The gods could be addressed for many reasons: thanksgiving, asking for favors, exploring the divine will. In general, the Romans were not excessively eager to contact them. The gods were thought of as members of an ordered society who had obligations and rights. They were to receive their share and, for the most part, no more. The astonishing openness of the system that admitted more and more gods on private initiative (see above) does not indicate exaggerated piety but rather corresponds to the openness of the citizen body on the human level. By freeing one’s slaves anybody could produce new citizens without a magistrate’s permission.
Communicating with the gods by ritual means always had two aspects: the construction of the divine addressee and secondary communication among men. In daily speech, in oratory, or in letters the gods were frequently addressed collectively as di immortales (immortal gods). Such a phrase would not do for polytheistic ritual. Among the multitude of gods the right one for the present purpose had to be found and named. The superiority of the addressee and his or her qualities and personality had to be affirmed. Because the addressee was not as visible or tangible in the interaction as human addressees normally were, the speaker’s conception of his divine recipient had to be produced and confirmed, one of the most important features of religious ritual. As already mentioned, the choice of the place and the time helped to single out the other pole of the communicative act. As in human relationships between equals or unequals, the choice of the gift was important. It had to be adequate in terms of kind, color, quantity, or value - for example unblemished, white, female cattle for Juno Regina after the birth of a hermaphrodite. The gift could at the same time define the addressee. A deity given a male animal must be male; a deity given a white animal had to be a celestial god. Divination followed, for the success of the actual communication (apart from its later results) was at risk. Every major sacrifice was accompanied by divinatory practices to find out whether the addressee thought the gift was acceptable in that specific situation. The absence of a heart in the victim did not reveal a hidden flaw in the animal chosen. Instead, it constituted a sign sent by the addressee at the very moment of sacrifice. Thus the divinatory practices surrounding the ritual communication were a kind of second-order communication verifying the successful establishment of the first-order communication and stressing that the gods were sovereign with regard to human attempts to contact them.
Indirect human communication is another second-order trait of ritual communication with the gods. Most rituals were prominently and intentionally visible. Secret rituals (mysteries) did not play the same role at Rome they did in Greece.29 Nocturnal rites were prominent only in the ritual activities of women, for example, the nocturnal prayers of women during the secular games of Augustus or the rites of Bona Dea organized by a leading magistrate’s wife.30 Marginalized social roles and temporal margins reinforced one other, which points up some principles of agency and religious competence. Basically, religious competence, like political position, depended on one’s social role. The pater familias (the head of the family) led domestic sacrifice, while the magistrate led public sacrifice, supported by noble children and public slaves. The collegium pontificum, which included the pontiffs themselves, the flamines (priests responsible for individual cults) and the rex sacrorum, did have a certain share in public ritual, but typically it participated more in ancient routine rituals and obscure cults than in the great games or spectacular crisis rituals.
The sacerdotes publici (public priests) had perhaps in earlier times been more charismatic figures, but in the historic era they were members of the nobility and organized in colleges (see also Chapter 12). Typically, early entry was usual for flamines and probably Luperci and Salii (in their early twenties) as well as for the other priests (in their late twenties or early thirties), and foreshadowed a splendid career. For ‘‘new men’’, on the other hand, membership in a priesthood came after the consulate and crowned a successful career. Hence consular fathers in one priesthood tried to get their sons into another college, if possible one even more prestigious, as early as possible.31 Cooptation based on friendship and the ban on clan concentration within any one priesthood formed the basic principle of reproduction. It was temporarily modified by elements of popular election - from the second half of the third century onward 17 out of 35 tribes (tribus) drawn by lot elected the highest pontiff (pontifex maximus) from a list of candidates nominated by the college. For the period after 104 until Sulla and again from 63 onward, the same procedure was at the least also applied to the selection of all augurs and pontiffs. During the late Republic the balance for priests between a lifelong special role and an annual term of office like a magistrate tilted toward the magisterial model, but significant differences between priestly and political roles were maintained.32
