Читать книгу Religion in the Roman Empire - Группа авторов - Страница 24

When we characterize ancient paganism, we sometimes speak of religious freedom. It is true that individuals were in principle free, at least outside the public sphere, to worship the gods they wanted. Would not the omnipresence of the gods and the multiplicity of places of worship in Pompeii be a perfect illustration of this? The nature of the gods encountered in the public square, in the streets and houses of Pompeii seems to show, however, that free choice was closely controlled by the omnipotence of the great public gods, by community and civic constraints (the control of the authorities and the paterfamilias) without forgetting the involuntary servitude of the representatives, the implicit belief as defined by sociologists (Fig. 9).¹⁸ Obviously, the gods or the location of shrines are repeated from one neighbourhood to another or from one house to another. It is not diversity that dominates, but rather a certain uniformity and great coherence in the location of religious representations. Some easily recognizable divine personalities provided a close protective network with, on a daily basis, a repetition of the same forms of ritual: the same fruits were thus offered, in various combinations, on the flame of the domestic altar and on the tombs. Certainly, the idea of the gods that individuals held for themselves was in principle a personal matter, although the abundance of standardized images on walls and facades apparently left little room for very elaborate personal conceptions of the divine, at least for the vast majority of the population. The daily gods were in the end mainly the great gods of the city whose presence and means of action had to be ensured, in all places and under all circumstances.

Fig. 10: Ceremony painted in the kitchen of the house of Sutoria Primigenia (1, 13, 2). The family attends the sacrifice led by the paterfamilias (William Van Andringa cliché).

Thus, the picture drawn from Pompeii’s documentation reveals a pantheon that is not very varied, but carefully ordered and hierarchical according to the needs of circumstances, community circles and places of activity. The Pompeians sought above all the proximity of the gods they knew, a guarantee of a »daily tranquillity«.¹⁹ The gods were everywhere, but everyone in their place, in the countryside and in the city, in the public square, at crossroads, in houses or necropolises. »Our region offers such an assistance of deities that a god meets himself there more easily than a man,« Quartilla claims, with humour, in Petronius’ Satyricon (17.5), written during the last decades of Pompeii. The deities, geniuses and heroes lived with men; they had their own homes, temples, and sponsored everyday activities that interested public and professional life as much as the intimacy of the domestic world. Their status certainly made them superior beings, but they were easily accessible, present or made present in any place of daily life. The gods were finally considered as benevolent patrons who had to be made attentive by celebrating a sacrifice, most often a simple libation or an offering of a few burnt fruits on the flame, a gesture undoubtedly largely reflected in and guided by the many paintings in lararia which represent the same scene and officiants. The rituals made it possible to keep the attention of the gods awake, to modulate the meaning of the tributes paid according to the gods and communities involved, in other words according to the place. They also allowed a hierarchy of religious acts. While the Venus of the public square received animal victims, in principle female and white animals²⁰, slaughtered at the foot of the monumental altar, the domestic Venus was satisfied with a toast or a few minor offerings, a little incense, wine, a few fruits. Context guided the ritual action.

All this defined piety and founded the Roman religion defined by orthopraxy, that is, the accomplishment of an action in favour of the gods judged in accordance with tradition. On this point, recent archaeology provides some insights into the composition of rituals and the transmission of ritual know-how in a society like that of Pompeii. A few years before the destruction of the city by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, lightning struck a house in the south-eastern districts, the House of Four Styles (I, 8, 17), an event that led to the intervention of a specialist (perhaps a haruspex) in order to interpret the phenomenon and ensure a funeral of the lightning according to Roman custom. The recent excavation of the mound showed that it was a buried structure, which the Romans called bidental, consecrated according to specific rules: a site was chosen in the garden, sheltered from view and places of passage, an organized and careful collection of the materials affected by the lightning was carried out, the order was given to freeze the deposit with liquid mortar and to constitute a masonry mound with selected lightning elements.

Given we know that the ritual knowledge of the Romans was not transmitted in writing, the question arises of how the procedure evident in the garden of the House of the Four Styles was determined. How were rituals transmitted in a religion defined by orthopraxis, in other words on ritual action? Obviously the care taken in the burial of lightning in the House of the Four Styles indicates a well mastered ritual framework, the respect of elementary principles concerning the location of the structure and the necessary burial of the elements struck. These principles were known to Latin authors and undoubtedly from the fulgural books preserved in Rome.²¹ However, a comparison of the Pompeii bidental with other structures attested by archaeology in Rome, Ostia, Aquileia, Minturnae and elsewhere shows that, despite the respect of these few general principles, lightning could be buried according to various methods, defined by the designer and according to local know-how. The ritual was not only performed according to tradition and reinvented, it was tirelessly reconstructed, each time as a new object, as if the meaning ultimately resided in this unique construction and not only in the repetition of a general schema. It was the interpretation and implementation that were fundamental, the correct interpretation and project management entrusted to a specialist, deemed capable of devising the ritual, who was recognized as having the authority to do so.²²

Comparable principles are found in the devising of funeral rites and in their transmission. Indeed, the traces found in funeral enclosures, far from showing complex or frozen sequences, confirm the extreme plasticity of Roman ritual, articulated on a general framework that formed the ritual catchment, again well recognized by literary tradition. In fact, the transformation of the deceased (by fire) and the deposition of her or his remains in the grave were accompanied by ritual sequences involving a few objects, an oil lamp, perfume bottles, a coin, or food products burned on the flame of the pyre in honour of the deceased, usually some fruit, a little meat or fish placed on a plate. These few objects and products are recurrent; they were clearly sufficient to build the otherness of death, to structure the performance of local funeral beliefs, a necessary guarantee of the proper installation of the deceased in their final resting place.²³ The description of the gestures allowed by archaeology undoubtedly places us as close as possible to the meaning of the rites, because much of it resides in the objects and products themselves as well as in their manipulation.²⁴ The objects placed or broken, the light of the lamp (which marked the opposition to the darkness of death), the perfume exhaled (which marked the opposition to the bad smell of death), the money of little value offered (which accepted the installation of the deceased), the few items of luxury foods placed at the stake could certainly be interpreted in the light of general knowledge transmitted by Roman culture, written and oral (on the purification, the transformation of the deceased or the infernal gods). The essential factor, however, laid in the intrinsic power of these objects, in their ability to generate an experience, a sensual, emotional framework and obviously in their manipulation at different moments allowing to build, to orchestrate the funeral ceremony. The meaning was constructed in the course of the performance of the ritual, rather than predetermined in advance, as is evidenced by the variety of gestures deployed and the varied fate given to the objects. Far from being mere accessories, the oil lamp, the perfume, the coin participated in the construction of the ritual signifier, thanks to a cleverly orchestrated articulation by individuals between a common knowledge, relatively schematic and general, but sufficient to express the same tradition, and the personal or family initiative that gave its true meaning to the rite²⁵.