Roman Civilization

CMS 206 /History 206

• In a sense, to understand Roman religious practices, you must (if you've been born and raised in a modern Western culture) forget everything you know and think about religion. Judiasm, Christianity and Islam, three of the five dominant religions of modern life are monotheistic and scriptural religions. (Hinduism and Buddhism the other dominant world religions are different.) Monotheists believe that a single divine and immortal being governs the universe. The Romans, in contrast, were polytheists - they believed in a number of divine beings. Jews, Christians and Muslims also base their religion on scripture - writings they believe were authored or authorized by the divine being they worship. While the Romans did have a book of Sybiline Oracles they referred to in times of crisis, they had nothing like the Koran, Hebrew or Christian Bible which at least include, if not comprise, sustained narrative accounts of the world and human kind's place in it. Because of the nature of scriptural writing, Jews, Christians and Muslims have theology. That is, a theory and written tradition (though one always replete with contradictions and conflicts) of orthodox belief in the divinity. The Romans, in contrast, had no notion of theology. One man's idea about the nature of Saturn was at least as valid as another's. More importantly, Roman's would have found the modern preoccupation with "belief in God" a bit odd. While cult religious practices offered Romans something we would recognize as a personal relationship with the divine (and even something like a notion of personal salvation), such "religion" was optional. A modern, when asked to define himself, will frequently specify his personal religious identity. "I'm a Catholic," for example. A Roman, even one devoted to a particular god or cult, probably would not have done so. To a Roman, the most important aspect of religion, was the way it linked him to his community, and his community with the divine. Religion was inherently a collective, not an individual, relationship with the divine. What you "believed" mattered far less than what you did - properly perform the rituals the gods demanded.
  
  
• In studying Roman religion, we are also faced with difficult historical problems. We have many, many sources about Roman religious beliefs and practices. Most, however, are rather late. Many, moreover, were written by early Christians who were denouncing pagan beliefs, and hence are difficult to assess for their historical accuracy. As a consequence, it is quite difficult, really impossible, to know the origins of any particular Roman belief or practice. We have already seen, in fact, that the Romans themselves often didn't understand the meanings of religious hymns (e.g., the songs of the Salii at the Feriae Marti), ritual practices (e.g. the Lupercalia), or even the gods whom they worshiped in a ritual (e.g., the drowning of the Agrei). Moreover, it is clear both that the importance of different festivals and rituals to the Romans waxed and waned over time and that meanings Romans ascribed to the festivals varied. Varro, for example, a writer around the time of Julius Caesar, wrote a treatise on Roman religion, precisely because he felt Romans had forgotten important aspects of their own religious traditions. Augustus made a great deal about his efforts to physically restore neglected temples and shrines and to reinvigorate neglected Roman religious practices. Writers like Varro, Livy, Pliny the Elder and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (who proivde much information about Roman religion) in addition to writing centuries after the institution of religious practices they describe, write within the limitations of Roman historical knowledge about their own religion and within their own contemporary ideological traditions. Thus Varro may offer us better information about what a particular practice meant for Romans in his own day than what it meant for the Romans who instituted the practice in the first place.
  
  
• Another important, but difficult, aspect of Roman religion is its mutability and porosity. Archeologists have found evidence of Greek and Etruscan (perhaps even Carthagenian) religious practices in Rome as early as the sixth century B.C.E. Unlike many cultures, the Romans rarely found it threatening to their own cultural identity to incorporate the gods and rituals of other peoples into their own religious system of beliefs. We find not merely evidence of Roman indifference to the infiltration of "foreign" gods but also the conscious importation or adoption of alien gods and rituals (e.g., the Magna Mater, Mithras).
  