Socially, the priesthoods formed commissions of the Senate or, from a more anthropological perspective, banqueting circles among the nobility. The size of the colleges, even after this was raised to nine members each by the Ogulnian law in 300, which introduced plebeians into the priesthoods, stayed within the limit seen as optimal for symposia. Only Sulla’s policy to secure places in the priesthoods for all his important followers and supporters swelled their ranks to 15. After bloody civil wars, Caesar sought to attain the same goal by adding a sixteenth position to the augurs, pontiffs, and the quindecimviri sacris faciundis (15 men for the performance of rituals). The name of the latter college remained the same, however, as did the now ten-member septemviri epulonum, the ‘‘seven’’ (previously three) men who cared in particular for the banquets (epulae) organized for Jupiter. The pontifex maximus (the earliest one to be popularly elected) enjoyed a certain concentration of supervision, but this never supplanted the principle of a broadly and evenly distributed religious competence. Roman priests, the supreme pontiff included, remained part-time - or, better, spare-time - priests.34 Priestly roles supported social prestige; they did not oppose it. Given these circumstances, the accumulation of religious knowledge or the elaboration of ritual remained meager. The use of writing allowed individuals the possibility of creating additional expertise and elaborating on traditions. Such processes are discernible from the third century onward, for example, in the Commentaries of the Priests (commentarii sacerdotum) and in augural monographs composed in the first century, yet these did not gather a momentum that could overrule conflicting views. At least the names of former members could be ascertained beyond doubt.35 Contrary to widespread opinion, Roman priesthoods had only a limited share in religious communication, and the men who held them did not profit as priests but as members of the nobility in other roles from the enormous intensification of efforts at communication with the gods and their communicatory effects within the society that began in the third century.
Recent interpretations by ancient historians have stressed the intensified communication between the political elite and the Roman People within the ritual framework of the games (see Chapter 1). That contact enforced the mutual relationship of patronage and loyalty and explains the People’s willingness to participate in the extensive warfare led by the nobles.36 Such an interpretation could (and does) gain support from the growing social hierarchization reflected in the seating arrangements at the games and from the People’s gestures of greeting, disapproval, or support for individual senators there. It could also point to instances of spontaneous applause for and enforced repetitions of isolated passages in performances that were capable of being taken as comments on the contemporary political scene. Such an interpretation does not, however, succeed in answering or even addressing the question of the relationship of this second-order communication to the primary communication between the People of Rome and the gods that such games represented. Concentrating on the religious framework of political communication does not invalidate the observations referred to in this paragraph, but it does put them into a different and more agent-based perspective.
The gods, whether they were full of anger at the Roman People or had recently been extremely helpful to them, were the addressees of these ritual activities. They were offered the best - cultural innovations recently imported from the Greek world. The ritual agents, the dancers, musicians, and actors (who were undergoing a process of professionalization or who were already professionals at this point) were mere instruments. These performers, who frequently were foreigners themselves, visitors to Rome by force or for profit, put on undeniably Greek performances, culture for ostentation. The gods were spectators, part of the audience, and only participants in a more intensive manner through the sacrifices offered to them. The Roman citizens were spectators, too, watching the gods watching the performances offered to them. The gods’ tastes corresponded to those of the elite who were eagerly Hellenizing their villas and lifestyles. The crowd enjoyed participating by observing elite culture. They saw plays performed by the same actors who entertained at aristocratic symposia.37 Even in their titles, many plays, comedies in particular, stressed their Greek origins, even if they dealt with problems and situations from Roman life (see also Chapter 25). Different genres could address different sorts of problems and values. Historical dramas (praetexta) treated the same subjects that the more private and elite forms of epic and historiography did, while comedy dealt with daily life and social structure. The Roman way of life was enhanced by superior foreign cultural products at the same time that Rome demonstrated its dominance by actively and forcefully transporting this culture to Rome. Roman gods enjoyed Greek marble statues, too. It is no accident that the assembly of Roman nobles, the Senate, took care that this form of participation in elite culture was only temporary. The Roman plebs would not enjoy a permanent stone theater for watching these performances before the age of Pompey and Caesar, in contrast to circuses, where permanent structures appeared earlier. The Senate’s decision might have had another end in view as well. The use of public space in the center of the city for theatrical performances instead of a temple at some random place in the city and the involvement of the magistrates of the year instead of priests who served for life made the dramatic festivals extremely up-to-date, flexible, and central. And they involved many gods and a whole array of public cult, not merely a portion of these dear to a small number of devoted followers and selected by individual decision. The gods were not less but more present. Why?
World History
