The founding of Rome was a prehistoric event or process later
greatly embellished by Roman historians and poets. Archaeological
evidence indicates that Rome developed from the gradual union of several
hilltop villages during the Final Bronze Age or early Iron Age. Prehistoric habitation of the Italian Peninsula occurred by 48,000 years ago, with the area of Rome being settled by around 1600 BC. Some evidence on the Capitoline Hill possibly dates as early as c. 1700 BC and the nearby valley that later housed the Roman Forum had a developed necropolis by at least 1000BC. The combination of the hilltop settlements into a single polity by the later 8th centuryBC was probably influenced by the trend for city-state formation emerging from ancient Greece.
Most modern historians doubt the existence of a single founder or
founding event for the city, and no material evidence has been found
connecting early Rome to Alba or Troy. Most modern historians also
dismiss the putative Aeneid dynasty at Alba Longa as fiction. The
legendary account was still much discussed and celebrated in Roman
times. The Parilia Festival on 21 April was considered to commemorate the anniversary of the city's founding during the late Republic and that aspect of the holiday grew in importance under the Empire until it was fully transformed into the Romaea in AD121.
The year of the supposed founding was variously computed by ancient
historians, but the two dates seeming to be officially sanctioned were
the Varronian chronology's 753 BC (used by Claudius's Secular Games and Hadrian's Romaea) and the adjacent year of 752 BC (used by the Fasti and the Secular Games of Antoninus Pius and Philip I). Despite known errors in Varro's calculations, it is the 753BC date that continues to form the basis for most modern calculations of the AUCcalendar era.
The conventional division of pre-Roman cultures in Italy deals with cultures which spoke Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The Italic languages, which include Latin, are Indo-European and were spoken, according to inscriptions, in the lower Tiber Valley.
It was once thought that Faliscan – spoken north of Veii on the right
bank of the Tiber – was a separate language, but inscriptions discovered
in the 1980s indicate that Latin was spoken more generally in the area.
Etruscan speakers were concentrated in modern Tuscany with a similar language called Raetic spoken on the upper Adige (the foothills of the eastern Italian Alps).
When drawing a connection between peoples and their languages, a
reconstruction emerges with Indo-European peoples arriving in various
waves of migrations during the first and second millennia BC: first a
western Italic group (including Latin), followed by a central Italic
group of Osco-Umbrian dialects, with a late arrival of Greek and Celtic on the Italian peninsula, from across the Adriatic
and Alps, respectively. These migrations are generally believed to have
displaced speakers of Etruscan and other pre-Indo-European languages;
although it is possible that Etruscan arrived also by migration, almost
certainly before 2000 BC.
The start of the Iron age saw a gradual increase in social
complexity and population that led to the emergence of proto-urban
settlements in central and northern Italy writ large. These proto-urban
agglomerations were normally clusters of smaller settlements that were
insufficiently distant to be separated communities; over time, they
would unify.
Archaeological evidence
There is archaeological evidence of human occupation of the area of modern Rome from at least 5,000 years ago, but the dense layer of much younger debris obscures any Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites. Traces of occupation have been found in the general region – including Lavinium and the coast near Ardea – going back to the 15th century BC. The area was home to the Apennine and Proto-Villanovan cultures before the advent of the more regional Latial culture.
Bronze Age
Archaeological evidence suggests that Rome developed over a long period, but it was definitely occupied by the middle of the Bronze Age. Core samples have shown that the terrain of Bronze-Age Rome differed greatly from what is present now. The area of the Forum Boarium north of the Aventine Hill
was a seasonally dry plain that simultaneously provided a safe inland
port for the era's seafaring ships, a wide area for watering horses and
cattle, and a safe ford of the Tiber with shallow and slow-flowing water even if Tiber Island had not yet formed, one of the river's major fords between Etruria and Campania.
This advantageous but exposed location was closely flanked by the
Capitoline, which at that time rose sharply from the more easterly bank
of the Tiber and provided a ready citadel for defense and for control of the salt production along the river and at its mouth. The other hills and the marshes between them provided similarly defensible points for settlement.
Accordingly, thick deposits of manure and ancient pottery shards have been discovered in the Forum Boarium from the middle of the Bronze Age.
Current evidence suggests that there were three separate bronze-using
settlements on the Capitoline during the period 1700–1350 BC and in the
neighboring valley that later became the Roman Forum from 1350–1120 BC. Some 13th centuryBC
structures indicate that the Capitoline was already being terraced to
manage its slope. Evidence in the Final Bronze Age around 1200–975 BC is
clearer, showing occupation of the Capitoline, Forum, and adjacent
Palatine. Excavations near the modern Capitoline Museums
suggest the construction of fortifications and some scholars have
speculated that settlements also existed on the other hills, especially
the Janiculum, Quirinal, and Aventine. The Capitoline currently seems to have been the earliest settled
but it is debated whether the settlements on the other hills were
independent, colonies of the Capitoline settlement, or formerly separate
villages already consolidated into a single polity. By 1000 BC, a necropolis existed in the Forum for cremation graves. By the early Iron Age c. 900 BC, graves started to be placed into the ground. Other cemeteries appear on the Esquiline, Quirinal, and Viminal Hills by the 9th century, containing pottery, imported Greek wares, fibulae, and bronze objects.
Remains from huts on the Palatine have been found that date to the 9th
or 8th centuries BC, with accelerating development by the early to
middle 8th century BC.
Eighth and seventh centuries BC
By this time, four major settlements emerged in Rome. The nuclei
appeared on the Palatine, the Capitoline, the Quirinal and Viminal, and
the Caelian, Oppian, and Velia.
There is, however, no evidence linking any settlement on the Quirinal
hill with the Sabines, as is alleged by some ancient accounts.
The area of the Forum also was converted at this time into a
public space. Burials there discontinued and portions of it were paved
over. Votive offerings appear in the comitium
in the eighth century, indicating a more central religious cult, and
other public buildings appear to have been erected around that time. One
of those buildings was the domus publica (the official residence of the pontifex maximus), which is now believed to have been constructed between 750 and 700 BC. Religious activity started also in this period on the Capitoline hill, suggesting a connection to the ancient cult of Jupiter Feretrius. Other offerings discovered indicate Rome's connections outside Latium, with imported Greek pottery from Euboea and Corinth.
The first evidence of a wall appears in the middle or late eighth century on the Palatine, dated between 730 and 720 BC. It is possible that the circuit of the wall marked out what later Romans believed to be the original pomerium (sacred boundary) of the city. The discovery of gates and streets connected to the wall, with the remains of various huts, suggest that Rome had by this time:
acquired a defined boundary ... [and] a more sophisticated level of
social and political organisation ... the use of the Forum as a public
space point[s] to the development of [a] shared civil and ritual space[]
for the inhabitants of all communities, demonstrating an increasing
level of centralisation.
Like other Villanovan proto-urban centres, this archaic Rome was
likely organised around clans that guarded their own areas, but by the
later eighth century had confederated. The development of city-states was likely a Greek innovation that spread through the Mediterranean from 850 to 750 BC.
The earliest votive deposits are found in the early seventh century on
the Capitoline and Quirinal hills, suggesting that by that time a city
had formed with monumental architecture and public religious
sanctuaries. Certainly, by 600 BC, a process of synoikismos
was complete and there had been formed a unified Rome – reflected in
the production of a central forum area, public monumental architecture,
and civic structures – can be spoken of.
Ancient tradition and founding myths
By the late Republic, the usual Roman origin myth held that their city was founded by a Latin named Romulus on the day of the Parilia Festival (21 April) in some year around 750BC. Important aspects of the myth concerned Romulus's murder of his twin Remus, the brothers' descent from the god Mars and the royal family of Alba Longa, and that dynasty's supposed descent from Aeneas, himself supposedly descended from the goddess Aphrodite and the royal family of Troy. The accounts in the first book of Livy's History of Rome and in Vergil's Aeneid were particularly influential. Some accounts further asserted that there had been a Mycenaean Greek settlement on the Palatine even earlier than Romulus and Remus, at some time during the 12th century BC.
Modern scholars disregard most of the traditional accounts as myths. There is no persuasive archaeological evidence for either the Romulan foundation or for the idea of an early Greek settlement.
Even the name Romulus is now generally believed to have been
retrojected from the city's name – glossed as "Mr Rome" by the
classicist Mary Beard – rather than reflecting a historical or actual figure. Some scholars, particularly Andrea Carandini,
have argued that it remains possible that these foundation myths
reflect actual historical events in some form and that the city and Roman Kingdom were in fact founded by a single actor in some way. This remains a minority viewpoint in present scholarship
and highly controversial in the absence of further evidence, with the
arguments made by Carandini and others appearing to rest on highly
tendentious interpretations of what is currently known with certainty
from scientific excavations.
The Romans' origin myths,
however, provide evidence of how the Romans conceived of themselves as a
mixture of different ethnic groups and foreign influences, reflecting the reality of Latium being a mixing ground between Etruscan, Apennine, and Greek civilizations. It also served as a measure of societal control, with the patricians
partially justifying their long dominance of Roman institutions by
their supposed descent from Alba Longan nobility and other legendary
figures.
The Romans took the foundation of their own new cities seriously,
undertaking many rituals and attributing many of them to remote
antiquity. They long maintained the Hut of Romulus,
a primitive dwelling on the Palatine attributed to their founder,
although they had no firm basis for associating it with him
specifically.
While the Romans believed that their city had been founded by an eponymous founder at a specific time, when that occurred was disputed by the ancient historians. The earliest dates placed it c. 1100BC out of a belief that Romulus had been Aeneas's grandson. This moved Rome's foundation much closer to the fall of Troy, dated by Eratosthenes to 1184–83 BC; these dates are attested as early as the 4th centuryBC. Romulus was later chronologically connected to Aeneas and the time of the Trojan War by introducing a line of Alban kings, which scholars consider to be entirely spurious.
Ancient attempts to date the foundation of the city were based on the
length of the republic, counted by the number of consuls, followed by
subtracting of an estimated regal period. Modern scholars, however, largely reject the estimates of the length of the regal period as synthetic calculations.
From Claudius's Secular Games in AD47 to Hadrian's Romaea in AD121, the official date seems to have used the chronology established by Varro in the late 1st centuryBC, placing Rome's founding in 753BC. Augustus's Fasti running to AD13 and the Secular Games celebrated at Rome's 900th and 1000th anniversaries under Antoninus Pius and PhilipI, meanwhile, used dates computed from a foundation a year later in 752BC. Despite known errors in Varro's work, it is the former date that has become the most repeated in modernity and is still used for computing the AUCcalendar era.
By the late Republic, the founding had also become closely associated with the Parilian Festival celebrated annually on April 21. This festival was originally concerned with the purification of shepherds and herds of sheep
in the countryside around Rome, but eventually became so associated
with Rome's foundation myth that it was restructured as the urban Romaea
in AD121. The association with Romulus may have arisen from the twins' supposed foster parents Faustulus and Acca Larentia, who initially raised them as shepherds.
In the best known form of the legend, Romulus and Remus are the grandsons of Numitor, the king of Alba Longa. After Numitor is deposed by his brother Amulius and his daughter Rhea Silvia is forced to become a Vestal virgin, she becomes pregnant – allegedly raped by the war godMars – and delivers the two illegitimate brothers. Amulius orders that the children be left to die on the slopes of the Palatine or in the Tiber River, but they are suckled by a she-wolf at the Lupercal and then discovered by the shepherd Faustulus and taken in by him and his wife Acca Larentia. (Livy combines Larentia and the she-wolf, considering them most likely to have referred to a prostitute, also known in Latin slang as a lupa or she-wolf.)
