CMS 206
Roman Civilization
Week 9 Class 1 Lecture
Announcements
- book reports from O-Z due Thursday
- web teams meet with Imber to preview web sites next week (Monday, Wednesday
or Friday)
- outline and bibliographies of papers due in class next Tuesday
Topics
Roman Religion(s):
- 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. Judaism, 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, which 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 (although such traditions are
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
to the divine. Religion involved an inherently collective, not individual,
relationship with the divine. What you "believed" mattered far less than what
you did - properly perform the rituals the gods demanded. In other words,
Romans were concerned less with "proper thinking" about the gods
than "proper action" in their worship.
- 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 provide 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.
Varro, accordingly, 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 Carthaginian) 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 imbued virtually every kind of space (e.g.,
the Lares
in one's fields and Penates in the storerooms of one's home and Vesta
in one's hearth), 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 interfere 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 Sibylline 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 necessarily 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 sacrilegious (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.
Encyclopaedia
Britannica on Roman Religion /
divination
/ Sibylline
Books /
Roman
religion
Cato
on planting and harvest rites for individual farmers
Ludi Apollinares
- July 6-13. During a particularly bad year in the Punic
Wars (212 BCE), the Romans consulted the Sibylline
Books and were advised to hold Games in honor
of the Greek god, Apollo. The gods must have been pleased and their pleasure
must have impressed the Romans because four years later when a plague broke
out, Rome decided to make the Ludi Apollinares permanent. Over the
course of the next two centuries the Romans extended the length of the games
until they came to last eight days. The principal sacrifice was always on
the 13th of July. Two days of the festival were devoted to games in the Circus,
the rest to theater productions.
- The first celebration of the Games was quite an affair.
The treasury of Rome paid for an ox and cow and two white she-goats. They
gilded the horns of all the animals. The decemviri
sacris faciundis took care that the details
of the Greek ritual were properly fulfilled. The audience, all of whom wore
garlands, included married women, who offered prayers to Apollo. It seems
that part of the celebration included a feast celebrated in front of the family
house with the doors left open.
- Despite the often complained of July heat in Rome, these
ludi were popular and on occasion, the site of political protest by
ordinary citizens. Cicero enjoys with grim delight the fact that in a theatrical
performance of a play which included the line, "It's our misfortune that you
are great," the audience inferred a reference to Pompey
the Great and applauded like mad. One attraction of these games (as well
as the Ludi Romani and Ludi Plebeii) was the mercatus (market or fair)
held for six days following the conclusion of the games. Because July was
the time to harvest barley and beans, farmers who lived outside the city could
come to Rome for the ludi, sell their goods at the mercatus
and in some years, attend the Test of the Roman Equites held
on July 15.
- Romans believed that the gods Castor and Pollux had come
to their aid at the battle of Lake Regillus in 496 BCE where they conquered
the Latins. After the battle, the gods brought their horses down to the Forum
to give them water. The Censor Q. Fabius Rullianus in 304 BCE decided to establish
a cavalry parade to honor them. Originally the parade was held annually, but
over time came only to be celebrated every fifth year when the censors held
the census of the Equites. The Roman knights rode from the temple of Mars
on the Campus Martius through the city to the Forum, ending at the temple
of Castor
and Pollux in the Forum where the censors were
seated. The knights rode in their centuries as if coming from battle. But
they wore crowns made of olive branches and purple robes striped with red.
If they had received decorations during their military career they wore those
too. At the temple, each knight advance to the Censors, who then decided if
the gentleman in question qualified to remain an equite (which is why the
Romans called it a probatio - test, and not a parade). By the end of
the Republic the Romans had stopped holding the probatio. Augustus,
however, restored it. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, it was a great
show.
The Augustan Age
-
After Actium:
- 31 BCE - Octavian's troops
defeat those of Anthony and Cleopatra at the Battle
of Actium
- Consider the observations
of the historian Tacitus in his Annales, written in 109 CE.
- Translated by Alfred John
Church and William Jackson Brodribb. Available from MIT's Internet
Classics Archive at http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals.1.i.html.
- When after the destruction
of Brutus and Cassius there was no longer any army of the Commonwealth,
when Pompeius was crushed in Sicily, and when, with Lepidus pushed
aside and Antonius slain, even the Julian faction had only Caesar
left to lead it, then, dropping the title of triumvir, and giving
out that he was a Consul, and was satisfied with a tribune's authority
for the protection of the people, Augustus won over the soldiers with
gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of
repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself
the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. He was
wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or
in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they
were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion,
so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the
present to the dangerous past. Nor did the provinces dislike that
condition of affairs, for they distrusted the government of the Senate
and the people, because of the rivalries between the leading men and
the rapacity of the officials, while the protection of the laws was
unavailing, as they were continually deranged by violence, intrigue,
and finally by corruption.
