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Introduction

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 Italian peoples in the Social War to stop Roman domination, resulting in the victory of Rome over all of Italy in 89.

Impelled by sea changes in the nature and structure of the Roman aristocracy, and itself helping to consolidate, channel, and constrain those changes, Roman religion was transformed over this period. The inventions and revisions then undertaken might be separately classified and analyzed under rubrics like ritualization, routinization, systematization, even abstraction, skepticism, Hellenization, and modernization. In this book, I shall argue that the bulk of this change might helpfully be understood as rationalizing: rules and principles were abstracted from practice; these were made the object of a specialized discourse, with its own rules of argument, and institutional loci; and, thus codified and elaborated, these then guided future conduct and innovation.

Let me make one thing clear at the outset. The evidence does not permit us to say, and I will in any event not argue, that all change in this period was systematic or purposive, or that it was driven by processes in the intellectual sphere. The massive changes that took place in Roman ritual life in the late fourth century, when sweeping accretions were made to an earlier calendrical and topographically localized ritual system, are a case in point. As I shall describe and attempt to explain in Chapter 2, these changes should be seen as driven in the first instance by varied political motives. But in the period that followed, and continuing throughout the third century, religious changes exhibit a logic that is the product at once of their formation in a particular place and time, and also of their subjection to discursive control. What we know of them, what they became, is the result of their revision and performance under the rationalizing and systematizing pressures of late middle republican religious discourse, processes that gained momentum down to the end of the Republic. This is the development described and analyzed in this book.

Rationalization

Even superficial examination of the final two centuries of the Roman Republic, from c. 240 to 40, reveals an urban society experiencing rapid change in several areas—social, political, juridical, economic, and religious—in connection with large-scale political and economic expansion and massive cultural imports, especially of tastes and practices understood as Greek.¹ This process has been described in terms of escalating conflict in the political arena and as a (partial) modernization in the cultural arena. Most often, it is described in terms of an accelerating Hellenization of both Roman culture and Italian urbanism, and a concomitant decline of tradition, leading to the end of the Republic and a breakdown of republican Roman religion. This study calls for a reconsideration of how this process should be characterized: it does so on the basis of findings arising out of the multidimensional contextualization of religious change within the other areas of Roman republican society already named—that is, the political, economic, and juridical arenas.

It will be argued here that Max Weber’s concept of rationalization and his typology of rationality provide an enormously useful index for describing religious and cultural change in this period. By “rationality” I refer not to some branch or descendant of Aristotelian logic—itself a type of theoretical rationality—but to the ordering and systematization of concepts, practices, or instruments used to reach particular ends.² In particular, I define “rationalization” as the attempt to apply ideas to practices and to systematize those practices in order to put them into words and submit them to rules. Rationalization is the systematization—or attempted systematization—of practice.³ By adopting such an analytic framework, I argue, it is possible not simply to analyze changes in different realms comparatively, but also to concentrate investigation intensively on the connections and differences between developments, and the groups that sustained those changes. These are complex claims. Let me attempt to clarify them provisionally at the outset.

Again, it should be emphasized that the particular characteristics of Western rationality are not of primary concern for my analysis. This is so even though classical Greek thought as synthesized in Latin texts of the late Roman Republic—especially those by Cicero and Varro—played a foundational role in European thought up to the early modern period.⁴ Instead, following Wolfgang Schluchter, I approach Weber’s socioreligious studies as contributions to research on typology and historical change.⁵ So understood, Weber’s implicit and explicit conceptual tools can be used for the analysis of specific societies, whether Western or not, as well as for their comparative classification. All manner of caution is obviously necessary nonetheless: Weber’s conceptual system does after all proceed from assumptions derived from his work in the field of religion, work that is today considered outdated. But this does not prevent his work from being useful as an interpretive framework, as long as one adopts a critical stance.