Faustulus eventually reveals the brothers' true origins, and they
depose or murder Amulius and restore Numitor to his throne. They then
leave or are sent to establish a new city at the location where they had
been rescued.
The twins then come into conflict during the foundation of the
city, leading to the murder of Remus. The dispute is variously said to
have been over the naming of the new city, over the interpretation of auguries,[63] whether to place it on the Palatine or Aventine Hill, or concerned with Remus's disrespect of the new town's ritual furrow
or wall. Some accounts say Romulus slays his brother with his own hand,
others that Remus and sometimes Faustulus are killed in a general
melee. Wiseman and some others attribute the aspects of fratricide to the 4th-century BC Conflict of the Orders, when Rome's lower-class plebeians began to resist excesses by the upper-class patricians.
Romulus, after ritualistically ploughing the generally square course of the city's future boundary, erects its first walls
and declares the settlement an asylum for exiles, criminals, and
runaway slaves. The city becomes larger but also acquires a mostly male
population. When Romulus' attempts to secure the women of neighbouring settlements by diplomacy fail, he uses the religious celebration of Consualia to abduct the women of the Sabines.
According to Livy, when the Sabines rally an army to take their women
back, the women force the two groups to make peace and install the
Sabine king Titus Tatius as comonarch with Romulus.
The story has been theorised by some modern scholars to reflect
anti-Roman propaganda from the late fourth century BC, but more likely
reflects an indigenous Roman tradition, given the Capitoline Wolf
which likely dates to the sixth century BC. Regardless, by the third
century, it was widely accepted by Romans and put onto some of Rome's first silver coins in 269 BC. In his 1995 Beginnings of Rome, Tim Cornell
argues that the myths of Romulus and Remus are "popular expressions of
some universal human need or experience" rather than borrowings from the
Greek east or Mesopotamia, inasmuch as the story of virgin birth,
intercession by animals and humble stepparents, with triumphant return
expelling an evil leader are common mythological elements across Eurasia
and even into the Americas.
Aeneas
The indigenous tradition of Romulus was also combined with a legend
telling of Aeneas coming from Troy and travelling to Italy. This
tradition emerges from the Iliad's prophecy that Aeneas's descendants would one day return and rule Troy once more.
Greeks by 550 BC had begun to speculate, given the lack of any clear
descendants of Aeneas, that the figure had established a dynasty outside
the proper Greek world. The first attempts to tie this story to Rome were in the works of two Greek historians at the end of the fifth century BC, Hellanicus of Lesbos and Damastes of Sigeum,
likely only mentioning off hand the possibility of a Roman connection; a
more assured connection only emerged at the end of the fourth
century BC when Rome started having formal dealings with the Greek
world.
The ancient Roman annalists, historians, and antiquarians faced
an issue tying Aeneas to Romulus, as they believed that Romulus lived
centuries after the Trojan War, which was dated at the time c. 1100 BC. For this, they fabricated a story of Aeneas's son founding the city of Alba Longa and establishing a dynasty there, which eventually produced Romulus.
In Livy's first book he recounts how Aeneas, a demigod of the Trojan royal Anchises and the goddess Venus, leaves Troy after its destruction during the Trojan War
and sailed to the western Mediterranean. He brings his son – Ascanius –
and a group of companions. Landing in Italy, he forms an alliance with a
local magnate called Latinus and marries his daughter Lavinia, joining the two into a new group called the Latini; they then found a new city, called Lavinium. After a series of wars against the Rutuli and Caere, the Latins conquer the Alban Hills and its environs. His son Ascanius then founds the legendary city of Alba Longa, which became the dominant city in the region.
The later descendants of the royal lineage of Alba Longa eventually
produce Romulus and Remus, setting up the events of their mythological
story.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus similarly attempted to show a Greek
connection, giving a similar story for Aeneas, but also a previous
series of migrations. He describes migrations of Arcadians into southern Italy some time in the 18th century BC, migrations into Umbria by Greeks from Thessaly, and the foundation of a settlement on the Palatine hill by Evander (originally hailing also from Arcadia) and Hercules, whose labour with the cattle of Geryon was placed in the Forum Boarium by the Romans.
The introduction of Aeneas follows a trend across Italy towards Hellenising their own early mythologies by rationalising myths and legends of the Greek Heroic Age into a pseudo-historical tradition of prehistoric times;
this was in part due to Greek historians' eagerness to construct
narratives purporting that the Italians were actually descended from
Greeks and their heroes. These narratives were accepted by non-Greek peoples due Greek historiography's prestige and claims to systematic validity.
Archaeological evidence shows that worship of Aeneas had been established at Lavinium by the sixth century BC. Similarly, a cult to Hercules had been established at the Ara Maxima in Rome during the archaic period. By the early fifth century BC, these stories had become entrenched in Roman historical beliefs. These cults, along with the early – in literary terms – account of Cato the Elder,
show how Italians and Romans took these Greek histories seriously and
as reliable evidence by later annalists, even though they were
speculations of little value.
Much of the syncretism, however, may simply reflect Roman desires to
give themselves a prestigious backstory: claim of Trojan descent proved
politically advantageous with the Greeks by justifying both claims of
common heritage and ancestral enmity.
Other myths
By the time of the Pyrrhic War
(280–275 BC), there were some sixty different myths for Rome's
foundation that circulated in the Greek world. Most of them attributed
the city to an eponymous founder, usually "Rhomos" or "Rhome" rather
than Romulus.One story told how Romos, a son of Odysseus and Circe, was the one who founded Rome. Martin P. Nilsson
speculates that this older story was becoming a bit embarrassing as
Rome became more powerful and tensions with the Greeks grew. Being
descendants of the Greeks was no longer preferable, so the Romans
settled on the Trojan foundation myth instead. Nilsson further
speculates that the name of Romos was changed by some Romans to the
native name Romulus, but the same name Romos (later changed to the
native Remus) was never forgotten by many of the people, so both these
names were used to represent the founders of the city.
Another story, attributed to Hellanicus of Lesbos by Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
says that Rome was founded by a woman named Rhome, one of the followers
of Aeneas, after landing in Italy and burning their ships.
That by the middle of the fifth century Aeneas was also allegedly the
founder of two or three other cities across Italy was no object.
These myths also differed as to whether their eponymous matriarch Roma
was born in Troy or Italy – i.e. before or after Aeneas's journey – or
otherwise if their Romus was a direct or collateral descendant of
Aeneas.
Myths of the early third century also differed greatly in the
claimed genealogy of Romulus or the founder, if an intermediate actor
was posited. One tale posited that a Romus, son of Zeus, founded the
city.
Callias posited that Romulus was descended from Latinus and a woman
called Roma who was the daughter of Aeneas and a homonymous mother.
Other authors depicted Romulus and Romus, as a son of Aeneas, founding
not only Rome but also Capua. Authors also wrote their home regions into
the story. Polybius, who hailed from Arcadia, for example, gave Rome not a Trojan colonial origin but rather an Arcadian one.
Religion in ancient Rome consisted of varying imperial and
provincial religious practices, which were followed both by the people
of Rome as well as those who were brought under its rule.
The Romans thought of themselves as highly religious, and attributed their success as a world power to their collective piety (pietas) in maintaining good relations with the gods. Their polytheistic religion is known for having honoured many deities.
The presence of Greeks on the Italian peninsula from the beginning of the historical period influenced Roman culture, introducing some religious practices that became fundamental, such as the cultus of Apollo. The Romans looked for common ground between their major gods and those of the Greeks (interpretatio graeca), adapting Greek myths and iconography for Latin literature and Roman art, as the Etruscans had. Etruscan religion was also a major influence, particularly on the practice of augury, used by the state to seek the will of the gods. According to legends, most of Rome's religious institutions could be traced to its founders, particularly Numa Pompilius, the Sabine second king of Rome, who negotiated directly with the gods. This archaic religion was the foundation of the mos maiorum, "the way of the ancestors" or simply "tradition", viewed as central to Roman identity.
Roman religion was practical and contractual, based on the principle of do ut des, "I give that you might give". Religion depended on knowledge and the correct practice of prayer, rite, and sacrifice, not on faith or dogma, although Latin literature
preserves learned speculation on the nature of the divine and its
relation to human affairs. Even the most skeptical among Rome's
intellectual elite such as Cicero, who was an augur, saw religion as a source of social order. As the Roman Empire expanded, migrants to the capital brought their local cults, many of which became popular among Italians. Christianity was eventually the most successful of these beliefs, and in 380 became the official state religion.
For ordinary Romans, religion was a part of daily life. Each home had a household shrine at which prayers and libations to the family's domestic deities were offered. Neighbourhood shrines and sacred places such as springs and groves dotted the city. The Roman calendar was structured around religious observances. Women, slaves,
and children all participated in a range of religious activities. Some
public rituals could be conducted only by women, and women formed what
is perhaps Rome's most famous priesthood, the state-supported Vestals, who tended Rome's sacred hearth for centuries, until disbanded under Christian domination.
The augurs read the will of the gods and supervised the marking
of boundaries as a reflection of universal order, thus sanctioning Roman
expansionism and foreign wars as a matter of divine destiny. The Roman triumph
was at its core a religious procession in which the victorious general
displayed his piety and his willingness to serve the public good by
dedicating a portion of his spoils to the gods, especially Jupiter, who embodied just rule. As a result of the Punic Wars (264–146 BC), when Rome struggled to establish itself as a dominant power, many new temples were built by magistrates in fulfillment of a vow to a deity for assuring their military success.
As the Romans extended their dominance throughout the Mediterranean world, their policy in general was to absorb the deities and cults of other peoples rather than try to eradicate them, since they believed that preserving tradition promoted social stability.
One way that Rome incorporated diverse peoples was by supporting their
religious heritage, building temples to local deities that framed their
theology within the hierarchy of Roman religion. Inscriptions throughout
the Empire record the side-by-side worship of local and Roman deities,
including dedications made by Romans to local gods.
By the height of the Empire, numerous international deities were cultivated at Rome and had been carried to even the most remote provinces, among them Cybele, Isis, Epona, and gods of solar monism such as Mithras and Sol Invictus, found as far north as Roman Britain.
Foreign religions increasingly attracted devotees among Romans, who
increasingly had ancestry from elsewhere in the Empire. Imported mystery religions,
which offered initiates salvation in the afterlife, were a matter of
personal choice for an individual, practiced in addition to carrying on
one's family rites
and participating in public religion. The mysteries, however, involved
exclusive oaths and secrecy, conditions that conservative Romans viewed
with suspicion as characteristic of "magic", conspiratorial (coniuratio),
or subversive activity. Sporadic and sometimes brutal attempts were
made to suppress religionists who seemed to threaten traditional
morality and unity, as with the Senate's efforts to restrict the Bacchanals in 186 BC. Because Romans had never been obligated to cultivate one god or one cult only, religious tolerance was not an issue in the sense that it is for monotheistic systems. The monotheistic rigor of Judaism
posed difficulties for Roman policy that led at times to compromise and
the granting of special exemptions, but sometimes to intractable
conflict. For example, religious disputes helped cause the First Jewish–Roman War and the Bar Kokhba revolt.
In the wake of the Republic's collapse, state religion had adapted to support the new regime of the emperors. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, justified the novelty of one-man rule with a vast program of religious revivalism and reform. Public vows
formerly made for the security of the republic now were directed at the
well-being of the emperor. So-called "emperor worship" expanded on a
grand scale the traditional Roman veneration of the ancestral dead and of the Genius, the divine tutelary of every individual. The Imperial cult
became one of the major ways in which Rome advertised its presence in
the provinces and cultivated shared cultural identity and loyalty
throughout the Empire. Rejection of the state religion was tantamount to
treason. This was the context for Rome's conflict with Christianity, which Romans variously regarded as a form of atheism and novel superstitio, while Christians considered Roman religion to be paganism. Ultimately, Roman polytheism was brought to an end with the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the empire.
