2011 - A Companion to Roman Religion

ACTA01 1/25/07 13:28 Page iii A COMPANION TO ROMAN RELIGION Edited by Jörg Rüpke ACTA01 1/25/07 13:28 Page iv © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd blackwell publishing 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Jörg Rüpke to be identified as the Author of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2007 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to Roman religion / edited by Jörg Rüpke. p. cm. — (Blackwell companions to the ancient world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-2943-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-2943-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Rome—Religion. I. Rüpke, Jörg. BL803.C66 2007 292.07—dc22 2006025010 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10/12pt Galliard by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed and bound in [Country of Printing] by [Name and Address of Printer] The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com ACTA01 1/25/07 13:28 Page v Contents List of Figures viii List of Maps xi Notes on Contributors xii Abbreviations xvii Maps xxiv 1 Roman Religion – Religions of Rome Jörg Rüpke 2 Approaching Roman Religion: The Case for Wissenschaftsgeschichte C. Robert Phillips, III 1 10 Part I Changes 29 3 The Religion of Archaic Rome Christopher Smith 31 4 Pre-Roman Italy, Before and Under the Romans Olivier de Cazanove 43 5 Urban Religion in the Middle and Late Republic Eric Orlin 58 6 Continuity and Change: Religion in the Augustan Semi-Century Karl Galinsky 71 ACTA01 1/25/07 13:28 Page vi vi Contents 7 8 9 Religions and the Integration of Cities in the Empire in the Second Century ad: The Creation of a Common Religious Language William Van Andringa Old Religions Transformed: Religions and Religious Policy from Decius to Constantine Hartmut Leppin Religious Koine and Religious Dissent in the Fourth Century Michele Renee Salzman Part II Media 10 The History of Roman Religion in Roman Historiography and Epic Denis Feeney 83 96 109 127 129 11 Religion and Roman Coins Jonathan Williams 143 12 Reliefs, Public and Private Katja Moede 164 13 Inscriptions as Sources of Knowledge for Religions and Cults in the Roman World of Imperial Times Rudolf Haensch 14 Religion in the House Annemarie Kaufmann-Heinimann Part III Symbols and Practices 15 Roman Cult Sites: A Pragmatic Approach Ulrike Egelhaaf-Gaiser 16 Complex Rituals: Games and Processions in Republican Rome Frank Bernstein 17 Performing the Sacred: Prayer and Hymns Frances Hickson Hahn 18 Music and Dance: Forms of Representation in Pictorial and Written Sources Friederike Fless and Katja Moede 19 Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors John Scheid 176 188 203 205 222 235 249 263 ACTA01 1/25/07 13:28 Page vii Contents Part IV Actors and Actions vii 273 20 Religious Actors in Daily Life: Practices and Related Beliefs Nicole Belayche 275 21 Republican Nobiles: Controlling the Res Publica Veit Rosenberger 292 22 Emperors: Caring for the Empire and Their Successors Peter Herz 304 23 Urban Elites in the Roman East: Enhancing Regional Positions and Social Superiority Athanasios Rizakis 24 Living on Religion: Professionals and Personnel Marietta Horster 317 331 Part V Different Religious Identities 343 25 Roman Diaspora Judaism Jack N. Lightstone 345 26 Creating One’s Own Religion: Intellectual Choices Attilio Mastrocinque 378 27 Institutionalized Religious Options: Mithraism Richard Gordon 392 28 The Romanness of Roman Christianity Stefan Heid 406 Part VI Roman Religion Outside and Seen from Outside 427 29 Exporting Roman Religion Clifford Ando 429 30 Religion in the Roman East Ted Kaizer 446 31 Roman Religion in the Vision of Tertullian Cecilia Ames 457 Bibliography 472 Index 511 ACTA01 1/25/07 13:28 Page xii Notes on Contributors Cecilia Ames studied at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina, and at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Since 1994 she has been professor of ancient history and of myth and religion in Greece and Rome at the National University of Cordoba. Invited as a researcher to Tübingen and Erfurt universities and to the Kommission für Epigraphik und Alte Geschichte/German Archaeological Institute at Munich, she is also a research member of CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas, Argentina) and director of the “Discursive Practices in Greco-Roman Times” research project. Clifford Ando is professor of classics and of the college at the University of Chicago. He studied at Princeton and Michigan and was formerly professor of classics, history, and law at the University of Southern California. Nicole Belayche studied at the University of Paris IV–Sorbonne and the École pratique des hautes études (Paris). She was maître de conférences of Roman history at the Universities of Orléans and Paris IV–Sorbonne 1989–99, then professor of Roman history at the University of Rennes. Since 2002, she has been directeur d’études at the École pratique des hautes études, sciences religieuses (Paris). She coordinates the following research programs within the Centre Gustave Glotz (UMR 8585): “Les communautés religieuses dans les mondes grec et romain,” “Les identités religieuses dans les mondes grec et romain,” and “Cohabitations et contacts religieux dans les mondes grec et romain.” Frank Bernstein studied at the universities of Düsseldorf, Oxford (Brasenose College), Duisburg, and Mainz). Since 2002 he has been Hochschuldozent of ancient history at the University of Mainz, and is currently replacement teaching chair of ancient history at the University of Bielefeld. He is working on Greek and Roman