Читать книгу Religion in Republican Rome - Jorg Rupke - Страница 10

Chapter 3

Changes in Religious Festivals

As sketched in the previous chapter, the mixture of Roman festivals changed from the fifth and fourth to the second and first centuries, a “long” third century being the turning point. How is this change related to the religious and political development of the Republic? I contended that the ritual changes are related to the changing role of the Senate and the nobility and to the changing notion of “public” in the term res publica. As most of our sources stem from the last century of the Republic—the exceptions being imperial, not earlier—reconstruction of historical change in the Republic is a notoriously difficult problem. And yet the attempt has to be made, helped by historico-critical approaches toward the texts, nontextual evidence, and models informed by results of comparative research. In order to keep these difficulties in the forefront of our perspective, my analysis will not follow a chronological narrative but will proceed by focusing on different traits of the festivals. Following the overview of developments provided in the previous chapter, I will argue that many of the observable changes can be interpreted as a systematization of religion, in practices of religious communication in particular. The actual character of the changes suggests that we may speak about a rationalization of religion as a public affair.

A Multitude of Occasions

Political interpretations of festivals (such as I will myself soon offer) are often inadequate, because they concentrate on the content and meaning of a single event. So particularist an approach will not suffice for the cultic reality of the Roman Republic. I start by taking a closer look at the Fasti Antiates maiores, the only extant republican calendar.¹ On the Idus Sextiles (the calendar antedates the Augustan period and hence the month Augustus), several entries in smaller letters are to be found that refer to the dies natales of the temples of Diana, Vortumnus, Fortuna Equestris, Hercules Victor, and Castor and Pollux, and to a sacrifice to the Camenae. These anniversaries of dedications would have been celebrated by opening the temples and performing sacrifices. These deities were not obscure, but were frequently well-known. We would expect that each of these events would attract onlookers, pious venerators as well as mere spectators—that is to say, active participants in the ritual as well as curious children or passersby only momentarily halting their step. Given the length of time necessary for sacrifices and the preparation of meat from a sacrifice, it must be assumed that the rituals would start roughly at the same time—there is no evidence of any detailed temporal coordination. As the locations involved included the Aventine, the Porta Capena, and the Forum, people who wished to take a significant part in the ritual must have had to make a selection. Such a choice was necessary on many days.

The public character of these events was not a given. It resulted, in its realization and its degree, from a variety of factors. Many temples were built on the initiative of victorious generals, even if built with public money and by senatorial consent.² In their choice of a day for the dedication, dedicators struggled for a maximum of public awareness, and the Ides—free from various burdensome duties and everyday routines (like school)³—would offer a splendid opportunity to stage a number of additional attractive rituals. We do not know how large an audience would be gathered for the anniversaries. Individually initiated temple dedications and their annual recurrence were not the only events in competition for an audience. Concurrence of rituals was sharp on the Ides of March, for example. As on every Ides, the Flamen Dialis (and some other nonspecified priests)⁴ would sacrifice a castrated ram to Iuppiter. The day was Feriae Martis according to later calendars, which implies a sacrifice to Mars somewhere. The popular rite of the Mamuralia, the Salian priests’ beating of a fur, was dated to March 15 by Ioannes Lydus in the sixth century, but to March 14 by the mid-fourth-century Fasti Filocali; any resolution of this conflict in our data must remain hypothetical.⁵ Many people, however, decided to spend the day not in the center of the city, but on the banks of the Tiber. Ovid describes the day as popular for outings and the drinking of wine in honor of Anna Perenna, whose cult place has now been located in the north of the city.⁶

Concurrence was even sharper on the Ides of October. Whereas the ludi Capitolini attracted Romans to the Capitoline summit,⁷ the rites of the Equus October took place on the Field of Mars, after the staging of a horse race, a sacrifice, and an ensuing race to the Forum (passing the foot of the Capitoline); the ritual contest between the inhabitants of the Subura and the via Sacra would find an end in the Regia in the center of the Forum Romanum.⁸ Whereas the Capitoline Games were organized by a college, the sacrifice of the October Horse seems to have been performed by the Flamen Martialis. The complex topographic and calendrical structure of Roman religion necessitated a large number of priesthoods and agents that were coordinated rather than subordinated. There was no central administration of these activities. Lists of ritual dates, ferialia, for every group or priesthood would regulate such complex activities. The fasti did not serve as an instrument of any detailed centralized regulation.⁹

