• Wednesday, 1/16 - inform Imber of your discussion group preferences
• Friday 1/18 - Book Report 1 from students whose last name begins with A-H due. (Hard copy in my office door by 5:00 pm).

2. Religious festival Compitalia

• celebrated in early January
• feriae conceptivae Ð festivals whose celebration date was determined on an annual basis by the magistrates; i.e., the exact date of the celebration might change from year to year but it was always around the same general time period [cf. Thanksgiving vs. Christmas]
• what did the Compitalia celebrate? Ð honored the Lares of the crossroads
  
  
  • a "compitum" is a cross roads;
  • "compitalia" is the adjective which means "of the cross roads
  • a Lar was a tuteLary deity, but you usually find more than oneÐ hence youÕll read about them in the plural, Lares. TuteLary means responsible for protecting/guarding (cf. guardian angels).
  • Think premodern, rural society: imagine a point where two roads cross, making four fields. Each field had a Lar and the family who had a house on the farm in that corner was responsible for worshipping their fieldÕs Lar. Lares thus were associated closely with individual households and over time were worshipped with that householdÕs Penates Ð the deities who protected the familyÕs storeroom.
  • Lares were usually represented by statues of young men in short tunics holding a drinking horn (the equivalent of a bottle of wine) in one hand and a cup in another. These statues were set around figures representing the familyÕs Penates and Vesta (the goddess who protected the family hearth) set in a small shrine located in every home. The day began with a prayer and grain offering at the shrine.. You should be getting the sense that every family had private religious celebrations.
  • Sometimes these celebrations where echoed in public or state religious festivals. The Compitalia is a good example. Probably at some very early date, the families whose four fields met at the crossroads would join together to worship the Lares. As Roman society developed politically and socially, the state had an interest in ensuring that the Lares of all the Roman crossroads were content (remember how many roads the Romans built). You should note how this kind of practice imagines the state as a parallel to the family Ð a phenomenon we will see embraced and resisted at various points in Roman history and culture.
• How was the feast celebrated?
  • The folks in charge of the festival were called the Magistri Vici ("The Neighborhood Officials"). Slaves rather than free men were the attendents at the festival (they side because the Lares particularly liked being attended to by slaves). The upside is the slaves then were given a holiday for the rest of the day.
  • According to Aulus Gellius, a Roman author of the 2nd century CE, the festival began with the magistrates invoking the words ""Dienoni populo Romano Quiritibus Compitalia erunt quando concepta fuerint, nefas." Folks made and sacrificed honey cakes at the festival.
  • Romans believed that the festival was originated by the last Etruscan kings of Rome. According to one author (Macrobius - who wrote in the 5th century CE), the last king, Tarquinus Superbus (Tarquin the Arrogant) sacrificed boys to the mother of the Lares, who was named Mania ("Lady Death"). Once the brave and sensible Romans drove the kings out, however, they substitued sacrifices of garlic and poppies at the festival instead of boys. Note - this is one of the few references [we'll talk about others] to human sacrifice in Roman culture].
  • In the late republic (1st century BCE) Roman politicians funded games in conjunction with the celebration of the Compitalia. The Senate thought this was shameless political pandering to the urban mob and outlawed the practice. During the Civil Wars [arguably 133-27 BCE, but here the period when Julius Caesar was taking power, 49-45 BCE] folks stopped celebrating the Compitalia.
  • Augustus restored the festival after he became emperor, but with a twist. He substituted worship of his personal Lares, which he declared to be the Lares of the state, for the Lares C ompitalia and started a special order of priests, Augustales, drawn from the ranks of freedmen, to run the festival. Thus, once Augustus came to power, if you wanted to celebrate the Compitalia, you had to recgonize Augustus' control of the Roman state.

