Religions of Rome, part 2

Religions of Rome keeps on giving. A couple of nice tidbits:

p.126-8
Obnuntiatio was an established convention whereby someone could legitimately prevent the process of legislation by claiming that he had seen bad omens (or perhaps simply that he would be watching for bad omens; the surviving texts aren't clear). However, the standard procedure for this involved making an official statement to the magistrate that you would be watching the skies (de caelo spectare). This caused a certain amount of legal confusion in 59 BC, when the consul Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus apparently became unable to leave his house for fear of being beaten up by Julius Caesar's henchmen (instead staying home and repeatedly sending messages that he was still watching the sky and so passage of Caesar's land redistribution plan should be halted immediately. Leonard Nimoy would be proud).

p.130
"Throughout his account of these events [Clodius' trial] in his letters to Atticus, Cicero huffs and puffs- deriding (as he had to) almost every aspect of the procedure, from the mistaken tactics of his own allies to the failure at one stage in the voting proceedings to produce any ballot papers with the option 'yes' on them."

More generally, the book is turning out to be interesting in the context of the debate over whether 'religion' is valid as an etic term. A lot of effort has been put into this debate over the course of the 20th century, so I'm not going to do it justice properly here- but the basic point is that it appears to be very very difficult to come up with a definition of 'religion' which:

• covers all human cultures


• is not tautological


• excludes everything which most Westerners are uncomfortable labelling as 'religious' (e.g. Marxism, humanism, science)


• includes all the things which most Westerners want to label as 'religious' (e.g. Confucianism, Buddhism)

Several people have had a go at this game, but so far no one has succeeded in fixing their definition as the standard for academia (although arguably this says more about the social sciences and its aversion for fixed terms than it does about religion per se, and admittedly some people like Spiro and Geertz have at least produced definitions which are widely drawn on). Basically, the problem seems to boil down to the fact that while Western culture has a relatively clear distinction between stuff that is 'religious' and stuff that is 'secular', other cultures don't appear to. This leads to the argument that 'religion' is a word which only makes sense in relation to the West and cultures which have been significantly influenced by the West (although admittedly the number of people in the latter box is increasing these days).

One book which makes this argument pretty well is Peter Beyer's Religions in Global Society (2006, London: Routledge). His view is that the concept of 'religion' as a distinct social sphere did not exist in most cultures until extensive contact with the West happened, and that nowadays the debate over whether something is or is not a religion is less a definitional issue and more of a political and legal one (i.e. asking a social group "are you a religion?" is not really asking them "do you fulfil some well-defined abstract criteria?" -it's more a case of asking things like "do you want to qualify for certain kinds of tax break? Do you want to appeal to the kind of people who regard themselves as atheists?")

A nice example of this is Shinto- Beyer argues that since the West led Japan to adopt the idea of 'religion' as a concept distinct from other aspects of society, there's been an ongoing debate between Shinto-supporters who want it defined as a religion and those who don't. To some extent, this is a question that can be rephrased as: "to what extent do we want Shinto to resemble Christianity in the modern West?" E.g. "is state support for Shinto compatible with postwar Japanese laws of separation of religion and the state? Does labelling it as 'religion' imply that it's possible for someone to renounce it, and if so, is this the message we want to be sending people? On the other hand, does calling it 'religion' stress the idea that it's worthy of a kind of default respect which a 'secular' philosophy might not be?" (see also John K. Nelson's excellent ethnography Enduring Identities: the guise of Shinto in contemporary Japan. Beyond this and Beyer, I don't actually know very much about Shinto, so I may be misrepresenting the emic debate. I'm currently borrowing a copy of Hardacre's Shinto and the State, which apparently goes into the issue in more detail, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet).

So I've frequently seen the argument that 'religion' is a distinctively Western concept, but so far I haven't read anything that attempts to trace the concept's genesis in any great detail (this is probably because I haven't specifically gone looking yet; it seems like an obvious thing for someone to go write about). As such, looking at what we now term 'religion' in pre-Christian Rome seems like a good idea. So, does Beard et al.'s book give the impression that 'religion' existed in Rome as an emic concept?

So far the answer seems to be 'no'. Granted, Beard et al. haven't yet tackled the question head on (although I'm only up to the section on the early imperial period). I'm also sure that there's a source somewhere which attempts to answer this question from the perspective of someone who's actually studied Classics (unlike me). But the impression I'm getting at the moment is that the sort of rituals which my society would normally label 'religious' in Rome were pretty tightly bound up with stuff that I'd normally be inclined to label as 'secular politics'. One example of this is the stuff I mentioned in my previous post over the extent to which the modern concept of 'priest' is applicable in Ancient Rome. Since then, Beard et al. have mentioned other things which feed into this debate. Some examples which I need to think about:

"It would have made no sense in Roman terms to have claimed rights to political power without also claiming rights to religious authority and expertise." (p.135, stated in relation to the plebeians' struggle to gain places in the pontifical and augural colleges- in other words, to gain access to what we might today see as high-status 'priesthoods').

