast between these two images of Roman religion in the late Republic: on the one hand, its centrality within a wide range of ancient writing, its generation of new, explicitly religious forms of expression in Roman theology and philosophy; on the other, its decline and neglect, as witnessed and lamented by Romans themselves. We will consider, in particular, what kind of comparison is possible between the religious life of the late Republic and earlier (or later) periods; and how we can ever evaluate claims that this (or any) religion is in decline, what it would mean, for example, to know that a religious system was demonstrably ‘failing’ – then or now.
In the second part of the chapter, we will turn to other aspects of the religion of the period: from the involvement of religious practice and conflicts in the political battles of the end of the Republic, through the deification of Julius Caesar, to the changing relations of Roman religion with the growing Roman empire. But through all these discussions we shall attempt to highlight the particular importance of contemporary religious discourse and debate, and the new ways of representing religion that were characteristic of the Ciceronian generation. To be sure, we do not imagine the urban poor or the rural peasants (who made up the vast majority of the Roman citizens at this, as at every, date) participating in the kind of theoretical discussions staged for us by Cicero; those discussions were the pastime of a very few, even among the élite. But it was a pastime that was to change forever the way Roman religion could be understood and discussed by Romans themselves. For the revolution of the late Republic was as much intellectual as it was political, as much a revolution of the mind as of the sword; and religion was part of that revolution of the mind.
The controversy around Cicero’s house, with which we opened this chapter, reveals some of the problems that face anyone trying to compare the status and ‘strength’ of religion between, say, the middle and late Republic (between, that is, the periods discussed in this and the last chapter). As we saw, Cicero’s speech before the pontifices took us right into the middle of religious conflict, into a world of religious rules that were not fixed (or at least were open to challenge), into the inextricable mixture of religious, political and personal enmity. It is a totally different kind of representation of religious business from the brief, ordered, retrospective account of a historian such as Livy, on whom we depend for almost all we think we know of religion in the middle Republic.
The modern observer is faced with (at least) two quite separate possibilities in comparing the Ciceronian-style account of the first century with the Livian style of the third or early second centuries. The first is that in religious terms these two periods really were worlds apart; that by the late Republic the ordered rules of religious practice that typified the earlier years, and are reflected in Livy, had irrevocably broken down into the conflict and dissent of which Cicero’s speeches, on this and other occasions, are a significant part. The second is that the apparent difference between the two periods lies essentially in the mode of representation: the difference, in other words, is between the contribution of an engaged participant (Cicero) and the narrative of a distanced annalistic historian (Livy). On this model, if we still had Livy’s account of the argument over the consecration of Cicero’s house, it would be hard to distinguish from those earlier disputes (between pontifex maximus and flamen, for example), where Livy gives us just the bare bones of the conflict, the final decision and very little more. And so, conversely, if we still had the words spoken by the different parties in the disputes so tersely related by Livy they would look just as charged, just as personally loaded, just as challenging to the idea of religious consensus as anything spoken by Cicero. Livy himself hints as much when – in recounting the argument of 189 B.C. between the pontifex maximus and the flamen Quirinalis (who wished to take command of a province, against the will of the pontifex) – he briefly mentions ‘the vigorous quarrels’ in the senate and assembly, ‘appeals to the tribunes’, the ‘anger’ of the losing party.16 Scratch the surface of the Livian narrative, in other words, and you would find a whole series of speeches very like Cicero’s.
Neither of these views is particularly convincing, at least not in an extreme form. Although there clearly is a difference of reporting, and a wholly different purpose in the different accounts, we are not dealing simply with a different rhetorical style. It is hard to believe that there was no difference in the character and importance of religious arguments in the two periods; hard to believe that while the Republic lurched to its collapse, it was business as usual in the religious department. If nothing else, the simple fact of the circulation of such speeches as Cicero s, the fact that this kind of religious argument was available to be read outside the meeting at which it was originally delivered, speaks to some difference in religious atmosphere in the last years of the Republic.17 The problem is, what difference? And how are we to characterize the complex of similarities and differences that mark the late republican changes?
Some of the same issues are at stake when we come to explore the contrasts between the last decades of the Republic and the early imperial period; and to explore the repeated claims in Augustan literature that the new emperor brought a new religious deal, after the impious neglect that had marked the previous era. It is obviously important to recognize that the Augustan régime was inevitably committed to that view of religious decline and restoration; that, if the traditional axiom that proper piety towards the gods brought Roman success still meant anything, then the disasters of the civil wars that finally destroyed the Republic (and Rome too – almost) could only signify impiety and neglect of the gods; and that this predetermined logic of decline says a lot about Augustan self-imaging, but little perhaps about the ‘actual’ conditions of the late Republic. It is also the case that many of the nostalgic remarks of Cicero and Varro, that appear to confirm the sad state of religion in their own day, may be just that – nostalgia; and nostalgia, as a state of mind, can flourish under the healthiest of régimes. On the other hand, none of these considerations is sufficient to prove the republican decline of religion merely an Augustan fiction, or just intellectual nostalgia. Varro, for example, supplied a great deal of information about cults and practices that had lapsed by his own time, which he identified (nostalgically maybe) as evidence of decline. Besides, it may be that the nostalgia of the late Republic, the pervading sense (whatever the truth) that religion was somehow in better shape in the past, is one of the most important characteristics that we should be investigating.
The problems in trying to judge this period of religious history against its neighbours, to calibrate its religious strengths and weaknesses, are almost insurmountable. And it is probably not worth the effort; after all, what would it mean to say, of our own time, that the twentieth century was less or more pious, less or more religious, less or more concerned with theology, than the nineteenth?18 There is, however, one area where we can test the difference in levels of piety that is proclaimed between the late Republic and what preceded and followed it: temple foundation and repair. We saw in chapter 2 how temple building could be a useful indicator of changing religious preferences among the Roman élite; we now take that discussion of the material setting of religion forward into the late second and first centuries B.C., with some rather different questions in mind. At the same time, we shall be able to see one of the contributions that archaeology can make to our understanding of religious history even in a period that is so well documented by literary texts.
The questions we will be looking to answer are these: what happened to the religious buildings of the city during the late Republic? were ancient temples duly tended and repaired? were new temples founded? how different was the late republican pattern from what had gone before? Once again comparison between Livy and Cicero is central to the issue. Livy records, as we have seen, an impressive series of temple buildings and dedications up to the mid second century B.C. (where his surviving text breaks off).19 Cicero, from time to time, focusses on a particular crisis surrounding a temple: Verres’ supposedly fraudulent restoration of the Temple of Castor, for example, or the accidental destruction of the temple of the Nymphs in street riots in 57 B.C.20 Otherwise temples only feature prominently again in the Augustan literature that claims the restoration of the dilapidations of the previous generation and vaunts its own lavish temple building schemes (some of which still survive).21 It is clear from this bald summary how modern observers have come to conclude that the late Republic was a particularly low point in care for the religious buildings of the city – which is itself seen as a significant index for respect for religion more generally. It is also clear, from what we have already said, that there can be no simple comparison between Livy’s text on the one hand (with its regular inclusion of information on major religious dedications) and Cicero’s writing on the other (where temple matters intrude only when out of the ordinary or relevant to some oratorical purpose at hand); or between Cicero and the pietistic boasts found in some Augustan writers.22 But can we go further than that, to show (for example) that the Augustan representation of late republican temple dilapidation – however crucial to Augustan self-representation – is, in late republican terms, a mis-representation?
Fig. 3.1 Pompey’s temple and theatre-complex on the Campus Martius in Rome (dedicated 55 B.C.), according to one of the many possible reconstructions. The temple of Venus Victrix is on the far right, approached by the stepped auditorium of the theatre; beyond the stage, to the left, a garden surrounded by colonnades. (Map 1 no. 35) (Overall length of the theatre and garden, c. 260m.)
For once, we believe that we can – up to a point. A careful search through the casual references (often in later writers) to religious building projects of the period, combined with the surviving evidence of archaeology, can produce a clear enough picture of the regular founding of new temples and the continued maintenance of the old through the last years of the Republic. The great generals of the first century B.C. seem to have followed the pattern of their predecessors in founding (presumably out of the spoils of their victories) new temples in the city.
Pompey (to take just one of these generals) can be credited with at least three foundations: a temple of Hercules (briefly alluded to in Vitruvius’ handbook On Architecture and Pliny’s Natural History);23 a temple of Minerva (also known from a brief discussion by Pliny);24 and a much more famous temple of Venus Victrix, ‘Giver of Victory’ (Fig. 3.1).25 This temple of Venus has often been underrated as a religious building because it was part of a lavish scheme, closely associated with a theatre – as if its real purpose was (or so many modern observers, and ancient Christian polemicists, have thought)26 merely to give respectability to a place of popular entertainment. In fact, whatever Pompey’s real motives, it fits into a long Italian tradition of just such ‘theatre-temples’ and is not a smart new invention at all.27 Caesar too was involved in major religious building. His new forum was centred around a temple of Venus Genetrix (‘the Ancestor’ – both of the Romans and his own family, the Julii), dedicated in 46 B.C. (Fig. 3.2); and he planned (though did not live to complete) a huge new temple of Mars, which (according to Suetonius) was to be the biggest temple anywhere in the world.28
Fig. 3.2 Caesar’s Forum (a possible reconstruction). The temple of Venus Genetrix stands at one end of the open piazza. (Map 1 no. 10) (Overall length of temple and forum, c.l33m.)
Even outside the circle of the most powerful figures of the period, other foundations by less prominent members of the élite can also be traced. There are, for example, three inscriptions surviving from Rome that mention a ‘caretaker’ (aedituus) of the temple of Diana Planciana. It seems very likely that the name ‘Planciana’ refers to the founder of the temple, probably Cnaeus Plancius, who issued coins bearing symbols of Diana in 55 B.C. Plancius was not a leading figure in late-republican Rome; though he was important enough to be elected aedile in the mid-50s B.C. and was defended by Cicero (in his speech For Plancius) against a charge of electoral corruption.29
A very similar picture emerges if we consider the restoration of existing temple buildings. The repair and upkeep of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was clearly prestigious enough to be the object of competition between leading magistrates: for example, in 62 B.C. Julius Caesar as praetor tried to remove responsibility for the upkeep from Quintus Lutatius Catulus (and give it to Pompey) on the grounds that he was taking too long over restoration.30 But other, less illustrious, temples had facelifts too. Cicero, for example, refers in his letters to his own embellishment of the temple of Tellus (Earth);31 and one of the few thoroughly excavated temples in the city, the temple of Juturna (Temple A, in the site known as the Largo Argentina), appears from the surviving remains to have been extensively refaced in the middle years of the first century B.C.32
We have more than enough material then to undermine any strident claims (whether made by ancient or modern authors) that the religious environment of the late Republic was in a state of complete neglect or collapse. We can be confident, at the very least, that those claims are seriously exaggerated; they may even be quite ‘wrong’. But this is not the end of our problem. Unless we are to convict the Augustan authors of wilful deception, we shall still be faced with wondering in what sense, for them, the claims of religious dilapidation were ‘true’. One possibility is that they were (in a limited sense) literally true, but only at the very end of the Republic as a result of the sustained and vicious bout of civil war which followed Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C. It is also possible, however, that they were true only in the sense of the traditional symbolic logic of Roman piety: the proper worship of the gods leads to Roman success; Roman failure stems from the neglect of the gods; the temples of the city must have been neglected during a period of Roman political failure. But even (or especially) if that is the case, those claims – false or not by other criteria – remain religious claims that demand our attention, not dismissal.
Besides, there may be a large gap between the fabric of the religious buildings of the city of Rome and the religious ideology, attitudes and devotion of its citizens. We are well aware from our own experience that there sometimes is, and sometimes is not, a connection between the upkeep of religious buildings and the upkeep of ‘faith’; and the connection is equally hazardous for Rome. We can never know what any Roman ‘felt’, at any period, when he decided to use his wealth to build a temple to a particular god; still less how Romans might have felt when entering, walking past or simply gazing at the religious monuments of their city. If the continued upkeep of temple buildings is, in other words, an index of continuity of expenditure on religious display, it is not necessarily an index of continuity of attitude, feeling or experience. As we move on through this chapter to look at different areas of the Roman religious world, we shall keep in mind what might count as an index of that experience.
Many of the contemporary, or near contemporary, accounts of religious conflict in the late Republic do suggest extraordinary disruptions in the religious life of the city. Irrespective of any model of development or decline; irrespective, that is, of any suggestion that the situation was worse then than in the periods that immediately preceded or followed it; irrespective of the political turmoil that almost inevitably implicated the religious institutions of the state... irrespective of all such considerations, religion in the last decades of the Republic was conspicuously failing, neglected, abused, manipulated, flouted. That at least (as we have already noted) has been the view of many modern commentators.
This section examines two of the major incidents, the causes célèbres, of late republican religious ‘abuse’. It reveals a set of religious rules, a religious ‘system’, that is often disrupted during this period; sometimes unable to adapt to all the strange and unprecedented circumstances that it faced; occasionally pushed to the limit of what political advantage might be extracted from it;33 overloaded, certainly, by the enormous political stakes that were now entailed in almost every public conflict (it was, after all, control of the whole world that Caesar and Pompey fought out in the civil war of the 40s B.C.). But, crucially, neither of these incidents, nor any of the others we might have chosen to highlight, attest an atmosphere in which religious traditions were simply violated: we find, for example, no case where the formal decision of a college of priests was blithely contravened; no clear case where the proper religious procedures (however problematically defined) were simply ignored.
At the same time, this section will pose the question of what constitutes religious neglect, as it explores two particular cases of religious traditions that changed or died out during the period. Here we shall meet again the challenge of different points of view, different judgements passed on the same events. So, for example, some observers (ancient or modern) will interpret the disappearance of a particular priesthood, or the neglect of a particular tradition, as an indication of the strength of the religious system overall; it is, after all, only a dead system, a religious fossil, that preserves all its traditions, no matter how far circumstances have changed; any living religion discards some of the old, while bringing on the new; in short, it adapts. But for other observers the same disappearance, of a ritual (say) carried out for centuries, or of a priesthood that (however quaintly old-fashioned) evoked some of the most hallowed traditions of the city, will mark a crucial stage in Rome’s disregard for its gods, its collective amnesia about their worship. The point is, as we shall see, that ‘neglect’ is always a matter of interpretation; and accusations of neglect almost inevitably appear hand in hand with boasts of adaptation and updating. Both sides of the coin have to be taken seriously.
