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Chapter 4

Incipient Systematization of Religion in Second-Century Drama: Accius

So far systematization has been observed in the form of changes in institutions. In this, the rationalization of communication served the feathering of space, and the public religion appeared as an instrument rather than an object of rationalization. This chapter will address the first stages of a process that could be termed the theoretical rationalization of religion, turning religion into something that could be known and discussed and subjected to standards of argumentative coherence, that is, rationality. Although the process is visible in other texts, this chapter will concentrate on those texts that were at the center of the stages of the process analyzed so far: Roman drama.

Roman drama is best known from two of its earliest playwrights, Plautus and Terence. A recent study has shown how widespread religion is in the plays of Plautus, illustrating the performative properties of Roman ritual and the intricacies of communication with different deities. Although the image of religion thus presented seems quite coherent, and the precariousness of communication between humans and gods is thematized through the frequent dramatization of interrupted rituals, nonetheless, no systematizing critique is offered in the corpus of Plautus.¹ There is a reference to the question of whether the gods care for humans at all at the beginning of Mercator (5–8), but the idea, once voiced, is immediately employed to justify referring to the audience as the primary addressee of the dramatic narrative.² We have to wait for the second half of the second century before we find meaningful change in the nature of religious discourse and the content of critique.

The sources for the period under consideration are rather sparse. In the few cases where we have contemporary texts—contemporaneity being of particular significance for this investigation—they are short and seldom more than fragments. Polybius, who was at least present in Rome, is Greek and not particularly interested in religion. Nonetheless, his positive evaluation of the function of this superstition,³ as a Polybius today would call it, may be considered an important reflection of theories that were circulating among his interlocutors: members of the Roman upper class like Cato the Elder.⁴

In the next generation of Roman playwrights, the works of Accius (c. 170–90 B.C.E.) constitute an important point of departure. These are broadly represented by numerous if scattered fragments. A review of all the fragments shows three areas to be significant: critical reflection on the gods, or theology, one could say, in general; description of meteorological and astronomical phenomena, which are treated in theoretical terms according to Greek natural philosophy; and statements about divination, which connect to a comparable theoretical discourse, enabling a distinctive criticism of Roman institutions.

Theology

Accius’s dramatic productions contain a divine apparatus of personalized gods in a polytheistic framework, which allows them to move the plot forward. This does not at first glance appear different from the approach of his predecessors. The selection of deities named as agents in the action is not particularly striking, despite the arbitrariness of the material left to us: Iuppiter appears several times (e.g., 535, 646 R = 210, 450 D); Iuno (652 R = 702f. D) and Mars as Mavors (321 R = 157 D), Arquitenens or bow-bearer is used of Diana (52 R = 324 D) and Apollo (167 R = 285 D). Minerva bears the epithet armipotens (R 127). The list is lengthened by the “forest-inhabiting” fauns (237 R = 428 D), Silvanus (405 R = 481 D), and Fortuna and Sol (619 R = 88 D), along with groups of gods such as the di inferi (R 62) and the Cabires (526 R), an apparently typical Roman term for the “great gods” worshipped, for example, on Lemnos and Samothrace.⁵ According to Servius Auctus (Aen. 8.130) the genealogy of Evander, which went back to Maia and her son Mercurius, received extensive treatment in the Atreus (Atreus I R = I D). Vulcan distinguishes himself by being named three times (484, 529, and 558 R = 129, 204, and 233 D as Mulciber).

A pure or primitive Roman religion that lies beyond any Greek influence does not exist, as Franz Altheim has demonstrated.⁶ At the same time, different forms and stages of assimilation can be identified. Hence, in the context of contemporaneous cult names, it seems striking that it is precisely the offspring from the relationship between the god Zeus and the human Semele, Dionysus, who is referred to by a Greek name, although perfectly usual Latin equivalents were available in Bacchus and Liber:⁷ o Dionyse, optime pater, uitisator, Semela genitus, euhie! (240–242 R). This passage from the Bacchae is not an isolated case. In the Tereus the same god is referred to in a similar manner: Deum Cadmogena natum Semela adfare et famulanter pete (642 R = 445 D). The longest genealogy, from the praetexta Aeneadae sive Decius (fr. I = 676 D), is one of Iuppiter (in the long version of his name): it proceeds in four steps to Anchises. It is completely Greek and ends, significantly, with Anchises, not with Decius.⁸ The aforementioned genealogy of Evander from the Scholia Danielis may have resulted in a decidedly Greek-sounding text (Atreus I R/D). If one sees this as a form of distancing, the very pronounced statement in the Epinausimache (328 R = 139 D) that the children of gods are mortals fits this ontological separation of men and gods well.

