Cult Practice

As Augustine saw, religion as practiced in the city, Varro’s ‘‘civic’’ religion, acted out the claims of the religion of the poets, Varro’s ‘‘mythical’’ religion (De civ. D. 6.7). Just as the mythical religion of Homer and Hesiod is very closely related to that of Virgil and Ovid, so the structures of public cult in the Roman world closely resemble those in the Greek world. Sacrifice - the ritualized slaughter of domestic animals and the pouring of offerings of wine - is the central ritual for both Greeks and Romans, and for both sacrifice is surrounded by an apparatus of prayer and dedication, of temples and altars, and of priests and priestesses. But behind this checklist of cult practices lie significant institutionalized differences between Greek and Roman cult practice that beg for a political explanation.

In Greek cities priests and other religious officials were of negligible political account (Parker 2005: ch. 5). Cities might listen especially to what priests and other religious officials, such as seers, had to say on religious matters. The plot of the Iliad turns on Agamemnon’s refusal to return the daughter of the priest Chryses and Apollo’s sending of a plague which afflicts the Achaean camp in order to make Agamemnon concede, and much of the tension of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus stems from the power of the insights of the seer Teiresias into the Theban plague, insights which Oedipus both does and does not want to hear. In Athenian history, too, we find religious officials bringing to the Assembly matters that relate to cult (as a public statement by Euthydemus, the priest of Asclepius, results in a proposal to the Athenian Assembly about using the rents from a quarry to pay for sacrifices (IG ii2 47), and the Athenian seer Lampon moves amendments to a decree about the offering of first-fruits at Eleusis (IG i3 78)). But priests and seers were only two of multiple sources of religious authority, and we never hear of anyone ever coveting either priesthood or the position of seer for the political influence that it gave. The important fourth century Athenian politician Lycurgus of Boutadai was a member of the family which filled two important priesthoods at Athens, and he himself was priest of Poseidon Erechtheus, but although his religious interests may be manifested in some of his policies and initiatives (granting land for a temple to Citian merchants, overhauling the dedications at a number of prominent temples, making new sacred vessels for the Panathenaea; see Humphreys 2004: ch. 3), there is no reason to believe that his religious position significantly promoted his political career. The two Spartan kings held the priesthoods of Zeus Ouranios and Zeus Lacedaimon (Hdt. 6.56.1), but this religious position was only one of the many sources of royal charismatic authority at Sparta (others of which included double portions at dinner and priority in religious rituals, whether or not either Zeus cult is involved).

Spartan kingship was hereditary - although various devices could be employed to ensure the succession of one royal offspring rather than another. So too many priests in Athens came from particular families (gene) and served for life. But in the fifth century some new priesthoods, at least, were chosen, as were most secular magistrates, by lot - even though priesthoods were individual and not a matter of joining a board of ten. Although women were not eligible for allotment to civil magistracies, the principle of allotment was extended to the priestess of Athena Nike established in the third quarter of the fifth century (IG i3 35-6). Various priestly families seem to have gone over to the use of the lot to select among their own members (Parker 1996: 292-3). Selection by lot from a preselected list enabled potential manipulation greater than was possible with a pure inheritance or pure lottery system, but there was no way that even the scion of a genos could ever ensure that they would succeed to a priesthood. The holding of office for life distinguished priestly from secular officeholders, and the randomness with which vacancies occurred in priesthoods further contributed to the impossibility of banking on the acquisition of priestly office.

In Greek Asia Minor, from the fourth century onward, the situation was different: priesthoods were sold (Dignas 2002: 251-71). Sometimes the sale was restricted to members of a priestly family, sometimes it was for life, but increasingly priesthoods were sold on an annual basis. Such annual priesthoods, accessible to those who could bid the highest, were much closer to secular magistracies than were the priesthoods of classical Athens - especially since magistracies too could involve shouldering financial as well as administrative burdens. These were cities in a different position to the autonomous city-states of classical Greece. They were subordinate to major powers - hellenistic kings (for whom see Eckstein, this volume, chapter 16 for religion aspects) and then to Rome - and wealth became increasingly the main route to political influence as wealthy men served as ambassadors and bought favor for their cities.

