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When we originally discussed how to present the religious practices of the Roman Empire in the Imperial period to the readers of Religionen der Menschheit, we decided not to try to summarise or replicate the high quality recent accounts framed in the terms mentioned at the beginning. This volume offers something different and complementary, although also self-sufficient and self-contained. Rather than beginning from institutions and structures, we aim to explore Roman ritual and religious thought as a lived religion, a bundle of practices and attitudes, habits and routines, practiced and understood by members of Roman society and subjects of the Roman state. The term Lived Religion acknowledges the inspiration of a broad set of approaches very different to the structuralist and post-structuralist anthropologies that inspired most accounts of Roman religion as a system. The concept of ›lived religion‹ was developed in the late 1990s in the context of the study of present-day religions. In such a framework, ›religion‹ is understood as a spectrum of experiences, actions, and beliefs and communications hinging on human communication with super-human or even transcendent agent(s), for the ancient Mediterranean usually conceptualized as ›gods‹. Material symbols, elaborate forms of representation, and ritualization are called upon for the success of communication with these addressees.¹⁵

Such a communication at the same time implies the forging or—at times—rejection of human alliances. Thus, the existence and importance of culturally stabilized forms of rituals and concepts and people who are invested in developing and defending them cannot be denied. Traditions claimed, kept and re-invented; the religious practices of elites, demonstratively practiced; and emerging forms of institutionalised religion in complex sanctuaries or professionalised priesthoods were part and parcel of such lived religion in antiquity. Members of the elites of circum-Mediterranean ancient cities (we know much less about tribal areas) certainly used the possibilities offered by religious communication for various purposes. For political actors, reference to divine agents was ideally suited to creating a communicative space beyond the families and clans. Thus, they could emphasize shared interests and yet could also use religious activity as a field in which to compete and obtain distinction. This flexibility helped ritual activity and religious architecture to achieve a high degree of dynamism: ever new possibilities of religious communication were invented, or existing traditions appropriated and altered in order to deal with the problems thrown up by the increasing geographic extent of ancient empires, urban growth or increasing social differentiation and competition. ›Civic religion‹ as just mentioned could be reconceptualised as part of lived religion rather than as the over-arching frameworks allowing for inconsequential acts of popular religion and its irrelevant variations and innovations respectively a politically similar unimportant sector of elective cults.¹⁶

By contrast with contemporary anthropological research, ›ancient lived religion‹ goes far beyond concepts like ›everyday religion‹ or ›popular religion‹.¹⁷ Vice versa, individual religious practices are not entirely subjective. There are religious norms, there are exemplary official practices, there are control mechanisms. For the historian ›lived religion‹ also points to the fact that our evidence is biased. It is precisely such institutions and norms that tend to predominate in the surviving evidence from antiquity. Such norms, too, are the outcome of a communicative strategy on the part of agents in positions of power or larger means. If we observe religion in the making—as is stressed here—institutions or beliefs are not simply culturally given, but are themselves aggregates of individual practices—as well as of the latters’ constraints. The specific forms of religion-as-lived are barely comprehensible in the absence of specific modes of individual appropriation of motives and models offered by traditions, even when this took the form of the radical rejection of dominant ways of life, as in asceticism or martyrdom. For the concrete forms and above all for their survival to the present day to be available to us as ›evidence‹, cultural techniques such as reading and writing, the interpretation of mythical or philosophical texts, rituals, pilgrimages and prayer, and the various media of representation of deities in and out of sanctuaries are decisive.

The notion of agency is important here. Agency is not about the lonely individual, but about the interaction of individuals with structures, structures, which are themselves the result of individual actions.¹⁸ In view of the normative tagging of teachings, traditions, narratives etc. in the field of religion, and in view of the normative claims raised by some of the agents—the question of how ideas are taken up and are modified by others or in other words—the specification of processes of reception is of particular importance. Talking of lived religion offers a frame for a description of the formative influence of professional providers, of law and other legal norms, of philosophical thinking and intellectual reflections in literary or reconstructed oral form, of social networks and socialization, of lavish performances in public spaces (or performances run by associations) with recourse to individual conduct in rituals and religious context.

