Reading: Religions of Rome, by Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price (1998, Cambridge: CUP)

This is a nice intro for people (like me) who have a certain amount of vague general knowledge about Ancient Rome, but know very little about the specifics and so need to be walked through each historical period with a Classicist holding their hands and making sure they don't get lost.

So far I've only covered the introduction and the pre-imperial chapter, but I was surprised by how teacherite1 many of the priestly collegia seemed. There seems to be a general willingness to accept a lot of vagueness in terms of stuff like which gods were which and how they related to each other- but the attitude towards religious practice is interestingly legalistic. Some examples:

• If things were going badly, the Senate could hold an inquest to find out if it was because someone had messed up a religious ritual (emic term: to see if anyone had committed a vitium, or religious mistake). This involved getting in the augures, who normally didn't actually perform rituals themselves (that was the job of various politicians), but acted kind of like an auditing agency who kept the regulations on how things were meant to be done and so could come in and start checking if everything was being done to proper standards. Then they submitted a report to the Senate, acting sort of like an expert witness (i.e., they stated their expert opinion on the issue, then the Senate officially ruled on whether a vitium had been committed, and if so, whose fault it was) (p.29).

• The pontifices were, from our society's perspective, a sort of amalgam of priest and lawyer- they were experts on the rituals involved in private issues like adoptions and inheritances, which meant that they could adjudicate in disputes between private citizens. They were responsible for maintaining the calendar (which meant informing the Senate of which days were not appropriate for Senate meetings/ court cases/ committee meetings). They were also required to keep track of all the important news of the day and write it on a big public whiteboard (these eventually went into a permanent record that other people could check) (p.25).

“Thus, for instance, the pontifices in 222 BC prevented Marcus Claudius Marcellus from adding the cult of Virtus to an existing temple of Honos, on the ground that it was essential for each of the deities to have their own chapel (cella)- so that, it was argued, in the event of a lightning stroke it would be clear who was the offended deity to whom the appropriate sacrifices should be made.” (p.105)

• If you wanted the gods to do something, then you could publically ask for their help and promise to sacrifice to them if they did so. The gods might or might not accept your offer (so, legally speaking it's not a divine contract so much as an invitation to treat)- but the conditions for acceptance and the nature of the sacrifice are very very clearly specified.

For example, during the Hannibalic War, Rome promised the gods an unusually large sacrifice in exchange for military aid. The record of the vow specifies that if the gods kept Rome safe against both the Carthaginians and the Gauls of North Italy for a period of five years, then they would receive a sacrifice of every domestic animal born during the spring of that year (with the period that constitutes 'spring' being clearly defined). It further specifies that the sacrifice would still count if someone made a mistake during the ritual and that if any of the animals were stolen, then blame would fall on the thief and not the animal's owner or Rome. (p.82)

• The Hannibalic War also seems to have been a period in which Romans devoted an unusual level of attention to Juno-worship. This may have been because she was seen as the equivalent of Astarte, the protective goddess of Carthage, and thus someone who could have a major influence over the war. According to Servius, writing some time after the fact, attempts to 'summon out' Juno from Carthage (evocata) failed during the war and were only eventually successful in 146 BC. However, he states that they did at least succeed in 'placating' her (exorata). (p.82)

Sadly, the book is also giving me the impression that the study of Classics has attracted a certain number of people fixated on the idea that there was some period or culture which counts as 'authentic' ancient Rome, meaning that if you come across any historical detail which seems to offend your aesthetic sensibilities then it must be some kind of foreign import or sign that the Ancient Ways had become corrupt and degenerate. The upshot is that Religions of Rome occasionally has to pause to acknowledge arguments which, on the the face of things, seem utterly ridiculous.

For example, it sounds as though our concept of 'priest' lacked an exact analogue in ancient Rome- i.e. there were various people whose fulltime job involved maintaining a temple or a set of 'religious' rituals, but there was no sharp line between these and secular admin jobs. Also it sounds like there was little or no emic sense that pontifices and augures and Salii and Vestals and haruspicers and so on constituted a single category of occupation who were more like each other than they were like any other professional group. There are apparently theorists who argue that, on the contrary, this superficial diversity masks a sort of deep-down schema of 'priests' as a separate class of people who absolutely had to be kept separate from 'secular society' (p.28-9). However, the impression I'm getting from Beard et al. is that this opinion rests pretty much on the argument from absence- if anyone else knows anything about it, I'd appreciate being chucked a reference.

1 See: here">http://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/campaign/teacher.asp?NavID=40>here. The setting is fictional and is thus going to err on the side of Eurocentrism for the sake of accessibility, but anyone who's heard my rants against the State of the World Today is aware that I find these labels useful, though not entirely serious.