By contrast, in the Roman Republic, although once more sources of religious authority were highly diffuse, there was considerable political competition to hold a priesthood, and the position of‘‘chief priest’’ (pontifex maximus), in particular, came to be coveted by ambitious politicians and could be the basis for political influence and manipulation. Like magistracies, after the ‘‘struggle of the orders’’ the colleges of priests had a minimum number of plebeian members stipulated (by the lex Ogulnia of 300 Bc), and as with magistracies, the number in the priestly colleges was raised over the years, and in particular by Sulla (Beard 1990: 35). Popular election was brought in as the method of choosing the pontifex maximus in the third century BC, and in 104 BC the lex Domitia was passed which established that in future new augurs, pontifices, XVviri and VIIviri would be chosen by popular election, albeit from a shortlist chosen by the existing priests themselves (Beard 1990: 23). This both ensured future political importance for these priests and reflected the political nature of the role that they already enjoyed. Priests were expected to acquire and deploy expert religious knowledge, but that knowledge gave them an authority which could be transferred into the political realm.

The differences between Greece and Rome come out clearly if we consider the sources of advice on ritual matters. Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, an investigation into piety, frames itself around the actions of Euthyphro, who is bringing an action against his own father for manslaughter after the father has left a murderer in a ditch where he has died. The murderer died while Euthyphro’s father was seeking advice on what he should do with him from an exegetes, that is, an expounder of religious law. Exegetai are somewhat mysterious, and were important enough for Plato to make special, and obscure, arrangements for their appointment in his Laws (679d), but their exposition never becomes a political matter. On major religious issues the ultimate source of authority was the oracle at Delphi. By contrast, giving advice on ritual matters was at Rome the duty of the college of pontifices, and their intervention to determine matters of burial and family religion, as well as of the proper procedure for establishing temples and sacrifices, gave them a political role, bridging, as their name suggested, between the ultimate source of authority on these matters, the senate, and the people (Beard 1990: 39).

The political significance of priestly office and of religious authority comes out clearly from three incidents in the period during which Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus allied to form the ‘‘First Triumvirate’’ and dominate Roman politics. The first is Caesar’s seeking and achieving election in 63 bc to the position ofpontifex maximus. His campaign for this office seems to have involved not only electoral bribery of the special tribal assembly responsible for the election, but the invention of the tradition that lulus, mythical founder of the lulii, had been pontifex maximus at Alba Longa (L. Taylor 1949: 43). The second is the use by Bibulus, consul with Caesar in 59 bc, of the device of watching for omens in an attempt to prevent Caesar passing legislation. The third is Cicero’s writing to Atticus and suggesting that one thing that would make him support the triumvirs would be the offer of a place in the college of the augurs (Att. 2.5.2).

Both the causes and the consequences of the Roman republican expectation that religious office should have a political impact deserve consideration. Given the essentially parallel mythical theology in the Greek city-state and in Rome, and given the acceptance by Roman scholars writing in the late republic that Roman civic religion was quite separate from the ‘‘natural’’ religion of the philosophers, the very different position of religious officials with regard to politics demands explanation. Part of what separates Rome from classical Athens is the commitment of Rome to popular election. Athens selected all bar its military and its highest financial magistrates by lot, relying on boards of ten magistrates in every office to guarantee that the lot could provide sufficient competence. Rome did not employ the lot as a mechanism of selection, but from bottom to top elected its magistrates by various sorts of popular election. Just how ‘‘democratic’’ Roman electoral procedures were has been much debated (see most recently Mouritsen 2001), but the important fact for the current question is that those who held office had been selected by a process that involved weighing capacities against criteria. Those elected to civil magistracies might not be the most expert in the relevant capacities, since there were limits on age and reelection, but they would at least be the best of those available. The Athenian lot enabled no such judgment to be made - rather it was itself made possible by the assumption, most clearly articulated in the myth told by Protagoras in Plato’s homonymous dialogue, that all citizens had the relevant minimum of qualifications. In consequence the Athenians had no expectation that those who held office had peculiar virtues that demanded special respect. Like the Romans, the Athenians came to select their priests by processes parallel to, if not identical with, the processes by which they selected their civil magistrates, but with diametrically opposite effects.