history. Olivier de Cazanove studied at the Sorbonne, at the Ecole normale supérieure (Paris), and at the French School at Rome. Formerly director of the Jean Bérard Centre in ACTA01 1/25/07 13:28 Page xiii Notes on Contributors xiii Naples, then maître de conférences of ancient history at the University of Paris I, he is currently professor of archaeology at the University of Burgundy at Dijon. He directed excavations in South Italy and works on the “Inventory of Sacred Places in Ancient Italy” program, promoted by the French National Center for Scientific Research, Italian universities and archaeological soprintendenze. Ulrike Egelhaaf-Gaiser studied at the universities of Munich and Tübingen. She was a research assistant at the University of Tübingen 1994–5, then a research associate at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Inscriptiones Graecae) and a research assistant at the University of Giessen. Since 2006 she has been a research associate at the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 434) working on “Memory Cultures” at the University of Giessen, and she is currently replacement teaching chair of Latin at the University of Hamburg. Denis Feeney studied at Auckland University and Oxford University. He has held teaching positions at Edinburgh, Wisconsin, Bristol, and New College, Oxford, and is Giger Professor of Latin and chairman of the Department of Classics at Princeton University. In spring semester 2004 he was Sather Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Friederike Fless is professor of classical archaeology at the Institute for Classical Archaeology, Freie Universität Berlin. She studied at the University of Trier, the Julius-Maximilians-Universität, Würzburg, and the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz. Her current research focuses on Attic red figure vases as a part of Greek culture in the necropolis of Pantikapaion, toreutics and jewelry in the North Pontic region, and sepulchral representation in the Bosphoran kingdom. Karl Galinsky studied at Princeton University. He is the Floyd Cailloux Centennial Professor of Classics and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He has directed several projects, including faculty seminars on Roman religion, for the National Endowment of the Humanities and received many awards both for his teaching and for his research, including grants from the Guggenheim and von Humboldt Foundations. Richard Gordon studied at Jesus College, Cambridge. He was a research fellow at Downing College 1969–70; then a lecturer and senior lecturer in ancient civilization at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He was a visiting fellow at Darwin College 1979–80, and since 1987 has been a private scholar resident in Germany. Rudolf Haensch studied at the universities of Cologne and Bonn. He became a member of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, in 2001, then replacement teaching professor of ancient history at Hamburg and Cologne, then visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). Since 2004 he has been second director of the “Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts” (Munich). Stefan Heid has been professor of the history of liturgy and hagiography at the Pontifical Institute for Christian Archeology at Rome since 2001. ACTA01 1/25/07 13:28 Page xiv xiv Notes on Contributors Peter Herz studied at the universities of Mainz and Oxford. He was professor of ancient history at the University of Mainz 1986–94, then chair of ancient history at the University of Regensburg. In 1990 he became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Frances Hickson Hahn studied at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She was assistant professor of classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 1987–93, then became associate professor of classics. Marietta Horster studied at the University at Cologne, where she was a researcher in ancient history 1990–4. She was assistant professor in ancient history at the University of Rostock 1995–2001, and researcher at the Prosopographia Imperii Romani in Berlin 2003–6. Since October 2006 she has been the replacement teaching chair of ancient history at the University of Bamberg. Ted Kaizer studied at the University of Leiden and Brasenose College, Oxford. He was an associate lecturer at the Open University 2001–2, then British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Since 2005 he has been a lecturer in Roman culture and history at the University of Durham. Annemarie Kaufmann-Heinimann studied at the universities of Basel and Bonn. She is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a research associate of the Archäologisches Seminar of the University of Basel. She works as a freelance archaeologist, and her main fields of research are Roman bronzes and religion, and Roman silver. Hartmut Leppin studied at the universities of Marburg, Heidelberg, and Pavia. He was replacement teaching chair of ancient history at the University of Greifswald 1995–6, then Feodor-Lynen Fellow at the University of Nottingham, and Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Göttingen. Since 2001 he has been chair of ancient history at the University of Frankfurt/Main. He is a member of the editorial board of the Historische Zeitschrift and editor of Millennium Studies and the Millennium Yearbook. Jack N. Lightstone studied at Carleton University and Brown University. He is currently president and vice-chancellor, as well as professor of history, at Brock University. He previously served as professor of religion and provost and vice-rector, academic, at Concordia University. He has been a visiting research fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at the University of Miami, and vice-president and subsequently president of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. Attilio Mastrocinque studied at the University of Venice. He was a fellow of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici (Naples) 1975–6 and of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche 1978–81, then a researcher in ancient history at the University of Venice. He was professor of Greek history at the University of Trento 1987–95 and at the University of Verona 1995–2002. Since 2002 he has been chair of Roman history at the University of Verona. He is also Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung research fellow at the Universities of Cologne, Aachen, and Freiburg im Breisgau, and in 1993 he was invited professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris). ACTA01 1/25/07 13:28 Page xv Notes on Contributors xv Katja Moede is a researcher at the Institute for Classical Archaeology, Freie Universität Berlin. Eric Orlin studied at Yale University, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and the University of California, Berkeley. She was an instructor in ancient history at California State University, Fresno, 1995–6, then assistant professor of history and classical studies at Bard College, and since 2000 she has been associate professor of classics at the University of Puget Sound. She was a participant at the NEH Seminar on “Roman Religion in its Cultural Context”, American Academy in Rome, 2002. C. Robert Phillips, III studied at Yale, Oxford, and Brown universities. He went to Lehigh University in 1975, where he became professor of classics (1987) and professor of classics and ancient history (1990); he chaired the Department of Classics 1982–8. In his free time he practices Chopin’s Etudes. Athanasios Rizakis studied at the universities of Thessalonika, Paris, and Lyon. He was a lecturer in Greek language and civilization at the University Lyon III-Jean Moulin 1974–8, then assistant and maître assistant associé at the University of St-Etienne. He became a research fellow and, in 1984, director of research at the National Hellenic Research Foundation, where he is head of the “Roman Greece” program and of many other European or bilateral research projects. He was an invited member at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton (1994), and visiting professor at the universities of Creta (1980–1), Lyon II (1987–8), and Cyprus (1996–97). Since 1998 he has been professor of ancient Greek history at the University of Nancy II (France). Veit Rosenberger studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Augsburg, Cologne, and Oxford. He was an assistant at the University of Augsburg 1992–2003 and exchange professor at Emory University (Atlanta) 2000–1, and has been professor of ancient history at the University of Erfurt since 2004. Jörg Rüpke studied at the universities of Bonn, Lancaster, and Tübingen. He was replacement teaching chair of Latin at the University of Constance 1994–5, then professor of classical philology at the University of Potsdam. Since 1999 he has been chair of comparative religion at the University of Erfurt, and he is the coordinator of the Priority Program of the German Science Foundation (SPP 1080) “Roman Imperial and Provincial Religion: Processes of Globalization and Regionalization in the Ancient History of Religion” 2000–7. He was visiting professor at the Université Paris I-Sorbonne Panthéon in 2003, and T. B. H. L. Webster lecturer at Stanford University in 2005. Michele Renee Salzman studied at Bryn Mawr College. She was assistant professor of classical studies at Columbia University 1980–2, then assistant to associate professor at Boston University. Since 1995, she has been associate to full professor of history at the University of California at Riverside. She has been chair of the Department of History and professor-in-charge of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies, Rome. She is senior editor of the Cambridge History of Ancient Mediterranean Religions. ACTA01 1/25/07 13:28 Page xvi xvi Notes on Contributors John Scheid’s PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Schilling. He was a member of the Ecole française de Rome 1974–7, then assistant professor of ancient history at the Université de Lille III, and afterwards professor and directeur d’etudes at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sciences religieuses. Since 2001 he has been a member of the Collège de France as successor to Jean-Pierre Vernant. Christopher Smith studied at Oxford University, and was appointed to St Andrews University in 1992. He is currently professor of ancient history. In 2001 he gave the Stanford Lectures at Trinity College Dublin. William Van Andringa studied at the universities of Toulouse and Oxford. He has been maître de conférences in Roman history and archaeology at the University of Picardie Jules-Verne since 2001. He is co-director of the excavation of the necropolis of Porta Nocera at Pompeii 2003–7, and coordinator of the research program “Sacrifices and Meat Markets in the Roman Empire” (Centre Gustave Glotz, Paris) 2006–9. He was a member of the French School at Rome 2002–3. Jonathan Williams studied classics at the University of Oxford. He was a lecturer in ancient history at St Anne’s College, Oxford, 1992–3, then curator of Iron Age and Roman coins at the British Museum. Since 2005 he has been policy adviser on international affairs for the British Museum. ACTC01 1/25/07 13:28 Page 1 CHAPTER ONE Roman Religion – Religions of Rome Jörg Rüpke Roman Religion Why