Cults and Religions

As might be expected in a society that was in as state of rapid transition, the religion of Pompeii during the lst century and a half of its existence was a stream of many currents.  The traditional state religion was one of practice rather than of religious experience.  It satisfied certain enduring everyday needs both of the individual and society.  Many of Roman popular beliefs and practices inherited from a remote past, which were, and were to remain, one of the enduring aspects of Mediterranean society.  At one end of the scale, there were the great gods of Olympus and their Italian counterparts; and at the other end there were the countless little local gods who so often lurk behind the well-known names.  Great and small, together they represented the classical worldís first attempt to come to terms with the forces of nature and the vagaries of human society.  They were the intermediaries to whom men turned when confronted by the hazards and seeming irrationalities of the world around them (Pompeii AD 79) .

Few classical sites can equal Pompeii for the light they throw on religion at its popular, grassroots level.  The household shrines that are such a prominent feature of the houses represent religion at its simplest and least articulate and yet, because it was obviously so much a part of everyday life, also at its most real.  Traditional Roman religion was concerned with success, not sin.  At every level of society religion was a matter of observance, not doctrine (Cornell and Lomas).

By Ciceroís time, the public face of religion was entirely in the hands of colleges of priests, prominent citizens who were elected or appointed to perform the proper ceremonials and rituals on behalf of the community they represented.  Domestically, the father of the family fulfilled the same office on behalf of the household under his care, offering daily prayers and gifts to the traditional household gods or other divinities whom the family might hold in special honor.  Here too performed the ritual associated with important family events, such as a boyís coming of age.  These simple rituals were a part of daily life that no prudent Roman would have willingly neglected.  Yet another aspect of primitive religion that lived on into historic times was an emphasis on fruitfulness and reproduction, an ideology associated in popular belief with that of good and evil fortune as active forces that has to be no less actively fostered or diverted.  The Italian peasant who hangs a pair of horns at his roof tree is acting of of traditions that go right back to the patterns of belief natural to a primitive agricultural society, in which survival and fruitfulness are virtually synonymous.  Many of the Latin gods had been concerned with aspects of agriculture, and objects such as wreaths of fruit and horn were among the enduring commonplaces of religious symbolism.  Clearly enough, fruitfulness was an accepted and important fact of life (Pompeii AD 79).

The Romans devoted to the gods, and freely identified them with the gods.  Despite the massive Hellenization of Roman educated society, and the consequent      transference to many of the old Italian gods of the attributes and characteristics of their Greek counterparts, so far as the traditional religion of Italy was concerned these were  superficial changes.  Jupiter might be portrayed in the guise of Zeus, but it was as the time-honored guardian divinity of Rome, whose temple on the capital was at once the symbol and enduring guarantee of Roman prosperity, that he continued to head the Roman pantheon.  In 80 BC when a colony of Roman citizens was established at Pompeii, one of the first act of the new regime was to convert the existing temple of Jupiter at the head of the Forum into a temple of Jupiter Optimus maximus Capitolinus.  This was not just a token of Roman political dominion: in terms of traditional Roman belief, it was the obvious and natural way of ensuring the continued welfare of Pompeii within the larger polity of Rome, of which Pompeii had now become a part (Pompeii AD 79).