Despite the heavy ritual demand on the Ides (and Nones and Calends), around 30 percent of the triumphs of both the third and the second centuries were staged on these days, too, concentrating on the first and last months of the year. Here, clearly, individual strategies to maximize the impression made on the public led to the choice of the date—despite the existence of concurrent events. It has to be added that exactly the same dates, Calends and Ides in particular, were used to celebrate birthdays.¹⁰ Thus another substantial portion of the urban population had—and must have used—alternative contexts for merrymaking.

Monopoly by Procession

To judge by the size of the temple of Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, Rome must have already been a large city by the beginning of the Republic in the late sixth century: “la grande Roma dei Tarquini.”¹¹ A city of about thirty thousand inhabitants (to give a rough idea of its size),¹² Rome was large enough to house several festivals at public temples and hundreds of private parties at the same time. Conditions would have improved (or, from another perspective, worsened) with the growth of the city’s population to several hundred thousand by the time of the Punic Wars, and perhaps half a million by the end of the first century. How could a ritual gain the attention of a significant portion of this population? The answer was the same at Rome as in ancient Mesopotamia and archaic Athens: processions.¹³

Processions were a staple of Roman ritual life. In the first half of the second century, Cato describes the ritual of the lustratio agri, where sacrificial animals were led around the property.¹⁴ One would imagine that the lustratio urbis comprised a similar procession, copying the annual amburbium as a crisis rite to cope with prodigia. Yet the evidence to corroborate Paulus Diaconus’s etymological definition, amburbiales hostiae dicebantur, quae circum terminos urbis Romae ducebantur—“the victims that were led around the boundary markers of the city of Rome were called ‘amburbiales’ ” (5.3–4 L)—is feeble. The fantastic economy of ancient references to the rite does not exclude anything: references to the lustratio do not exceed the phrase urbe lustrata or urbem lustrat.¹⁵ The route is difficult to reconstruct: for the amburbium Strabo gives a precise location, six miles out of Rome; the luci of Robigo and Dea Dia were about five miles away from Rome; according to Ovid, the Terminalia were celebrated at the sixth milestone on the via Laurentia.¹⁶ A processional route on this periphery would have a length of at least thirty kilometers. This is unimaginable for a one-day procession with animals to be led around and intermittent rituals. A circumambulation of Rome of the so-called Servian wall, including the Capitoline, Porta Collina, Porta Caelemontana, and Raudusculana (that is, the Aventine), would cover a minimum of ten kilometers as well—again, hardly imaginable for a large-scale procession, and difficult even for a small group of religious specialists with all their apparatus.

Scattered evidence suggests that the priesthood of the Salii did cover distant parts of the city with their dancing processions and the changing public location for their dinners, which were possibly a daily occurrence.¹⁷ Yet these ritual movements, which underline the unity of the city, covered the whole of the month of March. Apart from a few topographical foci (such as the Quinquatrus, a special ritual on March 17 that included other religious agents), spectators would be involved only occasionally, perhaps by chance.

Another possible candidate for an old processional rite is offered by the dedication of the spolia opima, a procession attributed already to Romulus, which featured the armor and arms of a hostile general. It is impossible to isolate a clear image of an early ritual underneath the assimilation of the spolia opima to the later triumph in the Augustan sources. However, the probably fictitious sacral regulation assigned to the ritual in these late sources implies different temples as destinations, including the Temple of Mars on the Campus Martius. The latter destination would not have made for a grand procession; the same was true in its way of Iuppiter Feretrius on the Capitol.¹⁸

In order to find a ritual that not only conveys the idea of a unified and unitary city but actually tries to universalize that ideal through, in part, the attraction of the whole city’s interest, one has to wait for the pompa circensis, the opening procession to the circus, and the actual games, the ludi circenses. Here, obviously, the older type of competitive races and other types of competition—which would find their culminating form in the ludi circenses— were combined with a long procession that involved more than a large number of marching participants. Many deities were also displayed, in the form of statues, busts, or symbols, and their presence at least implied that many temples were involved (as the natural places to store such items), even if the procession proper started from the Capitol. It is significant that the starting days of games in the late Republic do not compete with other spectacular events, but rather create such an event by monopolizing the public stage.