dedicate a book of over five hundred pages to a religion as stone-dead as that of one of thousands of ancient Mediterranean cities? For the choice of the city, it is easy to find arguments. Rome was one of the most successful cities ever to build an empire, which comprised millions of square kilometers and lasted close to a millennium. It was and is a cultural and religious center, even if the culture was frequently Greek and the religion is known nowadays as Catholic Christianity. Finally, Rome remains a tourist center, a symbol of a past that has succeeded in keeping its presence in school books and university courses. And yet, what has this all to do with Roman religion? “Roman religion” as used here is an abbreviation for “religious signs, practices, and traditions in the city of Rome.” This is a local perspective. Stress is not given to internal differences between different groups or traditions. Instead, the accent is placed on their common history (part I) and range of media (part II), shared or transferred practices (part III), and the social and institutional context (part IV). Many religious signs were exchangeable. The fourth-century author of a series of biographies on earlier emperors (the so-called Historia Augusta) had no difficulties in imagining an emperor from the early third century venerating Christ among the numerous statuettes in his private rooms. Gestures, sacrificial terminology, the structure of hymns were equally shared among widely varying groups. Nevertheless some stable systems, sets of beliefs, and practices existed and were cared for by specialists or transported and replicated by traveling individuals. They were present in Rome, effective and affective, but a set of beliefs, a group, or even an organization had a history of its own beyond Rome, too. Here, the local perspective is taken to ask how they were modified in Rome or the Roman period (part V). ACTC01 1/25/07 13:28 Page 2 2 Jörg Rüpke “Rome,” the name of the city, finally, is merely a cipher for the Roman empire. In the long process of its expansion and working, the religious practices of the center were exported, in particular the cult of the living or dead emperors and the cult of the dominating institutions, the “goddess Rome” (dea Roma) or the “Genius of the senate” (Genius senatus). This was part of the representation of Roman power to its subjects (see chapter 22), but at the same time it offered space for the activities of non-Roman local elites to get in touch with the provincial and central authorities and to distinguish themselves from their fellow-citizens (chapter 23). As communication between center and periphery – and other attractive centers in a periphery that was marginal in administrative terms only – these activities touched upon the religious practices in the city of Rome, too. “Roman religion” cannot be isolated from the empire, at least for the imperial period, if we take for granted the character of earlier Rome as a Hellenistic city on the margins of Hellenic culture (Hubert Cancik, p.c.). Again, that perspective holds true in both directions. The history of Mediterranean religions in the epoch of the Roman empire must acknowledge the fact that Persian Mithraism, Hellenistic Judaism, and Palestinian Christianity were Roman religions, too. It is the final section of this book that explicitly takes this wider geographical stance (part VI). An Ancient Religion Roman religion did not grow out of nothing. Italy, above all in its coastal regions, was already party to a long-distance cultural exchange in the Mediterranean basin in a prehistoric phase. The groups that were to grow into the urbanization of the Roman hills did not need to invent religion. Religious signs and practices were present from the ancient Near East, via Phoenician culture, at least indirectly via Carthage, and via Greece and the Etruscans. Speaking an Indo-European language, these groups shared a religious “knowledge” in the form of names or rudimentary institutions in the area of cultural practices that we call religion. Even if historians of Roman religion do not any longer privilege the distant common heritage of Celts, Romans, Greeks, Persians, and Indians over the intensive cultural exchange of historical times and the immense diffusion of practices from the non-Indo-European Near Eastern cultures, some constellations might find an explanation in those distant areas by comparing cultures more isolated from each other in later times. Cultural exchange – as said above – was not restricted to the founding phases. It is hard to overestimate the diffusion of religious practices within and from the Latins, Umbrians, and Etruscans. In detail, the range is not clear at all. There are definite similarities, a shared culture (or, to use a Greek term, koine), in votive and burial practices. To say the same for the architecture of sanctuaries is neither contradicted by the evidence nor massively supported. We can suppose that many characteristics of the gods, the fascination of statuary and anthropomorphic representation, were shared. The very few longer non-Latin texts demonstrate surprising similarities in calendrical practices (the Etruscan tegula Capuana from the fifth century bc) or in priestly organization and ritual detail (the Umbrian tabulae Iguvinae from the second ACTC01 1/25/07 13:28 Page 3 Roman Religion – Religions of Rome 3 to first centuries bc). Unfortunately, non-Latin Italian languages ceased to be spoken (and especially to be written) in the first century bc and the first century ad as a consequence of Roman domination. Latin antiquarian writers adduce many instances of the borrowing of middle Italian practices