Statements and emphases of this type had contemporary relevance at the end of the second century (the term is used advisedly, since chronological precision in a history of this kind is impossible). In Roman civic theology, there was by this time a long-standing tradition of suppressing or at least eliding genealogical relationships between the gods and especially relationships with humans. Particular attention is paid in this regard to the central god of the community, Iuppiter.⁹ The hypercorrectness on display in the selection of Jove over Iuppiter, linguistically oriented to the Greek, and like “Zeus” refraining from the use of the epithet pater, which was by contrast applied cultically to other gods (Mars Pater or even Marspiter, Ianus Pater), could be a part of this trend (and not something that should be interpreted as a Greek-ism). It is found before Accius in Naevius (active as playwright c. 235–205) and Pacuvius (c. 220–130).¹⁰ It is in opposition to this rationalization of the earlier aristocratic consensus that, at the end of the second century, the claim to divine ancestry is taken up in the public sphere in claims to excellence on the part of individuals, born to politically second-string gentes.¹¹ The advancing of such claims to divine ancestry takes place in the same context of conflict in which the compilation (and invention) of the republican consular fasti occurs—the fasti being themselves both a memorial to and medium of competition for aristocratic distinction with respect to ancestry—and this process will continue into the Augustan period.¹²

On this basis it is hardly coincidental that the word caelites in the sense of “gods” appears three times in Accian fragments. I interpret this as part of the same trend of ontological separation between men and gods. Accius is not the first to use it. It appears twice in fragments of Ennius’s dramas, and Arcturus introduces himself with this term at the beginning of the prologue of Plautus’s Rudens (1–3):

Qui gentes omnes mariaque et terras mouet,eius sum ciuis ciuitate caelitum.ita sum ut uidetis splendens stella candida.

With him who moves all peoples, seas, and lands, I am a fellow-citizen in the city of the heavenly (beings). I am, just as you see, a shining and bright star.

“Heavenly” means here “inhabitants of heaven” and is to be taken literally, even if the metaphorical meaning “gods” is implied, as the first verse shows.¹³ The same hierarchy of meaning is found in the Hecuba of Ennius in the formulation o magna templa caelitum commixta stellis splendidis (Scaen. 196 Vahlen): gods they may be, but they also dwell in heaven, among the stars. The more narrowly spatial meaning of the term, which was overdetermined by its etymology, is also preserved in the related form caelestes, which dominates completely from Cicero onward. In Accius templum resonit caelitum (Aeneadae X = 686 D) belongs in this category.

The word gains a new nuance in Ennius’s Telamo. In one passage, which formulates sharp criticism of current religious ideas in several ways,¹⁴ the god Telamo himself remarks, in the face of the death of his mortal son Ajax, that the gods do not care about humans: “For if they did take care, it would go well with the good and badly with the bad, which is not at all the case” (nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest, Scaen. 318 Vahlen = Trag. 265 Jocelyn). This is the classical formulation of the problem of theodicy,¹⁵ and a standard polemic against the Stoic concept of divine Providence. It is significant that precisely in this connection¹⁶ Telamo shifts from the term dei to the term caelites and employs it in expressing the thought that the gods/inhabitants of heaven do not care about humans:

Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus.¹⁷

I have always said and will always say that the race of heaven-dwelling gods exists; but I do not think they care what the human race does.