When did these processions originate? The author of the most detailed description, the Augustan Greek antiquarian and literary critic Dionysios of Halikarnassos (7.72.1–14), claims to base his description on Fabius Pictor, a late third-century author. Although Dionysios’s avowed interest in providing a Greek origin for Roman culture might incline us to suspicion on this point, the many elements of the pompa that clearly parallel or even imitate Greek practices are plausible for the time of Fabius.¹⁹ I follow the skeptical position of Mommsen in postulating annual games only from 367/66 (the date being indicative rather than precise) onward; Frank Bernstein’s arguments for an earlier date (following Livy’s dating to the regal period)²⁰ rely heavily on the Varronian theory that anthropomorphic cult statues were an invention of the late regal period only and hence related to the cult of Iuppiter Optimus Maximus and his Capitoline Temple. The lack of an annual ritual that included cult statues from many temples does not exclude the possibility that ritual agents or high-ranking spectators were transferred by chariots (as perhaps depicted on an architectural frieze of the Capitoline Temple), but makes a full-fledged procession for the earlier phase less probable. The conversion of the pompa circensis into a spectacular procession would have been a development of the fourth and third centuries. Such a date would explain the rise of processions as an attempt to compete with contemporary Hellenistic rituals. Similarly, as I will argue in Chapter 5, the triumphal procession and— following Harriet Flower—the pompa imaginum of noble funerals hardly antedate the second half of the fourth century.²¹

Dionysios’s description of the pompa circensis reveals how spectators were attracted:

Before beginning the games the principal magistrates conducted a procession in honour of the gods from the Capitol through the Forum to the Circus Maximus. Those who led the procession were, first, the Romans’ sons who were nearing manhood and were of an age to bear a part in this ceremony, who rode on horseback if their fathers were entitled by their fortunes to be knights, while the others, who were destined to serve in the infantry, went on foot, the former in squadrons and troops, and the latter in divisions and companies, as if they were going to school; this was done in order that strangers might see the number and beauty of the youths of the commonwealth who were approaching manhood. These were followed by charioteers, some of whom drove four horses abreast, some two, and others rode unyoked horses. After them came the contestants in both the light and heavy games, their whole bodies naked except their loins. . . . (5) The contestants were followed by numerous bands of dancers arranged in three divisions, the first consisting of men, the second of youths, and the third of boys. These were accompanied by flute-players, who used ancient flutes that were small and short, as is done even to this day, and by lyre-players, who plucked ivory lyres of seven strings and the instruments called barbita. . . . (6) . . . The dancers were dressed in scarlet tunics girded with bronze cinctures, wore swords suspended at their sides, and carried spears of shorter than average length; the men also had bronze helmets adorned with conspicuous crests and plumes. Each group was led by one man who gave the figures of the dance to the rest, taking the lead in representing their warlike and rapid movements, usually in the proceleusmatic rhythms. . . . (10) But it is not alone from the warlike and serious dance of these bands which the Romans employed in their sacrificial ceremonies and processions that one may observe their kinship to the Greeks, but also from that which is of a mocking and ribald nature. For after the armed dancers others marched in procession impersonating satyrs and portraying the Greek dance called sikinnis. Those who represented Sileni were dressed in shaggy tunics, called by some chortaioi, and in mantles of flowers of every sort; and those who represented satyrs wore girdles and goatskins, and on their heads manes that stood upright, with other things of like nature. These mocked and mimicked the serious movements of the others, turning them into laughter-provoking performances. . . . (13) After these bands of dancers came a throng of lyre-players and many flute-players, and after them the persons who carried the censers in which perfumes and frankincense were burned along the whole route of the procession, and also the men who bore the show-vessels made of silver and gold, both those that were sacred to the gods and those that belonged to the state. Last of all in the procession came the images of the gods, borne on men’s shoulders, showing the same likenesses as those made by the Greeks and having the same dress, the same symbols, and the same gifts which tradition says each of them invented and bestowed on mankind. These were the statues not only of Iuppiter, Iuno, Minerva, Neptune, and the rest whom the Greeks reckon among the twelve gods, but also of those still more ancient from whom legend says the twelve were sprung, namely, Saturn, Ops, Themis, Latona, the Parcae, Mnemosynē, and all the rest to whom temples and holy places are dedicated among the Greeks; and also of those whom legend represents as living later, after Iuppiter took over the sovereignty, such as Proserpina, Lucina, the Nymphs, the Muses, the Seasons, the Graces, Liber, and the demigods whose souls after they had left their mortal bodies are said to have ascended to Heaven and to have obtained the same honours as the gods, such as Hercules, Aesculapius, Castor and Pollux, Helen, Pan, and countless others. . . . (15) After the procession was ended the consuls and the priests whose function it was presently sacrificed oxen; and the manner of performing the sacrifices was the same as with us.²²