Neat though this parallel is, it cannot entirely account for the difference between Greek and Roman practice. For there seems to be no expectation that priestly office was a route to political authority in any Greek city, and many Greek cities did elect their magistrates, as Sparta elected its ephors. A further factor lies in the strong Roman identification of particular gods with particular places. Greek cities had their own poliad deities, and in every city there was a main cult. But not only did many cities share worship of Athena Polias as their main deity, but the distinction between, say, Athena Polias at Athens and Athena Chalkioikos at Sparta seems never to be stressed. Local heroes might come to a city’s assistance at a particular place, as the hero Ekhetlaos was said to have appeared to help the Athenians on the battlefield at Marathon (Pausanias 1.32.4), but it is rare for anything to be made of capturing the gods or heroes of another city. When Herodotus (5.82-6) tells the story of Athens trying to seize the statues of Damia and Auxesia from Aegina, the motivation he gives is that Aegina had refused to offer the annual sacrifice to Athena Polias and Erechtheus which had been the price which the Epidaurians, from whom the Aeginetans had themselves acquired the statues, had been accustomed to pay for the original use of Athenian olive wood for the statues. In marked contrast stands the Roman ritual of evocatio, the ritual summoning out of the enemy city of its god. The most famous instance of this is the evocation from Veii of Juno Regina in 396 bc (Livy 5.21 ff.), but a form of this ritual seems to have been operated in the first century bc, to judge by the inscriptional evidence from Isaura Vetus in modern Turkey. This belief that the gods could, and should, be recruited is related to another Roman ritual with no parallel in Greece: the ritual operated by the priestly college of the fetiales when the Romans declared war, whereby the war was proclaimed to be just. This ritual involved the public declaration of the Roman grievance which Jupiter was called upon to witness, a period of 33 days when the enemy could concede the claim, and then a symbolic casting of a spear into enemy territory.

As to what lay at the root ofthis thorough politicizing ofthe gods at Rome, we can only speculate. Although various Greek cities traced back their origin to particular mythical figures, and made those mythical figures the basis of claims to political friendship (C. Jones 1999), and although the Athenians literally regarded themselves as a ‘‘race apart’’ in claiming to be autochthonous (cf. Loraux 1986, 1993), Rome constructed itself as distinct from the other people of Italy in a much stronger way. This is reflected in the Roman claims to descent from immigrant Trojan refugees from the sack of Troy (Erskine 2001), which seem to have been well formed by the end of the third century bc. Whereas Greek cities recognized cult as one of the things that they had in common - Herodotus 8.144.2 has the Athenians cite common cult places and cult practices as one reason why they would never go over to Persia - Rome was inclined to treat the peoples of Italy as barbarians until such time as they were incorporated into the Roman state, and to stress contrasts in their religious life rather than what they had in common (Dench 1995: ch. 4). Panhellenism was something which various Greek politicians and political thinkers from time to time sought to promote. They had at best limited and temporary success, and that only at moments, such as opposing the Persians, when falling apart was clearly the only alternative to standing together, but the thought that Greeks ought to be united was never seriously opposed. By contrast, the only comparable movement with regard to Italy was the combination of Italian peoples against Rome in the Social War at the beginning of the first century bc, and there is only occasional and faint trace, as perhaps in the misohellene Cato’s decision as to how to structure his Origines, of any conviction that Italy should form a unit.

One particular incident deserves attention in this context. In the early second century bc the Romans became worried by activities that were going on in various places in Italy in connection with the cult of Bacchus/Dionysus. The senate passed a resolution which severely restricted the cult, and sent out copies of the resolution to be posted in various parts of Italy. The survival of one copy (CJL 12.581) from Tiriolo in Calabria, and a long account in Livy 39.8-19 enable us to see both what was done in 186 BC and what Roman tradition made of the affair. In one sense the suppression of the cult was entirely within the tradition of suspicion and hostility toward the god Dionysus. Such hostility is variously embodied in Greek myth, but most famously in Pentheus’ attempt to keep Dionysus out of Thebes, as staged in Euripides’ Bacchae. Cult activity which involved women (only) engaging in rituals not in temples but in the wild countryside and in which the women came to perceive the world differently, and in particular to relate differently to wild nature, is presented in these myths as in tension with the order of the Greek city. But the Roman acting out of the myths to destroy existing cult places, to require future cult activity to happen only with the express permission of the praetor urbanus and the Roman senate, and to limit future groups to not more than three men and two women, is quite unlike any intervention in cult activity by any historic Greek city.

The consequences of Roman politicization of priestly office and cult practice extend well beyond the manipulation of matters of cult in relation to the peoples of Italy. In 12 BC Augustus became pontifex maximus, and from that point on that office was held by every emperor. The imagery of the emperor sacrificing became both one of the most prevalent imperial iconographies and the dominant sacrificial iconography (Ryberg 1955), with the forging of an artificial scene which fused together different moments in the ritual and transferred the focus from the victim to the sacrificer (Gordon 1990a: 203-5). Imperial domination of the priesthood, both in terms of the office of pontifex maximus and in terms of the iconography, inevitably diminished the role of the priestly colleges. Consultation of the colleges became rare, the political significance of the priesthood was concentrated entirely on the one figure of the emperor, and the political desirability of belonging to one of the colleges came to rest on the manifestation of imperial favor and the proximity to the emperor which being made a member signified. The particular Roman construction of the priestly role became in this way a tool of imperial rule.