3. The site of Rome -

• Assignments
  • i. MWPC Ð 157 Ð81 Review this material on line
  • ii. Rciv v.I sec. 3 [ 55-56]
• Questions from Homework assignment?
• Italy - MWPC map of Italy ; IAM Map of Italy
  • "The difference btween the Greek polis and the Latin civitas corresponds to the difference between the mountains of Greece and the hills of Latium." A. N. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship (2nd ed.), p. 5.
  • how might the fact that Rome started as one of a number of villages inhabited by Latins situated in a plain, explain its legal /social structure:
    • they had to find a way to live in peace with neighbors in order to develop socially/economically: -> Latin rights; e.g. ius commercii; ius conubii
    • inherently "racially diverse" population - people came and settled; cf. story of the Rape of the Sabines (p. 157 MWPC); evidence of "doubled" institutions; e.g. Salii Palatini and Salii Collini -> guaranteed places for members of distinc ethnic groups in institutions common to Larger groups. Till very late in its history, Rome maintained inter-communal festivities and councils.
    • inherently socially diverse population - Roman foundation legend is that they were founded by shepards (the dregs of the ancient world), brigands and kidnappers. [Compare this to the Greeks, whose cities were always founded by the sons of gods.] Note, unlike other ancient societies, Romans routinely freed a significant proportion of their slaves and incorporated those slaves and their progeny into their citizen population. [Which is not to say they weren't horrible snobs about servile origins, but if you were a freedman's son, legally your were as good as a senators - you just didn't get invited to the same dinner parties usually. Horace has a lot to say about this in a poem addressed to his mentor, Maecenas (who was the right hand man of Augustus). Satire 1.6]
    • Rome early on adopted the idea of incorporation of different populations (as opposed to wiping out); -> Roman unification of Italy; Orbis Terrarum - see MWPC road map of Italy
      • note method of Roman expansion in Italy (MWPC, p. 173):
        • defeat the neighboring town;
        • take a portion of its land;
        • instead of taxing require military support;
        • gradually extend benefits of Roman citizenship to conquered town -
        • in 75-150 years you have Romans
  • "A river can unite as well as separate" - The Tiber [see also MWPC, p. 170]
    • Latins extended west of the Tiber to settle lower Tiber basin early
    • Rome controlled important Tiber crossing - if you crossed the Tiber in Rome, you had access to the ocean [i.e., to salt]
    • North/South trade and salt routes on Italian peninsula followed Tiber; Rome conroled the Via SaLaria (Salt Road) on the left bank of the Tiber -> access to traders/markets helped Rome develop economically
    • note the importance that Cicero [RCiv, v.1., sec. 3, p. 55-56 (=Cic., Rep. II.v-vi)] places on Rome's access to the sea via the Tiber
      • import/export - i.e.trade
  • Etruria (map) [see also, MWPC, p. 167] - to the north of Latium; when Rome first emerging as important town in Latium, Etruria was far more developed socially, economically, politically. Indeed, 7th and 6th centuries BCE often referred to as the period of "Etruscan domination" in Roman history. Remember Tarquin the Arrogant, the last king of Rome? Would you be surprised to learn that Tarquinii was an important Etruscan city?
    • One effect of "Etruscan domination" was to unify Latin peoples. Evidence suggests the towns of Latium enjoyed a greater degree of federal unity after Etruscan kings than before.
  • Greece - Rome had "porous" culture - open to new ideas from different peoples (unlike, e.g., Greeks) because they believed there had always been diferent peoples and ideas in Rome. And they were right. There were Greeks in Rome before there were Romans in Rome. As a consequence, Greek culture had profound influence on the development of Roman culture (which is often why we say "Greco-Roman"). It's not unlike the way American culture has been influenced by European cultural traditions because of immigration history in US
• Roman values
  • socially and politically conservative - cf. ideas in "nova" and "mos maiorum"
  • hierarchical and proud of it
    • patricians and plebians - Conflict of Orders (MWPC, p. 170) transformed Rome from an aristocracy of birth to an aristocracy of wealth and office.
    • - patron-client networks (amicitia - unequal power, mutual obligation: officia and beneficia)
  • deeply pious - religion pervaded every aspect of private and public (a distinction the Romans would have thought of as stupid) life
  • virtus - originally "bravery in battle" [Horatius at the bridge] eventually comes to mean something more general like our "virtue"; pudicitia - a sense of modesty in deportment, for women also included sexual chastity - ideal of una vira (nb. - this was an ideal, not a social practice)
  • keep your word, fulfill your obligations - fides, pietas
  • patriarchal - in theory at least the power of the pater was absolute (ius necandi); marriage practice (usus vs. manus) and demography meant that middle aged women often had a great deal of economic and social power (but not direct political power); quite different than Greece
  • consensual - in practice all patres made decisions by taking the advice of their consilium (friends, in-laws, even wives?)
  • competitive (agonistic) - cursus honorum
  • auctoritas - the tendency of people to take your advice, follow your lead because
    • 1) you come from an old family that everyone in the community knows
    • 2) you have conducted yourself with fides and pietas.
    • 3) by the end of the republic it didn't hurt to be fabulously wealthy
• Roman Images
  • Virtual Rome - forum tour
  • A clickable reconstruction of the Roman forum
  • Ancient Rome: Images and Pictures
• Further Reading
  • Imber on the Etruscan Domination
  • Imber on 5th Century Rome - How to Found a Republic
  • Imber on 4th Century Rome [the conquest of the Italian Peninsula]
  • Imber on 3rd Century Rome [beyond Italian shores]
  • Imber on 2nd Century Rome [conquering the world]
  • Imber on the Roman Constitution