- According to Tacitus,
Octavian was successful because:
- The Senate had not
army left to oppose him.
- The leadership of
the senatorial oppostion had perished in battles or proscription.
- Octavian bought off
the remaining senators (with promotion), the soldiers (with bonuses)
and the urban masses (with cheap corn.
- The provincial elites
supported Octavian because the Senate had so mismanaged government
of the provinces.
-
Why did Octavian (pix)succeed
where Julius
Ceasar (pix
- Image, Jean-Leon Gerome's "The Death of Caesar," 1867.) had failed?:
- 1) Octavian, perhaps because
he had the opportunity of studying Caesar's failure, adopted a more effective
political and constitutional reconciliation of the Roman senatorial elite
to his monarchical rule:
- Caesar was famous for
his clemency - a stance that presumes (and thus promotes?)
the political superiority of the clement (and political reforms that
protected the ordinary from the depredations of the elite).
- Octavian was famous for
his auctoritas - a Roman (republican) social
attribute - auctoritas (tr. "authority) was the respect
accorded to one's opinion because of the quality of one's prior counsel
and conduct. Octavian, in other words, suggested that he had earned
whatever clout he had in Roman politics the old fashioned way and
was exercised (unlike Caesar's clemency) in accordance with the Republican
constitution and the mos maiorum.
- Octavian, in other words, offered the defeated senatorial aristocracy
a rhetoric and style which explained his power in traditional republican
terms. Everyone knew that Octavian was "the man," but he
had the good sense not to rub anyone's nose in the fact. He claimed
that he was simply the princeps - the leading
figure in the Senate (an old and informal republican term used to
describe the Senator with the most clout - nothing monarchical about
that).
- From 31 bce on, Octavian took care to obtain the office of consul,
which, under the Republican constitution authorized his use of political
power. After 23 bce, if Octavian was not consul, the Senate passed
decrees authorizing his authority. So authorized, Octavian set about
"restoring the republic." In 27 bce, he announced that he
had finished his job and turned the operation of the state back over
to the Senate, which would henceforth govern as demanded by the mos
maiorum of Rome's republican past.
- Certain facts should lead us to question Octavian's claim to be
just a simple Senator doing his job:
- Back in 32 (when he was still warring with Anthony for control
of the Empire) Octavian required all citizens in the western part
of the Empire (the area under his control) to swear an oath of
personal allegiance to him. This oath was eventually
extended to all citizens of the empire. Soldiers had to take a
special oath of allegiance to Octavian.
- Q: did Republican soldiers take oaths of allegiance to the
consul?
- When he "lay down his office" [as restorer of the
republic] in 27 bce he received as "proconsular provinces"
Spain, Gaul, Egypt and Syria for 10 years. He retained the office
of consul. This grant of provincial authority was regularly renewed
by the Senate.
- Q: how can you be the governor of more than one province
at a time?
- Q: how can you
be consul and provincial governor at the same time?
- The Senate promptly voted Octavian the title, "Augustus"
and renamed the month Sextilis, "Augustus" after him.
- The Senate had originally considered the name "Romulus,"
to indicate that Octavian was the second founder of Rome.
Romans, however, had come to have a rather grim view of the
fratricide in the story of Romulus and Remus due to their
experience of fratricide during the last century of civil
war.
- augustus was an adjective used in religious
contexts throughout the republican period [are you sensing
a trend here?] to indicate both something authorized by the
gods and the divine authority to authorize - it was typically
contrasted with the adjective humanus.
- In 23 bce, after a
serious illness had prompted rumors of conspiracies against him,
Augustus resigned his consulship. The Senate granted him imperium
maius [the legal right to contravene the actions of the consul]
and tribunicia potestas [inviolate person, right to initiate
and veto legislation].
- Q: under the Republican Constitution, what Senator had constitutional
authority independent of office?
- Octavian/Augustus fostered religious cults which both enhanced
his authority and unified the diverse populations of the empire.
At first, in the eastern provinces, he styled himself divus
filius ["son of a god" - the Senate had declared
Julius Caesar, who had adopted Octavian in his will, a god, after
his death] and permitted citizens there to worship
him as a god through a cult of Rome and Augustus. In the
western part of the empire (which did not have, as the east had,
a tradition of ruler-cults) he fostered cults in honor of Rome
and the divine Julius. In 12 bce, after the disgraced triumvir
Lepidus finally died, Augustus became pontifex maximus [chief
priest of Rome under republican Roman religious and political
practice]. At this point, he instituted cults in the west which
worshipped his genus [reviving the republican religious
festival, the Compitalia,
to do so]. The activities of these cults were organized by flamines.