If the imperial monopoly of the chief priesthood by the emperor led to the emasculation of the priestly colleges, the senate retained its religious authority. It came, indeed, to exercise that authority in an important new way. For it was the senate whose decree had ‘‘set Caesar among the stars’’ and which proceeded to turn approved emperors into gods on their death (Gradel 2002: chs 3 and 12). The emperor, who in life, as pontifex maximus, had mediated between senate and people, on death could come to mediate between man and god - whether or not he did so depended precisely on how satisfied the senate was that he had in life performed his mediation between themselves and the people to its satisfaction. For all that emperors might protest their humanity in their lifetime, and intellectuals might mock the rituals of deification after an emperor’s death, as Seneca does in his Apocolocyntosis, the recognition of the supreme political agent as also divine was simply the operation of the logic of Roman religious cult (Feeney 1998: 108-14).

The politics of cult was also instrumental in Roman rule over its empire in ways that did not centrally involve the emperor. Just as issues of cult had been at the center of Rome’s differentiation from the peoples of Italy, so it remained at the center of

Rome’s differentiation from the peoples of the empire (Gordon 1990a: 207). It continued to be the case that cults from elsewhere were adopted in Rome and by the citizens of Rome, but those cults were measured against the sacrificial system over which the emperor as pontifex maximus presided. In some senses, the cults that develop in the empire do so against the pattern of Roman civic cult, renegotiating sacrifice, establishing alternative criteria for priesthood (cf. the grades of Mithraic initiation), and establishing goals that were personal rather than civic. While the Romans did not automatically move to suppress all cults that fell outside the framework of its civic religion, the potential for conflict was ever present. We see this in the relationship of the Romans to Judaism, which was problematic because of its own strong identification of religious and political leadership. Roman attempts to capitalize on this by making the high priest a Roman political appointment met limited success (Gordon 1990b: 244-5).

While the Romans tried to incorporate Judaism by transforming it into another civic cult, they attempted to reject Christianity as not a religion at all but, like the practices of some of the people of central Italy in earlier centuries, superstitiones. Christians neither accepted animal sacrifice nor integrated themselves into the civic structure. The other-worldly goals of early Christianity, admired by some non-Christians as approaching the condition of the philosophers (so Galen Summary of Plato’s Republic 3), rejected entirely the linking of political and religious elites and set up a quite alternative structure of charismatic authority. As the second century Epistle to Diognetus says of Christians:

While they dwell in Greek or barbarian cities according as each man's lot has been cast, and follow the customs of the land in clothing and food, and other matters of daily life, yet the condition of citizenship which they exhibit is wonderful, and admittedly strange. They live in countries not their own, but simply as sojourners; they share the life of citizens, they endure the lot of foreigners; every foreign land is to them a fatherland, and every fatherland a foreign land. . . They spend their existence upon earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. (5.4-5, 9, trans. Stevenson 1989 after Radford)

Ironically, that alternative lifestyle and authority structure, politicized by the very persecution which sought to destroy it, came to prove irresistibly attractive to the Emperor Constantine, who saw in the church a network of power more strongly integrated than the discrete local networks formed by traditional Greco-Roman religion.

The practices and institutions of the religions in the Greco-Roman world were inevitably in conversation with the practices and institutions of political organization in that world. There is little doubt that the development of Christianity to be cosmopolitan, and not tied to a chosen people, along with the ambitious claims to universal dominion of the Christian God, by contrast to the particularist interests of both Olympian deities and the god of Judaic tradition, were enabled by the very existence of the Roman Empire. Worship of the emperor conveniently aligned the interests of the deity with those of the overarching political unit, something which worship of none of the parochially defined manifestations of Olympian religion could offer. Worship of the Christian god offered, and would continue to offer, the advantage of not even respecting the boundary of the political empire.

Philosophical (‘‘natural’’) religion gave little or no purchase on the political world. Christianity, for all that it was built on an inversion of conventional values, respected, as it reflected, the political world. As we move from considering the gods of the city to considering the City of God, the theological and cultic construction of the world remains a most important context within which to view political thought.