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Topics

• Roman religion(s)
• The Ludi Apollinares
• The Augustan Age 

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.

• 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:
      
      
      1. The Senate had not army left to oppose him.
      2. The leadership of the senatorial oppostion had perished in battles or proscription.
      3. Octavian bought off the remaining senators (with promotion), the soldiers (with bonuses) and the urban masses (with cheap corn.
      4. 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)