As consul in 59 B.C., Julius Caesar introduced into the assembly a notoriously controversial piece of legislation to redistribute land to veteran soldiers; the bill was implacably opposed by his colleague in the consulship, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus. The precise details of the conflict are far from clear. But it seems that at the beginning of the year Bibulus offered objection to Caesar’s proposals in the traditional way: he appeared in the Forum and declared to the presiding magistrate that he had seen (or that he would be watching for) evil omens, preventing the progress of legislation.34 We, of course, do not know what exactly these omens were, or what it would have meant for Bibulus to claim to have seen them. But the logic of this kind of procedure (which has an established place in Roman voting and legislation)35 is clear enough: if the gods support and promote the Roman state (as they do), then they will make known their opposition to legislation that is against the interests of the state. The snag, of course, is that there could be vastly different views on what legislation is in fact ‘good for Rome’.
As the year went on, however, there was more and more rioting and civil disturbance. And Bibulus himself became the object of such violent assaults from partisans of Caesar that he took refuge in his own house; too frightened to go out, perhaps, he simply issued messages that he was watching the sky for omens (de caelo spectare). The assemblies went ahead despite these objections and the land bill and other controversial legislation were passed.36 These laws were to prove vulnerable to all kinds of challenge, on the grounds that their passing had violated religious rules. On one occasion in 58 B.C., according to Cicero, Clodius himself arranged a public meeting (contio) with Bibulus and a group of augurs. This was not a formal session of the priestly college, followed by a formal priestly ruling on the problem, but a chance, it seems, for Clodius to put the hypothetical question to the priests: if you were to be asked, as priests, if it was legal to conduct an assembly while Bibulus was watching the heavens, what would you say? Cicero claims (but he would...) that the augurs replied that such an assembly would not be legal.37 In fact, however, no such question was ever formally put to them as a college; and Caesar’s legislation remained challenged, but in force.38
One way of looking at this incident is as a flagrant example of the heedless flouting of religious rules in the last phase of the Republic: Bibulus had followed traditional procedures (validated by the augurs in their discussion with Clodius), but Caesar and his friends had simply ridden roughshod over them all. Cicero presumably reasoned that way, as have many modern observers – who have seen in this incident a clear case of the absolute domination of religious concerns by factional politics; and blatant disregard for religious obligations where they conflicted with secular ambitions. But this is only one side of the story. Through all the partisan ranting of Cicero in favour of Bibulus’ objections, one thing is clear: that the status of Caesar’s legislation was, and remained, controversial. Caesar (the pontifex maximus) did not, in other words, simply get away with total disregard for religious propriety. We need to try to get closer to what might lie at the centre of the controversy.
It seems very likely that a question mark hung over the effective status of Bibulus’ own actions. He claimed through much of his consulship to be ‘watching the heavens’, but he did not – as was, we assume, the traditional practice – declare this in person to the presiding magistrate before the assembly took place; instead, he sent a series of runners carrying messages of what he was doing...! Such a procedure could have been seen in at least two completely different ways. On the one hand it must have been argued that, once Bibulus had incarcerated himself at home and started simply to send messages that he was watching the heavens’, his objections had no validity; for ill omens only constituted proper obstruction to public business if announced in person, on the spot.39 On the other, it must also have been arguable that, since violence made it impossible for Bibulus to attend the assemblies and follow the standard procedures, the religious objections should stand, however procedurally incorrect. And even some of Caesar’s own supporters seem to have taken the line (or so, again, Cicero would have us believe) that the legislation should be re-submitted, this time with all the proper observances.40
It is now (and almost certainly would have been then) hard to resolve those two opposing views. That is of course the point. We have no precise idea of the terms that governed the declaration of ill omens, but it seems very likely that, while they may have assumed the presence of the objector at the assembly concerned, they did not directly stipulate it.41 For the conventions of this religious practice had taken shape over a period when the effects of the prolonged urban violence of the last decades of the Republic could hardly have been foreseen; earlier generations, in other words, would not have thought to legislate for an objector who was too scared to go out. If so, it would not have been the case in 59 of not following the religious rules, but of not knowing what were the rules to follow.
All kinds of factors come together to make Bibulus’ objections to Caesar’s legislation in 59 such a cause célèbre. Beyond the accusations and counter-accusations over the uncertainty of the religious rules themselves, there was also the fact that an enormous amount was at stake in any decision; if Bibulus’ objections were valid, then the whole legislative programme of Caesar’s consulship would have to be annulled (as well as all the legislation passed by Clodius as tribune).42 It may well have been the republican tradition to improvise the religious rules as was necessary, but too much was at stake here for that improvisation to work smoothly: the legislative and constitutional chaos that would have followed the annulment of all decisions made in the face of Bibulus’ objection is unthinkable. The sheer scale of political business (and its implications) presumably was a distinctive feature of the political and religious world of the late Republic. Whether or not it amounts to a proof of a failing religious system depends on your point of view.
A slightly earlier incident of religious conflict provides a second example of these difficulties in applying the traditional rules. This was the controversy of 62–61 B.C., after the invasion of ceremonies of the Bona Dea (traditionally restricted to women only) by Cicero’s adversary – so it was believed – Publius Clodius Pulcher. This incident was apparently followed immediately by faultlessly correct action: the Vestal Virgins repeated the ritual; the senate asked the Vestals and pontifices to investigate, and they judged it to count as sacrilege; the consuls were instructed to frame a bill to institute a formal trial; Julius Caesar (in whose house the ceremonies had taken place) even divorced his wife as a direct result of the scandal.43 So far, so good; but some of the quarrels and disagreements that were to surround the trial itself again suggest uncertainty in how such a process should be handled, and in the eyes of some, no doubt, a breakdown in the city’s ability to control religious disorder.
We should recognize straight away that the act of sacrilege on its own (however outrageous to contemporary observers) is not particularly important for our view of late republican religion. It is hard to imagine that there had not always been this kind of isolated, high-spirited attack on the traditional conventions of ritual; for no religion anywhere has succeeded in getting everyone to obey all the rules all the time, and most religions (we suspect) have not particularly sought to.44 Nor is the fact that Clodius was eventually acquitted itself a strong signal of religious failure. For despite the fulminations of Cicero (who, predictably, attributed the acquittal to bribery of the jury), very few people could have known – and we and Cicero are certainly not among them – whether Clodius was guilty or not. The problems are much more to be located in the squabbles over whether there should be a formal trial at all, and how the jury was to be composed.
Throughout his account of these events in his letters to Atticus, Cicero huffs and puffs – deriding (as he had to45) almost every aspect of the procedure, from the mistaken tactics of his own allies to the failure at one stage in the voting proceedings to produce any ballot papers with the option ‘yes’ on them. At the same time, though, he makes it absolutely clear that the handling of the sacrilege was high on the public agenda, a major focus of debate. Part of this debate may well have been prompted by all kinds of personal enmities and loyalties, by the interests of factional politics; for a conviction on such a charge would certainly have put Clodius’ whole career in jeopardy. But this is not at all to suggest that there was widespread acceptance of behaviour that appeared to flout traditional, religious rules; quite the reverse, in fact, if we imagine that Clodius’ career really was in danger. The problems lie, rather, in formulating the details of the judicial action, in establishing a procedure for dealing with this particular religious crime – in the context of such ruinously high stakes. Cicero, we should remember, reports no claim that the disruption of the festival didn’t matter, or that such religious business was the concern only of a few old grey-beards.
For more than seventy years, from 87 or 86 B.C. to 11 B.C., the office of flamen Dialis, the ancient priesthood of Jupiter, was left unfilled.46 Not surprisingly, this has been seen as a classic example of religious neglect. Some ancient authors write in approval of Augustus’ appointment of a new priest after the long gap, as one component of his ‘revival’ of traditional religion.47 For many modern writers, the lapse in the office has been one of the clearest signs of the Roman élite’s lack of interest in religion at this period or, at least, of their shifting priorities: they were, in other words, no longer willing to countenance the inconvenient taboos of this venerable office (particularly when those taboos, as we have seen, could obstruct a full political and military career). All this is true, so far as it goes. Augustus very likely did vaunt his re-appointment of a flamen Dialis, as a sign of a new religious deal after decades of neglect; and so it might well have appeared to many observers at the time. No doubt also there were some members of the Roman aristocracy (as we know already from centuries earlier) who found the archaic restrictions on this particular priest more than irksome.48 None the less, if we examine the circumstances that lie behind the first vacancy in the priesthood in the 80s, we shall find them to be rather more complicated than simple unwillingness to undertake the office; and we shall find the degree of neglect of the rituals normally undertaken by the priest much less than is often assumed. In the case of the flamen Dialis we can glimpse some of the complex stories that might lie behind any instance of apparent neglect of traditional ritual.
The story starts in the civil wars in the 80s B.C. When Rome was under the control of Cinna and Marius, in 87 or in early 86, the young Julius Caesar was designated as flamen Dialis, in succession to Lucius Cornelius Merula, who had committed suicide after the Marian takeover of the city. But before Caesar had been formally inaugurated into the office, Rome had fallen once more to Sulla, who annulled all the enactments and appointments made by his enemies.49 It is impossible now to reconstruct how the Roman élite viewed the vacant flaminate, or Caesar’s status in relation to the priestly office that arguably he already filled. It is impossible to know whether or not Caesar himself was privately relieved to find a convenient way out of a priesthood that would, in due course, almost certainly have conflicted with his political ambitions. But we can see that it was Sulla’s action in dismissing Caesar, in the confusion of civil war, that represented the first step in the suspension of the priesthood; not, that is, some general agreement that the office no longer mattered.
The crucial decision, of course, was what should happen to the various rituals usually carried out by the flamen: the absence of a priest was one thing, the failure to fulfil the proper rituals of the state was quite another. We have already seen that the peculiar position of the flamines as individual priests of their deity could be seen to demand that the rituals assigned to them were carried out by them alone, outside the collegiate structure of the pontifical college (which would normally imply the interchangeability of one priest with another). On the other hand, if you chose to think of the flamines as regular members of the pontifical college, it would be clear enough that, in the absence of a flamen, his duties could fall to the other pontifices. This is, in fact, precisely what Tacitus states, when he puts into the mouth of the flamen Dialis of A.D. 22 the claim that, over the long years when the priesthood was unoccupied, the pontifices performed the rituals: ‘the ceremonies continued without interruption’ and even though the office was vacant ‘there was no detriment to the rites’.50 Of course, this particular priest has an axe to grind himself; for these are his arguments in support of his own claim to be allowed out of Italy to hold the governorship of the province of Asia. But, even so, he gives us a further clue as to how the long vacancy in the office might have developed. Suppose there was a brief period when there was widespread uncertainty about who was (or was not) the flamen Dialis; suppose then (as we have seen was almost certainly the case) the pontifices took over the rituals of the vacant priesthood; and suppose this situation carried on, as a temporary measure, for a whole year, for the complete annual cycle of ceremonies normally performed by the flamen ... Is that not already the makings of a new system? Has it not already habituated the Roman élite to a change of roles amongst the priestly hierarchy? Has not the lapse in the tenure of the flaminate been effectively masked?
Yes and no. For some Romans, the performance of the rituals was probably what really counted, the absence of an archaic priest, with a strange pointed hat, much less. For others, the vacancy in an office which (as its odd taboos underlined) represented the most ancient traditions of Roman piety, stretching back as far as you could trace into the mythical origins of the city, must have seemed a clear sign that Rome was disastrously failing in its obligations to the gods. Still others (presumably the vast majority) would never even have noticed the absence.51 For us, however, the circumstances surrounding the lapse in this office (more than the simple fact of the lapse itself) highlight the close interrelationship between the disturbances of civil war and the apparent ‘neglect’ of religion; as well as the various tactics of change and adaptation (in this case a growth in the ritual obligations of the pontifices) that might accompany such lapses.
Our next example focusses even more strongly on these changes. The geographical expansion of Roman imperial power underlies several of the most striking losses and adaptations in the religious traditions of Rome during the late Republic. Various rituals of war, for example, that originated in the now distant days when Rome was fighting her Italian neighbours were no longer appropriate (and in some cases almost impossible to carry out) when Rome’s expansion was far overseas. One of the clearest instances of this is the ritual of the fetial priests on the declaration of war. It had been traditional fetial practice to proceed to the border of Rome’s territory and to hurl a ritual spear across into the enemy’s land: a first symbolic mark of the coming war. But when Rome’s enemies were no longer her neighbours, but lived hundreds of miles away overseas, that particular ritual became practically impossible to carry out – short of packing the priests off on a boat, and waiting maybe months for them to make the journey. Instead the ritual was retained in a new form: a piece of land in Rome itself, near the temple of Bellona, was designated (by legal fiction) ‘enemy ground’ and it was into this that the priests threw their spears. Whether this was a case of lazy sophistry, conscientious adaptation to new circumstances or imaginative creativity, the ritual continued to be carried out – but in a new form.52
The ritual of evocatio undergoes a similar, but more complex, change. As we have seen, the tradition here was that the Roman commander should press home his advantage in war by offering to the patron deity of the enemy a better temple and better worship in Rome, if he or she were to desert their home city and come over onto the Roman side. The best recorded occasion of this practice was the evocatio of the goddess Juno, patron of Veii, who deserted the Veians for the Romans in 396 (thus ensuring Rome’s victory), and who was worshipped thereafter at Rome with a famous temple on the Aventine Hill.53 It has often been thought that this practice had entirely died out at Rome by the late Republic. For the temple of Vortumnus (founded in 264 B.C.) is the last temple in the city clearly to owe its origin to this particular ritual; for whatever happened at the evocation of Juno from Carthage in 146 B.C. (even if we do not bracket it off as an antiquarian fantasy), there is no evidence that it resulted in the building of a new temple for the goddess in Rome.54 But an inscription discovered in Asia Minor suggests that the practice did not die out; rather, it was performed differently.
This inscription was discovered, on a building block, at the site of the city of Isaura Vetus, taken by the Romans in 75 B.C. It refers to the defeat of the city and to the fulfilment of a ‘vow’ of the Roman commander, echoing in its language some of the formulae used (as other, literary, accounts suggest) in the ceremony of evocatio. The most plausible explanation is that this inscribed stone comes from a temple dedicated by the Roman general to the patron deity of Isaura Vetus, who had been ‘called out’ of the town in the traditional way; but that on this occasion the temple offered to the deity was not in Rome itself, but on provincial territory.55
This is just one piece of evidence, fragmentary at that. But it may allow us to construct a different account of the late republican history of this ritual: not that it entirely died out, but that the location of the promised temple changed. If this is the case, it could be seen as a relaxation, a ‘watering down’, of the traditional religious obligations of the ritual. But it could also be seen in the context of changing definitions of ‘Roman-ness’, of what counted as ‘Roman’. Whereas in the early Republic to offer a rival deity a Roman home meant precisely offering a temple in the city itself, at the end of the Republic by contrast, imperial expansion, and the changing Roman horizons that went with it, meant that provincial territory could now be deemed Roman enough to stand for Rome. We may be dealing then with one feature (of which we shall see more later) of Roman religious adaptation to a vastly expanded empire.