Against this background this volume implies a methodological reorientation in order to achieve a richer description of ancient religious practices and concepts and their interaction and change in space and over time. In the individual chapters we are focusing on religious practices as situational appropriations¹⁹ as well as individual realizations of locally or regionally established, family or group ›traditions‹. Combining micro- and macro-historical perspective, the range of individual variations and innovations is taken seriously as a potential driver of long-term changes, even against contemporary as well as later, academic observers, who took for granted that a coherent set of religious networks²⁰ and cultural rules defined individual behaviour. The constitution of individual religious agents and the elaboration of collective identities (or even tangible social groups) are presented as an intertwined process.

Replacing the reproduction of traditional religious norms (a process usually judged as incomplete and faulty) by the selective and creative ›appropriation‹ of individual actors is central. But the ›lived ancient religion‹ approach induces further methodological modifications in the process of selecting and interpreting the evidence. Its focus is on experience rather than on symbols. We do not start from lists of gods, mythologems or an inventory of rituals. The concept of experience has not yet been brought fully to bear on ancient religion outside Judaism and Christianity, even if ›experience‹ has been used in a book title already by Fowler²¹ and increasingly in phrases indicating the stress on the subjective side of ancient culture by French structuralists and Anglophone anthropologists.²² For many, the very subjective nature of ›experience‹ seems to be in conflict with the dearth of ancient sources. However, there is a lot of communicated, narrated experience in even formulaic texts. The focus on ›experience‹ points to the individual prehistory and consequences of acts of religious communication and stresses the roles of the viewer and user of images, and also more or less sacralised space in open and domestic contexts. For material culture, the term ›archaeology of religious experience‹ addresses this perspective and stresses individual experience both domestically and in the service of public religious infrastructure.²³

A second focus is on culture in interaction rather than on habitus, organisation or culture as text. Religion in the making²⁴ is not to be grasped in terms of individual isolation, but is characterised by diverse social contexts that are appropriated, reproduced and informed by the actors on relevant occasions. Like the anthropological concept of ›lived religion‹, the concept of ›culture in interaction‹ has been developed in the ethnographic analysis of contemporary societies. Focusing on situational communication in groups, the concept aims to identify specific ›group styles‹, which modify the use of linguistic as well as behavioural register within cultural contexts.²⁵

As a consequence, we have chosen not to organise the volume in terms of a series of chapters each addressed to particular ›cults‹ treated as stable and exclusive groups of people or ›proto-religions‹. Our primary focus is not on competing ›religions‹ or ›cults‹, but symbols as they assumed ever new configurations within a broad cultural space.²⁶ It was religious professionals who made enormous efforts to establish and secure group boundaries. ›Religions‹ as seen ›from below‹ are the product of attempts—often by just a few individuals—to occasionally create order and boundaries, rather than an imperfect reproduction on the part of the citizens of some normative system. Thus, the people that do religion are not a group and do not behave according to that group’s norms. Instead, by trying to embody imagined norms they form a group in a specific public context, according to the situational necessities of forming alliances, displaying differences, pretending membership.²⁷ For the most thoroughly defined and stabilised social contexts of ritual interaction—namely the nuclear and wider family (including slaves), clans, neighbourhoods, professional bodies, and voluntary associations (usually meeting three or four times a year), intellectual networks supported by letters and the exchange of manuscripts²⁸—the concept helps theorise situational differences in reproducing cultural religious representations as well as in evoking less widely shared knowledge and practices.

The authors of the essays gathered together in this volume are not doctrinaire followers of one particular set of investigative protocols. Our work develops out of common discussions, many framed within the ERC funded Lived Ancient Religion project.²⁹ But our methods are eclectic as is our inspiration. What we have in common is a commitment to begin with the agency and understanding of practitioners, with the day-to-day business of existing in a world inflected with peculiarly Roman views of the gods and of the sacred. That starting point has not just led us through a different series of theoretical orientations, some deriving from religious studies, others from a wider range of social studies. It has also led us to emphasize different categories of evidence, especially the material traces of ritual. And we have found that if one does begin an exploration of Roman religion from, say, anatomical votives or the archaeology of graves rather than Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods and Augustine’s City of God a rather different picture emerges.³⁰ It is in the nature of an approach of this kind that we do not seek to depose the knowledge orders of an earlier generation and replace them with our own. Instead we seek to offer a different route through the religion of the Romans (writ large), one which opens up some novel panoramas, suggests new contrasts (and similarities with) other traditions, and has more to say than some other general accounts about the material traces of Roman cult and the experiences of individual members of Roman society.