By the 1920s the previous fascination with evolution as a means of explaining religions had largely run its course. Indeed, there arose a strong counter-reaction in all the disciplines, including classical studies, a reaction which was largely occasioned by the evident excesses of evolutionist theorizing; inside classical studies the ire devolved especially upon the so-called Cambridge ritualists. But the counter-reaction was curious.
Students of religion sought other approaches to understanding religion that ranged from positivistic philological and historical studies of religious texts and communities to phenomenological and hermeneutical “studies” of particular aspects or elements of religious belief, ritual practice, and behavior, and of religions and religion in general, that produced what might well be called “virtuoso scholarship,” dependent more upon the idiosyncratic ideas of the individual scholar than on the nature of the subject matter and general rules of inquiry. (Wiebe 2004: 234-5)
But notice that only “positivistic. . . studies” and “virtuoso scholarship” apply to what happened in classical studies generally and the study of Roman religion specifically. Classicists remained, and continue to remain, albeit with scattered significant exceptions in recent years, innocent of and often hostile to concepts such as the phenomenological and hermeneutical. From the teeming scholarship I select three items.
First is H. J. Rose’s summary of scholarship for 1910-60 (Rose 1960). The “idiosyncratic” appears with the various works of George Dumezil and Franz Altheim (cf. Rose 1934); there are sympathetic observations on the evolutionists Frazer and Tylor. Far the most part of the scholarship Rose identifies falls squarely into the category of “positivistic” studies, which he overtly considers the prime desideratum. Second is Agnes Michels’s justly celebrated survey of recent trends; unlike the other two authors, and most specialists in Roman religion then, she takes on its own merits each theory and approach of the “happy chaos” (Michels 1954/5: 27). Her view has much in common with the very recent words of Wiebe. Third is Stefan Weinstock’s review of Kurt Latte’s Romische Religionsgeschichte (Weinstock 1961). To his credit, Weinstock here and elsewhere does not reject animism out of hand, contra Latte (Weinstock 1961: 206; 1960: 116-18). To his discredit, he takes Roman religion as a religion without belief. The bulk of his review, however, devolves on the positivistic corrections and additions of scholarship and evidence. But herein lies a fundamental problem of the field, a problem unresolved. If three notable specialists can disagree on the scholarship appropriate for Roman religion, where does that leave the field and its place inside classical studies?
World History