The Roman mythological tradition is particularly rich in historical myths, or legends,
concerning the foundation and rise of the city. These narratives focus
on human actors, with only occasional intervention from deities but a
pervasive sense of divinely ordered destiny. For Rome's earliest period,
history and myth are difficult to distinguish.
According to mythology, Rome had a semi-divine ancestor in the Trojan refugee Aeneas, son of Venus, who was said to have established the basis of Roman religion when he brought the Palladium, Lares and Penates from Troy to Italy. These objects were believed in historical times to remain in the keeping of the Vestals, Rome's female priesthood. Aeneas, according to classical authors, had been given refuge by King Evander, a Greek exile from Arcadia, to whom were attributed other religious foundations: he established the Ara Maxima, "Greatest Altar", to Hercules at the site that would become the Forum Boarium, and, so the legend went, he was the first to celebrate the Lupercalia, an archaic festival in February that was celebrated as late as the 5th century of the Christian era.
The myth of a Trojan founding with Greek influence was reconciled through an elaborate genealogy (the Latin kings of Alba Longa) with the well-known legend of Rome's founding by Romulus and Remus. The most common version of the twins' story displays several aspects of hero myth. Their mother, Rhea Silvia,
had been ordered by her uncle the king to remain a virgin, in order to
preserve the throne he had usurped from her father. Through divine
intervention, the rightful line was restored when Rhea Silvia was
impregnated by the god Mars. She gave birth to twins, who were duly exposed by order of the king but saved through a series of miraculous events.
Romulus and Remus regained their grandfather's throne and set out to build a new city, consulting with the gods through augury,
a characteristic religious institution of Rome that is portrayed as
existing from earliest times. The brothers quarrel while building the
city walls, and Romulus kills Remus, an act that is sometimes seen as
sacrificial. Fratricide thus became an integral part of Rome's founding
myth.
Romulus was credited with several religious institutions. He founded the Consualia festival, inviting the neighbouring Sabines to participate; the ensuing rape of the Sabine women
by Romulus's men further embedded both violence and cultural
assimilation in Rome's myth of origins. As a successful general, Romulus
is also supposed to have founded Rome's first temple to Jupiter Feretrius and offered the spolia opima, the prime spoils taken in war, in the celebration of the first Roman triumph. Spared a mortal's death, Romulus was mysteriously spirited away and deified.
His Sabine successor Numa was pious and peaceable, and credited with numerous political and religious foundations, including the first Roman calendar; the priesthoods of the Salii, flamines, and Vestals; the cults of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus; and the Temple of Janus,
whose doors stayed open in times of war but in Numa's time remained
closed. After Numa's death, the doors to the Temple of Janus were
supposed to have remained open until the reign of Augustus.
Each of Rome's legendary or semi-legendary kings was associated
with one or more religious institutions still known to the later
Republic. Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Marcius instituted the fetial priests. The first "outsider" Etruscan king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, founded a Capitoline temple to the triad Jupiter, Juno and Minerva which served as the model for the highest official cult throughout the Roman world. The benevolent, divinely fathered Servius Tullius established the Latin League, its Aventine Temple to Diana, and the Compitalia to mark his social reforms. Servius Tullius was murdered and succeeded by the arrogant Tarquinius Superbus, whose expulsion marked the end of Roman kingship and the beginning of the Roman republic, governed by elected magistrates.
Roman historians
regarded the essentials of Republican religion as complete by the end
of Numa's reign, and confirmed as right and lawful by the Senate and people of Rome: the sacred topography of the city, its monuments and temples, the histories of Rome's leading families, and oral and ritual traditions.
According to Cicero, the Romans considered themselves the most
religious of all peoples, and their rise to dominance was proof they
received divine favor in return.
Rome offers no native creation myth, and little mythography
to explain the character of its deities, their mutual relationships or
their interactions with the human world, but Roman theology acknowledged
that di immortales (immortal gods) ruled all realms of the
heavens and earth. There were gods of the upper heavens, gods of the
underworld and a myriad of lesser deities between. Some evidently
favoured Rome because Rome honoured them, but none were intrinsically,
irredeemably foreign or alien.
The political, cultural and religious coherence of an emergent
Roman super-state required a broad, inclusive and flexible network of
lawful cults. At different times and in different places, the sphere of
influence, character and functions of a divine being could expand,
overlap with those of others, and be redefined as Roman. Change was
embedded within existing traditions.
Several versions of a semi-official, structured pantheon were developed during the political, social and religious instability of the Late Republican era. Jupiter,
the most powerful of all gods and "the fount of the auspices upon which
the relationship of the city with the gods rested", consistently
personified the divine authority of Rome's highest offices, internal
organization and external relations. During the archaic and early
Republican eras, he shared his temple, some aspects of cult and several divine characteristics with Mars and Quirinus, who were later replaced by Juno and Minerva.
A conceptual tendency toward triads may be indicated by the later agricultural or plebeian triad of Ceres, Liber and Libera, and by some of the complementary threefold deity-groupings of Imperial cult.
Other major and minor deities could be single, coupled, or linked
retrospectively through myths of divine marriage and sexual adventure.
These later Roman pantheistic hierarchies are part literary and mythographic, part philosophical creations, and often Greek in origin. The Hellenization of Latin literature and culture supplied literary and artistic models for reinterpreting Roman deities in light of the Greek Olympians, and promoted a sense that the two cultures had a shared heritage.
The impressive, costly, and centralised rites to the deities of the
Roman state were vastly outnumbered in everyday life by commonplace
religious observances pertaining to an individual's domestic and
personal deities, the patron divinities of Rome's various neighbourhoods
and communities, and the often idiosyncratic blends of official,
unofficial, local and personal cults that characterised lawful Roman
religion.
In this spirit, a provincial Roman citizen who made the long journey from Bordeaux to Italy to consult the Sibyl at Tibur did not neglect his devotion to his own goddess from home:
I wander, never ceasing to pass through the whole world, but I am first and foremost a faithful worshiper of Onuava.
I am at the ends of the earth, but the distance cannot tempt me to make
my vows to another goddess. Love of the truth brought me to Tibur, but
Onuava's favourable powers came with me. Thus, divine mother, far from
my home-land, exiled in Italy, I address my vows and prayers to you no
less.
Roman calendars show roughly forty annual religious festivals. Some
lasted several days, others a single day or less: sacred days (dies fasti) outnumbered "non-sacred" days (dies nefasti).
A comparison of surviving Roman religious calendars suggests that
official festivals were organized according to broad seasonal groups
that allowed for different local traditions. Some of the most ancient
and popular festivals incorporated ludi ("games", such as chariot races and theatrical performances), with examples including those held at Palestrina in honour of Fortuna Primigenia during Compitalia, and the Ludi Romani in honour of Liber. Other festivals may have required only the presence and rites of their priests and acolytes, or particular groups, such as women at the Bona Dea rites.
Other public festivals were not required by the calendar, but occasioned by events. The triumph of a Roman general was celebrated as the fulfillment of religious vows,
though these tended to be overshadowed by the political and social
significance of the event. During the late Republic, the political elite
competed to outdo each other in public display, and the ludi attendant on a triumph were expanded to include gladiator contests. Under the Principate,
all such spectacular displays came under Imperial control: the most
lavish were subsidised by emperors, and lesser events were provided by
magistrates as a sacred duty and privilege of office. Additional
festivals and games celebrated Imperial accessions and anniversaries.
Others, such as the traditional Republican Secular Games to mark a new era (saeculum),
became imperially funded to maintain traditional values and a common
Roman identity. That the spectacles retained something of their sacral
aura even in late antiquity is indicated by the admonitions of the Church Fathers that Christians should not take part.
The meaning and origin of many archaic festivals baffled even
Rome's intellectual elite, but the more obscure they were, the greater
the opportunity for reinvention and reinterpretation – a fact lost
neither on Augustus in his program of religious reform, which often
cloaked autocratic innovation, nor on his only rival as mythmaker of the
era, Ovid. In his Fasti, a long-form poem covering Roman holidays from January to June, Ovid presents a unique look at Roman antiquarian lore, popular customs, and religious practice that is by turns imaginative, entertaining, high-minded, and scurrilous; not a priestly account, despite the speaker's pose as a vates
or inspired poet-prophet, but a work of description, imagination and
poetic etymology that reflects the broad humor and burlesque spirit of
such venerable festivals as the Saturnalia, Consualia, and feast of Anna Perenna on the Ides of March,
where Ovid treats the assassination of the newly deified Julius Caesar
as utterly incidental to the festivities among the Roman people.
But official calendars preserved from different times and places also
show a flexibility in omitting or expanding events, indicating that
there was no single static and authoritative calendar of required
observances. In the later Empire under Christian rule, the new Christian
festivals were incorporated into the existing framework of the Roman
calendar, alongside at least some of the traditional festivals.
Public religious ceremonies of the official Roman religion took place
outdoors, and not within the temple building. Some ceremonies were
processions that started at, visited, or ended with a temple or shrine,
where a ritual object might be stored and brought out for use, or where
an offering would be deposited. Sacrifices, chiefly of animals, would take place at an open-air altar within the templum or precinct, often to the side of the steps leading up to the raised portico. The main room (cella) inside a temple housed the cult image of the deity to whom the temple was dedicated, and often a small altar for incense or libations.
It might also display art works looted in war and rededicated to the
gods. It is not clear how accessible the interiors of temples were to
the general public.
The Latin word templum
originally referred not to the temple building itself, but to a sacred
space surveyed and plotted ritually through augury: "The architecture of
the ancient Romans was, from first to last, an art of shaping space
around ritual." The Roman architect Vitruvius always uses the word templum to refer to this sacred precinct, and the more common Latin words aedes, delubrum, or fanum for a temple or shrine as a building. The ruins of temples are among the most visible monuments of ancient Roman culture.
Temple buildings and shrines within the city commemorated
significant political settlements in its development: the Aventine
Temple of Diana supposedly marked the founding of the Latin League under
Servius Tullius. Many temples in the Republican era were built as the fulfillment of a vow made by a general in exchange for a victory: Rome's first known temple to Venus was vowed by the consul Q. Fabius Gurges in the heat of battle against the Samnites, and dedicated in 295 BC.
Religious practice
Prayers, vows, and oaths
All sacrifices and offerings required an accompanying prayer to be effective. Pliny the Elder declared that "a sacrifice without prayer is thought to be useless and not a proper consultation of the gods."[34]
Prayer by itself, however, had independent power. The spoken word was
thus the single most potent religious action, and knowledge of the
correct verbal formulas the key to efficacy.
Accurate naming was vital for tapping into the desired powers of the
deity invoked, hence the proliferation of cult epithets among Roman
deities. Public prayers (prex)
were offered loudly and clearly by a priest on behalf of the community.
Public religious ritual had to be enacted by specialists and
professionals faultlessly; a mistake might require that the action, or
even the entire festival, be repeated from the start. The historian Livy reports an occasion when the presiding magistrate at the Latin festival forgot to include the "Roman people" among the list of beneficiaries in his prayer; the festival had to be started over.
Even private prayer by an individual was formulaic, a recitation rather
than a personal expression, though selected by the individual for a
particular purpose or occasion.