In point of fact, it is precisely Weber’s interest in religion that invites the application of his concept of rationality to the analysis of developments of the late Roman Republic.⁶ Our sources for this period imply that developments in religious practice and reflection on religion played a key role within the larger process of cultural change. In the political communication of the Roman aristocracy, too, religious media played a central role.⁷ That said, the centrality of religion across these domains of political action and cultural production must be seen as contingent and should be subjected to repeated evaluation in different periods.

Placing changes in the domain of religion at the center of analysis even as one contextualizes those same changes potentially permits an understanding of late Roman republican society to surmount the current interpretation of aristocratic practice in respect to religion with all its implied polarities, that is, as paradox, cognitive dissonance, or hypocrisy. That the pontifex Cotta, a participant in Cicero’s philosophical dialogue On the Nature of the Gods, claims simply to ignore all philosophical skepticism in his priestly activities— seemingly repudiating any imputation of cognitive dissonance⁸—is not a historical datum, but merely Cicero’s literary solution to the problem of this discrepancy. Theories of balkanization simply cannot provide an adequate description of the behavior of the late republican aristocracy, which experienced the practical success of rationalization firsthand.

Within this approach to rationalization, with its emphasis on communicative practice and the institutionalization of knowledge production and interpretive rule-making, it is essential to identify the contexts of production and performance of our main sources, as well as the communicative practices described in these sources. This includes the communicative function of religious practices that were made the objects of discourse. Hence, to anticipate a thesis I shall defend in what follows, I suggest that the various Greek precedents for rational discourse about religion did not gain acceptance at Rome simply because of their rationality; their success was, rather, dependent on the existence of a public audience that was open to and, indeed, already engaged in the rationalization of religion. In other words, this project cannot proceed solely through the reading of texts and tracing of their reception. We must also study the formation of public audiences and their institutional context. This topic is taken up in the first part of this book, which is dedicated to rituals.

Outline of the Book

A serious history of republican religion has not been written.⁹ This book fills this gap in scholarship by pursuing an interest in both Roman history and the history of religion, inquiring into the formative period of Rome’s initial experiments with imperial expansion and continuing into the late middle and late Republic. Thus, while the primary focus of this book is on the period from roughly 240 to 40 B.C.E., occasional glimpses into earlier periods are included. Mapping change requires attention to chronology, and this book is structured to shed light on both change and its chronology. While the final chapter (Chapter 14) summarizes the processes analyzed in the previous chapters in depth, Chapter 1 attempts to reconstruct Roman religion at the dawn of our period, as far as is possible from the meager extant evidence.¹⁰

The first part of this book (Chapters 2–5) is dedicated to public ritual. The term “public” denotes a large audience that is ideologically identified as the Roman people, even if it is not representative in any legal or statistical manner. As used in this volume, “public” is not a precisely differentiated analytical term but rather a heuristic one. Particularly as an anachronistic term, which is colored by modern ideas of participatory decision-making processes, it raises the question of arenas of communication that indicate “audiences” beyond themselves in the realm of the entire society. In this sense “public,” in the singular, represents an arena of communication that enables open, general communication and association, publicité and communauté. Communicative situations involving audiences of this type are reviewed first (Chapter 2). The rituals of republican religion are then analyzed for changes in their visibility and the size of their audience, as are situations— political and juridical assemblies, to name but two—that might form theaters of communication (Chapter 3). In this ritual context of communication, as arguments were formed or were able to take effect, critical reflection on institutions and further institutionalization arising from those reflections could be articulated.

Dramatic performances, it has been stressed, offered an important communicative space, and the texts performed in that space—objects of brief glances in the opening chapters of this book—receive detailed examination in Chapter 4.¹¹ But the performative aspect of drama should not so occupy our attention that we neglect to consider the circulation of written drama from the later second century B.C.E. onward.¹² Some passages preserved among the fragments of the second-century poet Accius will allow important insights into incipient rationalizing interpretations of religion in this period.