I have already pointed out the advantages of any procession ritual. The lengthy description shows in detail how mass appeal is created for such an event, clearly ritualized by its mixture of excessive order and rather anarchic elements. Many people are involved as actors or attracted as spectators. Young participants guarantee the participation of their families; the potential for an up-close look at the drivers and athletes attracts the athletic-minded crowd (1), the dances the aesthetic-minded. The level of noise marking this event must have been quite boisterous. Every sense is engaged: unusual dresses in bright colors (6), odors (13), music, even played on archaic instruments (5), thus giving additional ceremonial qualities to the procession. There is a close interaction between actors and spectators, whose laughter is provoked by improvised performance (10). And last, but not least, the ritual assembles a large number of deities, including the most important ones according to Greek and Roman standards. The use of standardized representations of these deities, clearly stressed (13), ensures intellectual as well as religious satisfaction.²³

Duration and Intensification

Processions must be judged a highly effective means of creating publicity for a ritual and centralizing a highly diverse urban sacral topography. Otherwise, the powerful attraction of the triumph for many—but by no means all²⁴ —republican generals could not be understood. However, watching a procession along a processional route—even a route more and more monumentalized in itself²⁵—implied certain limits and deficits.

The first limit is temporal. The importance of a procession could be indicated by its length, but velocity and the duration of natural light put limits on that. Triumphal processions experimented with two-day processions starting in the early second century and reached a maximum of three days in the first, but normal reactions seem to have taught the organizers of the latter to create successions of thematically varying booty and war representations—for example, by organizing separate triumphs over different peoples and regions— rather than indefinitely prolonging a unified course of people and images.²⁶ The prolongation of the competitions or scenic spectacles of the games was easier. By the time of the calendar of Antium, nine days each were marked for the Ludi Magni in September and the Ludi Plebeii in November.

Another type of ritual reached even greater lengths, namely supplications. This was a decentralized ritual, with the opening of all (or at least, many) temples to enable sacrifices and ensuing banquets throughout the city, in the second century even throughout Italy.²⁷ An exceptional ritual of petition or thanksgiving, usually lasting one to three days in the middle Republic—again the annalistic historiography is not reliable enough to enable the identification of an exact starting point—exploded during the last century of the Republic. Three supplications of fifty days in the years 45, 44, and 43 mark the acme of this trend. Obviously, as I have already observed, such a duration would not allow the difference between exceptional ritual status and everyday life to be maintained. Thus it is easy to see why this form lost its importance from Augustus onward. Yet the sustained focus of this book on pragmatic and political aspects of the history of religion, and above all on changes in the nature, structure, and cohesiveness of the nobility, should not cause us to neglect a consequence in ritual of long-lasting, even permanent importance. I would maintain that the phenomenon of daily cult in the form of small daily sacrifices, hymns, or lamps, known from some temples and of growing importance in the imperial period, derives in part from this idea of enlarging ritual efficacy through an ever prolonged daily cult at the same temples.²⁸

