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Before outlining our own approach some comment is appropriate on how we use the terms Religion, Religions and Religious since there has been much discussion in recent years of how appropriate these ideas are to describe ancient and non-Christian ritual and belief in particular.

Religions are understood as traditions of religious practices, conceptions, and institutions, in some contexts even fully developed organisations. According to an important strain of sociological thought going back to Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), we are dealing here with social products,⁷ as a rule with groups of people normally living together within a territory, who withhold the central core of their life together, their shared orientation, from the necessity of daily discussion by investing it in forms of religious symbolism. There emerges a system of signs whose immanence is preserved by the performance of rituals, and which seeks to explain the world in images, narratives, written texts, or refined dogma, and to determine behaviour by the use of ethical imperatives, often by recourse to an effective apparatus of sanctions (for instance through the power of the state), but sometimes even without that implied threat. Many volumes within the series Die Religionen der Menschheit are following the first, tradition-based, and the second, geographically defined, line of understanding.

Such a conception of religion meets its limits when it seeks to explain religious pluralism, the enduring coexistence of different, mutually contradictory conceptions and practices, or the quite distinct relationship of individuals with religion on which lived ancient religion is focusing. This conception of Religion has already been attacked as being too closely oriented to ›western‹, and above all Christian religious and conceptual history, and criticized for its unquestioned and unquestioning ›colonial‹ transference to other cultures.⁸ It has similarly problematic ramifications when we seek to apply it to Antiquity.⁹ The reason for this also lies in the present. The dissolution of traditional allegiances frequently to be observed in our time is seen as religious individualism, the disappearance of religion, or even the displacement of collective religion by individual spirituality.¹⁰ This perspective then becomes associated with the complementary assumption that early societies and their religions must have been characterized by a high level of collectivism. We shall see how a problematic assumption in respect of the present day creates a highly distorted picture of the past.¹¹

But it is not the notion of religion that we have to drop. In demand is a concept of religion that enables us to describe the aforementioned changes in the social location and individual significance of religion. This can successfully be achieved by conceiving of religion from the standpoint of the individual and his or her social involvement. Only in rare instances does such lived ancient religion coalesce into networks and organized systems, to resemble what we normally categorize as religions, expressed in written texts that may then develop an enduring autonomous existence of enormous proportions.

How, then, is religion to be modelled? We understand the religion of the epoch in question as comprising the situative inclusion of agents (whether they be described as divine or gods, demons or angels, the dead or the immortal) who are in a particular respect beyond or above that situation. Above all, however, their presence, their collaboration, their significance in a particular situation is not simply an unquestioned given: other human participants in the situation might regard them as invisible, silent, inactive, or simply absent, perhaps even non-existent. Succinctly, religious activity is present at a time and a place where, in a particular situation, at least one human individual includes such agents in his or her communication with other humans, whether by merely referring to those agents or by directly addressing them.

Even in ancient cultures, however, such a strategy of communication or action is not simply self-evident. It was beset with risks in respect of personal and functional credibility. Opposition hardly ever implied a general statement that the gods did not exist; it would rather question the assertion that one particular deity, whether Jupiter or Hercules, had helped or would help oneself or others, or question the claim that Fortuna or ›fate‹ stood behind one’s own actions. In the same vein also an occasional obvious success of a prayer or curse did not produce unquestionable proof, but it could also sustain the plausibility of such claims in the face of many unfulfilled prayers. Ascribing authority to invisible agents and exercising corresponding circumspection in one’s actions appears, as postulated by evolutionists, to have been conducive to survival and accordingly favoured in human development;¹² but the same strategy has always tended to be seen by one’s fellow humans as presenting an Achilles’ heel, and its systematization has been liable to provoke organized dissent.¹³ It is not simply the case that the past was more pious. Countless thousands brought small gifts to Roman temples to show their gratitude or give emphasis to their requests; millions did not. Millions buried their deceased children or parents with care, and provided them with grave goods; countless millions contented themselves with disposing of the corpses.

As a consequence, we have to ask, where the use of religious communication and religious activity strengthened the agency of the individual, his or her competence and creativity in dealing with problems that sometimes went beyond the everyday. Where did reference to not indisputably plausible agents contribute to the formation of collective identities that enabled the individual to act or think as part of a group, of a social formation that might vary greatly in form and strength, no matter whether it existed in actuality or only in the imagination or fevered awareness of a few people? We have defined religion as the extension of particular environments beyond the immediately plausible social milieu of living humans in specific forms of agency, identity formulation, communication. What is no longer ›immediately plausible‹ in a relevant milieu may vary in ways that are entirely culture-dependent; plausibility, ›worthiness of applause‹, is itself a communicative, rhetorical category. In the one instance it might be the dead, in another gods conceived of in human form, even places that are no longer definable in terms of mere topography: or humans beyond a sea. Interpretation and assignment of what is disputed in a culture depends on the boundaries drawn by the academic observer.

A high level of investment in the construction of initially improbable actors as ›social partners‹ consistently creates an ›excess‹ of personal consolidation, power, or problem-solving capacity in the person making that investment, an outcome that in turn becomes precarious on account of the disadvantage caused to others, who may seek to defend themselves against it. Sacralisation, declaring objects or processes in the immediately plausible, visible environment to be ›holy‹, is an element of such an investment strategy.¹⁴ The investment metaphor can easily be related to the enormous scale on which religions have recourse to media, cult images and sanctuaries, as well as complex rituals and strategies in respect of texts and communication, as has been indicated under the rubric of religious communication. We should also, however, be curious about inferior status reinforced by religion, a situation countered with strategies of social change by some individuals in a religious context, while others turn their backs on religion, to pursue social mobility on their own account (when they do not turn to quietism).

Such questions and problems indicate the role of concepts of ›religion‹. They help to stimulate and to systematize observations. Many of the questions thus provoked cannot be answered for ancient or ›Roman‹ religion. Many of the details will not be applicable to other cultural configurations.