"Crucially, there is no sign in any Roman political debate that any public figure ever openly rejected the traditional framework for understanding the gods' relations with humankind. Political arguments consisted in large part of accusations that 'the other side' had neglected their proper duty to the gods, or had flouted divine law. It was a competition (in our terms) about how, and by whom, access to the god was to be controlled- not about rival claims on the importance or existence of the divine. So far as we can tell, no radical political stance brought with it a fundamental challenge to the traditional assumptions of how the gods operated in the world. There were, to be sure, as there always had been, individual cults and individual deities that were invested (for various reasons) with a particular popular resonance. The temple of Ceres, for example, as we have seen, had special 'plebeian' associations from the early Republic; likewise the cult of the Lares Compitales (at local shrines throughout the regions (vici) of the city) was a centre of religious and social life for, particularly, slaves and poor (and was later to be developed by Augustus precisely for its popular associations) [...] There was always likely to be choices and preferences of this kind in any polytheism. But if these cults did act as a focus for an entirely different view of man's relations with gods, no evidence has survived to suggest it." (p.139)

"The honours granted to Julius Caesar immediately before his assassination suggest that he had been accorded the status of a god- or something very like it: he had, for example, the right to have a priest (flamen) of his cult, to adorn his house with a pediment (as if it were a temple) and to place his own image in formal processions of the images of the gods. Shortly after his death, he was given other marks of divine status: altars, sacrifices, a temple and in 42 BC a formal decree of divination, making him divus Julius. Ever since the moment they were granted, these honours- particularly those granted before his death- have been the focus of debate. If you ask the question 'had Caesar officially become a Roman god, or not, before his death? Was he, or was he not a deity?" you will not find a clear answer. Predictably both Roman writers and modern scholars offer different and often contradictory views." (p.140-1)

Sidenote: I've always been given to understand that Caesar was killed because people were scared he was trying to turn himself into a king. Possibly this is a popular misconception- if not, it makes the whole thing even harder to get my head around, since it seems to suggest that people at the time were more uncomfortable with the idea of King Julius than with Julius the Living God. Anyone have any insight on this?

"Traditionally religion was deeply embedded in the political institutions of Rome: the political elite were at the same time those who controlled human relations with the gods; the senate, more than any other single institution, was the central locus of 'religious' and 'political' power. In many respects this remained as true at the end of the Republic as it had been two or three centuries earlier. But at the same time, we can trace- at least over the last century BC- the beginning of a progression towards the isolation of 'religion' as an autonomous area of human activity, with its own rules, its own technical and professional discourse. In this section we shall look at two particular aspects of this process: first, the development of more sharply defined boundaries between different types of religious experience: between the licit and the illicit, between religion and magic." (p.150)

"In the late Republic, in other words, we begin for the first time to hear of practices designated as 'magical'. Many of these practices had, in fact, been part of religious activity at Rome as far back as you could trace; what was new was precisely their designation as 'magical' and the definition of magic as a separate category. [...] magic is not a single [cross-cultural] category at all, but a term applied to a set of operations whose rules conflict with the prevailing rules of religion, science or logic of the society concerned. And so, for the historian, the interest of what we may choose to call 'magic' lies in how that conflict is defined, what particular practices are perceived as breaking the rules, and how that perception changes over time." (p.154, emp. mine)

"We have almost no evidence at all for the circumstances that led to the destruction of the shrines of Isis in (probably) 59, 58, 53, 50 and again in 48 BC; nor, for that matter, for those that led to the expulsion of the astrologers (Chaldaei) from Rome in 139 BC. But we can make a plausible guess at one or two factors that may have lain behind such an action. The cult of Isis, with its independent priesthood and its devotion to a personal and caring deity could represent (like the Bacchic cult) a potentially dangerous alternative society, out of the control of the traditional political elite. Likewise astrology, with its specialised form of religious knowledge in the hands of a set of religious experts outside the political groups of the city, necessarily constituted a separate (and perhaps rival) focus of religious power. Although it did not offer a social alternative in the sense of group membership, it represented (as we have seen in other areas before) a form of religious differentiation which threatened the undifferentiated politico-religious amalgam of Roman practice." (p.161)

Finally, there's an interesting source from a contemporary Greek writer named Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who apparently argued that the Romans were more Greek than the Greeks (on the grounds that they had taken "the best customs in use among the Greeks" while rejecting "all the traditional [Greek] myths concerning the gods, which contain blasphemies and calumnies against them." He elaborated that by 'blasphemies and calumnies', he meant:

• theogonies (stories in which the gods fight for supremacy- e.g. the story of how Zeus overthrew Kronos)


• stories in which gods warred with mortals or were subjugated by them (e.g. the bit in the Iliad about how Apollo briefly served as a herdsman to the mortal King Laomedon)


• rituals which made reference to gods dying, or which required worshippers to behave disreputably (e.g. the mysteries of Dionysius or Persephone)

Wikipedia says he died some time relatively soon after 7 BC- that's a shame; I would have liked to see what he made of Christianity.

I've still got just under half the book to finish. If I decide to keep trawling ancient Roman stuff, I might have a look for readable translations of Cicero, since Beard et al. make him sound like an interesting guy (although I'd probably have no idea who he was if I hadn't read Allan Massie's fictional autobiography of Augustus, ages and ages ago- quite a good book for getting your head around the period, although like almost all autobiographies it suffers from a lack of neat character arcs). While I remember: I should also attempt to track down a library copy of CS Lewis' The Problem of Pain, because I skimmed the first part in Waterstone's the other day and it looks like he's come up with a theodicy which I hadn't heard of before.