At the end of the first part, our focus will shift to the language of ritual. The development of the triumph constitutes an instance of the effects of ritualization in the form of a public ritual as a form of control (Chapter 5).

The second part of this book will directly address texts and the establishment of rules, shifting the focus from the middle to the late Republic. My point of departure is the presence of highly developed practical and theoretical rationalizations: practical in the form of instrumental rationalization, that is, solutions to technical problems, and the rationalization of values; theoretical in the form of causal, for example intellectual, rationalization in epistemological theory and worldviews. Outside the sphere of religion, we might locate such rationalizing tendencies in late republican culture first in the form of Greek schools and texts.¹³ Greek culture occupied a prestigious position in this period, of course: Roman aristocrats competed to equip their villas with Greek art, and Greek culture dominated on stage. But my focus will be on the forms of rationalization visible within this borrowed Greek culture, and in particular on what I call insular rationalizations, namely, segmental systematizations.

Rhetoric is an example of such insular rationalization. By the second century it had been developed into a teachable art of convincing argumentation. In conformity with the conventions of Roman historical thought, a story was naturally told of the arrival of rhetoric at Rome: in 155 B.C.E., Carneades demonstrated the truth of a claim on one day and the truth of the opposite claim on the following day.¹⁴ He was driven out of the city, but Greek rhetoric nevertheless attracted Romans in the subsequent decades. It also remained controversial: the setting up of Latin rhetorical schools was forbidden as late as 92. This type of rationalization thus remained insular in two senses: it was denied a large spread, and its successful application was restricted to intellectual discourse in private houses, books, and pleading in the courts. Divination, too, became the object of a discursive tradition, both within and without institutional controls, and, as with rhetoric, this occurred against the backdrop of intensive Greek philosophical discussion. Sacrificial practices, for instance, were hardly subjected to similar systematization or critique.

After a short introduction dealing with the spread of writing (Chapter 6), the chapters of this section focus on the Roman fasti—that is, the calendar (Chapter 7); religious rules and their place in historiographic reflection (Chapter 8); and the late republican attempt at describing the place of religion within a constitution-like charter, the lex Ursonensis (Chapter 9).

Despite their insular character, I argue that the historical cases thus reviewed were not mere attempts at, but indeed successful instances of, rationalization. Giving full weight to that fact is a major concern of this book. Even if such rationalizations must first be attached to formal criteria, primarily to systematization in the mode of language, the question of the problem-solving capacity of such formal rationality—in the eyes of contemporaries—cannot be ignored. On this basis this book will expand upon Claudia Moatti’s original and convincing attempt to locate the “birth of rationality in Rome” in Cicero’s generation, that is, in the first century, through a gestational history and through differentiation of her concept of rationality.¹⁵ This opens up a new perspective on a culture that has often been seen as merely transitional and is rarely credited with originality.¹⁶ Indeed, it is precisely the opportunity to investigate the development and diffusion of rationality, and the clash of rationalizing and the mythological worldviews (to use the hackneyed characterizations), that constitutes the attraction of my topic.¹⁷ Thus the third section will deal with two theoretical genres, antiquarianism and philosophy. A brief introduction to the problems and analytical tools (Chapter 10) will be followed by analyses of two figures whose writings survive only in fragments but who are nonetheless important indicators of religious change, namely Ennius and Varro (Chapters 11 and 12). An analysis of Cicero’s classical philosophical treatments of religion concludes this part (Chapter 13).

As cultural change within cultural exchange becomes a notion of growing importance throughout the book, the final chapter (Chapter 14) will try to map the interrelation of the two processes. The last two centuries of the Republic were characterized by complex processes of expansion and reception, the consolidation of new elites, the formation of insular rationalizations before large-scale alternative worldviews, and sweeping institutional change, all of which cast a petrified tradition into a defensive stance. In this context, “religion” did not go unchallenged. Instead, it grew in importance and in its range of application and systematization. This book’s underlying conviction holds that well into the Augustan and imperial periods, religion can serve as an indicator of historical change.