Processions imply a second restriction beyond the temporal: interaction between participants is limited, though of course spectators did interact among themselves. Ovid knew about this: the Ars amatoria recommends to its male audience theaters, circuses, munera, and triumphs as places to make new female acquaintances and imagines the verbal interactions that would take place in such spaces.²⁹ The prologue of Plautus’s comedy Poenulus (1–45) gives an even livelier picture:

I have a mind to imitate the Achilles of Aristarchus; from that tragedy I’ll take for myself the opening: “Be silent, and hold your tongues, and give attention, for the general bids you listen”—the head-manager, that with a good grace you may be seated on the benches, both those who have come hungry and those who have come well filled. You who have eaten, have done so most wisely by far: you who have not eaten, be filled with the Play. But he who has something ready for him to eat, ’tis really great folly for him to come here to sit fasting for our sakes. Rise up, cryer! Bespeak attention among the people: I’m now waiting to see if you know your duty. Exercise your voice, by means of which you subsist and take care of yourself; for unless you do cry out, in your silence starvation will be creeping upon you. Well, now sit down again, that you may earn double wages. How fine a thing it is that you obey my commands! Let no worn-out debauchee be sitting in the front of the stage, nor let the lictor or his rods be noisy in the least; and let no seat-keeper be walking about before people’s faces, nor be showing any to their seats, while the actor is on the stage. Those who have been sleeping too long at home in idleness, it’s right for them now to stand contentedly, or else let them master their drowsiness. Don’t let slaves be occupying the seats, that there may be room for those who are free; or else let them pay down the money for their places; if that they cannot do, let them be off home, and escape a double evil, lest they be striped both here with scourges, and with thongs at home, if they’ve not got things in due order when their masters come home. Let nurses keep children, little brats, at home, and let no one bring them to see the Play, lest both they themselves may be athirst, and the children may die with hunger, or lest they go bleating around here in their hungry fits, just like young goats. Let the matrons see the piece in silence, in silence laugh, and let them refrain from screaming here with their shrill voices; their themes for gossip let them carry off home, so as not to be an annoyance to their husbands both here and at home. And, as regards the managers of the performance, let the palm of victory not be given to any player wrongfully, nor by reason of favour let any be driven out of doors, in order that the inferior may be preferred to the good ones. And this, too, besides, which I had almost forgotten: while the performance is going on, do you, lackeys, make an attack on the cookshops; now, while there’s an opportunity, now, while the tarts are smoking hot, hasten there. These injunctions, which have been given as the manager’s command, it will be well, by Hercules, that every man remembers them for himself.³⁰

The Circus Maximus offered seats, but, by virtue of their smaller size, theaters—which for most of the Republic were temporary structures, sometimes set up within a circus—enabled more intensive communication among the audience as a whole. The enormous growth of the ludi scaenici during the second century cannot be separated from this fact. Even if modern theorizing about the political functions of dramatic performance at Rome rests mostly on Ciceronian observations, any unbiased description must acknowledge that the intensity of political communication exploded in this kind of ritual.

Rituals in smaller circles not identical with primary groups like families offered even more intensive forms of communication.³¹ Banqueting had been an aristocratic practice, offering opportunities for the display of luxury in the aristocracies of early Latin cities. Now it was either revived or intensified as a social practice. The proliferation of villas in the areas surrounding Rome offered a growing space for elaborate dining. Professional poets like Ennius offered attractive and envied forms of entertainment. This was no purely secular form of festival. Literary dialogues usually imagined religious dates as the opportunities for banquets. According to the Fasti Praenestini, the newly introduced cult of the Great Mother of the Gods gave birth to mutitationes, mutual invitations for dinner among the nobility. The sweeping changes taking place in banqueting as a site of social display and differentiation are obliquely attested in the prominence of sumptuary legislation in this period, which sought to limit expenditure and force banqueting groups into open, that is, controllable, space.³² This development started long before the 190s. The reforms of the priestly colleges enacted by the lex Ogulnia in 300 transformed the colleges into “banquetable” circles of nine persons (three to each triclinium); the longest extant fragment of the protocols of the pontifex maximus gives details of a pontifical dinner.³³ When a new priesthood was created in 196, the only such innovation to achieve the prestige of the augurs, pontiffs and (quin-)decimviri, it was the tresviri epulonum, whose duties basically consisted in supervising the senatorial banquets connected with the great Iuppiter festivals in September and November.