The disruption of religion in the late Republic will continue to baffle its modern observers, as (no doubt) it baffled ancient observers too. It is not difficult to spot all kinds of ‘impieties’ and ‘failures’, or to be struck by the outrage of Cicero at some of the events he witnessed, by the irresolvable conflicts that threatened those whose business it was to handle Roman relations with the gods smoothly. But, not surprisingly (and appropriately enough), it is far less easy to evaluate or generalize. We have already emphasised, in discussing the four incidents that we have chosen in this section, how different interpretations follow from different points of view, and different starting points; how the same incident can be seen as outright neglect and constructive adaptation, cynical self-seeking and uncertain fumbling after the proper religious course of action. The same would be true if we were to look in any detail at any of the other particular causes célèbres we have not examined here: from accusations of forging oracles to priestly ‘manipulation’ of the calendar.56
Paradoxically, though, one thing does seem to be clear through this extraordinary array of different views, interpretations and debates: namely that religion remained throughout this period a central concern of the Roman governing class, even if principally as a focus of their conflicts. There was, in other words, a consensus that religion belonged high up on the public agenda. In the next section we shall explore this consensus further, as we look more closely at the role of religion within public, political debate from the late second century onwards.
As part of Roman public life, religion was (and always had been) a part of the political struggles and disagreements in the city. Disputes that were, in our terms, concerned with political power and control, were in Rome necessarily associated with rival claims to religious expertise and with rival claims to privileged access to the gods. That was the view of Livy, for example, who – from his early imperial standpoint – perceived the political struggles of the early Republic partly in terms of struggles against patrician monopoly of religious knowledge and of access to the divine. In the final stages of his account of ‘The Struggle of the Orders’, he gives a vivid picture of the passing of the lex Ogulnia in 300 B.C., the law which gave plebeians designated places in the pontifical and augural colleges. The patricians, according to Livy, saw such a law as a contamination of religious rites, and so liable to bring disaster on the state; the plebeians regarded it as the necessary culmination of the inroads they had already made into magisterial and military office-holding.57 It would have made no sense in Roman terms to have claimed rights to political power without also claiming rights to religious authority and expertise.
The struggles of the late Republic and the ever intensifying political competition provide even clearer testimony of the inevitable religious dimension within political controversy at Rome. It was not just a question of arguments being framed (as we shall see clearly later) in terms of the will of the gods, or of divine approval manifest for this or that course of action. As political debate came to focus, in part at least, on the opposition between optimates and populares– on the clash, that is, between those who voiced the interests of the traditional governing class and those who claimed to speak for, and were in turn backed by, the people at large – religious debate too seems to have become increasingly concerned with issues of control between aristocracy and people: with attacks on the stranglehold of the optimates over priestly office-holding and with attempts to locate religious (along with political) authority more firmly in the hands of the people as a whole. The historian Sallust, for example, who interprets the conflicts of the late Republic very much in these terms, puts into the mouth of Caius Memmius (tribune 111 B.C.) a virulent attack on the dominance of the nobles, who
walk in grandeur before the eyes <of the people>, some flaunting their priesthoods and consulships, others their triumphs, just as if these were honours and not stolen goods.58
The juxtaposition of ‘priesthoods’ and ‘consulships’ here is not an accident. Those who resented what they saw as the illicit monopoly of power by a narrow group of nobles would necessarily assert the people’s right of control over both religious and political office, over dealings with the gods as well as with men.
One of the clearest cases of the assertion (and rejection) of popular control over religion is found in the series of laws governing the choice of priests for the four major priestly colleges. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the traditional means of recruiting priests to most of the colleges was co-optation: on the death of a serving priest, his colleagues in the college themselves selected his replacement (on what principles, we do not know). It was only in the case of the choice of the pontifex maximus from among the members of the pontifical college that a limited form of popular election had been practised, since the third century B.C.59 The process of co-optation had been first formally challenged (so far as we know) in 145 B.C., when Caius Licinius Crassus introduced a bill to replace the traditional system with popular election.60 That bill, as we saw in chapter 2, was defeated; but a similar proposal introduced in 104 B.C. by Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (consul 96) succeeded: the priests of the four major colleges (pontifices, augures, decemviri and triumviri) retained the right to nominate candidates for their priesthoods, but the choice between the candidates nominated was put in the hands of a special popular assembly, formed by 17 out of the 35 Roman voting tribes – the method of election already used for the pontifex maximus. The priests themselves no longer had complete control over the membership of their colleges.
Roman writers offer various interpretations of this measure. Suetonius, in particular, stresses the personal motives of Domitius: having himself failed to be co-opted into the pontifical college, he proceeded out of pique to reform the method of entry.61 We cannot judge the truth of such allegations; and, indeed, all kinds of personal or narrowly political motives may have lain behind Domitius’ proposal. But the details of the law itself suggest that a delicate compromise between the interests of the people and the traditional priestly groups may have been at work here. On the one hand, the electoral assembly was (as we have noted) already used in a priestly context; while the definition of that body as being just less than half of the normal popular assembly (seventeen out of the thirty-five tribes) suggests that here, as with the election of the pontifex maximus, there might have been some compunction about asserting outright popular control over priestly business. It was also the case that the college could exclude any candidate of whom they did not, for whatever reason, approve. On the other hand, the requirement that each member of the college should make a nomination for election, and that no more than two priests could nominate the same candidate, looks like an attempt to ensure that the assembly had a real choice, that the college could not fix the election in advance. However guarded, this reform clearly represents a political and religious challenge to the dominance of the traditional élite, a claim for popular control over the full range of state offices.62
The regulations for priestly elections remained a live issue for years. Domitius’ law was repealed by the dictator Sulla, as part of his re-assertion of traditional senatorial control; but it was later re-enacted in 63 B.C. by the tribune Labienus – in the last of the series of laws which undid the various controversial aspects of Sulla’s reforms, after his retirement. Labienus was a well-known radical and at that time a friend of Julius Caesar; support for the ‘popular cause’ inevitably involved support for popular control of human relations with the gods.63
Another challenge to traditional religious authority can be detected in the events of 114–113 B.C., when a number of Vestal Virgins were declared guilty of unchastity and put to death (as was the rule) by burial alive in an underground chamber. The story starts in 114, when the daughter of a Roman equestrian had been struck dead by lightning, while riding on horseback; she was found with her tongue out and her dress pulled up to her waist. This was declared a prodigy and interpreted by the Etruscan haruspices as an indication of a scandal involving virgins and knights. As a result, in December 114, according to traditional practice, three Vestal Virgins were tried for unchastity before the pontifical college; one of them was found guilty and sentenced to death. In reaction to the acquittal of the other two Vestals, Sextus Peducaeus, tribune of 113 B.C., carried a bill through the popular assembly to institute a new trial – this time with jurors of equestrian rank and a specially appointed prosecutor, the ex-consul Lucius Cassius Longinus. This new trial resulted in a death sentence for the other two Vestals.64 The traditional competence of the pontifices to preserve correct relations with the gods had been called into question, while the power of the people to control the behaviour of public religious officials had been asserted.
On other occasions rival claims by individual politicians to privileged access to the gods provided the focus of political debate: a man could demonstrate the correctness of his own political stance by showing that he, rather than his political opponent, was acting in accordance with divine will. This was clearly the case in 56 B.C., when Cicero and Clodius engaged in public debate over the interpretation of a prodigy – Cicero’s speech On the Response of the Haruspices (as we have already mentioned) representing one side of the argument. The haruspical response to the strange noise that had been heard on lands outside Rome had alluded to various causes of divine anger with the city: the pollution of games (ludi); the profanation of sacred places; the killing of orators; neglected oaths; ancient and secret rituals performed improperly.65 Yet (no doubt following the traditional pattern of such responses) much still remained unclear and unspecific, in need of further interpretation and debate.
In the arguments that followed Clodius and Cicero offered their own quite different interpretations of what the haruspices had actually meant, item by item. Clodius, for example, claimed (rather convincingly, we are tempted to suggest – despite Cicero’s scorn) that the ‘profanation of sacred places’ was a reference to Cicero’s destruction of the shrine of Liberty. Cicero himself, on the other hand, in his surviving speech, related ‘the pollution of games’ to Clodius’ disruption of the Megalesian Games (held in honour of Magna Mater) and claimed that the ‘ancient and secret rituals performed improperly’ were the rituals of the Bona Dea, reputedly invaded by Clodius a few years earlier.66 Much of this debate was clearly a series of opportunistic appeals to a conveniently vague haruspical response; a crafty exploitation of religious forms at the (political) expense of a rival. But at the centre of the argument – what they were arguing about – was a priestly interpretation of a sign sent by the gods. When both Clodius and Cicero claimed as correct their own, partisan, interpretation of the prodigy, each was effectively attempting to establish his own position as the privileged interpreter of the will of the gods. Divine allegiance was important for the Roman politician. In the turbulent politics of the mid 50s, it must inevitably have been less clear than ever before where that allegiance lay. Connections with the gods (as well as the alienation of the divine from one’s rivals) had to be constantly paraded and re-paraded.
Underlying these apparently deep divisions over the control of religion and access to the favour of the gods, there was (as we noted at the end of the last section) a striking consensus of religious ideology. Cicero’s speeches offer a clear instance of this. Loaded, partisan, aggressively one-sided – they were the most successful works of political rhetoric that the Roman world had ever known, constantly admired and imitated. In speech after speech, Cicero enlists the support of his listeners (and later his readers) with appeals to the gods and to the shared traditions of Roman religion and myth. In the first of his speeches against Catiline, for example, delivered in 63 B.C. to the senate (meeting in the temple of Jupiter Stator on the lower slopes of the Palatine), part of his persuasion of the wavering senators draws on the traditions of the particular temple in which they are assembled. He not only evokes Jupiter ‘the Stayer’ (‘who holds the Romans firm in battle’ – or ‘who stops them from running for it...’), but interweaves allusions to the mythical foundation of the temple, vowed by Romulus in the heat of his battles with the Sabines. He offers, in other words, a mythical model for the kind of threat he claims the city faces from Catiline, and by implication presents himself as a new founder of Rome. Privately, many senators may have been irritated, disbelieving or amused by these claims; but it seems clear enough that Roman public discourse found one of its strongest rallying cries in such appeals to the city’s religious traditions.67
But this public religious consensus is important too in the conflicts and disagreements of late republican politics; it is not just a feature of grand Ciceronian appeals to ‘unity’ in the state. Crucially, there is no sign in any Roman political debate that any public figure ever openly rejected the traditional framework for understanding the gods’ relations with humankind. Political argument consisted in large part of accusations that ‘the other side’ had neglected their proper duty to the gods, or had flouted divine law. It was a competition (in our terms) about how, and by whom, access to the gods was to be controlled – not about rival claims on the importance or existence of the divine. So far as we can tell, no radical political stance brought with it a fundamental challenge to the traditional assumptions of how the gods operated in the world. There were, to be sure, as there always had been, individual cults and individual deities that were invested (for various reasons) with a particular popular resonance. The temple of Ceres, for example, as we have seen, had special ‘plebeian’ associations from the early Republic; likewise the cult of the Lares Compitales (at local shrines throughout the regions (vici) of the city) was a centre of religious and social life for, particularly, slaves and poor (and was later to be developed by Augustus precisely for its popular associations); while Clodius’ dedication of his shrine to Liberty on the site of Cicero’s house no doubt had, as must have been the intention, a popular appeal.68 There were always likely to be choices and preferences of this kind in any polytheism. But if these cults did act as a focus for an entirely different view of man’s relations with gods, no evidence has survived to suggest it.
The particular quarrels between Clodius and Cicero well illustrate the religious consensus that operated even (or especially) in disagreement. These battles are known, as we have already remarked, almost entirely from the side of Cicero, who constantly characterized Clodius as ‘the enemy of the gods’ – whether for the invasion of the rites of the Bona Dea, or the ‘destruction of the auspices (in his reforms of the rules for obnuntiatio in 58 B.C.). The truth that may lie behind any of these allegations is now impossible to assess (and in many cases always was). More important is the fact that Clodius appears to have returned in kind what were, after all, quite traditional accusations of divine disfavour. As we have seen from Cicero’s defence in his speech On the Response of the Haruspices, Clodius did not disregard or even ridicule Cicero’s religious rhetoric; he did not stand outside the system and laugh at its silly conventions. He turned the tables, and within the same religious framework as his opponent, he claimed the allegiance of the gods for himself, and their enmity for Cicero. It was similar with other radical politicians. Saturninus (tribune in 103 and 100 B.C.), for example, protected his contentious legislation by demanding an oath of observance (sanctio) sworn by the central civic deities of Jupiter and the Penates in front of the temple of Castor in the Forum;69 and Catiline kept a silver eagle in a shrine in his house, as if taking over for his uprising the symbolic protection of the eagle traditionally kept in the official shrine of a legionary camp.70 The question, then, was not whether the gods were perceived to co-operate with the political leaders of Rome; but with which political leaders was their favour placed?
But this raises yet another question, which we will turn to consider in the next section: quite how close is the co-operation of men and gods, quite how easy is it to draw a distinction between the divine and the human?
The honours granted to Julius Caesar immediately before his assassination suggest that he had been accorded the status of a god – or something very like it: he had, for example, the right to have a priest (flamen) of his cult, to adorn his house with a pediment (as if it were a temple) and to place his own image in formal processions of images of the gods. Shortly after his death, he was given other marks of divine status: altars, sacrifices, a temple and in 42 B.C. a formal decree of deification, making him divus Julius. Ever since the moment they were granted, these honours – particularly those granted before his death – have been the focus of debate. If you ask the question ‘Had Caesar officially become a Roman god, or not, before his death? Was he, or was he not, a deity?’ you will not find a clear answer. Predictably, both Roman writers and modern scholars offer different and often contradictory views.71 Some speak stridently for, some stridently against, his manifest divinity; taken together they attest only the impossibility of fixing a precise category for Caesar, whether divine or human.72
It is, nevertheless, certain enough that the honours granted to him before the Ides of March 44 B.C. likened him in various respects to the gods, assimilated him to divine status. That assimilation itself could be understood in different ways: both as an outrageously new, foreign, element within the political and religious horizons of the Roman élite, and as a form of honour which had strong traditional roots in Roman conceptions of deity and of relations between political leaders and the gods. On the one hand, that is, particular inspiration for various of Caesar’s divine symbols may well have been drawn from the East, and the cult repertoire of the Hellenistic kings; the public celebrations on Caesar’s birthday, for example, and the renaming of a calendar month and an electoral tribe in his honour have clear precedents in the honours paid to certain Hellenistic monarchs.73 On the other hand, some aspects of Caesar’s divine status are comprehensible as the developments of existing trends in Roman religious ideology and practice. The boundary between gods and men was never as rigidly defined in Roman paganism as it is supposed to be in modern Judaeo-Christian traditions. Even if, as we have seen, the mythic world of Rome was more sparsely populated than its Greek equivalent with such intermediate categories between gods and men as ‘nymphs’ and ‘heroes’, it did incorporate men, such as Romulus, who became gods; the Roman ritual of triumph involved the impersonation of a god by the successful general; and in the Roman cult of the dead, past members of the community shared in some degree of divinity.74 There was no sharp polarity, but a spectrum between the human and the divine. Throughout the late Republic the status of the successful politician veered increasingly towards the divine end of that spectrum. Caesar, in some senses, represented a culmination of this trend.