The two passages from Accius must be read in this context.The junctures are similar: the topic is the cult of the—perhaps this adjective best reflects his tone—high gods: in the first case the approach to the caelitum aras (298 R = 606 D) and in the second an exclamation (593 R = 566 D): Delubra caelitum, aras, sanctitudines!¹⁸ In both cases the connection to earthly monuments produces a particular tension. The transcendence, or, to use a shameless anachronism, the otherness of the gods, is emphasized, and not the deus otiosus of the Ennianic Telamo. The distance—the form of the distance— given articulation by Accius prohibits any routinized, chummy closeness.

In the scanty remains of the formulations just cited the text is naturally inadequate for a reconstruction of Accius’s theology.¹⁹ One could follow the lead of Thomas N. Habinek and point to the creation of an artificial language, far removed from the everyday language of ordinary people. The creation of such a pure Latin would then mark an attempt to create an exclusive cultural resource of the nobility.²⁰ Caelites instead of ordinary dei would mark a social difference. Instead, I suggest that Accius is taking a critical stance in a contemporary conflict within the nobility, arguing against the divine genealogies of Romans by systematizing theological thinking.

The term sanctitudo leads to a further observation. On the one hand, it is the current term in the pre-Ciceronian period, in contradistinction to sanctitas. On the other, the usual glosses provided by way of translation, such as “religious protection” or “holiness,” are not very convincing. In confronting the unfamiliarity of the term in its second-century meaning, we are made to recognize the influence of Cicero’s attempt to transform the term sanctitas into a general religious term meaning “necessary cult.”²¹ In this connection Accius also makes a pair of nomen and numen (646 R = 450 D, also 691f. R = 704f, playing on the similar sound of “name” and “divine will” in Latin. The forced differentiation can best be understood as an attempt to distinguish the cultic form by which the god is known in ritual—nomen—from its inaccessible personality (numen), or perhaps as an attempt to interpret the former through the lens provided by the latter.

The attribution of a heightened transcendence to the gods enabled the use of the gods’ names as metaphors, a practice already visible in Plautus. I would see the use of duo Mavortes, “two Mars,” as a description of the collision of two rows of soldiers as an example of this. We must keep in mind, however, that Accius marks this kind of usage very precisely as nonliteral: crederes, “one could believe” (321 R = 157 D).

Statements on Natural Theology

The theoretical content that characterizes the passages related to the gods that we have thus far considered can be observed in the formulation of other topics, even if the difference in topic sometimes makes it difficult to identify the processes of rationalization at work in particular cases in terms of Greek natural philosophy. Several passages thematize vitality and life forces: the relationship between reason (animus) and vitality (anima) is referred to in the Epigoni (fr. 296 R = 589 D) and becomes the subject of an explicit psychological question in the Epinausimache: according to the plausible interpretation of the late antique lexicographer Nonius Marcellus, anima signifies an elementary affective drive, in this case aggression caused by anger.²²

Statements on geology help to maintain a scientific coolness. The mythological description of volcanism (529ff. R = 204ff. D) is treated with considerable distance through the use of dicitur and dictus – others “say”. Earthquakes, along with thunder and storms, offer primarily problems of perception (479f. R = 289f. D). The famous description of the shepherd in the Medea seeing a ship for the first time is above all precise, and only later in the text are there descriptions of physical processes like wind and waves with a slight shimmer of the mythological (391–402 R = 467–78 D).²³ A comparable mode of representation can be found in the description of thunder (223–25 R = 54–56 D).

The astronomical and astrological passages are the most revealing. While in the Clutemestra it is the deum regnator, the lord of the gods, who brings the night, the formulation nocte caeca caelum e conspectu abstulit (“by blind night he removed the sky out of sight”) contains a precise theory of basic processes of perception. It is the lack of light that creates blindness. The conception of the dawn (aurora) as radiorum ardentum indicem (“indicator of burning rays”; 493 R = 9 D) corresponds to this in its general structure, without being a component of a unified theory. Neither here nor in the following passages does Accius’s theoretical achievement go beyond older notions. What is striking, however, is the consistency with which, in comparison with older Latin literature, explanations for natural phenomena in the domain of myth are avoided.²⁴ Another example of this can be found in the description of the zodiac (711–13 D).²⁵