and symbols in order to explain contemporary Roman institutions. The continuous presence of self-conscious Greek writers is not the only reason to pay an ever-growing attention to Greek influences and their (frequently deeply modifying) reception. From the beginning of the great “colonization” – that is, especially from the eighth century – onward, Greeks were present in Italy and served as translators of the achievement of the earlier civilizations of Egypt and the “fertile crescent” of Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine. Anthropomorphic images, temple building, and the alphabet came by this route. Influences were extensive and continuous. Despite the early presence of the alphabet it was not before the third century bc that Rome started to adopt Greek techniques of literary production on a larger scale. Many of the rivalries of Italian townships of the second century bc – frequently resulting in large-scale temple building – were fought out in terms of Greek cultural products. Competing with Roman elites meant being more Greek. Much of what provincials thought to be Roman and adopted in the process of Romanization during the following centuries stemmed from Greece. The “Greece,” however, of this intensive phase of cultural exchange – intensified by Roman warfare and plunder in Greek territories – was Hellenistic Greece, was a cultural space that faced large territories. In the aftermath of the expansion by Alexander the Great (d. 323 bc) and on the basis of the earlier establishment of Greek ports and trading centers on Mediterranean coastlands, this Hellenistic culture had developed techniques of delocalization, of universalizing ancient Greek traditions. It offered grids of history, a mythic geography that could integrate places and societies like Rome and the Romans. Greeks thought Romans to be Trojans long before Romans discovered the usefulness of being Trojans in talking with Greeks. Religion for a City and an Empire Roman religion was the religion of one of hundreds of Mediterranean cities. It was a Hellenized city and religion. Yet it found many a special solution, for reasons of its geographic location, local traditions, immigrants. The most important contingent factor, certainly, was its military success. At least from the fourth century bc onward, Rome organized an aggressive and efficient military apparatus, managing hegemony and expansion first within Italy, then within the Mediterranean basin, finally as far as Scotland, the northern German lowland plain, the southern Carpathians, the coast of the Black Sea, Armenia, Arabia, and the northern edge of the Sahara. Preliminary to that was the orchestrated growth of the Roman nobility through the immigration of Italian elites. These processes had consequences for the shape of religion at Rome. There is a strong emphasis on control, of both centralization and presence (see chapters 21 and 16). Public rituals were led by magistrates, priestly positions filled by members ACTC01 1/25/07 13:28 Page 4 4 Jörg Rüpke of the political elite, mass participation directed into temporary and then more and more permanent architectural structures in the center of Rome. At the same time, religion remained independent in a peculiar sense: gods could be asked to move, but not ordered to do so; priesthoods could be presented with candidates, but co-opted them in their own right; the transfer of public property to imported gods was the subject of political decisions, but their rituals were not. Being not directly subjected to political decision, religion offered a powerful source for legitimizing political decisions; it remained what Georg Simmel called a “third authority.” The dominant Roman model for religion was not expansionist; it was rather absorbing. Numerous “gods” – that class of signs the centrality of which within a set of social interaction makes us term these practices a “religion” – in the forms of statues, statuettes, images, or mere names, were imported, and – what is more – stories about these gods, practices to venerate them, molds to multiply them, knowledge about how to build temples for them, even religious specialists, priests, accompanied them or were invented on the spot. For the ancient metropolis, a city growing to the size of several hundred thousand inhabitants, maybe close to a million by the time of the early empire, the usual models to describe the religions of Mediterranean cities do not hold. Surely, publicly financed cult – sacra publica, to use the ancient technical term – held an important share. The large buildings of public temples did provide an important religious infrastructure. So did the publicly financed rituals. Yet the celebrations of many popular rituals were decentralized. This holds true for the merrymaking of the Saturnalia (not a public holiday in the technical sense!) lasting for several days, and for the cult of the dead ancestors and the visits to the tombs during the Parentalia. We do not know how many people fetched purgatory materials from the Vestal Virgins for the decentralized rituals of the Parilia, the opening of the “pastoral year.” Many “public” rituals might have remained a matter of priestly performance without a large following. The life-cycle rituals – naming, leaving childhood, marrying, funeral – might utilize public institutions, but were neither spatially nor temporally coordinated. In times of personal crises, people often addressed deities and visited places of cult that were not prominent or were even outside of public ritual. Indeed, the growing importance of the centralized rituals of the public games – to be witnessed especially from the second half of the third