Rome’s political and military leaders had always enjoyed close relations with the gods. The logic of much of the display and debate discussed in earlier sections of this chapter (and in earlier chapters) was that magistrates and gods worked in cooperation to ensure the well-being of Rome; that the success of the state depended on the common purpose of its human and divine leaders. But there is another side to that logic: successful action, political or military, necessarily brought men into close association with the gods. So, as we have seen, in the ceremony of triumph the victorious general literally put on the clothes of Jupiter Optimus Maximus: in celebration of the victories that had been won through his cooperation with the gods, he slipped into the god’s shoes.75
But it was not as simple as that bare summary might suggest. The parade of any association between gods and men inevitably raised all kinds of questions: just how close was the association, for example, and how permanent? quite how literally was it to be taken? The story of the slave at the triumph constantly reminding the general that he was a man (not a god), offers its own clear antidote to the outright identification of man and god that might be implied by some of the ceremony itself: for those who chose to hear them, the slave’s words effectively stated that this was a general dressed up as Jupiter, acting, playing a part, not a general to be identified with, indistinguishable from, his divine model. Besides, even if for some the identification of man and god went closer than that, the triumph was by definition a temporary state; if the general stepped into Jupiter’s shoes, it was just for a day.76 Much the same was true for office-holding itself in the practice of the early and middle Republic. Magistracies and military commands were, by definition, temporary – held according to traditional practice for just a year at a time; if they brought their holders into proximity with the gods (even if not the extreme proximity reserved for the triumph), that proximity did not last long.
The late Republic set a new pattern of dominance, breaking with those earlier conventions. As the great political leaders of the age increasingly managed, by the repetition and extension of offices and by series of special commands, to exercise power at Rome for long periods, in some cases almost continuously, so they came to claim long term association with the gods. Sometimes adopting the symbolism of the triumph, sometimes using other marks of proximity to the divine, they displayed themselves (or were treated by others) as favourites of the gods, as like the gods, or ultimately as gods outright. So, at least, one version of the background to Caesar’s deification would run.
Already by the late third or early second century B.C. there are clear hints of the divine elevation of powerful political and military figures. We have already seen, for example, the close association that Scipio Africanus claimed (or was accused of claiming) with Jupiter Optimus Maximus.77 A little later Aemilius Paullus, after his victory over the Macedonian king Perseus at Pydna in 168 B.C., is said to have been granted not only a triumph, but also the right to wear triumphal dress at all Circus games.78 We should think very carefully about what this honour was, and what it might signify. Paullus was allowed to dress in the costume of Jupiter, with purple cloak and crown, and reddened face just like the statue – and so to appear at these regular public (and religious) gatherings of huge numbers of the Roman people. Maybe the fancy dress would have gone unnoticed; or maybe many of the participants would have been struck (impressed, outraged...) by the presence of their general-as-Jupiter. But, however it was perceived, this honour for Paullus must represent an important break with the temporary honorific status conferred by the traditional triumphal ceremony – extending its association of man and god beyond the moment of the ceremony itself. It was to be an honour granted again to Pompey in 63 B.C.79 and later, with even further extensions, to Caesar: the dictator was allowed to wear such costume on all public occasions.80
The leading political figures of the last decades of the Republic displayed (or were popularly granted) other marks of assimilation to the gods. This never amounted to a ‘formal’ decree of recognition as a god (like that granted to Caesar after his death, when he became officially divus Julius); but nevertheless the distinctions between some of the leading figures in the state and the gods were increasingly blurred. The political dominance of Marius, for example, seven times consul and triumphant victor over the renegade African king, Jugurtha, and over the Germans, was matched by his religious elevation. Not only did he go so far as to enter the senate in his triumphal dress – a display of religious and political dominance amongst other members of the élite from which he was forced to draw back; but after his victory over the German invaders he was promised, by the grateful people so it is said, offerings of food and libations along with the gods.81 This kind of outburst of popular support for a favoured political leader was no doubt temporary and informal (to the extent that it was sanctioned by no official law or decree); it also had earlier precedents – in, for example, the brothers Gracchi, who had received some sort of cult after their deaths at the places where each had been killed.82 But Marius seems to have set a pattern of cult for the living. Fifteen years later, in 86 B.C., the praetor Marius Gratidianus issued a popular edict, reasserting the traditional value of the Roman denarius, and was rewarded ‘with statues erected in every street, before which incense and candles were burned’. It may be significant that Cicero connects these divine honours with the independent action of Gratidianus in issuing the edict in his own name, without reference to his colleagues – so directly linking divine status with (claims to) political dominance.83
Association with the gods could also be seen in the form of the protection or favour that a politician might claim from an individual deity. Venus, in particular, ancestor of the family of Aeneas (and so by extension of the whole Roman people) became prominent in the careers of several leading men of the first century B.C. Such divine protection was in itself a relatively modest claim (compared with some of the honours we have just been considering). But this parade of divine favour developed, particularly in the hands of Pompey and Caesar, into a competitive display of ever closer connections with the goddess.
At the beginning of the first century B.C. Sulla, the dictator, claimed the protection of Venus in Italy and of her Greek ‘equivalent’, Aphrodite, in the East. He advertised this association not only on coins minted under his authority, but also in his temple foundations and in his dedication of an axe at Aphrodite’s great sanctuary at Aphrodisias in Asia Minor – apparently following the goddess’ appearance to him in a dream. But Sulla’s titles too incorporated his claims to her divine favour. In the Greek world he was regularly styled Lucius Cornelius Sulla Epaphroditus, and in the West he took the name Felix as an extra cognomen – a title which indicated good fortune brought by the gods, in this case almost certainly by Venus.84
Pompey followed suit – as it seems from the coins bearing images of Venus issued by his supporters, and from the dedications of his own lavish building schemes. As we have seen, his enormous theatre-temple in Rome was centred on a shrine of Venus Victrix (through whose aid, we are to assume, Pompey had won his victories); and a slightly later shrine in the same building complex was dedicated to Felicitas, a clear echo of Sulla’s title Felix. It is as if Pompey was taking over from the memory of Sulla the particular patronage of Venus, divine ancestress of the Roman race. The degree of outright rivalry between the two men that is implied by this is glimpsed in an anecdote from early in Pompey’s career, still in the period of the dominance of Sulla. Pompey is said to have wanted to ride into Rome for his triumph on a chariot drawn by four elephants; as this was a vehicle particularly associated with Venus, it was effectively an attempt to upstage Sulla and his divine associations.85
Caesar, of course, could outbid both Sulla and Pompey. For him, Venus was more than a patron goddess; she was the ancestress of the family of Aeneas, from which his own family of the Julii traced their line. Caesar, in other words, could claim to be a direct descendant of the goddess herself. He himself made a point of this already in 68 B.C., in his funeral oration for his aunt Julia, celebrating her divine ancestry from Venus. And later, as we have seen, when he embarked on the grand development of a new and lavish forum (no doubt itself a calculated bid to rival the building schemes of Pompey), he dedicated his temple to Venus Genetrix (the ancestor). The significance of this would have been clear for those who chose to think of it: while Pompey and others could claim the support of Venus as the forbear of the Roman race as a whole, Caesar could and did parade her as the particular ancestress of his own family.86 It is a significance highlighted in another anecdote told of Pompey – this time dreaming, before his final battle with Caesar at Pharsalus, of spoils decorating his temple of Venus Victrix. According to Plutarch, ‘on some accounts he was encouraged, but on others depressed, by the dream. He feared lest the race of Caesar, which went back to Venus, was to receive glory and splendour through him.’87
But even before Caesar himself had drawn directly on the repertoire of divine honours granted to Hellenistic kings in the Greek world, Rome’s expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean brought with it another context in which leading Romans became closely associated with the gods. From at least the second century B.C., there is a small body of evidence to show individual Roman generals and governors receiving various forms of divine honours from Eastern cities – presumably on the pattern of the honours they had granted their pre-Roman rulers. From the point of view of the cities concerned, this practice may well have been part of their strategy of ‘fitting the Romans in’ to their own familiar system of power and honours.88 From the point of view of the generals thus honoured, the granting of such divine status might have seemed either an outrageous form of impious flattery from a conquered people, to be tolerated only in the interests of provincial control; or, on the other hand, a confirmation of the traditional Roman association between political leadership and the divine – as well as an opportunity to explore more lavish and explicit forms of cult away from the gaze of their peers in Rome. Probably their reaction took in all three.
Fig. 3.3 A fragment of a frieze from the temple of Venus Genetrix showing Cupids playing with a washing bowl, a scabbard and a shield. The armour alludes to the god Mars and to the story of his love affair with Venus. Like most of the visible remains of this temple, the frieze dates from a restoration of the early second century A.D. – though the original decoration must also have featured the goddess and her myth. (Height of block, 1.45m.; length, 1.92m.)
The earliest and one of the most vivid examples concerns honours given to Titus Quinctius Flamininus (the consul of 198 B.C. and upholder of the ‘freedom’ of Greece against the claims of Philip V of Macedon). Plutarch describes the rituals at Chalcis in his honour that were still performed three hundred years later – sacrifices, libations, a hymn of praise, as well as the appointment of his own priest. He even quotes the last lines of the hymn: ‘...we revere the trusty Romans, cherished by our solemn vows. Sing, maidens, to Zeus the great, to Rome and Titus, with the trusty Romans. Hail Paean Apollo. Hail Titus our saviour.’89 And we can find evidence for other such honours later in the Republic, even if they were not always so long-lasting: a priest and sacrifices for Manius Aquilius, who established the Roman organization of the province of Asia in the 120s B.C.;90 a festival (the Mucia) in honour of Quintus Mucius Scaevola, proconsul of Asia in 97 B.C.;91 temples voted to Cicero (though refused by him) on more than one occasion in the East.92
By far the most striking array of divine honours, however, were those offered to Pompey during his major commands in the East. A month was renamed after him at Mytilene; he had a cult on the island of Delos, with cult officials, Pompeiastai, recorded in inscriptions; he was honoured as ‘saviour’ at Samos and Mytilene; it is also possible that temples were actually built to house his cult.93 Plutarch also suggests that his divinity was part of the street-talk of Greek graffiti, quoting a line scratched on an Athenian wall, apparently addressed to Pompey: ‘The more you know you’re a man, the more you become a god’. Plutarch hazards no guess at how Pompey took this message, when he saw it; but we will surely spot its double edge, as well as its allusion to the language of the triumphal ceremony: ‘remember you’re a man’.94
These honours for Pompey far outstrip, in their closeness to specifically religious cult, any that we know he was offered (or claimed) at Rome. Whatever these eastern honours entailed, with whatever enthusiasm, or sense of obligation, they were performed (and the bare references in inscriptions give us almost no clue on that), they contrast markedly with the relatively traditionalist image Pompey seems to have had in Italy itself. How important that distinction was, between West and East, is much less clear to determine. It would, for example, be impossibly neat to imagine that Pompey’s divine status, enjoyed and exploited in Greece, was shed instantly he touched Italian soil. All the same, one way of understanding the novelty of Caesar’s divine status is as a novelty of place: Caesar, that is, finally brought to Rome a degree of outright identification with the gods that his rival had attained (or dared to assume, perhaps) only in the East – out of range of the constraining gaze of his peers.95
Every narrative of Roman apotheosis tells, at the same time, a story of uncertainty, challenge, debate and mixed motives. It would be naive to suppose that leading Romans saw divine honours simply and solely as a reflection and extension of the traditional links between gods and magistrates. Many, or most, must have enjoyed the prospect of being treated like a god (at the same time, no doubt, as feeling uncomfortable about such a display of excess); many must have perceived the advantage over their rivals that divine honours would bring, and have planned (or solicited) yet further marks of divine status. It would be likewise naive to imagine that those offering divine honours did not on some occasions calculate that the offer would redound to their own benefit. There was an advantage in your community (rather than the town thirty miles down the road) being the one that presented the Roman governor with a series of sacrifices and a grandiose temple. Nor should we imagine that, even in the Greek world, there were no objections to offers of divine honours to Roman generals. The very fact that the evidence for these divine honours is so patchy, particularly in the decades immediately following Flamininus, in the early and mid second century, may suggest that such honours were not actually common. And that, in turn, may suggest that it was not at first generally accepted that these temporary Roman commanders, turning up for a short-term stint of power, did fit into the model of the earlier Hellenistic kings and their divine power.96
Deification is not, then, just our problem. Roman religion, as we have seen, constructed the boundary between humans and the gods very differently from most modern world religions; and that must have made a difference to the ways most people would have understood (or accepted) what seems to us an extraordinary, impossible status transition: becoming a god. On the other hand, many of the puzzlements and problems we find were shared by Romans too: did honours equal to those given to the gods mean that the recipient was no different from a god like Jupiter or Mars? what actually happened at the moment of deification? and so on.97
These debates and conflicts are highlighted for us clearly in the different versions told in the first century B.C., and later, of the myth of Romulus’ death and apotheosis. Romulus could provide a mythic model for the final, and official, deification of Caesar, as divus Julius, after his assassination in 44 B.C. Rome’s founder, so one version of the story went, simply disappeared at his death: he vanished in a cloud. Then, shortly after, he made known to the world his new divine status, as the god Quirinus – appearing to announce the fact to a Roman called (appropriately enough) Proculus Julius. Rome’s founder, so the myth says, joined the gods, witnessed by an ancestor of the very next man who would receive official apotheosis, temple and cult in Rome: a story spread wide by partisans of Caesar. But significantly, almost every time that this story is told by Roman writers, it is challenged by discordant versions that are told along with it: Proculus Julius may just have been ‘put up’ by the senators, who wished to deflect any suggestion that they had murdered the king; or indeed the king really was murdered, and ‘disappeared’ by being cut up into tiny pieces and hidden in the senators’ togas...98 These mythic variants are not just a cunning subversion of Caesar’s divinity, reasserting his bloody death over any claims to godhead. More generally, the telling and re-telling of this complicated and conflicting set of myths opens up each time the uncertainty of any human claim to be, or to have become, a god – or, for that matter to have witnessed that ‘becoming’. It asserts deification as a process that involves fraud and piety, tradition and contrived novelty, political advantage and religious truth: for the Romans, as for us.