Divination

Accius several times describes situations that are treated as omens, or prodigies that relate to the whole of society,²⁶ whether within the dramatic plot or in contemporary Roman practice. It is not possible to identify a clear position on divination or criticism of divination on the basis of the fragments. What does come through clearly is the effort to apply a clear and precise terminology to the full range of such phenomena, as well as the attempt to formulate the conditions necessary for correct divination. This is shown in the conditional clause si satis recte aut uera ratione augurem (87 R = 644 D: “if I divine sufficiently correct or by true method”), and also in the use of multiple techniques in order to ensure greater accuracy: Principio extispicium ex prodigiis congruens ars te arguit (419 R = 496 D: “First of all the identical answer of inspection and prodigies accused you!”). Even in reference to the golden ram of Atreus, the relationship between portentum and prodigium is precisely defined.²⁷

There are also more bitingly formulated criticisms of teachings on augury, which was at the core of public and political divination in Rome. In the Telephus the question is posed, Pro certo arbitrabor sortis oracla adytus augura (624 R = 92 D: “I shall have for certain lots, oracles, temples, and prophecies”). This criticism is expressed even more stringently in the Astyanax:

Nil credo auguribus, qui auris uerbis diuitantalienas, suas ut auro locupletent domos. (169f. R)

In no wise do I trust augurs, who enrich the ears of others with words, so that they may fill their own houses with gold.

These formulations are reminiscent of criticisms voiced by Ennius and Cato regarding the recourse to “unreliable seers” (harioli),²⁸ but here, by contrast, the possibility that the Roman system should somehow escape criticism by appearing to direct that criticism solely at socially or geographically foreign practices is not left open. The use of assonance in augures, aures, and aurum does not subtract from the argument. Aurum, unlike Ennius’s drachmae, opens up the possibility of a metaphorical interpretation as payment. The context in which these texts were produced and first received is undeniably one in which both the theory and the practice of augury was the basis of controversy: the lex Aelia Sentia, which belongs to the last third of the second century, was an attempt to resolve just those controversies.²⁹ This atmosphere is reflected in another fragment from the Astyanax, in which the seer Calchas is instructed to stop being obstructive (171f. R = 281f. D):

Nunc, Calcas, finem religionum fac: desiste exercitummorari meque ab domuitione arcere tuo obsceno omine.

Now, Calcas, make an end to religious scruples: stop delaying the army and hindering me from returning home by means of your unpropitious sign.

Likewise in the Melanippus, the question of the limits of religious scruple is raised in the remark reicis abs te religionem (430 R = 531 D: “You cast away religious scruple!”), as well as in the question about stains (433 R = 529 D): Crediti’ me amici morte inbuturum manus? (“Do you think I am going to maculate my hands with the death of a friend?”)

The Dream of Tarquinius Superbus

The longest surviving fragment by Accius is the Dream of Tarquinius Superbus, consisting of twenty-two verses in the preface to Brutus (651–72 D). Probably first performed c. 136 after the return of D. Iunius Brutus, the consul of 138, from Spain,³⁰ this fragment demonstrates Accius’s rational engagement with literary and religious topics and the fruitfulness of viewing that engagement in light of a broader understanding of contemporaneous changes in religious practice and discourse.³¹

The religious-historical motifs of the extract have long spurred interest in the dream.³²

What is interesting for an investigation of the history of argumentation is neither the dream motif nor the content of its interpretation but that the interpretation offered by a professional interpreter is introduced by an explicit theory of dreams:

Rex, quae in uita usurpant homines, cogitant, curant, uident,quaeque agunt uigilantes agitantque, ea si cui in somno accidunt,minus mirum est; sed in re tanta haud temere improuiso offerunt. (663–65 D)³³

King, if the things that occupy people in life, what they think about, worry about, and look upon, and what they do and busy themselves about when awake, happen to somebody when asleep, it is no wonder; but in a matter of this gravity they do not arise unexpectedly or without cause.