century bc onward – were meant to compensate for these deficits of “public religion.” Hence the “civic cults” (or “polis religion”) does not form a sociologically useful category. Neither does “pantheon.” The idea of “pantheon” as a concept for the history of religion derives from the analysis of ancient Near Eastern and especially Greek mythological text. These seem to imply the existence of a limited group of deities (around ten to twenty) that seem to be instituted in order to cover the most important needs of the polity. Internal coherence is produced by genealogical bonds or institutions by analogy to political ones: a council of the gods, for instance. For Greece, the omnipresence of the Homeric poems gives plausibility to the idea that local deities were thought to act within or supplement the circle of the around twelve most important gods, even if these were not present in the form of statues or individually owned ACTC01 1/25/07 13:28 Page 5 Roman Religion – Religions of Rome 5 temples. For Rome and Italy this plausibility is lacking. The aforementioned centralizing rituals might further the idea of such a “pantheon” – technically, by the way, a term to denote the exceptional case of a temple owned by “all the gods.” In contrast to the frequently used term di immortales, designating the gods as an unstructured ensemble, the circus processions would present a definite number of gods. Yet we do not know whether the order of the gods was fixed or subject to situational and individual decisions. Even if tradition – that is, precedent – had its share, there was no codified body of mythological tales that would constitute an order of gods or even an inner circle of divine figures. The multitude of gods venerated in the city of Rome was always increased by individual decisions – those of generous members of the nobility and victorious generals investing parts of their booty, as well as those of immigrants with a foreign ethnic background. Likewise the decrease in number was due to individual neglect of cultic performances or lack of interest in maintaining and repairing sanctuaries. These findings corroborate the earlier characterization of Roman religion. Of course, Roman religion was an “embedded religion” (see the introduction to chapter 25 for further methodological considerations). That is, religious practices formed part of the cultural practices of nearly every realm of daily life. Banqueting usually followed sacrifice (chapter 19) and building a house or starting a journey implied small sacrifices and prayers, as did meetings of the senate, parades, or warfare. Religion, hence, was not confined to temples and festivals; it permeated, to repeat this point, all areas of society. Yet politics – to concentrate on the most interesting realm in this respect – was not identical with religion. Many stories, the huge number of non-public rituals, individual superstitions (doing or believing more than is necessary), the complicated procedures for installing priests: all this demonstrates the independence of the gods and the possibility of distinguishing between religion and politics, between res sacrae and res publicae, in everyday life. It was religion thus conceptualized, thus set apart, that could be used as a seemingly independent source of legitimization for political action. This set the guidelines for liberty and control and explains the harsh reaction to every move that seemed to create an alternative, a counter-public, by means of religion. To define these borders of religion – one might say, from without – the technique of law was employed, developing a body of regulations that finally appeared as an important part of the law collections of late antiquity (see chapter 29) and were of the utmost importance for the history of religion in Europe. If the Romans did not export their religion, they certainly exported their concept of religion. Of course, the outcome varied from area to area. The impact of particular Roman religious signs (names and images of deities, for example) and practices (rituals, festivals) was small in the Hellenized territories of the Hellenistic east, even if Mishnaic Judaism can hardly be imagined without the impact of Roman law and administration. Yet for parts of northern Africa and the more northern European provinces of the empire, the diffusion of stone temples and plastic images, of writing and permanently individualized gifts to the gods, the permanent visibility of votives, and the self-representation of the elite by means of religious dedications – these traits (by no means exclusively Roman practices) fundamentally changed ACTC01 1/25/07 13:28 Page 6 6 Jörg Rüpke the shape of religion and its place in provincial societies, shaping Christianity no less than paganism. Roman religion became an inseparable strain of the history of religion in the Mediterranean world and what much later came to be termed “Europe.” Religion In terms of the history of religion this is no “history of reception” or Wirkungsgeschichte. For reasons of disciplinary traditions and political history, the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century offer an easy borderline for this book. Publicly financed polytheistic religion was ended, and non-Christians (with Jews as a special, frequently not privileged exception) were discriminated against for the filling of public offices. Yet cultic practices continued for centuries, Christians being perhaps not willing or able to stop them or to destroy the architectural infrastructure on which they were the performers. As transmitted by texts, ancient – that is, Greek and Roman – religion, together with the polytheistic practices in