Oaths—sworn for the purposes of business, clientage and service, patronage and protection, state office, treaty and loyalty—appealed to the witness and sanction of deities. Refusal to swear a lawful oath (sacramentum) and breaking a sworn oath carried much the same penalty: both repudiated the fundamental bonds between the human and divine. A votum or vow was a promise made to a deity, usually an offer of sacrifices or a votive offering in exchange for benefits received.
Sacrifice
In Latin, the word sacrificium means the performance of an act that renders something sacer,
sacred. Sacrifice reinforced the powers and attributes of divine
beings, and inclined them to render benefits in return (the principle of
do ut des).
Offerings to household deities were part of daily life. Lares
might be offered spelt wheat and grain-garlands, grapes and first
fruits in due season, honey cakes and honeycombs, wine and incense, food that fell to the floor during any family meal, or at their Compitalia festival, honey-cakes and a pig on behalf of the community. Their supposed underworld relatives, the malicious and vagrant Lemures, might be placated with midnight offerings of black beans and spring water.
The most potent offering was animal sacrifice,
typically of domesticated animals such as cattle, sheep and pigs. Each
was the best specimen of its kind, cleansed, clad in sacrificial regalia
and garlanded; the horns of oxen might be gilded. Sacrifice sought the harmonisation of the earthly and divine,
so the victim must seem willing to offer its own life on behalf of the
community; it must remain calm and be quickly and cleanly dispatched.
Sacrifice to deities of the heavens (di superi, "gods
above") was performed in daylight, and under the public gaze. Deities of
the upper heavens required white, infertile victims of their own sex: Juno a white heifer (possibly a white cow); Jupiter a white, castrated ox (bos mas) for the annual oath-taking by the consuls. Di superi with strong connections to the earth, such as Mars, Janus, Neptune and various genii
– including the Emperor's – were offered fertile victims. After the
sacrifice, a banquet was held; in state cults, the images of honoured
deities took pride of place on banqueting couches and by means of the
sacrificial fire consumed their proper portion (exta,
the innards). Rome's officials and priests reclined in order of
precedence alongside and ate the meat; lesser citizens may have had to
provide their own.
Chthonic gods such as Dis pater, the di inferi ("gods below"), and the collective shades of the departed (di Manes) were given dark, fertile victims in nighttime rituals. Animal sacrifice usually took the form of a holocaust or burnt offering, and there was no shared banquet, as "the living cannot share a meal with the dead". Ceres and other underworld goddesses of fruitfulness were sometimes offered pregnant female animals; Tellus was given a pregnant cow at the Fordicidia
festival. Color had a general symbolic value for sacrifices. Demigods
and heroes, who belonged to the heavens and the underworld, were
sometimes given black-and-white victims. Robigo (or Robigus) was given red dogs and libations of red wine at the Robigalia for the protection of crops from blight and red mildew.
A sacrifice might be made in thanksgiving or as an expiation of a sacrilege or potential sacrilege (piaculum);
a piaculum might also be offered as a sort of advance payment; the Arval Brethren, for instance, offered a piaculum before entering their sacred grove with an iron implement, which was forbidden, as well as after.
The pig was a common victim for a piaculum.
The same divine agencies who caused disease or harm also had the
power to avert it, and so might be placated in advance. Divine
consideration might be sought to avoid the inconvenient delays of a
journey, or encounters with banditry, piracy and shipwreck, with due
gratitude to be rendered on safe arrival or return. In times of great
crisis, the Senate could decree collective public rites, in which Rome's
citizens, including women and children, moved in procession from one
temple to the next, supplicating the gods.
Extraordinary circumstances called for extraordinary sacrifice: in one of the many crises of the Second Punic War, Jupiter Capitolinus was promised every animal born that spring (see ver sacrum), to be rendered after five more years of protection from Hannibal and his allies.
The "contract" with Jupiter is exceptionally detailed. All due care
would be taken of the animals. If any died or were stolen before the
scheduled sacrifice, they would count as already sacrificed, since they
had already been consecrated. Normally, if the gods failed to keep their
side of the bargain, the offered sacrifice would be withheld. In the
imperial period, sacrifice was withheld following Trajan's death because the gods had not kept the Emperor safe for the stipulated period. In Pompeii, the Genius
of the living emperor was offered a bull: presumably a standard
practise in Imperial cult, though minor offerings (incense and wine)
were also made.
The exta were the entrails of a sacrificed animal, comprising in Cicero's enumeration the gall bladder (fel), liver (iecur), heart (cor), and lungs (pulmones). The exta were exposed for litatio (divine approval) as part of Roman liturgy, but were "read" in the context of the disciplina Etrusca. As a product of Roman sacrifice, the exta and blood are reserved for the gods, while the meat (viscera) is shared among human beings in a communal meal. The exta of bovine victims were usually stewed in a pot (olla or aula), while those of sheep or pigs were grilled on skewers. When the deity's portion was cooked, it was sprinkled with mola salsa
(ritually prepared salted flour) and wine, then placed in the fire on
the altar for the offering; the technical verb for this action was porricere.
Human sacrifice
Human sacrifice in ancient Rome was rare but documented. After the Roman defeat at Cannae two Gauls and two Greeks were buried under the Forum Boarium,
in a stone chamber "which had on a previous occasion [228 BC] also been
polluted by human victims, a practice most repulsive to Roman
feelings".
Livy avoids the word "sacrifice" in connection with this bloodless
human life-offering; Plutarch does not. The rite was apparently repeated
in 113 BC, preparatory to an invasion of Gaul. Its religious dimensions
and purpose remain uncertain.
In the early stages of the First Punic War (264 BC) the first known Roman gladiatorialmunus was held, described as a funeral blood-rite to the manes of a Roman military aristocrat. The gladiator munus
was never explicitly acknowledged as a human sacrifice, probably
because death was not its inevitable outcome or purpose. Even so, the
gladiators swore their lives to the gods, and the combat was dedicated
as an offering to the Di Manes or the revered souls of deceased human beings. The event was therefore a sacrificium in the strict sense of the term, and Christian writers later condemned it as human sacrifice.
The small woollen dolls called Maniae, hung on the Compitalia shrines, were thought a symbolic replacement for child-sacrifice to Mania, as Mother of the Lares. The Junii took credit for its abolition by their ancestor L. Junius Brutus, traditionally Rome's Republican founder and first consul.
Political or military executions were sometimes conducted in such a way
that they evoked human sacrifice, whether deliberately or in the
perception of witnesses; Marcus Marius Gratidianus was a gruesome example.
Officially, human sacrifice was obnoxious "to the laws of gods and men". The practice was a mark of the barbarians,
attributed to Rome's traditional enemies such as the Carthaginians and
Gauls. Rome banned it on several occasions under extreme penalty. A law
passed in 81 BC characterised human sacrifice as murder committed for
magical purposes. Pliny saw the ending of human sacrifice conducted by the druids as a positive consequence of the conquest of Gaul and Britain. Despite an empire-wide ban under Hadrian, human sacrifice may have continued covertly in North Africa and elsewhere.
Domestic and private cult
The mos maiorum established the dynastic authority and obligations of the citizen-paterfamilias ("the father of the family" or the "owner of the family estate"). He had priestly duties to his lares, domestic penates, ancestral Genius
and any other deities with whom he or his family held an interdependent
relationship. His own dependents, who included his slaves and freedmen,
owed cult to his Genius.
Genius was the essential spirit and generative power –
depicted as a serpent or as a perennial youth, often winged – within an
individual and their clan (gens (pl. gentes). A paterfamilias could confer his name, a measure of his genius
and a role in his household rites, obligations and honours upon those
he fathered or adopted. His freed slaves owed him similar obligations.
A pater familias was the senior priest of his household. He offered daily cult to his lares and penates, and to his di parentes/divi parentes at his domestic shrines and in the fires of the household hearth. His wife (mater familias)
was responsible for the household's cult to Vesta. In rural estates,
bailiffs seem to have been responsible for at least some of the
household shrines (lararia) and their deities. Household cults had state
counterparts. In Vergil's Aeneid, Aeneas brought the Trojan cult of the lares and penates from Troy, along with the Palladium which was later installed in the temple of Vesta.
Religio and the state
Roman religio (religion) was an everyday and vital affair, a cornerstone of the mos maiorum, Roman tradition and ancestral custom. It was ultimately governed by the Roman state, and religious laws.
Care for the gods, the very meaning of religio,
had therefore to go through life, and one might thus understand why
Cicero wrote that religion was "necessary". Religious behavior – pietas in Latin, eusebeia
in Greek – belonged to action and not to contemplation. Consequently
religious acts took place wherever the faithful were: in houses,
boroughs, associations, cities, military camps, cemeteries, in the
country, on boats. 'When pious travelers happen to pass by a sacred grove or a cult place on their way, they are used to make a vow, or a fruit offering, or to sit down for a while' (Apuleius, Florides 1.1).
Religious law centered on the ritualised system of honours and
sacrifice that brought divine blessings, according to the principle do ut des ("I give, that you might give"). Proper, respectful religio brought social harmony and prosperity. Religious neglect was a form of atheism: impure sacrifice and incorrect ritual were vitia (impious errors). Excessive devotion, fearful grovelling to deities and the improper use or seeking of divine knowledge were superstitio. Any of these moral deviations could cause divine anger (ira deorum) and therefore harm the State.
The official deities of the state were identified with its lawful
offices and institutions, and Romans of every class were expected to
honour the beneficence and protection of mortal and divine superiors.
State cult rituals were almost always performed in daylight and in full
public view, by priests who acted on behalf of the Roman state and the
Roman people. Congregations were expected to respectfully observe the
proceedings. Participation in public rites showed a personal commitment
to the community and its values.
Official cults were state funded as a "matter of public interest" (res publica).
Non-official but lawful cults were funded by private individuals for
the benefit of their own communities. The difference between public and
private cult is often unclear. Individuals or collegial associations
could offer funds and cult to state deities. The public Vestals prepared
ritual substances for use in public and private cults, and held the
state-funded (thus public) opening ceremony for the Parentalia festival, which was otherwise a private rite to household ancestors. Some rites of the domus (household) were held in public places but were legally defined as privata in part or whole. All cults were ultimately subject to the approval and regulation of the censor and pontifices.
Public priesthoods and religious law
Rome had no separate priestly caste or class. The highest authority
within a community usually sponsored its cults and sacrifices,
officiated as its priest and promoted its assistants and acolytes.
Specialists from the religious colleges and professionals such as haruspices and oracles were available for consultation. In household cult, the paterfamilias functioned as priest, and members of his familia
as acolytes and assistants. Public cults required greater knowledge and
expertise. The earliest public priesthoods were probably the flamines (the singular is flamen), attributed to king Numa: the major flamines, dedicated to Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus, were traditionally drawn from patrician families. Twelve lesser flamines were each dedicated to a single deity, whose archaic nature is indicated by the relative obscurity of some. Flamines were constrained by the requirements of ritual purity; Jupiter's flamen in particular had virtually no simultaneous capacity for a political or military career.
In the Regal era, a rex sacrorum (king of the sacred rites) supervised regal and state rites in conjunction with the king (rex)
or in his absence, and announced the public festivals. He had little or
no civil authority. With the abolition of monarchy, the collegial power
and influence of the Republican pontifices increased. By the late Republican era, the flamines were supervised by the pontifical collegia. The rex sacrorum
had become a relatively obscure priesthood with an entirely symbolic
title: his religious duties still included the daily, ritual
announcement of festivals and priestly duties within two or three of the
latter but his most important priestly role – the supervision of the Vestals and their rites – fell to the more politically powerful and influential pontifex maximus.