One of the ways to understand the varied and complex processes of change that characterized the late Republic, in almost every sphere of life, is to think in terms of ‘structural differentiation’. As Roman society became more complex, many areas of activity that had previously remained undefined (or at least deeply embedded in traditional social and family groups) developed – for the first time as far as we can tell – a separate identity, with specific rules, claiming relative autonomy from other activities and institutions. Rhetoric, for example, became a specialized skill, professionally taught, not an accomplishment picked up at home or by practice in the Forum; likewise the institutions of criminal and civil law witnessed the development of legal experts, men who had made themselves knowledgeable in the law and carefully distinguished their skill from that of advocates and orators.99 The stages and causes of these developments are complex to reconstruct. The relative impact of the internal changes within Rome itself, versus the effect of growing Roman contact with the already highly differentiated world of some of the Greek states, is hard to evaluate. The consequences are nevertheless clear: by the end of the Republic a range of new and specialized activities existed; and, with those activities, new forms of discourse and intellectual expertise.
Religion is the area in which this particular model of change is most helpful. Traditionally religion was deeply embedded in the political institutions of Rome: the political élite were at the same time those who controlled human relations with the gods; the senate, more than any other single institution, was the central locus of ‘religious’ and ‘political’ power. In many respects this remained as true at the end of the Republic as it had been two or three centuries earlier. But, at the same time, we can trace – at least over the last century B.C. – the beginning of a progression towards the isolation of ‘religion’ as an autonomous area of human activity, with its own rules, its own technical and professional discourse. In this section, we shall look at two particular aspects of this process: first, the development of a theoretical (sometimes sceptical) discourse of religion, together with the emergence of religious experts and enthusiasts; and second, the development of more sharply defined boundaries between different types of religious experience: between the licit and the illicit, between religion and magic.
The philosophical treatises of Cicero are (as we noted at the very beginning of this chapter) the earliest surviving works in Latin to develop theoretical arguments, sceptical of the established traditions of Roman religion. One of the most engaging of these treatises is the dialogue On Divination, written during 44 and 43 B.C., whose second book includes an extended attack (in the mouth of Cicero the augur himself) on the validity of Roman augury, the significance of portents and dreams, and the agreed interpretation of oracles. In a spirited, and sometimes witty, attack, all manner of ridicule is poured on the gullible – who believe, for example, that cocks crowing before a battle may portend victory for one side or the other; or that if a sacrificial victim is found to have no heart, disaster inevitably looms. The ‘rational’ philosopher in Cicero has good sport, arguing that cocks crow too often for it to be significant of anything at all; or that it would be simply impossible for any animal ever to have lived without a heart.100 No element of Roman divination escapes this ruthless scrutiny.
The fact that Cicero could construct these sceptical arguments does not necessarily indicate that he himself held such views; nor that they were common among the Roman élite of his day. In fact, the second sceptical book of On Divination is preceded and balanced by a first book, which draws on Greek Stoic philosophy to present the arguments (put into the mouth of Cicero’s brother Quintus) in favour of traditional practices of divination.101 But even if Cicero himself was personally committed to an out and out sceptical position, it is not the most important aspect of this or any of his other theological studies. Much more significant is the fact that this kind of theoretical argument about traditional practice had begun to be framed at all. The philosophical definition and defence of traditional Roman piety that we see throughout Cicero’s work are just as important in the history of Roman religious ideas as the development of a particular strand of sceptical inquiry, which has often been given more attention. Both developments indicate a religion that was becoming an area of interest, identifiable as separate and thus the object of scrutiny, of scepticism and defence.102
This differentiation of religion was certainly associated with increasing Roman familiarity with Greek philosophy. Contact with the philosophical traditions of the Greek world did, as we saw in chapter 2, stretch back considerably further than the mid first century B.C. As early as the beginning of the second century, Ennius, the great epic poet of the Republic, had produced a Latin translation of Euhemerus’ work on the human origins of the gods, of which a few paragraphs from a prose version survive; and we have reference to (though no surviving trace of) a number of treatises from the end of the second century B.C. and later, which were probably expositions in Latin of Greek philosophical doctrines.103 It is, of course, impossible to judge writing that no longer survives. But from Cicero’s claims, at least, it would seem that his own treatises (and the philosophical work of his contemporaries) were crucially different in kind from their predecessors; and that it was only at the very end of the Republic that Greek theory came to be deployed on specifically Roman problems and practice, defining and differentiating new areas of recognizably Roman discourse. This was the first period, in other words, that Roman philosophy was more than translation from the Greek; the first period to define ‘religion through (and as part of) such intellectual theorizing.104
Antiquarian enquiry and the emergence of specifically religious historians is another aspect of the process of differentiation. Even if this material now survives only in ‘fragments’ quoted by later Roman writers, there is enough to highlight the cultural investment in religious expertise and religious curiosity that distinguished the late Republic from earlier periods of Roman history. By far the most comprehensive of the antiquarian treatises on Roman religion was Varro’s great encyclopaedia, Divine and Human Antiquities, which devoted sixteen (of its forty-one) volumes to the gods and religious institutions of the city. From the quotations that are preserved (notably in Augustine’s The City of God) we can gain some idea of its structure and content. It was clearly a work of rigorous classification, dividing its subject into five principal sections (priesthoods, holy places, festivals, rites and gods) and offering within those sections yet finer distinctions on types of deity and institution: shrines (sacella), for example, were treated separately from temples (aedes sacrae); gods specifically concerned with human beings (presiding over birth or marriage) were placed in a separate category from those concerned with food or clothing. But the Antiquities was also a work of compilation, assembling often recondite information on traditional Roman religion: the reason for the particular type of headdress worn by the flamen Dialis; the significance of the festival of the Lupercalia; the precise difference in responsibility between the god Liber and the goddess Ceres.105
Other works along these lines are known, although they do not now survive even to the extent of Varro’s, nor did they originally reach such vast lengths. Nigidius Figulus (praetor in 58 B.C.) was perhaps Varro’s closest precursor, with a work On the Gods in at least nineteen books, as well as treatises on divination and haruspicy, dreams and astrology.106 But among other writers were Granius Flaccus who dedicated to Julius Caesar a work De Indigitamentis (On Forms of Address), which discussed the formulae used by the pontifices in addressing the gods; and Aulus Caecina, another contemporary of Cicero and Caesar, and a man with distinguished Etruscan forebears, produced a Latin version of the Etruscan science of thunderbolts and their religious interpretation.107 There was also apparently something of an industry in writing on augury and the augural college. Cicero himself wrote one such treatise (in addition to his On Divination), and another was dedicated to him. This was written by Appius Claudius Pulcher, the consul of 54 B.C., who was such a passionate defender of augury that he was nicknamed the ‘Pisidian’ (after the people of Pisidia in Asia Minor, renowned for their own devotion to augury). Appius Claudius was also representative of the new breed of religious ‘enthusiast’; not only was he an augur himself, but he also endowed new building works at the famous Greek sanctuary at Eleusis, as well as making a point of going to consult the Delphic oracle.108
These works are almost certainly a new phenomenon of the latest phase of the Republic. Of course, we have seen that writing had long been associated with Roman religion: the pontifices and augures had, for example, long kept records within their own colleges of ritual prescriptions and various aspects of religious law; we have also noted the constructive ‘revivals’ of religious rituals in the mid second century, apparently based on priestly antiquarian enquiry.109 The late republican works were, however, quite different from writing of that kind; for (even when written by priests themselves) they were not part of internal priestly discourse within religion or directly related to ritual performance; they were commentaries on religion from an external standpoint. Unlike the so-called ‘priestly books’ of rules, formulae and precedents, they existed at a distance from traditional religious practice, defining religion as an object of scholarly interest, an object of knowledge. This is not to suggest that what Varro, and the others, wrote was not itself ‘religious’. To construct religion as the object of scholarly curiosity, whose traditions and rules could be investigated and preserved by a process of scholarly enquiry, was inevitably to change the way religion could be perceived and understood. Varro was himself contributing to the history of religious thought as much as he was commenting on that history. And in fact his great encyclopaedia was to become, almost from the moment he wrote it, a work of even greater symbolic authority than the priests’ own books – ‘as Varro says’ being a legitimating Roman catchphrase for almost any claim (bogus or not) about the history, traditions and theology of state religion.110
One of the religious ‘interests’ of Appius Claudius Pulcher was, supposedly, necromancy; according to Cicero, he called up the spirits of the dead, presumably (given his enthusiasms) to entice prophecy out of them.111 Another of his contemporaries, Nigidius Figulus, was even more renowned for his devotion to magic and astrology, alongside (as we have seen) an equally enthusiastic commitment to traditional divination, both Roman and Etruscan.112 This takes us into another area of differentiation of religion in the late Republic: that is, the construction of increasingly sharp boundaries between different types of religious activity, between ‘proper’ religion and its illicit (or marginal) variants. In part the development of these boundaries reflects the growing diversity of religious practice, the increasingly wide range of options in human relations with the gods, that came to be distinguished more clearly one from another over the late decades of the Republic; but to an equal, if not greater, extent, it was a consequence of a new desire to categorize, ever more subtly, the varieties of religious experience that had long been part of the Roman world. In the late Republic, in other words, we begin for the first time to hear of practices designated as ‘magical’. Many of these practices had, in fact, been part of religious activity at Rome as far back as you could trace; what was new was precisely their designation as ‘magical’, and the definition of magic as a separate category.113
Definitions of ‘magic’ have always been debated. There have been many ambitious modern attempts to offer a definition that applies equally well across all cultures and all historical periods; we shall discuss some of these in chapter 5. But it is worth emphasizing now that many of these attempted definitions miss the point. It is not just a question of different societies understanding magical practice in all kinds of different ways, offering different explanations and theories of how magic originated and developed, and disagreeing about what in their own world is to count as ‘magical’, rather than (say) ‘religious’. It is rather that (despite modern attempts to generalize across cultures and despite the claims of some self-styled ‘magicians’ to be deploying a universal skill) ‘magic’ is not a single category at all; but a term applied to a set of operations whose rules conflict with the prevailing rules of religion, science or logic of the society concerned. And so, for the historian, the interest of what we may choose to call ‘magic’ lies in how that conflict is defined, what particular practices are perceived as breaking the rules, and how that perception changes over time.
The development of the concept of magic (or ‘the magical arts’) at Rome is, in detail, very obscure; but we can trace some broad outlines. From the early and middle Republic there is plenty of evidence for what we would understand as magical practice – and for its prohibition. Cato’s treatise On Agriculture, for example, written around 160 B.C., includes a clear example of what is in our terms a magical remedy for healing sprains and fractures: ‘Whatever the fracture, it will be cured with this charm: Take a green reed four or five foot long and split it down the middle, and have two men hold it on your hips. Start to chant, motas vaeta daries dardares astataries dissunapiter...’;114 and the fifth-century B.C. legal code, The Twelve Tables, contains the clause that ‘no one should enchant another man’s crops’.115 But it is much less clear that, in contemporary Roman terms, we are dealing here with the specific category of ‘magic’ or with prohibitions directed at ‘magical’ practices as such. Cato appears to have seen the healing charm no differently from other remedies (that we might call ‘practical’ or ‘scientific’) suggested in his work; and the legal prohibition in The Twelve Tables seems to have been directed principally at the results of the action (that is, damage to another man’s property), rather than against the method by which that damage was brought about. It was not until the late Republic (and then only tentatively) that magic began to be defined as a particular and perverted form of religion.
The earliest extended Roman account of the magical arts that survives is part of the Elder Pliny’s Natural History, his vast encyclopaedia of the whole natural world, finished in the 70s A.D. Here he attempts to trace the spread of magical practice (originating in Persia and moving through Greece and Italy) and to define magic in relation to science and religion. He refers, for example, to the bestial quality of magic (men sacrificing men, or drinking human blood) and to its characteristic use of spells, charms and incantations – consistently opposing magic to the ‘normal’ rules of human behaviour and the traditions of Roman religion.116 We shall consider Pliny’s account in greater detail in a later chapter.117 At this point we want to ask only how far it is possible to trace any such attempts at a formal definition of ‘magic’ back into the late Republic.
There is no surviving work from a late republican author that attempts, like Pliny’s Natural History, a synoptic account of magic.118 Yet there are allusions that do seem to foreshadow some of the elements of Pliny’s theories in a range of writers of the mid first century B.C. Catullus, for example, abuses one of his favourite targets, Gellius, by saying that a magician (magus) will be the result of his incest with his mother, alluding at the same time to the Persian origin of magic.119 Cicero, likewise abusing his opponent Vatinius, charges him with just the kind of activities characterized by Pliny as ‘magical’. Under the cloak of so-called ‘Pythagoreanism’, Cicero claims, Vatinius indulged in calling up spirits and sacrificing young human victims to the gods below: a sign of the flouting of traditional religious norms that Cicero makes parallel to Vatinius’ disregard for augury and the auspices.120 This is, of course, all very different from any systematic account of magical practice; and its abusive rhetoric tells us almost nothing about the actual behaviour of its targets, or how they themselves would have defined their actions. All the same, the overlaps with Pliny are striking – and they suggest that the late Republic did witness the beginning of the process that was to define magic quite specifically as something outside, or in opposition to, the proper religious norms of Rome. That ‘magic’ could be used as a cliché of abuse is an important piece of evidence in any attempt to chart the history of that category.
All kinds of factors no doubt contributed to the development of a formal category of magic. Foreign influences, as in philosophy and theology, no doubt played some part. In particular, the convenient view that the origin of magic lay somehow outside the civilized world (in barbarian Persia) may well have derived from Greek definitions of magic and Greek polemic against the Persians.121 But as with the other themes discussed in this section, the underlying context lies in Roman society itself and increasing complexity of Roman culture and intellectual life. The same processes, in other words, that fostered a definition of ‘religion’ as an autonomous area of human activity also fostered a definition of religion’s ‘anti-types’.
Almost every section of this chapter has touched on the religious consequences of the growth of Rome’s empire: the change in the traditional fetial ritual for declaring war; religious honour paid to Roman generals in the East; the effect of growing contact with Greek philosophy on the development of religious discourse at Rome. This final section will consider directly two aspects of religious change in the context of the expanding empire: first, Rome’s export of some of its own religious forms to the outside world; second, the place of ‘foreign’ religions in Rome itself, in this last period of the Republic. The chapter will close by looking at a painting and a poem from that period, both of which throw light on the complexity of (and the complexity of our interpretations of) the religious world of the first century, its ‘foreign’ cults, and its cult groups.
Roman religion belonged in Rome. As we shall emphasize in the following chapters, it was closely tied by its rituals and myths to the city itself; and its deities, priests and ceremonies were not systematically exported to conquered territories (just as, for the most part, ‘native’ religious traditions continued under Roman domination).122 Nonetheless Roman power influenced the religion of Italian and provincial territories, while Roman imperialism was in part expressed through the development of religious institutions in the provinces. In this sense, by the late Republic, religion that was recognizably ‘Roman’ in some senses could be found elsewhere than in Rome itself.