Judah and Israel described in much less detail in the Bible, offered the typological alternative to Judaism and Christianity and formed an important pattern on which to describe and classify the practices of “heathens” in the colonial expansion of Europeans. Thus, “religion” could be coined as a general term encompassing Christianity and its illegitimate equivalents: Asian, American, African, and Australian idolatries. The latter process, to be dated to early modern times, implied that our perspective on religion is informed by Christianity, a religion that developed from antiquity onward, and furthered by centuries of theological faculties within European and (in this perspective) lately non-European universities, a complex and well-ordered theory to reflect on its beliefs and practices: theology. Yet the ancient history of religion is no field to be analyzed within the framework of the standard topics, the loci communes, of Christian dogma, even if many of them found their counterpart (and origin) in ancient philosophy. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the independent discipline of “comparative religion” or “history of religion” tried to supplant this scheme with series of topics like gods, beliefs, temples, rituals, priests. These are helpful as appealing to common sense, but ahistorical if applied as a system. What is described as “Roman religion” in this book is of an astonishing variety. Various are the phenomena, from Mithraic caves to hilltop Capitolia, from the offering of paid services by divinatory specialists (harioli) to colleges of freedmen whose members met on a monthly basis. Various are the social functions, from the pater familias who led the sacrifice to his own Genius, and thus underlined his position as head of the family, to neo-Pythagorean convictions that informed the preparation of one’s own burial and offered the prospect of a post-mortal existence. For the purpose of a historical analysis, “religion” is conceptualized by the authors of this book as human actions and communication. These were performed on the ACTC01 1/25/07 13:28 Page 7 Roman Religion – Religions of Rome 7 presupposition that gods existed who were part of one’s own social or political group, existed in the same space and time. They were to be treated by analogy to human partners and superiors. That offered space for wishful projections and experiments. What was helpful as regards human superiors should be useful in dealing with the gods, too. What was assumed to function among the gods should offer a model for human behavior, for consuls and kings. Without doubt, “gods” were important symbols, either in direct representation or by their assumed existence behind the attempts to communicate with them ritually. Methodologically, however, it is important neither to engage in a debate about their existence nor to expect to find them or their traces empirically. Thus, the lack of a chapter on “gods” is intentional. Analyzed as “signs,” the “gods” have neither an essence nor biographies. To represent the immortal god in social space, one has to produce new or use established signs, and these signs vary according to the media used. Narratives are an important medium, for example in historiography or epic (chapter 10); images could appear on coins (chapter 11), on reliefs (chapter 12), or independently as sculptured statues (chapter 15); and conventions of representation, of the use, and of the audience vary from genre to genre. Rituals (part III), too, are an important – perhaps the most important – means of not only communicating with the gods but demonstratively, publicly performing this communication, of defining the respective god by the strategy and content of the communicative approach (animal or vegetable sacrifice, female or male name, choice of time and place). Rituals stage-manage the gods’ existence and one’s own piety at the same time. Thus, it seems important to concentrate on the human actors in the center of the book (part IV): on ordinary individuals, on members of the changing elites, on those, finally, who made a living out of religion. If the renunciation of a chapter on the gods prompts an explanation, the lack of a systematic treatment of “cults” should prompt another. “Cult” as applied to ancient religions is a very convenient term, as it takes ancient polytheism to pieces that are gratifyingly similar to the large religious traditions like Christianity: defined by one god, be it Venus or Mithras, supposed to be connected to a specifiable group of persons, be it loosely or densely organized, characterized by common interests or social traits, be it women or members of the military, Syrians or freedmen. Without doubt, voluntary religious associations existed, but they were not necessarily exclusive, they did not necessarily concentrate on one god, and certainly, the sum of their activities did not comprise all or even most of ancient religious practices. According to socio-historical research, there was hardly a significant difference between the followers of the god Silvanus, a forest-god by name, sometimes venerated by colleges, and the god Mithras of Persian origin, whose exotic features were thematized in the cult of small and strictly hierarchical groups. Neither the sum of individual choices, ever changing or keeping within the limits of familiar or professional traditions, nor the identity of the name of a god from one place to another justifies speaking of “a cult” in the aforementioned sense. Thus, part V deliberately illustrates the wide spectrum of religious groups or options and does not attempt to map ancient polytheism as the sum of different “cults.” ACTC01 1/25/07 