Appointment to the position of flamen augustalis was
quite prestigious. In the provinces these positions were often
awarded to (and keenly sought after) by wealthy freedmen.
- Conclusion: Octavian/Augustus' authority in the Roman Empire
rested upon several pillars:
- fabulous wealth [obtained by conquering Egypt] used to guarantee
- support/control of army, which made the Senate quite willing
to grant him
- constitutional power to exercise political control which
- guaranteed peace [pax Romana] for the first time
in a century and thus earned him
- the loyalty of ordinary citizens in Rome and the provinces
whom he united through fostering
- a shared elite literary/artistic culture and a religious
culture shared by all citizens regardless of status
- 2) Octavian's success
was the logical culmination of a century of civil war:
- a century of increasingly
intense aristocratic competition for political power
which constantly tested the ability of the republican constitution
to manage elite ambition
- a century of increasing
geographic expansion of the empire which tested
the adaptability of the republican constitution (designed for
management of a city-state)
- a century of increasing
and unavailing reliance on extraordinary commands
(e.g. Pompey, Octavian), dictatorships (Sulla,
Caesar, Octavian) and triumvirates as constitutional
and quasi-constitutional responses to the stresses
geographic expansion and aristocratic competition created
- a century which saw
two Roman generals (Sulla and Caesar) used troops entrusted to
their command against to invade Italy in response to political
decisions which ran against their interests
- a century which saw
the republican army transformed from a seasonal citizen militia
to a permanent and increasingly professional institution
- that was subject
less to the authority of the state than that of a general
- in which soldiers
were dependent more on a general's military and political
acumen than the state's obligation to provide salary and retirement
benefits to the soldier for services from which the state
benefited
- a century which saw
the empire's provincial elite increasingly demand
a share of the power jealously guarded by the urban elite of Rome
(i.e., the transformation of Rome from a city-state
to the capital city of an empire)
- at the end of this
century the only logical conclusion was that Rome's aristocratic,
oligarchic republican constitution had failed and that the empire
could only be managed effectively through a monarchy
- 3) Octavian was simply the leader
of and front man for a new oligarchy - the provincial elites of Roman Italy
- Consider the observation
of Ronald Syme, the great historian of the Roman Revolution: (R. Syme,
The Roman Revolution, Oxford: 1939, p. 4).
In all ages, whatever the form government, be it monarchy, republic,
or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the facade; and Roman history,
Republican or Imperial is the history of the governing class. The marshals,
diplomats, and financiers of the Revolution may be discerned again in
the Republic of Augustus as the ministers and agents of power, the same
men but in different garb. They are the government of the New State.
- In Syme's view, we should consider the Roman Revolutions a process
in which one oligarchic elite (the Italian provincial elites who maintained
their power through the ascendancy of the Julian family and the constitution
of the Principate) had defeated another oligarchic elite
(the Roman nobiles who maintained their power through the republican
constitution).
-
What did Augustus reform and
Why?
- Problems facing Rome upon the end of the civil war (Republican failures)
- corrupt provincial governors and inefficient provincial administration
- dependence of armies on generals (which meant that generals were
always a political threat to central authority)
- far too many soldiers
- profound alienation of provincial elites who were suspicious of
the integrity of the Roman Senatorial elite.
- Solutions Augustus implemented
- named governors in "his" provinces and influenced senatorial
choice in Senatorial provinces
- disbanded huge numbers of soldiers and settled them on farms in
provinces
- limited commands (where possible) and triumphs to members of his
family
- professionalized army by
- incrasing pay (and giving bonuses)
- regular terms of service
- stationed in provinces and on frontiers
- established Praetorian Guard
- 9 cohorts: 3 in Rome and 6 in nearby towns
- evolutions of late Republican military practice of providing
Generals with a body guard (cohors praetoria)
- extended Roman citizenship
- as censor, reduced Senate to 600
- restored old Republican temples and cults
- passed laws encouraging/requiring marriage and providing political/social
incentives for having children
- sponsored artistic and architectural revival in Rome
Rome: The Age of
Augustus / Augustan
Timeline; Augustan
Chronology / The
Augustan Building Program
Augustan Bibliography
/ A
Very Select Bibliography for Augustus
The Emergence
of the Augustan Age / A
Literary History of the Augustan Age / Augustan
Age Links
The Political and
Social Position of Augustus / Augustan
Poetry and Propaganda / Augustus
and the Early Roman Empire
Julius Caesar
a biography in 12 parts / Julius
Caesar / The
Imperial Cult / Emperor
Worship / C.
S. Mackay on Emperor Worship
Augustus, the Principate
and Propaganda
Read the Res Gestae
(Augustus' autobiography - sort of)
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