The clearest instance of the direct export of Roman religious forms can be seen in the establishment and regulation of religious practices in the coloniae of Roman citizens, founded for the settlement of military veterans and the poor in Italy and sometimes (at least from the late second century B.C.) in provincial territory. We shall consider the religious life of coloniae more fully in chapter 7; for the moment it is enough to stress that these communities, in theory at least, mirrored the religious institutions of Rome itself. Not only were they founded according to a religious ritual modelled on that which Romulus was supposed to have used in the foundation of Rome: the auspices were taken and the founder ploughed a furrow round the site to mark its sacred boundary (replicating the pomerium of Rome).123 But also some central features of their religious organization were copied directly from that of the parent city. This is well illustrated by the charter of foundation that survives for Julius Caesar’s colonia at Urso in Southern Spain, laying out in detail the constitution of the new city.124 Several clauses in this charter make regulations for the selection and service of the civic priests, pontifices and augures; these clearly drew on the rules and privileges of the Roman priests of the same name, and even directly referred to the religious practice of Rome in framing some of their terms: ‘Let these pontifices and augures...be guaranteed freedom from military service and compulsory obligations in the same way as pontifex is and shall be in Rome.’125 Rome’s export of a new community, in other words, might involve a self-conscious replication of Roman religious forms outside Rome.
But the export of Roman religious practice, especially to the Greek world, often entailed a more complex process than the deliberate and direct replication of Roman cult abroad. The spread of Roman dominance led provincial communities – directly encouraged by Rome or not – to adopt (or adapt) various ‘Roman’ rites and religious institutions. Some of these were drawn directly from Roman religion itself; others were significantly different from anything found at Rome, but were nevertheless defined explicitly in terms of Roman power.
Various developments show the cities of the Greek world using for the first time elements of specifically Roman religious and mythic symbolism. An inscription from the island of Chios, for example, provides an unusually clear illustration of how Roman myth might be incorporated into a Greek religious context. It records the establishment, probably in the early second century B.C., of a procession, sacrifice and games honouring Rome; but it also records the dedication of some kind of representation (whether a visual image, a written account, or both, is not clear) of the story of Romulus and Remus and their suckling by the wolf. That is, one Roman mythic version of the foundation of their city is here put on display in a Greek cultic context.126
In other cases Eastern cities paraded their allegiance to Rome in the religious centre of Rome itself. So, for example, a series of inscriptions from the Capitoline hill recording dedications by various Eastern communities in gratitude for Roman benefactions or assistance shows another side of Greek assimilation of Roman religious forms. The exact date of many of these dedications is disputed; this is partly because some of the earliest texts of the group are preserved only in re-inscriptions of the early first century B.C. and others have been lost and survive only in manuscript copies from the Renaissance. Nonetheless it seems certain enough that this series of offerings had started at least by the late second century B.C.127 It includes a dedication by the Lycians of a statue of ‘Roma’ to Capitoline Jupiter and the Roman People: ‘in recognition of their goodness, benevolence and favour towards the Lycians’.128 And there are too, among others, dedications by a man surnamed ‘Philopator and Philadelphus’ (a King of Pontus, or member of its royal house, of the late second or first century B.C.) and Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia (early first century B.C.), presumably also to the Capitoline god.129 In other words, as Roman power spread, so also Roman religion, its cults and deities, began to have a significance further and further afield. The gods of the city of Rome, in the city of Rome, received offerings and dedications from an ever widening group of ‘foreigners’.
But one of the most striking developments in the eastern Mediterranean was not, in fact, a replication of any cult or deity that was found at Rome at all. From the early second century on, there spread through the Greek world cults centred on the deified personification of Rome – Dea Roma,‘Goddess Rome’ – or such variants as ‘The People of Rome’ or ‘Rome and the Roman Benefactors’.130 A few communities in the East dedicated temples to Roma – notably Smyrna from as early as 195 B.C., Alabanda in Caria and Miletus (all in Asia Minor). A particularly vivid inscription from the temple at Miletus details the regulations for the priesthood of Roma, the festival of the Romaia, as well as the regular sacrifices to be performed for the goddess. It shows that, at Miletus at least, these sacrifices were not only made on occasions specific to the cult of Roma herself, but that the regular turning points of civic life (such as the entry into office of new magistrates) were also marked by sacrifices to ‘Rome and its People’.131
Fig. 3.4 This seemingly anonymous statue is, in fact, one of the earliest surviving statues – perhaps the earliest – of the Goddess Rome (late second century B.C.). Found on the island of Delos, it is identified by an inscription which records that it is a dedication to the goddess (in thanks for her ‘good will’) by an association known as the ‘Poseidoniasts’; this was a group of traders from Berytus (Beirut) named after, and presumably under the protection of, the god Poseidon. (Height, as preserved, 1.54m.)
It is not clear overall (or in any particular case, for that matter) what prompted the establishment of the cult of Roma in the cities of the Greek world. No similar cult is known from Rome itself until the reign of Hadrian;132 so we cannot be dealing here with Greek emulation of contemporary Roman practice. It may be that for some citizens of the erstwhile independent Greek communities, the cult of some abstract conception of ‘Rome’ was a good deal more acceptable than the granting of divine honours to individual Romans; that Dea Roma provided a way of recognizing (celebrating, if need be) Roman power without treating the rapid turn-over of local governors as divine. It may also be that it was leading Romans themselves – as individuals or in the senate – who let their Greek clients know that they took exception to the granting of divine honours to individual members of their class. We simply do not know. What is certain is that a religious representation of Rome developed in the Greek East side by side with Roman dominance; that the Eastern cities gradually incorporated Roman power into their own religious and cultural world.
But to return finally to the city of Rome itself. In the last chapter, we looked in detail at the introduction of the goddess Magna Mater in 205 B.C., and at the ambivalence of Roman reactions to her cult: apparent distaste for the flamboyantly ‘foreign’ elements of the cult (in particular, the self-castrated, self-flagellating, wild Phrygian priests, the galli) at the same time as official incorporation within the cults of the state.133 Magna Mater, as we observed, marked the last of the great third-century series, starting with Aesculapius, of new deities and cults introduced from the Greek world into Rome by vote of senate and people. Religious imports by no means entirely died out in the last period of the Republic (they never did at Rome). We can point, for example, to new cults of Isis and Sarapis, coming ultimately from Egypt (though almost certainly strongly Hellenized by the time they reached Rome). But they were not ‘Voted in’ by the state authorities, as Magna Mater had been; nor were they the result of a consultation of the Sibylline Books, which had prompted so many of the earlier arrivals.
At this period, however, the surviving evidence draws our attention not so much to the first arrival of the new cults, but to the ways – once they had arrived – such recognizably ‘foreign’ cults operated within the society, culture and religion of Rome and Italy.134 Part of that operation is a story of tension and conflict. Although we have no case so well documented as the crisis over the worship of Bacchus in the early second century,135 it is clear that attempts at the control of some cults and practices continued through the first century B.C. We have almost no evidence at all for the circumstances that led to the destruction of the shrines of Isis in (probably) 59, 58, 53, 50 and again in 48 B.C.; nor, for that matter, for those that led to the expulsion of the astrologers (Chaldaei) from Rome in 139 B.C.136 But we can make a plausible guess at one or two factors that might have lain behind such action. The cult of Isis, with its independent priesthood and its devotion to a personal and caring deity could represent (like the Bacchic cult) a potentially dangerous alternative society, out of the control of the traditional political élite.137 Likewise astrology, with its specialized form of religious knowledge in the hands of a set of religious experts outside the priestly groups of the city, necessarily constituted a separate (and perhaps rival) focus of religious power. Although it did not offer a social alternative in the sense of group membership, it represented (as we have seen in other areas before) a form of religious differentiation which threatened the undifferentiated politico-religious amalgam of traditional Roman practice.138
But the role and significance of ‘foreign’ cults at Rome was much more wide-ranging and complex than any such simple narrative of acceptance and incorporation versus control and explusion might suggest. To conclude this chapter we shall look at two late republican representations of these cults (a painting representing the cult of Bacchus/Dionysus and a poem on the self-castration of Attis, the mythic ‘ancestor’ of the self-castrating priests of Magna Mater) – to explore further some of the ways these cults had, by the first century B.C., entered the visual, cultural and intellectual repertoire of the Roman world.
The best known Roman painting of all that survive from the ancient world depicts the god Dionysus, with a female companion, probably Ariadne – in a composition that includes other scenes which seem to represent various elements of the god’s cult. It was painted towards the end of the period we have been considering in this chapter, probably between 60 and 50 B.C., in a villa just outside the town of Pompeii, the so-called ‘Villa of the Mysteries’ (taking its modern name from the ostensible subject of the painting).139
This painting (the ‘Villa of the Mysteries frieze’) runs all round one room of the villa (over 20 metres in total length) (Fig. 3.5), and shows a series of figures on almost human scale, set against a rich red background: men, women, gods, mythical creatures... At the centre of one of the short sides (the other is largely taken up with a wide entrance-way) Dionysus reclines in a woman’s lap; and the couple are flanked on the left by a group of three mythical figures (a Silenus holds up a bowl into which two satyrs peer intently, one of them holding up a Silenus mask, over the Silenus’ head); and on the right by a near naked woman, who kneels down to draw back a veil from what may be a giant phallus – while next to her, at the corner of the room, a winged female figure wields a large whip. She seems to be whipping a woman in a state of ecstasy or trance at the end of the adjacent long side of the room, who kneels down to expose her naked back, her head resting in the lap of another (clothed) female figure. A naked female dancer twirls behind. Almost all the rest of this long side is occupied by a window; but on the long side opposite, there is a series of figures who point us in the direction of Dionysus. Moving from the far end (after a small doorway) we pass from a scene where a naked boy reads from a scroll, through a series of women (one carrying a tray of (perhaps) cakes, a group gathered around a table) up to a Silenus playing a lyre, two young satyrs (one of whom is suckling a goat) and finally (next to the short wall that carries the tableau of Dionysus) another female figure starting backwards – as if in fright at something she has seen on the end wall.
The interpretation of these extraordinary images is extremely difficult. Most art historians have agreed that the painting as a whole depicts aspects of the Bacchic/Dionysiac cult – intermingled, according to some, with the initiatory rites of a marriage; but there is almost no agreement about how it works in detail. So, for example, some have it that the satyrs and Silenus on the end wall are practising a form of divination (lecanomancy – where images are read out of a cup of liquid); others that they are witnessing a Dionysiac miracle, as the bowl fills spontaneously with wine.140 Some see the winged figure with the whip as an agent of initiation, flagellating the kneeling girl as a mark of her entry into the cult; while others would deny that she is whipping the kneeling figure at all, but rather turning in aversion from the (cultic) revelation of the phallus behind her – a demonic figure, not an agent of the cult at all.141 Such detailed problems of interpretation are connected to the broader issue of how the frieze is to be read. One view suggests that we are following the initiatory progress of a single woman (whether into the cult of Bacchus, or into marriage), who re-appears in different scenes through the frieze; that it is in other words a visual narrative of initiation. Others argue, by contrast, that it is an impressionistic montage of discrete images, that have no narrative connection one with another; or even that it shows the simultaneous initiation of several women into the cult of Bacchus.142
Fig. 3.5 A section of the ‘Villa of the Mysteries frieze’, Pompeii c.60–50 B.C. (height, 3.31m.). On the short wall (right): (i) Dionysus reclining in a woman’s lap, probably Ariadne; (ii) Silenus and satyrs. On the long wall, from the left: (iii) women around a table; (iv) Silenus playing a lyre; (v) two satyrs; (vi) ‘frightened woman’.
There is equally fierce disagreement about the purpose of the room decorated by these images and the history of the paintings themselves. It could be a Dionysiac cult room, with the images on the walls closely reflecting the activity that took place within those walls. Or that at least might have been the origin of the scheme, when the villa was in the hands (let’s imagine...) of a devotee of the cult. Years later the images could have remained as ‘just decoration, or a quaint reminder of some ancestor’s religious enthusiasms. They might, on the other hand, have been ‘just decoration’ all along: a version, perhaps, of some famous Greek painting, chosen by the villa’s owner out of the local painter’s book of patterns, a testament to his enthusiasm for Greek art rather than religion. Expensive wallpaper, in other words.143
It will obviously make a difference to how we understand these images whether we choose to think of them as the specifically religious icons of a specifically religious room or as an extravagant attempt to replicate an old Greek masterpiece on Italian soil. But those differences should not obscure a much more important (and certain) point that this painting raises for any history of the religious world of Rome and Italy in the first century B.C. Even (or especially) if we do choose to classify the frieze as ‘decorative’, it attests to an entirely new range of possibilities in the religious experience of this period: the visual repertoire of the Dionysiac cult, that is, has recognizably entered the repertoire of even domestic decoration; and with it, of course, the representation of an emphatically personal kind of religious commitment. The images that people saw around them, even in their homes, now included the visual icons of a cult that a hundred years earlier had been rigorously controlled by the Roman authorities. The boundaries of what was recognizable and acceptable as religious were widening – as we shall see too in our final example.
Among the poems of Catullus is a poem of almost a hundred lines that takes as its central theme the self-castration of Attis.144 Attis was, as we have already seen, the mythic ‘consort’ of the goddess Magna Mater and the mythic ‘ancestor’ of her castrated priests, the galli. Attis, it was told, had been the favourite of Magna Mater, but when she suspected his love for another, she drove him into a frenzy in which he castrated himself. In Rome, this story and the priests who were said to follow his example represented the wildest and most ‘foreign’ aspect of Magna Mater’s cult.145
The poem tells the story of this castration, from its mad exultant beginning:
Having sailed the sea-deeps in a swift vessel,
Attis arrived, ardently he entered
The Phrygian forest, set feverish foot
In the dark, dense-leaved demesne of the Goddess,
And there moved by madness, bemused in his mind,
Lopped off the load of his loins with a sharp flint.146
through Attis’ first exultant reaction and his rousing calls to his fellow worshippers – to his later, unfrenzied, horror at his own action:
“……….Female now,
But born boy, I became bearded, then as man
Was admired among athletes, ace among wrestlers;
My front door frequented, foot-warmed my threshold,
My doorposts decked with dewy garlands,
I bounded from bed at the break of each day.
A slave now of Cybele, must I serve her sisterhood?
Be a maenad, a moiety of myself, a man-corpse?” 147
Finally (after the goddess herself has driven Attis once more into frenzy) the last lines of the poem are spoken as if in the voice of the poet himself:
Great Goddess, Goddess who guards Mount Dindymus,
May your furies all fall far from my house.