13:28 Page 8 8 Jörg Rüpke FURTHER READING Any further reading should start with ancient sources, many of the literary texts being accessible in the bilingual editions of the Loeb library. There are no “scientific” accounts of Roman religion from antiquity, but some extensive descriptions exist in different literary genera. The most fully preserved account of Roman ritual is given in Ovid’s commentary on the Roman calendar (Libri fastorum VI), written in late Augustan times and trying to integrate traditional Roman worship, the cult of the emperors, and the natural cycle of time. His near contemporary, the Greek Dionysius of Halicarnassus, dedicated a long section in his Roman Antiquities to religion (172.63–74, trans. E. Cary). Varro’s Antiquities of Divine Things survived in fragments only (a shorter self-quotation might be found in his On Latin Language 6); the polemical usage of it by the Christians Tertullian, in his To the Nations, and Augustine, in his City of God, give the best idea of its contents and later reception. From the first half of the third century, Minucius Felix’s dialogue Octavius offers another polemical and informed view on early (rather than middle) imperial Roman religion (trans. and comm. G. W. Clarke, New York 1974). The most important documentary texts are the acts of the Secular Games (new ed. and comm. for the Augustan games: Schnegg-Köhler 2002) and the protocols of the Arval Brethren (ed., comm., and French trans. Scheid 1998b). Religion is central for a number of institutions discussed by the Greek politician and philosopher Plutarch in his Roman Questions; his account of Isis and Osiris (trans. and comm. J. Gwyn Griffiths, Cambridge 1970) is not only an ethnographic piece, but a contemporary perspective on a cult flourishing widely in the Greek and Roman world. Tacitus’ Germania shows how a Roman viewed foreign cultures (and religion) at the turn of the first to the second century ad (trans. and comm. J. B. Rives, Oxford 1999). For the religion of the imperial period the most interesting texts stem from genera of fictitious literature: book 11 of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses on the cult of Isis (comm. J. Gwyn Griffiths, Leiden 1975), Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Lucian’s Alexandros, and Aristeides’ autobiographical Hieroi Logoi. One should not forget the Christian New Testament, in particular the Acts of the Apostles, and the early acts of martyrs, which narrate the confrontations of Christians with the Roman administration in provincial centers. Finally, the emperor Julian’s Letters attest the project of an anti-Christian revival and Neoplatonic modification of traditional cults. Cicero, prolific author, rhetor, politician, and philosopher from the late republic, deals frequently with religion, yet his On the Nature of the Gods (comm. Andrew R. Dyck, Cambridge 2003–) is more revealing for the history of Hellenistic philosophy than for Roman practice. The same does not hold for the subsequent On Divination (comm. A. E. Pease, Cambridge, MA, 1920–3, repr. Darmstadt 1963). The speeches On His House and On the Reply of the Haruspices do give interesting insights into the fabric of religious institutions. Other important sources are less easily accessible. Livy’s Roman history remains basic to the history of republican religion. Religious information, however, is widely scattered. The lexicon of Festus, abridging the Augustan Verrius Flaccus’ alphabetic account of his linguistic and religiohistoric research, has not been translated so far. Beard et al. (1998) offer good commentary on a selection of sources for the late republican and early imperial period; Valantasis (2000) does so for late antiquity. Literary as well as archaeological sources are extensively documented in the Thesaurus cultus et rituum antiquorum (ThesCRA) (Los Angeles, 2004–6). For reliefs Ryberg (1955) remains essential, frequently supplemented by Fless (1995). Schraudolph (1993) and Dräger (1994) publish numerous Roman altars; sarcophagi are shown and interpreted by G. Koch ACTC01 1/25/07 13:28 Page 9 Roman Religion – Religions of Rome 9 (1993) and by Zanker and Ewald (2004). Muth (1998) offers a glimpse into private mythological mosaics. Recent monographic accounts of Roman religion are given by Beard et al. (1998) and Rüpke (2001 [2007]); shorter introductions are offered by North (2000) and Scheid (2003). The manual of Wissowa (1912, repr. 1971) remains indispensable (for a recent assessment of Wissowa’s achievements see Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 5, 2003). For monographic accounts of the religious history of individual provinces see now the series Religion der römischen Provinzen (Belayche 2001; Spickermann 2003; volumes on Sicilia and Dacia are forthcoming). The best guide to recent research is given by survey articles every three to four years organized by epochs and provinces (Belayche et al. 2000, 2003, forthcoming). For the concept of religion see J. Z. Smith (1978, 1990, 1998) and Gladigow (2005). Many chapters of this book offer frequent references, usually to the most important type of “reading,” the reading of the ancient evidence. This is mostly available in annotated and translated form, as far as standard literary texts are concerned; often conveniently put together into multi-volume corpora, as far as inscriptions are concerned; often widely scattered, analyzed without image or photographically represented without analysis, as far as archaeological evidence is concerned. Here, the attempt is made to provide the interested reader with direct references, even if these refer to rather specialist publications.