Donation and Appropriation

The dinner attested in the records of the pontifex maximus just mentioned was organized to celebrate the inauguration of a Flamen Martialis in about 70. We need not doubt the existence of other luxurious banquets. However, if a Roman of the first century wished to stress the lavishness, he would speak of cenae sacerdotalis (priestly meals). Of course, an event that is marked out as religious can also offer an occasion for intensified social interaction, however much communicative practice on such occasions was constrained by formal and informal rules specific to the event. This is not to contrast “secular” and “religious.” And yet the drawing of lots in order to determine the first voting unit, a randomized procedure that left the decision in the hands of the gods, did not transform electoral or legislative assemblies into religious meetings; contiones without such religious elements existed, too. The organization of splendid games, however, was considered to leave a greater impression on the voters than a grandiloquent speech. The rise of the games and public processional rites is as intensively connected to the euergetic habit as seemingly private dinners. What is the mechanism at work?

Religious occasions mean actions substantively involving the gods. Despite the neglect of the religious factor by many ancient historians, the gods were not superfluous or merely traditional paraphernalia. As shown above, the gods were the primary addressees of competitions and dramatic performances and were unmistakably present in place, time, or images—usually all three. Even the gladiatorial spectacles, which were classified neither as games nor as public during the Republic and long thereafter, were nonetheless organized with a view toward future elections; and yet they were labeled munera, duties owed to a dead ancestor. The great men of the late Republic took pains to identify such forebears and did not refrain from constructing long temporal bridges connecting particular munera to a death that had occurred years before. The audience that was thereby created—and an introductory pompa, of course, helped to create such an audience³⁴—did not constitute a private meeting, but rather a semipublic party offering cult to a divine being, that is, the dead person. The performance of munera for the dead was understood to sacralize, however unofficially, the site of their performance. The site became a locus religiosus (though perhaps not sacer).³⁵

The religious character was even clearer for the technically public rituals that were addressed to deities venerated by the res publica, that is, those venerated at its expense. In public religious ritual the axis of interaction between an energetic benefactor (the leading magistrate) and the consumer (the citizens present) was transformed into a complex field of interaction among four parties at least. By cofinancing the spectacles, the polity left no doubt about its role. The presence of the gods was the guarantee that those present would not simply consume the magistrate’s donation. In the ritual the gods were not honored by the leading magistrate, but by the citizenry as a whole. The explicit consumers were the gods, and the citizens became a part of the donating party. Thus the res publica appropriated the ritual action.

Distinction and Control

It has been my argument thus far that the possibility for the refinement, modification, and invention of forms of social differentiation was an important driving force behind the multiplication and enlargement of certain types of expensive audience-oriented rituals. As far as we can see, as regards the history of the rituals, this process was not primarily characterized by the modification of traditional competitions, sacrifices, and the like, but by the creation of new rituals, which opened up opportunities for new agents, usually magistrates, to distinguish themselves. The formation of the new nobility, the integration of patricians and office-holding plebeians from the end of the fourth century, demanded an intensified communication among its members, as between nobles and the populace. The development of a “literary culture” of drama and epic (and the financing of the first) is a consequence of this need for communication and the ritual contexts for their performance, namely banquets and ludi scaenici.³⁶ The populace needed space for communication among itself for other purposes, too. The need was not in the first instance simply to corroborate dominant understandings of citizenship or political association—there were enough blood-soaked possibilities for that. Other problems, however, needed alternative modes of constituting an audience and hence a populace: as the Plautine prologue quoted above demonstrates, such audiences included females and slaves, too.

