Religion in Republican Rome
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Roman religion as we know it is largely the product of the middle and late republic, the period falling roughly between the victory of Rome over its Latin allies in 338 B.C.E. and the attempt of the Italian peoples in the Social War to stop Roman domination, resulting in the victory of Rome over all of Italy in 89 B.C.E. This period witnessed the expansion and elaboration of large public rituals such as the games and the triumph as well as significant changes to Roman intellectual life, including the emergence of new media like the written calendar and new genres such as law, antiquarian writing, and philosophical discourse. In Religion in Republican Rome Jörg Rüpke argues that religious change in the period is best understood as a process of rationalization: rules and principles were abstracted from practice, then made the object of a specialized discourse with its own rules of argument and institutional loci. Thus codified and elaborated, these then guided future conduct and elaboration. Rüpke concentrates on figures both famous and less well known, including Gnaeus Flavius, Ennius, Accius, Varro, Cicero, and Julius Caesar. He contextualizes the development of rational argument about religion and antiquarian systematization of religious practices with respect to two complex processes: Roman expansion in its manifold dimensions on the one hand and cultural exchange between Greece and Rome on the other.
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Religion in Republican Rome
Clifford Ando, Series Editor
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Apart from the representation of a deity’s presence and power by a fenced-off area, the statuary representation of the deity is another—and not mutually exclusive—strategy to improve ritual communication. Such a strategy—not supplanting but supplementing the representation of humans— was present at Rome at least from the late sixth century onward. Life-size or nearly life-size painted terra-cotta statues dominated the period analyzed here,33 more and more rivaled by metal and marble statues later on. Occasionally, wooden statues were used. Such permanent epiphanies tended to be housed in temple buildings, marking the presence of the deity as well as restricting access.34 Ongoing processes of identification of those representations, through attributes and imagery from narratives on the architecture, regularly raised among the ancients the problem of the gods’ own translocal identities and thus encouraged the production of narratives of transfer or spontaneous movement.
In a historical perspective, it is important to remember that, for literary texts as for temples, the reconstruction of potential “meanings” cannot be restricted to the moment of creation but has to cover the long period of usage (and maybe different usages), too.35 Thus, even as the producers, initiators, and actual builders of temples in this period participated in rivalries and networks of exchange at a translocal level—some individuals were no doubt drawn from other towns—so, too, the users and spectators of these built complexes were probably themselves engaged in such rivalries and translocal relationships. In early Rome, important nodes in these networks of exchange would have included Greek and Carthaginian/Punic as well as Etruscan and Latin culture and localities. In many Latin towns, as mentioned above in regard to the so-called princely tombs, artistic techniques were at least as developed as they were at Rome. Apart from the terra-cotta fragments from the San Omobono finds, the terra-cotta acroter statue of Apollo from the Portonaccio temple at Veii and figures from the larger temple of Pyrgi (both in the Museum of the Villa Giulia, Rome) and the statue of Iuno Sospita from Lanuvium give an impression of what the statues in the Capitoline temple might have looked like.
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