The obscurity surrounding early Roman religion is profound. Writing about ancient religious experience is difficult in itself, but especially in the case of early Rome, in the absence of any substantial written record, and with a scattered and incomplete archaeological record, it is bound to be a task fraught with uncertainty and doubt. There is no doubt, however, that the subject has been, and continues to be, attractive to scholars. Rome has been considered to be a society whose religion is so static and whose customs so conservative that one might have hoped to find the traces of the earliest forms of Roman religion in present practice, and Rome has also been regarded by some as peculiarly bound to its religion, so that some facts of unusual value ought to be concealed within the origins of its practices (e. g. Fowler 1911; Ogilvie 1969).
Neither of these views would command much support today; Roman religion is regarded as dynamic, and scholars tend to eschew grand claims about the Roman identity (Beard et al. 1998). Nevertheless, we have to make some sense of the evidence that survives, and this is particularly the case because the history of early Rome has received so much attention of late that it is now appropriate to reconsider the religious aspects, in light of the kinds of arguments that are currently mounted in support of a degree of optimism in relation to the possibility of recovering some kind of narrative, or at least some degree of understanding of the structural underpinning of archaic Roman history (Cornell 1995; Forsythe 2005).
We should briefly reflect on the history of scholarship in this area. Roman religious practice was of interest to antiquarian scholarship in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but largely in matters of detail (see chapter 2). The point at which historians started to take the early myths of Rome more seriously was when these began to be scrutinized for their historical accuracy and deconstructed according to modern, skeptical, and analytical methods; the pioneer in this area was Niebuhr, who, early in the nineteenth century, began to analyze in detail the foundation stories and early myths (Niebuhr 1828-32).
From this point on, Roman mythology and religious practice began to be considered as a historical resource. Let us take an example which has been well studied recently: the story of Romulus and Remus, the twin brothers who founded Rome. Niebuhr excavated from this account a story about two cities, Rome and Remuria, the latter defeated by the former (this is universally discounted now). Schwegler thought that the twins were derived by ancient thinkers from the very early twin Lares Praestites, the protective deities of the city. Mommsen, who wrote a great account of the constitutional history of Rome, found in the story of the twins an explanation of the shared power of the consulship. More recent accounts have emphasized broad folktale motifs, but there is still the possibility that there is a political interpretation which can explain the myth (Wiseman 1995a).
All this depends on how we read the available sources. At this stage it is at least worth stating that a gulf has opened up between different traditions in the study of Roman religion. Anglo-American scholarship has tended to be skeptical about everything to do with early Rome, whereas French and Italian scholarship has sought to uncover the deepest and earliest religious history of Rome through the study of etymology and ritual, without placing much faith or interest in the validity of the historical accounts of the period (compare for instance Forsythe 2005 with Carandini 1997). As more scholars in the Anglo-American tradition adopt various strategies legitimately to recover a historical understanding of early Rome, a degree of rapprochement with the long European tradition becomes appropriate.
At the same time, we should not overlook the importance of the recovery of Roman religious activity through archaeology. In the context of Rome and its hinterland, Latium, and the fascinating yet mysterious civilization of the Etruscans across the Tiber, some elements of the material correlates of religious action have been long known, either as standing ruined temples, or as scattered finds. For the earlier phases, however, only careful excavation could reveal issues of context and sequence. Equally, for archaeologists of the late Bronze and early Iron Age across Europe, the scope and definition of what might be called religious, or more usually ritual, material, was developing. Archaeologists of this period usually have no texts on which to base their arguments, and therefore rely upon theories of human activity, and chief amongst those is the identification of recurrent and repeated activity which is invested with meaning. One recent and important definition (Bell 1992: 74) speaks of “ritualized” action, defined as the way in which certain ritual actions strategically distinguish themselves in relation to other actions, and this same account emphasizes issues such as power relations, knowledge, and knowledge as power, and the relationship between ritual and the human body, all of which are significant features in archaeological accounts. So archaeology brings to this period in particular a degree of theoretical sophistication, and we shall see how this has begun to draw out interesting and challenging interpretations of Latin religious behavior. At the same time we should acknowledge that as the historians of religion focused on behavior that was identifiable from literary texts, and as archaeologists sought behavior which they could identify as ritualized, the two approaches did not necessarily converge. To give a single example, the ritual of the Parentalia, which was intended to appease the spirits of the dead, is archaeologically invisible, but the ritualized activity relating to burial is the commonest and most significant aspect of the archaeological record for Latium, the area surrounding Rome, between 1000 and 500 bc, with Osteria dell’Osa being the most extensive necropolis yet excavated (Bietti-Sestieri 1992).
This introduction has outlined two problems. First, different traditions of scholarship have led to radically different interpretations of the early religion of Rome; second, the gulf between the approaches driven by literary texts and those inspired by archaeology and archaeological theory is wide. To bring these together is a substantial and perhaps impossible task; I will simply outline the major elements of available evidence, before indicating a particular way in which archaic Roman religion can be located in wider discourses of political structure and narrative.
World History