  
• In addition to their willingness to embrace the gods of others, and to assimilate their own gods to the Greek pantheon (e.g., Jupiter = Zeus), the Romans had a well developed sense of religious "animism" - a belief that a divine presence embued virtually every kind of space (e.g., the Lares and Penates, Vesta), activity and being (e.g., a god of ploughing the fields, a god of a particular mountain spring). These gods did not have the well developed personalities and mythologies of Greek gods, but are vital to Roman religious identity. The Romans do not seem to have been preoccupied with the particulars of the biographies of their gods. There are famous cases, for examples, of prayers addressed with astonishing vagueness ("Dear Saturn, or whatever name it is appropriate to call you"). Scholars have spent years arguing that the "pure" Roman religion, was in fact, this "primitive" animism which became infected with the more sophisticated gods and beliefs of foreign cultures that Rome encountered. This linear, progressive notion of Roman religion, however, doesn't seem either historically accurate or helpful. The problem for scholars is that it is quite difficult to understand how the Romans could maintain what seems to moderns to be two completely different ways of comprehending the divine (animism and a pantheon). The Romans, however, did not share this problem and if we are to understand Roman religion(s) we have to abandon our own rigid schemes that divide the religious world into "types" of beliefs.
  
  
• Another pervasive modern notion about religion that will inhibit your understanding of the Roman religious world is the ideal that religion is a separate sphere of activity from other aspects of social and political life. The idea of "separation of church and state," would have struck a Roman as unbelievably stupid. Instead, religion pervaded every aspect of Roman public (and private) life. Similarly, with a few exceptions, Romans did not think of their priests as specially trained religious authorities who lived their lives segregated from the larger community. Priests were citizens. During the course of their priesthood they acquired the specialized knowledge their duties required, but they were not formally trained for the job. In fact, Roman priesthoods usually were an ordinary part of a Roman politician's public life. Similarly, there was no central religious authority in Roman life. Priests had defined areas of specialization and didn't interfer in each others business. Moreover, the authority to make decisions about what to do in religious matters often rested with the Senate. It was the Senate who decided to recognize prodigies, consult the Sybilline Books, import new gods, etc. In the course of making their decisions, they turned to priests for advice. The priests, however, did not have the authority to take such actions. Conversely, before Romans engaged in any political action (declaring a war, inaugurating new consuls, holding an election), priests offered sacrifices and determined whether the gods favored the actions the politicians proposed to take. If the priests decided the gods didn't, the action was postponed.
  
  
• Just as the modern temptation to distinguish between "political" and "religious" activities fails for Rome, so too, the modern classifications of "public" and "private" tend to confuse more than illuminate Roman religious thinking. Every action a Roman took, whether as a politician in public life, or as citizen tending his farm, had a religious dimension. The citizen, in his role as head of his family (paterfamilias) acted as a kind of family priest. He ensured that family members (including slaves) maintained the sacra each family celebrated and worshipped the gods of each household, as well as supervised rituals relating to family activities (birth, death, reaching adulthood, marriage, etc). The sacrifice a Roman citizen made to the Lares in his home, or to the gods at harvest time, had their counterpart in public festivals paid for by the public treasury. These were not separate categories of religious activities, but rather comparable activities appropriate for different (but not necessecarily conflicting) perceptions of the community in which the individual participated.
  
  
• One last aspect of Roman religious thinking that is very hard for moderns to understand is the sense of humor Romans had about their gods. Rites like the Lupercalia were, among other things, a very good time. Comic poets routinely made jokes in varying degrees of taste about the gods and a poet like Ovid, whose poem on the Roman calendar, the Fasti, is an important source about Roman festivals, clearly enjoyed poking fun at the very rites he documented. To us, this may seem either sacriligious (how many good jokes about Jesus, Moses or Mohammed do you know?) or suggest that the Romans weren't very serious about their religious. Such conclusions would be completely wrong. Perhaps it was because religious thinking suffused every aspect of daily public and private life that the Romans could afford to laugh at and with their gods. But the laughter should underscore for us the central role religion played in Roman life.
  
  
• In this unit we will focus on four aspects of Roman religion:
  • Roman prayer
  • the state or public religion and its organization
  • religious cults
  • Christianity

Encyclopaedia Britannica on Roman Religion / On Roman Religion /

animism / divination / Sibylline Books /

BBC Roman religion page / roman religion in 15 minutes / Roman religion

bibliography on greco-roman religion

Cato on planting and harvest rites for individual farmers