Distinction was not the only end served by these developments. Control was enhanced too. Probably the same year that witnessed the introduction of drama into the Megalesia (191) saw the introduction of reserved seats for senators.³⁷ Opportunities were at the same time “channels.” As the establishment of a normative framework for political careers channeled the possibilities for martial success or, to put it more broadly, the exercise of aristocratic excellence, so, too, the spectrum of rituals channeled public communication. Social control was produced by forcing the members of the nobility to employ the framework of public rituals and by restricting access to them: the organization of games is restricted to specified magistrates or returning generals, the triumph has to be individually approved by the Senate after discussion of the achievements of the preceding campaign. Control was likewise exerted by the long delay in the construction of permanent theaters, which imposed upon would-be celebrants the high cost of building new, temporary infrastructure for a single ritual, and by new debates about and licenses for places for temples.³⁸ In order to prevent individuals from engaging in wholesale dissent from these new frameworks, the ritual has to be allotted high prestige (e.g., the opening of the most prestigious temple of Iuppiter Optimus Maximus for the triumph, the use of the Circus Maximus, and longer periods for games). But dissent was possible, or, to put it the other way around, social consensus within the nobility remained precarious. Generals continued to organize informal triumphs (the so-called triumphus in monte Albano) without the consent of the Senate, erect statues all over the city, distribute excessive amounts of booty to their soldiers, and give lavish munera, gladiatorial shows, for the people.

The effects of ritual control are seen more clearly if we take into account areas where this control is lacking. Neither the public reports regarding the conduct of war nor the representations of booty carried in triumphs nor the funeral procession and its laudatory speech were ritually directed toward the gods. They aimed rather at the spectators—and were deeply disputed. As passages in Plautus and Cicero demonstrate, in the public communicative acts conducted on these occasions, villages were made into cities and skirmishes turned into decisive battles, heroes were transformed into ancestors and ancestors were made into heroes, raising doubt and instigating debate.³⁹

The games are a somewhat different matter. In these highly public events, the heightened risk of the new communicative praxis impelled structural changes that insulated individuals among the nobility—and the nobility as a whole—from catastrophe. Most particularly, in the middle and late Republic nobles performed neither as actors nor as sportsmen. Competition was entirely left to professionals, and this, at least as regards the races and athletic competitions, appears a change from an earlier practice that seems to have known the participation of nobles from Rome and its surrounding areas. But in the very real competitions staged at large public rituals, a foreigner’s victory or the defeat of a consul’s son would no longer have been acceptable for the patricio-plebeian elite of the middle and late Republic. The truth of these claims may be verified to a point by examination of those competitions in which the elite participated, namely the mock competitions between the Luperci and the Sacravienses. The displacement effected by the use of professionals effectively insulated the organizing magistrate from responsibility for the outcome of any given contest, even if popular favor for a champion might still be disappointed.

The gods did exert censorship nevertheless. Being the primary addressees of the rituals, they enjoyed both the offering itself and the human spectators. The latter—as second-order spectators—watched the gods watching. Thus they could be sure that they were witnesses of cultural products of the highest quality, as indicated by the names of plays listed in this chapter. The gods got Greek or Greek-style cultural products, of the same provenance and style as those selected by the nobles throughout the Italian municipalities for their villas and libraries.⁴⁰ Nobles and gods seemed to have the same taste. How could the populace not share in admiring it, while not, of course, having command of it? To be sure, many adaptations to local taste were made in producing Greek comedy and tragedy for Italian audiences, even as local centers of production developed to produce Hellenizing wares that carried the genes of local media, local techniques, and local taste. Nonetheless, the elaborated level and enormous presence of Greek language and culture (even if one should not assume the knowledge of Greek originals⁴¹) was astonishing. This marked presence was mediated to the audience by the positive reception given to these things by the Roman gods in a manner that could be imitated.