The “theory of dreams” offered here had not been expressed in Latin before.³⁴ In Plautus, for example, detailed dream scenes derive their thematic significance from the similarity of the dream and reality, but the topic of the dream is by contrast the reality immediately following upon the dream.³⁵ Plautus’s “dream theory,” which appears in the demon prologue to the third act of the Rudens as well as in the Mercator, differs in glaring ways from that of Accius:

Miris modis di ludos faciunt hominibus,mirisque exemplis somnia in somnis danunt:ne dormientis quidem sinunt quiescere.³⁶

In wondrous ways the gods play games with humans,

in wondrous fashions they give dreams in sleep:

not even the sleeping do they permit to have their rest.

The gods play their games with humans, and this is “wondrous”: the label serves to bracket the entire phenomenon from rational explanation.

By contrast, when Accius refers to this language, he does so polemically: mirum, the wondrous, is exactly what is negated. Even the avowedly extranormal, which is explicitly the subject of the dream interpreter’s reflections,³⁷ is described by the dream interpreter as following a certain (admittedly vague) necessity: it is “not without cause.” The effort at rational explanation within the framework of a worldview that unquestioningly assumes the existence of the gods is clear enough. Again, a comparable theoretical treatment of the interpretation of dreams is not to be found in earlier Latin literature.³⁸

Also of note in the words of the interpreter of dreams is the connection between the dream and other forms of divination. The content of the dream itself is basically two divinatory events: an animal sacrifice gone wrong and an unusual astronomical event, a change in the course of the sun. These clues serve to disambiguate.³⁹ The private application of the first event, an attack by the sacrificial animal, is to our knowledge unclassified in Roman divinatory practice but is definitely negative. It is connected to the precise classification of a bad public omen (ostentum) (668–72 D):

. . . nam id quod de sole ostentum est tibi,populo commutationem rerum portendit fore perpropinquam. haec bene uerruncent populo! nam quod [ad] dexterumcepit cursum ab laeua signum praepotens, pulcherrume auguratum est rem Romanam publicam summam fore.

. . . for that which was shown to you concerning the sun portends that an upheaval soon awaits the people. May it turn out well for the people! For the fact that the mighty sign shifted its course from left to right is a most splendid omen that the Roman state will rise to greatness.

The astronomical abnormality is, according to its reference and direction, the object of the teaching on augury.⁴⁰ Here we see once again Accius’s concern for insuring the success of divinatory practice by applying several techniques simultaneously to the interpretation of signs.

Conclusion: Strengthening Probability

We should not expect to be able to extract a coherent or universalizing position from scattered passages deriving from diverse dramatic contexts and characters. The material is not sufficient to identify Accius’s own views, let alone to reconstruct anything like an Accian “theology.” Taken as a whole, however, the findings do allow us to recognize across the totality of the fragments specific modes of critique and interpretive presuppositions. These I interpret as primarily determined by the context of their production, rather than viewing them as evidence of some narrow process of reception of a philosophia perennis or as the mere report of a foreign view. (That said, this last category might well serve to characterize the religious-philosophical statements of Ennius.⁴¹)

Understood in this way, Accius appears closer to the type of rationality on display in works of the first century normally termed philosophical than to the form of rationality in play in antiquarian literature. Accius distances himself alike from criticism for the sake of criticism and also from pleasing the audience.⁴² He takes up the position of one integrated into the Roman upper class, to whom the “probable” of Greek philosophical argumentation has become not verisimile, but probabile. The theoretical judgment that something is “close to absolute truth” is replaced by the concept of positive social sanction, the socially acceptable that “could be given assent.”⁴³ Accius’s near contemporary, Pacuvius, while not sharing Accius’s social position, did share his attitude.⁴⁴

Accius, it should be remembered, was primarily a playwright. His reflections are part of dramatic discourse, which is to say, a distinctive form of public discourse. It did not have to be accepted, but it had to be witnessed by the audience. Public ritual thus offered space for explicit rationalization in a theoretical mode. Indeed, as the next chapter will show, ritualization itself could come to the service of rationalization.