It is now impossible for us to know how - or even whether - the Romans represented divine action and religious practice in narrative or song before they began their project of adapting Greek literary forms into a literature of their own in the second half of the third century bc. More and more contemporary scholars wish to believe the once discredited Roman traditions about ballads of the men of old supposedly sung in the pre-literary period. If such songs were sung (and that remains a big “if”), it is imaginable that they portrayed the help of the gods and the pious rituals of the Roman people and its generals. Again, if the Romans told stories about their past on occasions such as festivals, funerals, triumphs, and anniversaries of victories or the dedication of temples, then it is likewise imaginable that these stories included human ritual or divine manifestations. None of this can now be securely known. What can be known is that the new literary forms of historiography and epic which came into being in the late third century bc included religion as a vital component from the beginning. Already in the fragmentary remains of our very first texts, it is clear that the histories and epics of the Roman people are a venue for exploring the relationship between gods and men, and this crucial preoccupation continued to be central to both literary traditions for as long as they endured.
While sharing this common concern, each tradition had its own distinctive techniques and priorities, which were to a large degree the inheritance of the developed Greek literary forms which provided their starting point. The student who is reading these texts with an interest in their religious dimension must always be conscious of the fact that they are specific kinds of literature, which are interacting with other religious discourses in their own distinctive ways. These texts have much to teach us about the possibilities of Roman religion, but we can never simply “read off” information about Roman religion from them without allowing for the particular kinds of narratives that they are. For many years the histories and epics of the Romans were commonly regarded as only “literary,” with no relation to the “real” religion of the society. That phase of scholarship is thankfully passing, and the deep importance of the religious dimension of these texts is now generally acknowledged; the challenge now is to try to recover that religious dimension without making it conform to the norms of other kinds of religious discourse - without, in other words, blurring over the specific and distinctive literary characteristics of the work in question.
World History