Make other men mad, but have mercy on me!148
Arguments about the context and purpose of this poem are similar, in some respects, to the arguments about the Villa of the Mysteries frieze we have just explored. On the one hand, there are those who would see this poem as a hymn written by Catullus for ritual performance at the goddess’s festival of the Megalesia.149 The Megalesia, it is generally believed, was the focus of the more ‘Roman’ side of the cult; and this hymn, with its emphasis on the power of Magna Mater, but at the same time on the unacceptability of the self-castrating frenzy that was supposed to characterize its wilder, ‘Phrygian’ elements, might fit in well with that festival. On the other, the poem has been seen as very much the product of the study, not of the temple or ritual theatre, desktop versifying, drawing heavily on, maybe even translating from, some lost Greek model from the repertoire of Hellenistic poetry: the product of Catullus’ passion for Greek poetry, not his engagement with the cult of the goddess.150 Again, as with the Villa of the Mysteries, it would make a difference if we could certainly decide between these different positions; if, for example, we knew that we could take this poem (in origin at least) as part of the cult’s own internal discourse, as one of the ways this cult talked to itself, about itself. But, of course, we cannot; and, again, there are other more important points to raise.
Catullus’ Attis poem goes right to the heart of Roman society and values, questioning the very nature of the ‘Romanness’ that those values entail. This is not only a poem about castration; it is a poem that questions the whole definition of gender, directly asking what it is that constitutes a man, setting social norms against biological nature (and its mutilations). It is a poem that forever prompts questions about madness and frenzy, about what it is to know that you are, or that anyone else is, sane – or mad; as well as about the limits of power that may be exercised by one being over another, in slavery, for example, or in passion. In short, it is a poem that confronts and questions every notion of the subject, and of subjectivity. It is possible that some Romans had always asked themselves such questions in some form or other, right from the city’s very beginnings. But Catullus’ formulations of these issues are radically new and terrifyingly pointed; there is no trace of anything like them in any earlier Latin literature that survives.
The crucial point is that all these issues are discussed in this poem within the frame of religion. We are not dealing here with dilemmas of incorporation or expulsion of ‘foreign’ cults; we are dealing with those cults, and their repertoire of rituals and myths, as established ways of thinking at Rome about the most central human values. If some Romans were in this period establishing a tradition of questioning and wondering about all aspects of their own culture, if they were explicitly challenging, dissecting and reconstructing embedded notions of what it was to be, and act like, a Roman – they were doing that, in part, within the discourse of religion. Religion was, and remained, good to think with.
1 The background to this incident: Rawson (1975) 60–145; T. Mitchell (1991) 98–203. 114
2 Cicero, On his House 1 = 8.2a.
4 Against Verres II. 1.129–54; Steinby (1993-) 1.242–5.
5 For example, On the Command of Pompey 33 and 36 (Pompey’s divina virtus,‘god-like or god-given virtue’); 47 (= 9.1c) and 48 (the benefits from the gods bestowed on Pompey).
6 Discovery of sacrilege: below, pp. 129–30; the death and shrine of Tullia: (for example) Letters to Atticus XII. 12, 18, 19, 20, 36, 41; with Shackleton Bailey (1965–70) Vol. v, 404–13.
8 Clay (1983).
9 Catullus 63; below, pp. 164–6.
10 The survival of Varro’s encyclopaedia is discussed above, p. 8; also below, pp. 151–2.
11 Little of either of these accounts is concerned with specifically religious issues; but note the pontifex maximus’ analysis of Gallic religion, Gallic War VI.17 = 2.9a.
12 Sacred chickens as a means of divination: above, p. 22 and n.56. They were the centre of a classic case of religious transgression in 249 B.C., when Publius Claudius Pulcher, exasperated that they would not produce favourable omens, cast them overboard his ship and engaged in a naval battle with the enemy; the moral of the story was, of course, that he lost the battle (Cicero, On Divination 1.29; On the Nature of the Gods II.7; Suetonius, Tiberius 2.2). Modern accounts stress the failure of late republican religion: for example, Nock (1934) 468–9; Taylor (1949) 76–97; Dumézil (1970) 526–50.
13 Detailed coverage of the major personalities and events of this period: CAH IX2; more briefly, Brunt (1971) 74–147; more briefly still, Beard and Crawford (1985).
14 Odes III.6.1–4; below, p. 181.
15 Augustus, Achievements 20.4; Varro, Divine Antiquities, fr. 2a (Cardauns), from Augustine, City of God VI. 2.
16 189 B.C: Livy XXXVII. 51; cf. a similar dispute in 209 B.C., Livy XXVII.8.4–10 = 8.2d. The significance of such conflicts is discussed above, with further references: pp. 106–8.
17 The custom for leading public figures to preserve and circulate their speeches was established by the end of the second century B.C. Although the ancestor of this tradition was the elder Cato, writing in the early second century B.C., it is a characteristically late republican phenomenon.
18 These problems have not, however, prevented scholars of many periods from attempting such comparisons; a ‘classic’ study of this kind is Vovelle (1973). But even some of the ‘clearest’ evidence for religious change allows wildly different interpretations. If, to take a modern example, church attendance falls dramatically over a hundred year period, that could indicate a ‘decline’ in religion; but it could equally well signal a growing emphasis on private spirituality (outside the formal institutional framework of the church).
20 Castor: n.4; Nymphs: On behalf of Milo 73; Stoic Paradoxes 31.
21 Below, pp. 196–201. The remains of Augustus’ temple of Mars Ultor and the Ara Pacis: 4.2 and 3.
22 We are not considering here that even more tricky period between the end of the surviving text of Livy (in 167 B.C.) and the start of the period covered by Cicero’s writing. This is well analysed by Coarelli (1977a); though Coarelli does not emphasize the crucial differences between the testimony of Livy and Cicero, and he treats the final period of the Republic as if it were as methodically documented as the period covered by Livy.
23 On Architecture III.3.5 (referring to the ornamentation of its pediment); Natural History XXXIV. 57 (on a statue of Hercules kept inside it).
24 Natural History VII. 97 (explicitly stated to be funded from the spoils of war).
25 For example, Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights X.1.6–7; Pliny, Natural History VIII.20. Map 1 no. 35.
26 The classic discussion here is Tertullian, On the Spectacles 10.5–6 (below, p. 262); followed by many more recent writers – for example, Veyne (1976) 435. L. Richardson (1992) regards the temple dedication as ‘playful’ (p.411).
27 See Hanson (1959) (Pompey’s theatre: pp. 43–55). The scheme of this whole Pompeian development has been the subject of a number of (imaginative) studies: for example, Coarelli (1971–2); Sauron (1987). For a different reconstruction, L. Richardson (1987). For the temple-cum-theatre at Praeneste, 4.9.
28 Venus Genetrix: Weinstock (1971) 80–7; Amici (1991); Steinby (1993–) II.306–7; Map 1 no. 10. Mars: Suetonius, Julius Caesar 44; Weinstock (1971) 128–32 (discussing the relationship of these plans with Augustan dedications to Mars).
29 The inscriptions: CIL VI.2210 (= ILS 4999); AE (1971) 31–2; the coin: Crawford (1974) 455 no. 432 (though Crawford interprets the female head as Macedonia, not Diana, and the symbols of the hunt as a reference to the hunting lands of Crete – both regions where Plancius had held office). For the association of the temple with Plancius (and possible archaeological traces), Panciera (1970–1); (1987) – against C. P. Jones (1976) who would associate it with an early imperial Plancius. Steinby (1993–) II.15.
30 Suetonius, Julius Caesar 15. The temple had been destroyed by fire in 83 B.C. There is no reason to suppose (as has sometimes been done – for example, in Nock (1934) 468) that the repairs were seriously unfinished over twenty years later. The temple had, after all, been re-dedicated in 69 B.C. (Livy, Summaries XCVIII); and already in 76 B.C. it had apparently been used to house Sibylline Oracles (Lactantius, On Anger 22.6, quoting Fenestella) – implying, at the very least, four walls and a roof.
31 Cicero, To his Brother Quintus III.1.14.
32 Iacopi (1968–9); Coarelli et al. (1981) 16–18; Map 1 no. 32.
33 This is North’s formulation: North (1990) 528.
34 This is the implication of a rather muddled passage of Suetonius: Julius Caesar 20; for the events of Caesar’s consulship, see Meier (1995) 204–23.
35 The procedure Bibulus used (or attempted to use), known as obnuntiatio, was regulated by the lex Aelia et Fufia. For the debate about the exact terms of these laws, and about their reform by Clodius in 58 B.C., above, pp. 109–10. The procedure itself is also obscure in a number of respects: in particular the uncertain boundary between, on the one hand, claiming that you had seen ill omens and, on the other, announcing that you would be watching for them; both seem to have had the effect (in theory, at least) of halting proceedings.
36 Cicero, Letters to Atticus II.16.2; 19.2; 20.4; 21.3–5; with a detailed chronology by Taylor (1951); Shackleton Bailey (1965–70) I. 406–8.
37 On his House 39–41. Clodius was particularly implicated in this question, because he (born a patrician) had been adopted into a plebeian family in an assembly chaired by Caesar, while Bibulus was watching the heavens. His election to the tribunate of 58 (and so also all the legislation that he had carried then, including the law that led to Cicero’s banishment) would be invalid if his adoption was invalid; for plebeian status was a prerequisite for holding the office of tribune.
38 For other attacks, Cicero, On the Response of the Haruspices 48; On the Consular Provinces 45–6.
39 Linderski (1965) 425–6; Lintott (1968) 144–5 (with criticisms of his detailed interpretation, Linderski (1986) 2165).
40 On the Consular Provinces 46.
41 T. Mitchell (1986) suggests that Clodius’ reform of the legislation governing obnuntiatio in 58 B.C. amounted to the introduction of a clear statement that the presence of the objector was required at the assembly concerned. Most modern scholars have realised that, despite Cicero’s claims, Clodius’ legislation did not involve the wholesale abolition of obnuntiatio.
42 Above, n. 37.
43 Especially, Cicero, Letters to Atticus I.13. 3 (= 8.2b); 14.1–5; 15.1–6. The famous line (quoted by Plutarch, Caesar 10.6) that Caesar divorced his wife on the grounds that she ‘must be above suspicion’ refers to allegations that she had been having an affair with Clodius – hence the prank. Modern debates on the politics of this incident: Balsdon (1951); Tatum (1990). The ritual itself: Versnel (1993) 228–88. The cult of the goddess in general: Brouwer (1989). Note Juvenal’s satiric treatment of the women’s rites of the Bona Dea: Satires 6. 314–41 = 13.4.
44 In fact (as we implied in the case of the drowning of the sacred chickens, above p. 117, n. 12) telling the story of a few religious misdemeanours (and the dire consequences that normally followed) could be an important weapon in the armoury of religious traditionalism; religious traditions in other words needed to parade a few exemplary rule-breakers and their punishment.
45 His final letter to Atticus on the subject (I.16), written after the trial had taken place, and only in response to a query from Atticus himself (had Cicero shamefacedly kept mum?), is particularly strongly defensive – in ascribing his own side’s defeat in a case they should have won to the appalling bribery practised by the opponents.
46 Tacitus, Annals III.58. Below, p. 193.
47 For example, Suetonius, Augustus 31. As soon as Augustus had taken over the office of pontifex maximus, and so had the traditional authority to make a nomination to the post, he seems to have appointed a new flamen. For a different view, Bowersock (1990).
48 Above, pp. 106–8; the taboos and restrictions are collected by Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights X.15.1–25 = 8.1b.
49 Taylor (1941) 113–16; Leone (1976).
50 Annals III.58. We may be dealing here with a historical development by which the independent status of the flamines within the pontifical college was gradually weakened; so that they became (like the other pontifices) increasingly interchangeable in their priestly duties.
51 We should more correctly say that all of these attitudes could be (and no doubt were) held by one and the same individual: sometimes they regretted the absence of a flamen Dialis, sometimes they entirely accepted the pontifical role in the ritual duties – but mostly they didn’t give much thought to it.
52 Servius, On Virgil’s Aeneid IX.52 = 5.5d. The precise chronology of the changes, disuse and revival of the fetial rituals is unclear; Rich (1976) 56–60, 104–7. For a more sceptical view, suggesting that this reform of the ritual was an invented piece of archaism on the part of Octavian (in the civil wars following the assassination of Julius Caesar), Rüpke (1990) 105–7, below, p. 194 n. 98. Early fetial rituals: above, pp. 26–7.
53 Livy V.21.1–7 = 2.6a; above, pp. 34–5.
54 Above, p. 111.
55 AE (1977) 816 = 10.3b; see A. Hall (1973); Le Gall (1976).
56 Accusation of forgery: Cicero, Letters to Friends I.4.2. Cicero’s own attempt to influence the decision of the pontifices on intercalation: Letters to Atticus V.9.2.
57 Livy X.6.1 – 9.2; above, pp. 64, 68, 99. Patrician monopoly had never been quite so clear cut as the later tradition tries to make it; above, pp. 63–7.
58 Jugurthine War 31.10.
59 See above, p. 68, where we connect the introduction of this electoral process with the roughly contemporary lex Ogulnia.
60 Above, p. 109.
61 Nero 1.1; in a similar vein, Asconius, Commentary on Cicero’s On Behalf of Scaurus p.21 (Clark), with Scheid (1981) 124–5, 168–71.
62 For the challenge to élite dominance and full background to the reforms, Rawson (1974); North (1990)
63 Cassius Dio XXXVII.37.1–2. For an example of the role of influence, favour and patronage in the nomination and election of new priests, see Cicero, Letters to Brutus I.7 = 8.2c (Cicero as augur being urged to nominate the stepson of a friend to a vacant position in the college).
64 Livy, Summaries 63; Obsequens 37; Asconius, Commentary on Cicero’ s On behalf of Milo pp. 45–6 (Clark); Plutarch, Roman Questions 83 = 6.6b; see also Rawson (1974) 207–8; Cornell (1981) 28; Fraschetti (1984). This incident was also linked with the burial alive of a pair of Gauls and Greeks; above, pp. 80–2.
65 Cicero, On the Response of the Haruspices; with a reconstructed text of the response itself, 7.4a. For the haruspices in general, see above, pp. 19–20; on the particular circumstances of this speech, Lenaghan (1969).
66 On the Response of the Haruspices 9, 22–29, 37–39. The exaggeration of Cicero’s claims: Lenaghan (1969) 114–17; Wiseman (1974) 159–69.
67 For example, Against Catiline I.11, 33; Vasaly (1993) 40–87. In choosing this senatorial speech as an example of religious rhetoric, we are effectively questioning the common view that, while Cicero loads his speeches to the (easily impressed and superstitious) people with divine appeals, in speaking to the (sophisticated and sceptical) senate he keeps the gods off the agenda. As Vasaly shows, this is simply wrong. For further discussion of the importance of place and location in Roman religion, below, pp. 173–4 and ch. 4 passim.
68 Ceres: above, pp. 65–6. Clodius and Libertas: Allen (1944); Gallini (1962) 267–9. The popular character of the Compitalia and the local Lares, and the relations between these associations and professional collegia: Accame (1942); Lintott (1968) 77–83; Flambard (1977); and (for specifically Augustan developments) below, pp. 184–6, and 8.6a (an altar of the Lares Augusti).