Public priests were appointed by the collegia. Once
elected, a priest held permanent religious authority from the eternal
divine, which offered him lifetime influence, privilege and immunity.
Therefore, civil and religious law limited the number and kind of
religious offices allowed an individual and his family. Religious law
was collegial and traditional; it informed political decisions, could
overturn them, and was difficult to exploit for personal gain.
Priesthood was a costly honour: in traditional Roman practice, a
priest drew no stipend. Cult donations were the property of the deity,
whose priest must provide cult regardless of shortfalls in public
funding – this could mean subsidy of acolytes and all other cult
maintenance from personal funds. For those who had reached their goal in the Cursus honorum,
permanent priesthood was best sought or granted after a lifetime's
service in military or political life, or preferably both: it was a
particularly honourable and active form of retirement which fulfilled an
essential public duty. For a freedman or slave, promotion as one of the
Compitalia seviri offered a high local profile, and opportunities in local politics; and therefore business.
During the Imperial era, priesthood of the Imperial cult offered
provincial elites full Roman citizenship and public prominence beyond
their single year in religious office; in effect, it was the first step
in a provincial cursus honorum. In Rome, the same Imperial cult role was performed by the Arval Brethren,
once an obscure Republican priesthood dedicated to several deities,
then co-opted by Augustus as part of his religious reforms. The Arvals
offered prayer and sacrifice to Roman state gods at various temples for
the continued welfare of the Imperial family on their birthdays,
accession anniversaries and to mark extraordinary events such as the
quashing of conspiracy or revolt. Every 3 January they consecrated the
annual vows and rendered any sacrifice promised in the previous year,
provided the gods had kept the Imperial family safe for the contracted
time.
The Vestals
The Vestals were a public priesthood of six women devoted to the cultivation of Vesta, goddess of the hearth of the Roman state and its vital flame.
A girl chosen to be a Vestal achieved unique religious distinction,
public status and privileges, and could exercise considerable political
influence. Upon entering her office, a Vestal was emancipated from her father's authority.
In archaic Roman society, these priestesses were the only women not
required to be under the legal guardianship of a man, instead answering
directly to the Pontifex Maximus.
A Vestal's dress represented her status outside the usual
categories that defined Roman women, with elements of both virgin bride
and daughter, and Roman matron and wife.
Unlike male priests, Vestals were freed of the traditional obligations
of marrying and producing children, and were required to take a vow of
chastity that was strictly enforced: a Vestal polluted by the loss of
her chastity while in office was buried alive.
Thus the exceptional honor accorded a Vestal was religious rather than
personal or social; her privileges required her to be fully devoted to
the performance of her duties, which were considered essential to the
security of Rome.
The Vestals embody the profound connection between domestic cult and the religious life of the community. Any householder could rekindle their own household fire from Vesta's flame. The Vestals cared for the Lares and Penates of the state that were the equivalent of those enshrined in each home. Besides their own festival of Vestalia, they participated directly in the rites of Parilia, Parentalia and Fordicidia. Indirectly, they played a role in every official sacrifice; among their duties was the preparation of the mola salsa, the salted flour that was sprinkled on every sacrificial victim as part of its immolation.
One mythological tradition held that the mother of Romulus and
Remus was a Vestal virgin of royal blood. A tale of miraculous birth
also attended on Servius Tullius, sixth king of Rome, son of a virgin slave-girl impregnated by a disembodied phallus arising mysteriously on the royal hearth; the story was connected to the fascinus that was among the cult objects under the guardianship of the Vestals.
Augustus' religious reformations raised the funding and public
profile of the Vestals. They were given high-status seating at games and
theatres. The emperor Claudius appointed them as priestesses to the cult of the deified Livia, wife of Augustus.
They seem to have retained their religious and social distinctions well
into the 4th century, after political power within the Empire had
shifted to the Christians. When the Christian emperor Gratian refused the office of pontifex maximus, he took steps toward the dissolution of the order. His successor Theodosius I extinguished Vesta's sacred fire and vacated her temple.
Public religion took place within a sacred precinct that had been marked out ritually by an augur. The original meaning of the Latin word templum was this sacred space, and only later referred to a building. Rome itself was an intrinsically sacred space; its ancient boundary (pomerium)
had been marked by Romulus himself with oxen and plough; what lay
within was the earthly home and protectorate of the gods of the state.
In Rome, the central references for the establishment of an augural templum appear to have been the Via Sacra (Sacred Way) and the pomerium.
Magistrates sought divine opinion of proposed official acts through an
augur, who read the divine will through observations made within the templum before, during and after an act of sacrifice.
Divine disapproval could arise through unfit sacrifice, errant rites (vitia)
or an unacceptable plan of action. If an unfavourable sign was given,
the magistrate could repeat the sacrifice until favourable signs were
seen, consult with his augural colleagues, or abandon the project.
Magistrates could use their right of augury (ius augurum) to
adjourn and overturn the process of law, but were obliged to base their
decision on the augur's observations and advice. For Cicero, himself an
augur, this made the augur the most powerful authority in the Late
Republic. By his time (mid 1st century BC) augury was supervised by the college of pontifices, whose powers were increasingly woven into the magistracies of the cursus honorum.
Haruspicy
was also used in public cult, under the supervision of the augur or
presiding magistrate. The haruspices divined the will of the gods
through examination of entrails after sacrifice, particularly the liver.
They also interpreted omens, prodigies and portents, and formulated
their expiation. Most Roman authors describe haruspicy as an ancient,
ethnically Etruscan "outsider" religious profession, separate from
Rome's internal and largely unpaid priestly hierarchy, essential but
never quite respectable. During the mid-to-late Republic, the reformist Gaius Gracchus, the populist politician-general Gaius Marius and his antagonist Sulla, and the "notorious Verres"
justified their very different policies by the divinely inspired
utterances of private diviners. The Senate and armies used the public
haruspices: at some time during the late Republic, the Senate decreed
that Roman boys of noble family be sent to Etruria for training in
haruspicy and divination. Being of independent means, they would be
better motivated to maintain a pure, religious practice for the public
good.
The motives of private haruspices – especially females – and their
clients were officially suspect: none of this seems to have troubled
Marius, who employed a Syrian prophetess.
Omens and prodigies
Omens
observed within or from a divine augural templum – especially the
flight of birds – were sent by the gods in response to official queries.
A magistrate with ius augurium (the right of augury) could declare the suspension of all official business for the day (obnuntiato) if he deemed the omens unfavourable. Conversely, an apparently negative omen could be re-interpreted as positive, or deliberately blocked from sight.
Prodigies
were transgressions in the natural, predictable order of the cosmos –
signs of divine anger that portended conflict and misfortune. The Senate
decided whether a reported prodigy was false, or genuine and in the
public interest, in which case it was referred to the public priests,
augurs and haruspices for ritual expiation.
In 207 BC, during one of the Punic Wars' worst crises, the Senate dealt
with an unprecedented number of confirmed prodigies whose expiation
would have involved "at least twenty days" of dedicated rites.
Livy presents these as signs of widespread failure in Roman religio.
The major prodigies included the spontaneous combustion of weapons, the
apparent shrinking of the sun's disc, two moons in a daylit sky, a
cosmic battle between sun and moon, a rain of red-hot stones, a bloody
sweat on statues, and blood in fountains and on ears of corn: all were
expiated by sacrifice of "greater victims". The minor prodigies were
less warlike but equally unnatural; sheep become goats, a hen become a cock
(and vice versa) – these were expiated with "lesser victims". The
discovery of an androgynous four-year-old child was expiated by its
drowning and the holy procession of 27 virgins to the temple of Juno Regina, singing a hymn to avert disaster: a lightning strike during the hymn rehearsals required further expiation. Religious restitution is proved only by Rome's victory.
In the wider context of Graeco-Roman religious culture, Rome's
earliest reported portents and prodigies stand out as atypically dire.
Whereas for Romans, a comet presaged misfortune, for Greeks it might
equally signal a divine or exceptionally fortunate birth.
In the late Republic, a daytime comet at the murdered Julius Caesar's
funeral games confirmed his deification; a discernible Greek influence
on Roman interpretation.
Mystery religions
Most of Rome's mystery cults were derived from Greek originals,
adopted by individuals as private, or were formally adopted as public.
Mystery cults operated through a hierarchy consisting of transference
of knowledge, virtues and powers to those initiated through secret rites
of passage, which might employ dance, music, intoxicants and theatrical
effects to provoke an overwhelming sense of religious awe, revelation
and eventual catharsis. The cult of Mithras was among the most notable, particularly popular among soldiers and based on the Zoroastrian deity, Mithra.
Some of Rome's most prominent deities had both public and mystery
rites. Magna Mater, conscripted to help Rome defeat Carthage in the
second Punic War, arrived in Rome with her consort, Attis, and their joint "foreign", non-citizen priesthood, known as Galli.
Despite her presumed status as an ancestral, Trojan goddess, a
priesthood was drawn from Rome's highest echelons to supervise her cult
and festivals. These may have been considered too exotically "barbaric"
to trust, and were barred to slaves.
For the Galli, full priesthood involved self-castration, illegal for Romans of any class. Later, citizens could pay for the costly sacrifice of a bull
or the lesser sacrifice of a ram, as a substitute for the acolyte's
self-castration. Magna Mater's initiates tended to be very well-off, and
relatively uncommon; they included the emperor Julian.
Initiates to Attis' cult were more numerous and less wealthy, and acted
as assistant citizen-priests in their deity's "exotic" festivals, some
of which involved the Galli's public, bloody self-flagellation.
Rome's native cults to the grain goddess Ceres and her daughter Libera were supplemented with a mystery cult of Ceres-with-Proserpina, based on the Greek Eleusinian mysteries and Thesmophoria, introduced in 205 BC and led at first by ethnically Greek priestesses from Graeca magna. The Eleusinian mysteries are also the likely source for the mysteries of Isis,
which employed symbols and rites that were nominally Egyptian. Aspects
of the Isis mysteries are almost certainly described in Appuleius' novel, The Golden Ass.
Such cults were mistrusted by Rome's authorities as quasi-magical,
potentially seductive and emotionally based, rather than practical.
The wall-paintings in Pompeii's "Villa of the Mysteries" could
have functioned equally as religious inspiration, instruction, and high
quality domestic decor (described by Beard as "expensive wallpaper").
They also attest to an increasingly personal, even domestic experience
of religion, whether or not they were ever part of organised cult
meetings. The paintings probably represent the once-notorious,
independent, popular Bacchanalia mysteries, forcibly brought under the direct control of Rome's civil and religious authorities, 100 years before.
A common theme among the eastern mystery religions present in
Rome became disillusionment with material possessions, a focus on death
and a preoccupation with regards to the afterlife. These attributes
later led to the appeal to Christianity, which in its early stages was
often viewed as mystery religion itself.
Roman beliefs about an afterlife varied, and are known mostly for the
educated elite who expressed their views in terms of their chosen
philosophy. The traditional care of the dead, however, and the
perpetuation after death of their status in life were part of the most
archaic practices of Roman religion. Ancient votive deposits to the
noble dead of Latium and Rome suggest elaborate and costly funeral
offerings and banquets in the company of the deceased, an expectation of
afterlife and their association with the gods.
As Roman society developed, its Republican nobility tended to invest
less in spectacular funerals and extravagant housing for their dead, and
more on monumental endowments to the community, such as the donation of
a temple or public building whose donor was commemorated by his statue
and inscribed name. Persons of low or negligible status might receive simple burial, with such grave goods as relatives could afford.