Conclusion: Public and Publicity

My short survey of changes in the ritual portfolio of the Republic has necessarily focused on processes that are visible in our sources or at least pertain to prominent rituals. Only public rites received enough testimony to sustain such scrutiny. Most of the rituals hinted at in the late republican or Augustan calendars are almost never mentioned in historiographic texts or speeches. Where a context is specified, one has to assume continuity at least from the foundation of the respective temple onward. Of course, the idea of a Numan list of festivals is no longer tenable.⁴² Many of the rites that might go back to the early Republic, or even beyond, were performed by the priests gathered in the larger pontifical college, including the flamines and Vestal Virgins. The monthly sacrifice of a sheep to Iuppiter (ovis idulis), for example, might not have attracted any spectators; nobody, however, complained about that. The actual appeal of many rituals remains obscure, though “popular” rites might indicate popularity. A list of “popular rites” would be rather short but would be led by the Saturnalia together with Kalendae Ianuariae and the Septimontium, the festival of the Seven Hills, celebrated likewise from North Africa to Gallia Transpadana. Such a list would also include the Lupercalia (February 15), perhaps the sequence of Feralia, Parentalia, and Quirinalia, certainly the Matronalia (March 1, including a rite of reversal), and perhaps Anna Perenna (March 15). Attestations for the Liberalia (March 17) are astonishingly vague; the Parilia (April 21) might have been popular. The temple of Mater Matuta would have attracted women on June 11, the Vestalia (June 15) some matrons, as did the rites connected to Ceres.⁴³ The popular character of the Poplifugia (July 5) remains feeble. There is greater certainty in the case of the Neptunalia and Volcanalia, including the construction of temporary huts and bonfires (July 23 and August 23 respectively). Later in the year, one could think of the festivals of fountains and new wine (Fontinalia and Meditrinalia, both in mid-October), though the evidence is meager. Most of these festivals are characterized by decentralized commemoration; for the majority no central rite is known.

Evidently, from the mid-fourth century onward these festival practices were supplemented rather than supplanted by complex rituals that are characterized by centralized rites, designed to attract a larger share of the population (that is to say, around an eighth to a quarter of the inhabitants of Rome) and also spectators from the surrounding towns.⁴⁴ Large processions and competition among professionals were typical. The number of days dedicated to these “games” rose continually. At the end of the second century up to twenty-eight days may have been regularly reserved for scenic performances (including the mime),⁴⁵ a type of ritual that even dominated the circus games.⁴⁶ These rituals enabled and enforced a complex process of communication, the necessity for which seems to have been arisen from enormous expansion and military strain, as well as from internal processes of social differentiation and conglomeration. The rituals made it possible to extol individuals, in particular magistrates leading processions of different kinds (see below, Chapter 5), as well as to control and force them into the public framework, incorporating and transcending the citizens present. The latter themselves were constituted as a differentiated society that marked symbolic center and periphery. In the imperial era, this type of ritual became the standard language of religious communication of the emperor with the population of Rome, in large measure because its formal aspects had developed precisely to articulate the central importance of some individual within a larger community. Naturally, in the republican period, stress had been laid upon the public frame, while under the empire the centrality of the emperor, and his paradigmatic status as a performer and sponsor of ritual, became a dominant theme of religious communication.

As a consequence of the changes I have outlined, religion acquired a political importance it had not had at the start of the period analyzed. By involving the gods in large-scale communication, such communication was enabled, and a normative framework was at the same time given to it, which defined the interaction between prominent nobles and a large populace as “public.” This holds true even in the case of priestly banquets, when audiences were present only by medial discourse about the event. To state my thesis most clearly, religion captured and defined “public” space. This form of procedural systematization had two consequences. First, ritualization— forcing action into public space and religious forms—became an important form of social control. This process is the central concern of Chapter 5. Before this, however, the second consequence of this change must be addressed: the amount of religious communication grew dramatically. Growing complexity, new topics, and self-reflexivity followed; space or, better, contexts for the reception of Greek thinking on religion were available. Formulated in Latin on Roman stages, it could not but refer to Roman religion, and surely did so intentionally. This form of theoretical rationalization is the subject of the next chapter.