69 Appian, Civil Wars I.29–31 refers in general terms to an oath applied to Saturninus’ land law. FIRA I.6 (the Lex Latina Tabulae Bantinae) is a fragmentary inscribed text of what is almost certainly one of Saturninus’ laws, with the oath in front of the temple of Castor prescribed in section 3; Crawford (1996) I.193–208 (with text and translation of all that survives).
70 Cicero, Against Catiline I.9.24. This eagle was, in fact, even more symbolically loaded: it had been one of the legionary standards on Marius’ campaign against the Germans (Sallust, The War against Catiline 59.3).
71 How could they not? you might ask. What would it mean to be certain on such an issue – before, or for that matter after, Caesar’s death? Contemporary invective against Caesar’s honours: Cicero, Philippic II.110–11 = 9.2a (delivered in 44 B.C.); this speech, with its apparently detailed knowledge of Caesar’s cult, suggests that the ‘programme’ for deification was well worked out and well known months before the formal decree in 42 B.C. For coins of Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) illustrating his descent from divus Julius, 9.2b (iii) and (iv).
72 The classic study here is Weinstock (1971) – which should be read with North (1975); note also Taylor (1931) 58–77; Vogt (1953); Ehrenberg (1964); Gesche (1968), with full earlier bibliography in Dobesch (1966).
73 Cassius Dio XLIV.4.4 (with Weinstock (1971) 206–9); XLIV.5.2 (with Weinstock (1971) 152–62). Some scholars have also seen the traditions of Etruscan/Roman kingship in the honours paid to Caesar, for example Kraft (1952–3).
74 Romulus and other mythic examples of deification: above, p. 31; the triumph: pp. 44–5; the cult of the dead: p. 31.
76 And in any case it was on the way to being faced down on the Capitol by the real thing.
78 <Aurelius Victor> On Famous Men 56.5. A tenuous precedent for the extension of one element of triumphal honours may be found in the example of Caius Duilius (consul 260 B.C.), who (it was reputed), following a great naval victory, was granted the privilege of returning home after all public banquets accompanied by music and torchlight, as after a triumph; see <Aurelius Victor> On Famous Men 38.4; Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings III.6.4; Florus I.18.10.
79 Cassius Dio XXXVII.21.4; Velleius Paterculus, History of Rome II.40.4 (stating that he only used the honour once); Cicero, Letters to Atticus I.18.6.
80 Cassius Dio XLIII.43.1; Appian, Civil Wars II.106.442.
81 Plutarch, Marius 27.9; Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings VIII.15.7.
82 Plutarch, Caius Gracchus 18.2.
83 Cicero, On Duties III.80; also Pliny, Natural History XXXIII.132. The cult of Gratidianus was presumably at the local shrines of the vici, above, p. 139, below, p. 185.
84 Plutarch, Sulla 19.9; 34.4–5 = 9.1b(i); Appian, Civil War I.97 – with. Schilling (1954) 272–95; Champeaux (1982–87) II.216–36. For a discordant view (that Sulla’s associations were with the Greek Aphrodite rather than the Roman Venus) and a bibliography of earlier work, Balsdon (1951).
85 Coins: Crawford (1974) p. 448 no.424; p. 449 no.426.3. Theatre-temple: above pp. 122–3, with (for Felicitas) Degrassi (1963) 191 (Fasti Amiternini, 12 Aug.) and Weinstock (1971) 93 and 114; note also Cicero’s stress on felicitas in his speech On the Command of Pompey (for example, 47 = 9.1c), Champeaux (1982–7) II.236–59. The triumph: Plutarch, Pompey 14 – in fact, the team of elephants proved too big to get through the city gates, so the plan had to be dropped.
86 Funeral speech: Suetonius, Julius Caesar 6. Coins celebrating his connections with Venus: 9.2b(i) – (iii). The scheme as a whole, above, p. 123.
87 Plutarch, Pompey 68.2–3.
88 Price (1984) 42–7,
89 Plutarch, Flamininus 16.3–4. On some occasions these lines must have been sung, by some participants at least, with as much irony as reverence; the ‘trusty Romans’ scarcely able to avoid becoming a joke. For other honours to Flamininus, in other cities, Weinstock (1971) 289; inscriptions translated in Sherk (1984) no. 6.
90 IGRIV. 293. col. ii, 20–6; with Magie (1950) 153–4, 157–8.
91 Cicero, Against Verves II.2.51; W. Dittenberger- K. Purgold, Die Inschriften von Olympia (1896) no. 327; IGR IV 188 (trans. Sherk (1984) no. 58); Magie (1950) 173–4, 1064.
92 Letters to his Brother Quintus I.1.26; Letters to Atticus V.21.7. But note the honorific statues, in their own exedra, given to various members of Cicero’s family at Samos: Dörner and Gruber (1953).
93 The month at Mytilene: IG XII.2.589 (1.18); Robert (1969) 49, n.8. Pompeiastai: SIG3 749A. ‘Saviour’: SIG3 749B, 751 (trans. Sherk (1984) no. 75). The only evidence for temples comes from the line allegedly uttered over (or perhaps inscribed on) Pompey’s tomb by the emperor Hadrian: ‘how mean a tomb for one so overladen with temples!’ (Appian, Civil War 11.86; Cassius Dio LXIX.11.1). See also Tuchelt (1979) 105–12 and Price (1984) 46, who argue against there being cult places for Roman magistrates.
94 Plutarch, Pompey 27.
95 Weinstock (1971) explores throughout the Pompeian precedents for Caesar’s divine honours; the model of Caesar as ‘Pompey in Rome’ is also clearly suggested by Crawford (1976).
96 Nor may the granting of divine honours to individual Romans have been generally acceptable to the senate; below, p. 160.
97 For explicit recognition of these and many other bafflements of apotheosis, Seneca’s Pumpkinification of Claudius (almost certainly written just after – and in reaction to – the deification of the emperor Claudius) is the classic text; for a satiric treatment of the mechanisms of decision-making that lay behind apotheosis, for example, see Pumpkinification 9 = 9.2c. But Cicero’s theology also broaches some of these issues; for example, On the Nature of the Gods III.49–50, where the problem of the status of a god who started life as a human is explicitly raised.
98 Cicero, On the State II.20; Livy I.16 = 2.8a; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities II.56; Plutarch, Romulus 27–8.
99 Hopkins (1978) 76–80; Rawson (1985) 143–55.
100 For example, On Divination II.36–7 = 13.2b (the impossibility of an animal living without a heart); II.56 (the insignificance of cocks crowing).
101 For example, I.118–19 = 13.2a (the absence of a heart signalling disaster); I.74 (the significance of cocks crowing).
102 Beard (1986); Schofield (1986). For a different perspective, stressing the outright scepticism of On Divination, Linderski (1982); Momigliano (1984); Timpanaro (1988).
103 Roman philosophical experts: for example, Spurius Mummius (mid second century B.C.): Cicero, Brutus 94; Publius Rutilius Rufus (consul 105 B.C.): Brutus 114; On the Orator I.227; Titus Albucius (praetor c.105 B.C.): Brutus 131. For Latin treatises, note the work of Amafinius (? early first century B.C.): Tusculan Disputations IV.6; Rabirius: Academica (second edition) 1.5; Catius: Letters to Friends XV.16.1; 19.1. Though perhaps Cicero had a tendency to exaggerate the extent of earlier Roman philosophical activity, in order to give a pedigree to his own work (which some contemporaries clearly saw as un-Roman activity). For Ennius, above, p. 78.
104 The point is that the development of theory and the definition of ‘religion’ are integral parts of the same process; they go hand in hand; one does not precede the other; Beard (1986) 36–41. One possible earlier case of a Roman philosophical writer explicitly considering Roman practice is Mucius Scaevola (consul 95 B.C.) whose remarks on state religion are quoted by Augustine (The City of God lV.27; the theme is continued at VI.5 = 13.9). It seems likely, however, that Augustine is quoting the words not of the ‘real’ Scaevola, but of Scaevola as a character in a dialogue of Cicero’s contemporary Varro; Cardauns (1960). Others, however, have felt more inclined to accept the quoted words as words of the ‘real’ man (see Rawson (1985) 299–300). Different views on the character and significance of this early Roman philosophy: Rawson (1985) 282–316; Brunt (1989).
105 Cardauns (1976). Antiquarian information: fr. 51 (headdress), from Aulus Gellius Attic Nights X.15.32; fr. 76 (Lupercalia), from Varro, On the Latin Language VI.13; fr. 260 (Liber and Ceres), from Augustine, City of God VII.16.
106 Rawson (1985) 309–12. Surviving fragments of his work are edited in a collection by A. Swoboda (1889, repr. 1964); with a brilliant parody in Lucan (I.639–72).
107 The surviving fragments of Granius: Funaioli (1907) 429–35. Caecina: Rawson (1985) 304–5.
108 Late republican works on augury in general: Rawson (1985) 302. Appius Claudius: Cicero, On Divination I.105; Letters to Atticus VI.1.26; 6.2; Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings I.10; ILLRP 401. Appius Claudius was by no means the only Roman to explore traditional Greek religion: late republican Roman initiates at Eleusis include Sulla (Plutarch, Sulla 26.1); also Clinton (1989). Inscriptions commemorating the initiations of Romans into the mysteries of Samothrace: Fraser (I960) nos. 28a, 30, 32 (translations in Sherk (1984) no. 27); but Roman interest in the Samothracian gods (sometimes said to be the ancestors of the Roman Penates) may be a very special case (see Price (1998) ch. 8).
109 Above, pp. 9–10; 25–6; 110–13. Below, p. 181 on the imperial period.
110 For example, Seneca, Pumpkinification of Claudius 8.
111 On Divination I.132; Tusculan Disputations I.37.
112 Servius, On Virgil’s Aeneid X.175; Rawson (1985) 309–10.
113 A general overview: Garosi (1976); North (1980); Graf (1994); below, pp. 233–6.
114 On Agriculture 160. As usual with such charms, all kinds of half-sense are buried in this nonsense formula. The final word, for example, is reminiscent both of Jupiter and of any compound of dis – (splitting) apart.
115 Pliny, Natural History XXVIII.17–18; Seneca, Natural Enquiries IV.7.2; Crawford (1996) II.682–84.
116 Pliny’s account of the historical development of magic: Natural History XXX.1–18 (part = 11.3); but magic is an important theme throughout Books XXVIII and XXX (see, for example, XXVIII.4–5; 19–21). See also Köves-Zulauf (1978) 256–66.
117 See below, p. 219.
118 The most likely candidate to have written one is Nigidius Figulus.
119 Catullus 90.
120 Against Vatinius 14.
121 Pliny, Natural History XXX.3–11, with Garosi (1976) 30–1; see also the extracts at 11.3.
122 Below, pp. 339–48.
124 The charter is known from a late first century A.D. copy of the original regulations. The significance of this copy and other aspects of the regulations: below, p. 328.
125 ILS 6087, section 66 (= 10.2a); for a discussion and translation of the whole document, Crawford (1996) 1.393–454.
126 Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum XXX 1073; Moretti (1980); Derow and Forrest (1982), with arguments for a date around 190–188 B.C. The religious foundations are focussed on the goddess ‘Roma’; see below, pp. 159–60.
127 The dossier of republican texts, see ILLRP 174–81 (selections in ILS 30–4); for discussion and controversy over the precise dating, the form of the monument to which the texts were affixed and the circumstances of the dedications, Degrassi (1951–2); Mellor (1975) 203–6; Lintott (1978).
128 ILS 31 = ILLRP 174
129 ILS 30 = ILLRP 180; ILLRP 181
130 For example, the representation of Romulus and Remus at Chios was dedicated to Roma, and in the context of a festival of Roma (n. 126); a statue of Roma was dedicated by the Lycians on the Capitol (n. 128); note also the terms of the hymn to Flamininus, quoted above p. 146. The cult of Roma in general: Mellor (1975); Fayer (1976); Price (1984) 40–3.
131 Sokolowski (1955) no. 49 = 10.3a; for Smyrna: Tacitus, Annats IV.56; Alabanda: Livy XLIII.6.5.
132 Beaujeu (1955) 128–36; Mellor (1975) 201; below, pp. 257–8.
134 It all depends, of course, on what you mean by ‘foreign’. The inverted commas here are crucial. They refer to the conventional Roman representation of those cults as foreign – which has no necessary connection with the political or ethnic origin of those involved in the cults. To put it at its simplest: the cult of Magna Mater was insistently paraded by Roman writers as a ‘foreign’ cult; the majority of those participating in its rituals were no doubt as ‘Roman’ as anyone in Rome in the first century B.C., and on. See further below, pp. 164–6.
136 Shrines of Isis: Tertullian, To the Gentiles I.10.17–18 (quoting Varro); Cassius Dio XL.47.3–4; XLII.26.2; Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings I.3.4 (with Malaise (1972b) 362–77). Astrologers: Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings I.3.3: Livy, Summaries LIV; with Cramer (1951). As we shall emphasize below, pp. 230–1, we have no idea how, or how effectively, or by whom such expulsions were put into force.
137 The potential of the cult of Isis to develop into an independent focus of loyalty is illustrated by the account of the cult in Apuleius, Metamorphoses (for example, XI.21–5; (21 = 8.8). Below, pp. 287–8.
139 Full documentation: Maiuri (1931). Discussion, different approaches and extensive bibliography: Seaford (1981); Ling (1991) 101–4; Henderson (1996).
140 Mudie Cooke (1913) 167–9; Zuntz (1963) 184–6; Sauron (1984) 171.
141 J.Toynbee (1929) 77–86; Lehmann (1962); Turcan (1969).
142 Maiuri (1931) 128, for example, sees it as a montage of simultaneous events; J.Toynbee (1929) reads it as a narrative of initiation into marriage; Clarke (1991) 94–111 argues against any attempt to ‘pin down the meaning(s) of the frieze’.
143 Different views of the room’s function and the ‘originality’ of the frieze: Little (1972) 3–5, 9–10, 13–16; Grant (1971) 103 (the painter as a ‘devotee’ of the cult); McKay (1977) 148 (‘the festival hall...designed for Dionysiac feastings’).
144 Poem 63, with the important analyses by Rubino (1974) and Skinner (1993).
145 Above, p. 98, with the images of Attis, 2.7d Galli: Beard (1994); note also the image of the gallus on a tomb of Roman imperial date, 8.7c; and Juvenal’s satiric account, Satires 6.511–21= 8.7b.
146 Lines 1–5 (trans. Michie).
147 Lines 62–9.
148 Lines 90–2.
149 Wiseman (1985) 198–206.
150 Fordyce (1961) 262 (‘its spirit is so Greek ... that it seems certain that Catullus was translating or adapting a Greek original’.).