Funeral and commemorative rites varied according to wealth,
status and religious context. In Cicero's time, the better-off
sacrificed a sow at the funeral pyre before cremation. The dead consumed
their portion in the flames of the pyre, Ceres her portion through the
flame of her altar, and the family at the site of the cremation. For the
less well-off, inhumation with "a libation of wine, incense, and fruit
or crops was sufficient". Ceres functioned as an intermediary between
the realms of the living and the dead: the deceased had not yet fully
passed to the world of the dead and could share a last meal with the
living. The ashes (or body) were entombed or buried. On the eighth day
of mourning, the family offered further sacrifice, this time on the
ground; the shade of the departed was assumed to have passed from the
world of the living into the underworld, as one of the di Manes, underworld spirits; the ancestral manes of families were celebrated and appeased at their cemeteries or tombs, in the obligatory Parentalia, a multi-day festival of remembrance in February.
A standard Roman funerary inscription is Dis Manibus (to the Manes-gods). Regional variations include its Greek equivalent, theoîs katachthoníois and Lugdunum's commonplace but mysterious "dedicated under the trowel" (sub ascia dedicare).
In the later Imperial era, the burial and commemorative practises
of Christian and non-Christians overlapped. Tombs were shared by
Christian and non-Christian family members, and the traditional funeral
rites and feast of novemdialis found a part-match in the Christian Constitutio Apostolica.
The customary offers of wine and food to the dead continued; St
Augustine (following St Ambrose) feared that this invited the "drunken"
practices of Parentalia but commended funeral feasts as a Christian
opportunity to give alms of food to the poor. Christians attended
Parentalia and its accompanying Feralia and Caristia in sufficient numbers for the Council of Tours
to forbid them in AD 567. Other funerary and commemorative practices
were very different. Traditional Roman practice spurned the corpse as a
ritual pollution; inscriptions noted the day of birth and duration of
life. The Christian Church fostered the veneration of saintly relics, and inscriptions marked the day of death as a transition to "new life".
Religion and the military
Military success was achieved through a combination of personal and collective virtus (roughly, "manly virtue") and the divine will: lack of virtus, civic or private negligence in religio and the growth of superstitio
provoked divine wrath and led to military disaster. Military success
was the touchstone of a special relationship with the gods, and to
Jupiter Capitolinus in particular; triumphal generals were dressed as
Jupiter, and laid their victor's laurels at his feet.
Roman commanders offered vows to be fulfilled after success in battle or siege; and further vows to expiate their failures. Camillus promised Veii's goddess Juno a temple in Rome as incentive for her desertion (evocatio),
conquered the city in her name, brought her cult statue to Rome "with
miraculous ease" and dedicated a temple to her on the Aventine Hill.
Roman camps followed a standard pattern for defense and religious
ritual; in effect they were Rome in miniature. The commander's
headquarters stood at the centre; he took the auspices on a dais in
front. A small building behind housed the legionary standards, the
divine images used in religious rites and in the Imperial era, the image
of the ruling emperor. In one camp, this shrine is even called
Capitolium. The most important camp-offering appears to have been the suovetaurilia
performed before a major, set battle. A ram, a boar and a bull were
ritually garlanded, led around the outer perimeter of the camp (a lustratio exercitus)
and in through a gate, then sacrificed: Trajan's column shows three
such events from his Dacian wars. The perimeter procession and sacrifice
suggest the entire camp as a divine templum; all within are purified and protected.
Each camp had its own religious personnel; standard bearers, priestly
officers and their assistants, including a haruspex, and housekeepers
of shrines and images. A senior magistrate-commander (sometimes even a
consul) headed it, his chain of subordinates ran it and a ferocious
system of training and discipline ensured that every citizen-soldier
knew his duty. As in Rome, whatever gods he served in his own time seem
to have been his own business; legionary forts and vici included shrines to household gods, personal deities and deities otherwise unknown.
From the earliest Imperial era, citizen legionaries and provincial auxiliaries gave cult to the emperor and his familia on Imperial accessions, anniversaries and their renewal of annual vows. They celebrated Rome's official festivals in absentia, and had the official triads appropriate to their function – in the Empire, Jupiter, Victoria and Concordia were typical. By the early Severan era, the military also offered cult to the Imperial divi, the current emperor's numen, genius and domus (or familia), and special cult to the Empress as "mother of the camp". The near ubiquitous legionary shrines to Mithras of the later Imperial era were not part of official cult until Mithras was absorbed into Solar and Stoic Monism as a focus of military concordia and Imperial loyalty.
The devotio
was the most extreme offering a Roman general could make, promising to
offer his own life in battle along with the enemy as an offering to the
underworld gods. Livy offers a detailed account of the devotio carried out by Decius Mus; family tradition maintained that his son and grandson,
all bearing the same name, also devoted themselves. Before the battle,
Decius is granted a prescient dream that reveals his fate. When he
offers sacrifice, the victim's liver appears "damaged where it refers to
his own fortunes". Otherwise, the haruspex tells him, the sacrifice is
entirely acceptable to the gods. In a prayer recorded by Livy, Decius commits himself and the enemy to the dii Manes and Tellus,
charges alone and headlong into the enemy ranks, and is killed; his
action cleanses the sacrificial offering. Had he failed to die, his
sacrificial offering would have been tainted and therefore void, with
possibly disastrous consequences. The act of devotio is a link between military ethics and those of the Roman gladiator.
The efforts of military commanders to channel the divine will
were on occasion less successful. In the early days of Rome's war
against Carthage, the commander Publius Claudius Pulcher (consul 249 BC)
launched a sea campaign "though the sacred chickens would not eat when
he took the auspices". In defiance of the omen, he threw them into the
sea, "saying that they might drink, since they would not eat. He was
defeated, and on being bidden by the Senate to appoint a dictator, he
appointed his messenger Glycias, as if again making a jest of his
country's peril." His impiety not only lost the battle but ruined his
career.
Roman women were present at most festivals and cult observances. Some
rituals specifically required the presence of women, but their active
participation was limited. As a rule women did not perform animal
sacrifice, the central rite of most major public ceremonies. In addition to the public priesthood of the Vestals, some cult practices were reserved for women only. The rites of the Bona Dea excluded men entirely.
Because women enter the public record less frequently than men, their
religious practices are less known, and even family cults were headed by
the paterfamilias. A host of deities, however, are associated with motherhood. Juno, Diana, Lucina, and specialized divine attendants
presided over the life-threatening act of giving birth and the perils
of caring for a baby at a time when the infant mortality rate was as
high as 40 percent.
Literary sources vary in their depiction of women's religiosity:
some represent women as paragons of Roman virtue and devotion, but also
inclined by temperament to self-indulgent religious enthusiasms,
novelties and the seductions of superstitio.
Excessive devotion and enthusiasm in religious observance were superstitio, in the sense of "doing or believing more than was necessary", to which women and foreigners were considered particularly prone. The boundary between religio and superstitio is not clearly defined. The famous tirade of Lucretius, the Epicurean rationalist, against what is usually translated as "superstition" was in fact aimed at excessive religio. Roman religion was based on knowledge rather than faith, but superstitio was viewed as an "inappropriate desire for knowledge"; in effect, an abuse of religio.
In the everyday world, many individuals sought to divine the
future, influence it through magic, or seek vengeance with help from
"private" diviners. The state-sanctioned taking of auspices was a form
of public divination with the intent of ascertaining the will of the
gods, not foretelling the future. Secretive consultations between
private diviners and their clients were thus suspect. So were divinatory
techniques such as astrology when used for illicit, subversive or
magical purposes. Astrologers and magicians were officially expelled
from Rome at various times, notably in 139 BC and 33 BC. In 16 BC
Tiberius expelled them under extreme penalty because an astrologer had
predicted his death. "Egyptian rites" were particularly suspect:
Augustus banned them within the pomerium to doubtful effect; Tiberius repeated and extended the ban with extreme force in AD 19.
Despite several Imperial bans, magic and astrology persisted among all
social classes. In the late 1st century AD, Tacitus observed that
astrologers "would always be banned and always retained at Rome".
In the Graeco-Roman world, practitioners of magic were known as magi (singular magus), a "foreign" title of Persian priests. Apuleius, defending himself against accusations of casting magic spells, defined the magician as "in popular tradition (more vulgari)... someone who, because of his community of speech with the immortal gods, has an incredible power of spells (vi cantaminum) for everything he wishes to." Pliny the Elder
offers a thoroughly skeptical "History of magical arts" from their
supposed Persian origins to Nero's vast and futile expenditure on
research into magical practices in an attempt to control the gods. Philostratus takes pains to point out that the celebrated Apollonius of Tyana was definitely not a magus, "despite his special knowledge of the future, his miraculous cures, and his ability to vanish into thin air".
Lucan depicts Sextus Pompeius, the doomed son of Pompey the Great, as convinced "the gods of heaven knew too little" and awaiting the Battle of Pharsalus by consulting with the Thessalian witch Erichtho, who practices necromancy
and inhabits deserted graves, feeding on rotting corpses. Erichtho, it
is said, can arrest "the rotation of the heavens and the flow of rivers"
and make "austere old men blaze with illicit passions". She and her
clients are portrayed as undermining the natural order of gods, mankind
and destiny. A female foreigner from Thessaly, notorious for witchcraft,
Erichtho is the stereotypical witch of Latin literature, along with Horace's Canidia.
The Twelve Tables forbade any harmful incantation (malum carmen, or 'noisome metrical charm'); this included the "charming of crops from one field to another" (excantatio frugum) and any rite that sought harm or death to others. Chthonic
deities functioned at the margins of Rome's divine and human
communities; although sometimes the recipients of public rites, these
were conducted outside the sacred boundary of the pomerium.
Individuals seeking their aid did so away from the public gaze, during
the hours of darkness. Burial grounds and isolated crossroads were among
the likely portals.
The barrier between private religious practices and "magic" is
permeable, and Ovid gives a vivid account of rites at the fringes of the
public Feralia festival that are indistinguishable from magic: an old woman squats
among a circle of younger women, sews up a fish-head, smears it with
pitch, then pierces and roasts it to "bind hostile tongues to silence".
By this she invokes Tacita, the "Silent One" of the underworld.
Archaeology confirms the widespread use of binding spells (defixiones), magical papyri and so-called "voodoo dolls" from a very early era. Around 250 defixiones have been recovered just from Roman Britain,
in both urban and rural settings. Some seek straightforward, usually
gruesome revenge, often for a lover's offense or rejection. Others
appeal for divine redress of wrongs, in terms familiar to any Roman
magistrate, and promise a portion of the value (usually small) of lost
or stolen property in return for its restoration. None of these defixiones
seem produced by, or on behalf of the elite, who had more immediate
recourse to human law and justice. Similar traditions existed throughout
the empire, persisting until around the 7th century AD, well into the
Christian era.
History of Roman religion
Religion and politics
Rome's government, politics and religion were dominated by an
educated, male, landowning military aristocracy. Approximately half of
Rome's population were slave or free non-citizens. Most others were plebeians,
the lowest class of Roman citizens. Less than a quarter of adult males
had voting rights; far fewer could actually exercise them. Women had no
vote.
However, all official business was conducted under the divine gaze and
auspices, in the name of the Senate and people of Rome. "In a very real
sense the senate was the caretaker of the Romans’ relationship with the
divine, just as it was the caretaker of their relationship with other
humans".
