Fundamentally, republican religion is not about belief or conduct but action, more specifically, action toward the gods. There was a general consensus among the Romans that besides mortal beings a class of immortal, powerful, caring, and intervening agents existed and had to be dealt with. This chapter focuses on these practices. Methodologically, such an approach allows us to observe the manifold combinations and interactions of religious and nonreligious, political, social, economic, and medical practices. By presupposing the Romans’ intention to communicate or at least to take into account the existence of superhuman beings, modern analysis of ancient religious practices can try to identify their internal logic or rationality and can analyze their capacity and problematic aspects when these practices affect processes of political decision-making or the legitimation of power. Analyses of modern religions, which frequently examine institutions with clear-cut organizational boundaries or conscious self-definitions, might profit from a functional definition of religion that identifies hidden or ‘‘secularized’’ but nevertheless powerful forms of religion. For the religious practices of the ancient world, which were present in many areas of society that we might consider ‘‘secular,’’ that approach would yield less useful results in understanding the particular features of the civic structures of the Roman Republic.
Ancient religious thought did not concentrate on reflecting about the boundaries of ‘‘religion.’’ As most of postclassical theological thought did and still does, it reflected about the gods. In republican Rome, however, even for the gods we are dealing with diffuse convictions rather than clearly formulated concepts. Theologia, philosophical reasoning about gods (or god), was a trait of Roman religion that was not developed before the second century BC. Roman theology was a result of the intensified cultural contacts with the Hellenistic world from the third century onward. Down to the end of the republican period, writings in Latin about the gods
Were mostly paraphrases or even translations of Greek texts. This holds true for Ennius’ Euhemerus (shortly after 200) as well as T. Lucretius Carus’ didactic epic De rerum natura, ( On the Nature of Things, shortly before 55). M. Tullius Cicero (106-43) intended to provide a comprehensive and critical exposition of Greek theological thought in his works On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum). On Divination (De divinatione), and On Fate (Defato). M. Terentius Varro’s (11627) Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum (Human and Divine Antiquities, preserved only in fragments), integrated and systematized earlier antiquarian accounts of Roman practices and institutions.
The gods whose cultic veneration had been institutionalized by the Roman polity (other gods were irrelevant as long as one did not invade their territory) were part of society. As was true for human members of society, interaction between gods and humans was infrequent outside of a person’s large, private space. Wherever it occurred, communication was necessary and regulated, as will be described in the following sections.2 The gods were addressed in prayer and ritual action. Nonverbal communication intensified oral communication with the invisible addressees and helped to define them. Divinatory elements in ritual checked on the success of the communicatory effort. Such practices underlined the risky character of asymmetric communication with a superior agent. At the same time they provided hints to the god’s reaction in the form of the victim’s entrails or the shape of the flames on a sacrificial altar.
Some gods were regularly consulted on political decisions (e. g., Jupiter); others were asked for their help and general benevolence, volenspropitius esse/fieri, ‘‘to be/ become willing and benevolent’’ (e. g., Plaut. Curc. 88-9).3 The aims of this communication and the concepts its words expressed varied. One could seek venia (pardon) or to establish pax (a pact) with a particular god or all of them. The gods could be asked sinere (to allow) or velle (to will) something. On the level of the polity, military success was seen as a result of Roman piety, and defeats signaled the wrath of the gods ( ira deorum). Defeats, however, were occasional; military expansion was continuous. The occasional neglect of pietas (piety), if unintentional, as later juridical reasoning specified (Q. Scaev. iur. 10), could be healed by piaculum, an expiatory sacrifice. Yet pietas was not a disposition restricted to the relationship to the gods. Above all it was something that pertained to human interaction, in particular children’s behavior toward their parents or clients’ behavior toward their patrons. The Romans’ dealings with their gods reflected and shaped their social conduct at the same time.
World History