The links between religious and political life were vital to
Rome's internal governance, diplomacy and development from kingdom, to
Republic and to Empire. Post-regal politics dispersed the civil and
religious authority of the kings more or less equitably among the
patrician elite: kingship was replaced by two annually elected consular
offices. In the early Republic, as presumably in the regal era,
plebeians were excluded from high religious and civil office, and could
be punished for offenses against laws of which they had no knowledge. They resorted to strikes and violence
to break the oppressive patrician monopolies of high office, public
priesthood, and knowledge of civil and religious law. The Senate
appointed Camillus as dictator to handle the emergency; he negotiated a settlement, and sanctified it by the dedication of a temple to Concordia. The religious calendars and laws were eventually made public. Plebeian tribunes
were appointed, with sacrosanct status and the right of veto in
legislative debate. In principle, the augural and pontifical colleges
were now open to plebeians.
In reality, the patrician and to a lesser extent, plebeian nobility
dominated religious and civil office throughout the Republican era and
beyond.
While the new plebeian nobility made social, political and religious
inroads on traditionally patrician preserves, their electorate
maintained their distinctive political traditions and religious cults. During the Punic crisis, popular cult to Dionysus emerged from southern Italy; Dionysus was equated with Father Liber, the inventor of plebeian augury and personification of plebeian freedoms, and with Roman Bacchus. Official consternation at these enthusiastic, unofficial Bacchanalia
cults was expressed as moral outrage at their supposed subversion, and
was followed by ferocious suppression. Much later, a statue of Marsyas, the silen of Dionysus flayed by Apollo,
became a focus of brief symbolic resistance to Augustus' censorship.
Augustus himself claimed the patronage of Venus and Apollo; but his
settlement appealed to all classes. Where loyalty was implicit, no
divine hierarchy need be politically enforced; Liber's festival continued.
The Augustan settlement built upon a cultural shift in Roman society. In the middle Republican era, even Scipio's tentative hints that he might be Jupiter's special protege sat ill with his colleagues. Politicians of the later Republic were less equivocal; both Sulla and Pompey claimed special relationships with Venus. Julius Caesar went further; he claimed her as his ancestress, and thus an intimate source of divine inspiration for his personal character and policies. In 63 BC, his appointment as pontifex maximus "signaled his emergence as a major player in Roman politics". Likewise, political candidates could sponsor temples, priesthoods and the immensely popular, spectacular public ludi and munera whose provision became increasingly indispensable to the factional politics of the Late Republic. Under the principate,
such opportunities were limited by law; priestly and political power
were consolidated in the person of the princeps ("first citizen").
Because of you we are living, because of you we can
travel the seas, because of you we enjoy liberty and wealth. —A
thanksgiving prayer offered in Naples' harbour to the princeps Augustus,
on his return from Alexandria in 14 AD, shortly before his death.
Early Republic
By the end of the regal period Rome had developed into a city-state, with a large plebeian, artisan class excluded from the old patrician gentes
and from the state priesthoods. The city had commercial and political
treaties with its neighbours; according to tradition, Rome's Etruscan connections established a temple to Minerva on the predominantly plebeian Aventine; she became part of a new Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, installed in a Capitoline temple, built in an Etruscan style and dedicated in a new September festival, Epulum Jovis. These are supposedly the first Roman deities whose images were adorned, as if noble guests, at their own inaugural banquet.
Rome's diplomatic agreement with its neighbours of Latium confirmed the Latin league and brought the cult of Diana from Aricia to the Aventine. and established on the Aventine in the "commune Latinorum Dianae templum": At about the same time, the temple of Jupiter Latiaris was built on the Alban mount,
its stylistic resemblance to the new Capitoline temple pointing to
Rome's inclusive hegemony. Rome's affinity to the Latins allowed two
Latin cults within the pomoerium. The cult to Hercules at the ara maxima in the Forum Boarium was established through commercial connections with Tibur. The Tusculan cult of Castor as the patron of cavalry found a home close to the Forum Romanum:[159]Juno Sospita and Juno Regina were brought from Italy, and Fortuna Primigenia from Praeneste. In 217, the Venus of Eryx was brought from Sicily and installed in a temple on the Capitoline hill.
Later Republic to Principate
The introduction of new or equivalent deities coincided with Rome's
most significant aggressive and defensive military forays. Livy
attributed the disasters of the early part of Rome's second Punic War
to a growth of superstitious cults, errors in augury and the neglect of
Rome's traditional gods, whose anger was expressed directly through
Rome's defeat at Cannae (216 BC). The Sibylline books were consulted. They recommended a general vowing of the ver sacrum and in the following year, the living burial of two Greeks and two Gauls; not the first nor the last sacrifice of its kind, according to Livy.
In 206 BC, during the Punic crisis, the Sibylline books recommended the introduction of a cult to the Magna Mater (Great Mother) from Pessinus, supposedly an ancestral goddess of Romans and Trojans. She was installed on the Palatine in 191 BC.
Deities with troublesome followers were taken over, not banned. An unofficial, popular mystery cult to Bacchus was officially taken over, restricted and supervised as potentially subversive in 186 BC.
The priesthoods of most Roman deities with clearly Greek origins used
an invented version of Greek costume and ritual, which Romans called
"Greek rites." The spread of Greek literature, mythology and philosophy
offered Roman poets and antiquarians a model for the interpretation of
Rome's festivals and rituals, and the embellishment of its mythology. Ennius translated the work of Graeco-Sicilian Euhemerus, who explained the genesis of the gods as deified mortals. In the last century of the Republic, Epicurean and particularly Stoic
interpretations were a preoccupation of the literate elite, most of
whom held – or had held – high office and traditional Roman priesthoods;
notably, Scaevola and the polymath Varro.
For Varro – well versed in Euhemerus' theory – popular religious
observance was based on a necessary fiction; what the people believed
was not itself the truth, but their observance led them to as much
higher truth as their limited capacity could deal with. Whereas in
popular belief deities held power over mortal lives, the skeptic might
say that mortal devotion had made gods of mortals, and these same gods
were only sustained by devotion and cult.
Just as Rome itself claimed the favour of the gods, so did some
individual Romans. In the mid-to-late Republican era, and probably much
earlier, many of Rome's leading clans acknowledged a divine or
semi-divine ancestor and laid personal claim to their favour and cult,
along with a share of their divinity. Most notably in the very late
Republic, the Julii claimed Venus Genetrix
as an ancestor; this would be one of many foundations for the Imperial
cult. The claim was further elaborated and justified in Vergil's poetic,
Imperial vision of the past.
In the late Republic, the so-called Marian reforms
supposedly did the following: lowered an existing property bar on
conscription, increased the efficiency of Rome's armies, and made them
available as instruments of political ambition and factional conflict. The consequent civil wars led to changes at every level of Roman society. Augustus' principate established peace and subtly transformed Rome's religious life – or, in the new ideology of Empire, restored it (see below).
Sissel Undheim has argued that, with their Religions of Rome volumes, Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price
dismantled the well-established narrative of the decline of religious
in the late Republic, opening the way for more innovative and dynamic
perspectives. Towards the end of the Republic, religious and political offices became more closely intertwined; the office of pontifex maximus became a de facto consular prerogative.
Augustus was personally vested with an extraordinary breadth of
political, military and priestly powers; at first temporarily, then for
his lifetime. He acquired or was granted an unprecedented number of
Rome's major priesthoods, including that of pontifex maximus; as
he invented none, he could claim them as traditional honours. His
reforms were represented as adaptive, restorative and regulatory, rather
than innovative; most notably his elevation (and membership) of the
ancient Arvales, his timely promotion of the plebeian Compitalia shortly before his election and his patronage of the Vestals as a visible restoration of Roman morality. Augustus obtained the pax deorum,
maintained it for the rest of his reign and adopted a successor to
ensure its continuation. This remained a primary religious and social
duty of emperors.
Roman Empire
Eastern Influence
Under the rule of Augustus, there existed a deliberate campaign to
reinstate previously held belief systems amongst the Roman population.
These once held ideals had been eroded and met with cynicism by this
time.
The imperial order emphasized commemoration of great men and events
which led to the concept and practice of divine kingship. Emperors
postceding Augustus subsequently held the office of Chief Priest
(pontifex maximus) combining both political and religious supremacy
under one title.
Absorption of Cults
The Roman Empire expanded to include different peoples and cultures;
in principle, Rome followed the same inclusionist policies that had
recognised Latin, Etruscan and other Italian peoples, cults and deities
as Roman. Those who acknowledged Rome's hegemony retained their own cult
and religious calendars, independent of Roman religious law. Newly municipal Sabratha built a Capitolium near its existing temple to Liber Pater and Serapis.
Autonomy and concord were official policy, but new foundations by Roman
citizens or their Romanised allies were likely to follow Roman cultic
models.
Romanisation offered distinct political and practical advantages,
especially to local elites. All the known effigies from the 2nd century
AD forum at Cuicul are of emperors or Concordia. By the middle of the 1st century AD, Gaulish Vertault
seems to have abandoned its native cultic sacrifice of horses and dogs
in favour of a newly established, Romanised cult nearby: by the end of
that century, Sabratha's so-called tophet was no longer in use.
Colonial and later Imperial provincial dedications to Rome's Capitoline
Triad were a logical choice, not a centralised legal requirement. Major cult centres to "non-Roman" deities continued to prosper: notable examples include the magnificent Alexandrian Serapium, the temple of Aesculapeus at Pergamum and Apollo's sacred wood at Antioch.
The overall scarcity of evidence for smaller or local cults does
not always imply their neglect; votive inscriptions are inconsistently
scattered throughout Rome's geography and history. Inscribed dedications
were an expensive public declaration, one to be expected within the
Graeco-Roman cultural ambit but by no means universal. Innumerable
smaller, personal or more secretive cults would have persisted and left
no trace.
Military settlement within the empire and at its borders broadened the context of Romanitas.
Rome's citizen-soldiers set up altars to multiple deities, including
their traditional gods, the Imperial genius and local deities –
sometimes with the usefully open-ended dedication to the diis deabusque omnibus (all the gods and goddesses). They also brought Roman "domestic" deities and cult practices with them.
By the same token, the later granting of citizenship to provincials and
their conscription into the legions brought their new cults into the
Roman military.
Traders, legions and other travellers brought home cults originating from Egypt, Greece, Iberia, India and Persia. The cults of Cybele, Isis, Mithras, and Sol Invictus
were particularly important. Some of those were initiatory religions of
intense personal significance, similar to Christianity in those
respects.
In the early Imperial era, the princeps (lit. "first" or "foremost" among citizens) was offered genius-cult as the symbolic paterfamilias
of Rome. His cult had further precedents: popular, unofficial cult
offered to powerful benefactors in Rome: the kingly, god-like honours
granted a Roman general on the day of his triumph; and in the divine honours paid to Roman magnates in the Greek East from at least 195 BC.
The deification of deceased emperors had precedent in Roman domestic cult to the dii parentes (deified ancestors) and the mythic apotheosis of Rome's founders. A deceased emperor granted apotheosis by his successor and the Senate became an official State divus
(divinity). Members of the Imperial family could be granted similar
honours and cult; an Emperor's deceased wife, sister or daughter could
be promoted to diva (female divinity).
The first and last Roman known as a living divus was Julius Caesar,
who seems to have aspired to divine monarchy; he was murdered soon
after. Greek allies had their own traditional cults to rulers as divine
benefactors, and offered similar cult to Caesar's successor, Augustus,
who accepted with the cautious proviso that expatriate Roman citizens
refrain from such worship; it might prove fatal.
By the end of his reign, Augustus had appropriated Rome's political
apparatus – and most of its religious cults – within his "reformed" and
thoroughly integrated system of government. Towards the end of his life,
he cautiously allowed cult to his numen. By then the Imperial cult apparatus was fully developed, first in the Eastern Provinces, then in the West.
Provincial Cult centres offered the amenities and opportunities of a
major Roman town within a local context; bathhouses, shrines and temples
to Roman and local deities, amphitheatres and festivals. In the early
Imperial period, the promotion of local elites to Imperial priesthood
gave them Roman citizenship.
In an empire of great religious and cultural diversity, the
Imperial cult offered a common Roman identity and dynastic stability. In
Rome, the framework of government was recognisably Republican. In the
Provinces, this would not have mattered; in Greece, the emperor was "not
only endowed with special, super-human abilities, but... he was indeed a
visible god" and the little Greek town of Akraiphia could offer official cult to "liberating Zeus Nero for all eternity".
In Rome, state cult to a living emperor acknowledged his rule as divinely approved and constitutional. As princeps
(first citizen) he must respect traditional Republican mores; given
virtually monarchic powers, he must restrain them. He was not a living divus but father of his country (pater patriae),
its pontifex maximus (greatest priest) and at least notionally, its
leading Republican. When he died, his ascent to heaven, or his descent
to join the dii manes was decided by a vote in the Senate. As a divus,
he could receive much the same honours as any other state deity –
libations of wine, garlands, incense, hymns and sacrificial oxen at
games and festivals. What he did in return for these favours is unknown,
but literary hints and the later adoption of divus as a title for Christian Saints suggest him as a heavenly intercessor. In Rome, official cult to a living emperor was directed to his genius;
a small number refused this honour and there is no evidence of any
emperor receiving more than that. In the crises leading up to the
Dominate, Imperial titles and honours multiplied, reaching a peak under
Diocletian. Emperors before him had attempted to guarantee traditional
cults as the core of Roman identity and well-being; refusal of cult
undermined the state and was treasonous.
For at least a century before the establishment of the Augustan
principate, Jews and Judaism were tolerated in Rome by diplomatic treaty
with Judaea's Hellenised elite. Diaspora Jews
had much in common with the overwhelmingly Hellenic or Hellenised
communities that surrounded them. Early Italian synagogues have left few
traces; but one was dedicated in Ostia around the mid-1st century BC
and several more are attested during the Imperial period. Judaea's
enrollment as a client kingdom in 63 BC increased the Jewish diaspora;
in Rome, this led to closer official scrutiny of their religion. Their
synagogues were recognised as legitimate collegia by Julius Caesar. By the Augustan era, the city of Rome was home to several thousand Jews. In some periods under Roman rule, Jews were legally exempt from official sacrifice, under certain conditions. Judaism was a superstitio to Cicero, but the Church FatherTertullian described it as religio licita (an officially permitted religion) in contrast to Christianity.
Roman investigations into early Christianity found it an irreligious,
novel, disobedient, even atheistic sub-sect of Judaism: it appeared to
deny all forms of religion and was therefore superstitio. By the end of the Imperial era, Nicene Christianity was the one permitted Roman religio; all other cults were heretical or pagan superstitiones.
After the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, Emperor Nero accused the Christians as convenient scapegoats, who were later persecuted
and killed. From that point on, Roman official policy towards
Christianity tended towards persecution. During the various Imperial
crises of the 3rd century, "contemporaries were predisposed to decode
any crisis in religious terms", regardless of their allegiance to
particular practices or belief systems. Christianity drew its
traditional base of support from the powerless, who seemed to have no
religious stake in the well-being of the Roman State, and therefore
threatened its existence.
The majority of Rome's elite continued to observe various forms of
inclusive Hellenistic monism; Neoplatonism in particular accommodated
the miraculous and the ascetic within a traditional Graeco-Roman cultic
framework. Christians saw these practices as ungodly, and a primary
cause of economic and political crisis.
In the wake of religious riots in Egypt, the emperor Decius
decreed that all subjects of the Empire must actively seek to benefit
the state through witnessed and certified sacrifice to "ancestral gods"
or suffer a penalty: only Jews were exempt. Decius' edict appealed to whatever common mos maiores
(ancestors' customs) might reunite a politically and socially fractured
Empire and its multitude of cults; no ancestral gods were specified by
name. The fulfillment of sacrificial obligation by loyal subjects would
define them and their gods as Roman. Apostasy was sought, rather than capital punishment. A year after its due deadline, the edict expired.
Valerian
singled out Christianity as a particularly self-interested and
subversive foreign cult, outlawed its assemblies and urged Christians to
sacrifice to Rome's traditional gods.
In another edict, he described Christianity as a threat to Empire – not
yet at its heart but close to it, among Rome's equites and Senators.
Christian apologists interpreted his eventual fate – a disgraceful
capture and death – as divine judgement. The next forty years were
peaceful; the Christian church grew stronger and its literature and
theology gained a higher social and intellectual profile, due in part to
its own search for political toleration and theological coherence. Origen
discussed theological issues with traditionalist elites in a common
Neoplatonist frame of reference – he had written to Decius' predecessor Philip the Arab in similar vein – and Hippolytus recognised a "pagan" basis in Christian heresies. The Christian churches were disunited; Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch was deposed by a synod of 268 both for his doctrines, and for his unworthy, indulgent, elite lifestyle. Meanwhile, Aurelian (270–75) appealed for harmony among his soldiers (concordia militum), stabilised the Empire and its borders and successfully established an official, Hellenic form of unitary cult to the PalmyreneSol Invictus in Rome's Campus Martius.
In 295, Maximilian of Tebessa refused military service; in 298 Marcellus renounced his military oath. Both were executed for treason; both were Christians. At some time around 302, a report of ominous haruspicy in Diocletian's domus and a subsequent (but undated) dictat of placatory sacrifice by the entire military triggered a series of edicts against Christianity.
The first (303 AD) "ordered the destruction of church buildings and
Christian texts, forbade services to be held, degraded officials who
were Christians, re-enslaved imperial freedmen who were Christians, and
reduced the legal rights of all Christians... [Physical] or capital
punishments were not imposed on them" but soon after, several Christians
suspected of attempted arson in the palace were executed. The second edict threatened Christian priests with imprisonment and the third offered them freedom if they performed sacrifice. An edict of 304 enjoined universal sacrifice to traditional gods, in terms that recall the Decian edict.
In some cases and in some places the edicts were strictly
enforced: some Christians resisted and were imprisoned or martyred.
Others complied. Some local communities were not only pre-dominantly
Christian, but powerful and influential; and some provincial authorities
were lenient, notably the Caesar in Gaul, Constantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine I.
Diocletian's successor Galerius maintained anti-Christian policy until
his deathbed revocation in 311, when he asked Christians to pray for
him. "This meant an official recognition of their importance in the
religious world of the Roman empire, although one of the tetrarchs,
Maximinus Daia, still oppressed Christians in his part of the empire up
to 313."
Emperor Constantine and Christianity
The conversion of Constantine I ended the Christian persecutions. Constantine successfully balanced his own role as an instrument of the pax deorum
with the power of the Christian priesthoods in determining what was (in
traditional Roman terms) auspicious – or in Christian terms, what was
orthodox. The edict of Milan (313) redefined Imperial ideology as one of
mutual toleration. Constantine had triumphed under the signum (sign) of the Christ: Christianity was therefore officially embraced along with traditional religions and from his new Eastern capital,
Constantine could be seen to embody both Christian and Hellenic
religious interests. He passed laws to protect Christians from
persecution; he also funded the building of churches, including Saint Peter's basilica. He may have officially ended – or attempted to end – blood sacrifices to the genius
of living emperors, though his Imperial iconography and court
ceremonial outstripped Diocletian's in their elevation of the emperor as
somehow more than human.
Constantine promoted orthodoxy in Christian doctrine, so that
Christianity might become a unitary force, rather than divisive. He
summoned Christian bishops to a meeting, later known as the First Council of Nicaea, at which some 318 bishops (mostly easterners) debated and decided what was orthodox, and what was heresy. The meeting reached consensus on the Nicene Creed. At Constantine's death, he was honored as a Christian and as an Imperial "divus". Later, Philostorgius would criticize those Christians who offered sacrifice at statues of the divus Constantine.
Christianity and traditional Roman religion proved incompatible. From the 2nd century onward, the Church Fathers had condemned the diverse non-Christian religions practiced throughout the Empire as "pagan". Constantine's actions have been regarded by some scholars as causing the rapid growth of Christianity, though many modern scholars disagree. Constantine's unique form of Imperial orthodoxy did not outlast him. After his death in 337, two of his sons, Constantius II and Constans, took over the leadership of the empire and re-divided their Imperial inheritance. Constantius was an Arian and his brothers were Nicene Christians.
Constantine's nephew Julian rejected the "Galilean madness" of his upbringing for an idiosyncratic synthesis of neo-Platonism,
Stoic asceticism and universal solar cult. Julian became Augustus in
361 and actively fostered a religious and cultural pluralism, attempting
a restitution of non-Christian practices and rights.
He proposed the rebuilding of Jerusalem's temple as an Imperial project
and argued against the "irrational impieties" of Christian doctrine. His attempt to restore an Augustan form of principate, with himself as primus inter pares
ended with his death in 363 in Persia, after which his reforms were
reversed or abandoned. The empire once again fell under Christian
control, this time permanently.
In 380, under Theodosius I, Nicene Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Christian heretics
as well as non-Christians were subject to exclusion from public life or
persecution, though Rome's original religious hierarchy and many
aspects of its ritual influenced Christian forms, and many pre-Christian beliefs and practices survived in Christian festivals and local traditions.
The Western emperor Gratian refused the office of pontifex maximus, and against the protests of the Senate, removed the altar of Victory from the Senate house and began the disestablishment of the Vestals. Theodosius I
briefly re-united the Empire: in 391 he officially adopted Nicene
Christianity as the Imperial religion and ended official support for all
other creeds and cults. He not only refused to restore Victory to the
senate-house, but extinguished the Sacred fire of the Vestals and
vacated their temple: the senatorial protest was expressed in a letter
by Quintus Aurelius Symmachus to the Western and Eastern emperors. Ambrose, the influential Bishop of Milan and future saint, wrote urging the rejection of Symmachus's request for tolerance. Yet Theodosius accepted comparison with Hercules and Jupiter as a living divinity in the panegyric of Pacatus,
and despite his active dismantling of Rome's traditional cults and
priesthoods could commend his heirs to its overwhelmingly Hellenic
Senate in traditional Hellenic terms. He was the last emperor of both East and West.
Pagan continuity
Christianity
was introduced late in Mani, with the first Greek temples converted
into churches during the 11th century. Byzantine monk Nikon "the Metanoite" (Νίκων ὁ Μετανοείτε) was sent in the 10th century to convert the predominantly pagan
Maniots. Although his preaching began the conversion process, it took
over 200 years for the majority to accept Christianity fully by the 11th
and 12th centuries. Patrick Leigh Fermor
noted that the Maniots, isolated by mountains, were among the last
Greeks to abandon the old religion, doing so towards the end of the 9th
century:
Sealed off from outside influences by their mountains, the semi-troglodytic
Maniots themselves were the last of the Greeks to be converted. They
only abandoned the old religion of Greece towards the end of the ninth
century. It is surprising to remember that this peninsula of rock, so
near the heart of the Levant from which Christianity springs, should
have been baptised three whole centuries after the arrival of St. Augustine in far-away Kent.
According to Constantine VII in De Administrando Imperio, the Maniots were referred to as 'Hellenes' and only fully Christianized
in the 9th century, despite some church ruins from the 4th century
indicating early Christian presence. The region's mountainous terrain
allowed the Maniots to evade the Eastern Roman Empire's Christianization
efforts, thus preserving pagan traditions, which coincided with
significant years in the life of Gemistos Plethon.