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Chapter 1

The Background: Roman Religion of the Archaic and Early Republican Periods

Historical Sketch

The mapping of change needs a background. However, our knowledge of religion in early Rome is very limited. Contemporary literary sources or reliable later accounts are not available before the second half of the fourth or third century B.C.E. respectively.¹ Already by this time, the armies of Rome and its allies had started to build an empire that by the end of the first century B.C.E. comprised the whole of the Mediterranean coast. This is the period under scrutiny in this book. What is more, by the end of the first century C.E. much of the Mediterranean’s hinterland, to wit, the whole of western Europe, including Britain, and much of southeastern Europe, including today’s Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, and Asia Minor as far as Armenia had been added to the empire. Rome defended a hostile border with the Sassanian Persian Empire, influenced patterns in Arabian legislation, North African urbanization, and Celtic artistic representations—and became the seedbed of several major processes of rationalization in religious traditions.

Situated on or near a crossing of the Tiber, a distance of some twenty-five kilometers from the open sea, continuous settlement in the area of the later city of Rome started in the tenth century. The Tiber, even if large compared to other Italian streams, was but one of the relatively short west-flowing rivers that structured the western slopes of the central Italian Apennine chain. By the beginning of the eighth century, the settlements on the Palatine and the Quirinal fused. Urbanization proper begins at Rome only at the beginning of the so-called “late orientalizing period” (c. 650/40),² indicated by three interconnected processes. First, the Forum Romanum was paved in tamped earth, with some huts removed for this purpose; a stone pavement followed around 625. Second, by the sixth century, the cloaca maxima, a monumental tunnel, was created to drain the area. Developments in domestic architecture, the third step, are somewhat harder to date, but nonetheless, by this time at least, houses of stone with tiled rather than thatched roofs were being built on the slopes of the Palatine and on the Velia. Their form anticipated the later atrium-type with a number of rooms around a courtyard, and some had probably been occupied for centuries.

The Forum was built up relatively quickly. An assembly area of circular shape, comparable to Greek places for political assemblies, was created.³ Facing the Comitium, a building that can be interpreted as the first curia, the meeting place of the Senate, was constructed c. 600 in stone. Around 580 the first stone-built shrine followed in the Comitium. Here, an inscribed five-sided block (cippus) has been found, containing one of the earliest Latin texts, a regulation pertaining to a king (recei [sacrorum?]).⁴ The foundation deposit beneath this stone includes a fragment of an Attic black-figure vase, dated to c. 575–550, showing Hephaestus, the Greek smith-god, riding a mule. This might point to the identification of the structure as a shrine for the god Vulcan, a Volcanal, an impressive indicator of the material and conceptual presence of Greek culture and religion at the very beginning of Roman religion.⁵ Another early building marks the southern boundary of the Forum area; the name later applied to this building, Regia, “Royal Palace,” might suggest that this cult center was reserved at the earliest stage for the rex sacrorum and the pontifex maximus.⁶ Also around 580 the earliest full-fledged podium temple was built on the northern edge of the Forum Boarium, the cattle market near the bank of the Tiber, the nucleus of the (much?) later double sanctuary of Fortuna and Mater Matuta. By the mid-sixth century the temple was decorated with terra-cottas of Greek Heracles and Minerva.⁷ In the Forum, the (later) “House of the Vestals” (atrium Vestae) was one of the first stone buildings.⁸ Religious monumentalization reached its first climax with the construction of the temple on the Capitol. Completed at the end of the sixth century, it had a base measuring 61 x 55 meters and must have been one of the largest temples of its time in the entire Mediterranean area. Because of its size, visibility, and choice of deities, the sanctuary was indicative of the culture dominating the Eastern Mediterranean and present in Italy in places like Gravisca or Pyrgi, namely that of the Greeks. The temple was dedicated to Iuppiter Optimus Maximus (Jove the Best and Greatest), Iuno, and Minerva, and competed with the largest Greek sanctuaries in places like Athens, Corinth, and Olympia (Athena, Hera, Zeus). The investment in the quality of the terracotta statuary points to the same intention.⁹ The temple of the Dioscuri, dedicated in the Forum at the beginning of the fifth century, was smaller, but its foundations were nonetheless impressive, reaching a breadth of c. 29 meters and a depth of c. 39 meters.¹⁰ A new wave of monumental additions to the city center had to wait for the new political formation at the end of the fourth century.

The extraordinary size of the city by the end of the sixth century, forming a capital of perhaps 30,000 inhabitants, presupposes economic success and regional military expansion. Economic success is attested by the traces of Etruscan and Greek presence remaining in the Forum Boarium, mentioned above. Rome’s growing stature as a regional military power is indicated by the text of a treaty, preserved by the Greek historian Polybios, who wrote in the middle of the second century to explain to his fellow Greeks Rome’s rise to world empire.¹¹ The treaty was arranged between Rome, the regional power, and the Carthaginians, by the end of the sixth century. The latter, descendants of the Phoenicians, who had been sailing the Mediterranean since the late second millennium, not only dominated Sicily and the Western Mediterranean, but were extensively present on the coasts of central Italy, too. The Punic and Etruscan texts on the gold tablets from Pyrgi reveal that the Carthaginians maintained a cult of Astarte in that town, a mere fifty kilometers from Rome.¹²

Literary tradition as it was preserved and betimes invented by historians of the late second century and after provides a detailed, even hyperdetailed record of early Roman history. Beyond such traditions as could have been attached to and supported by institutional patterns, temples, laws, and genealogical narratives—and hence, for which we can postulate some reasonable mechanism for the transmission of knowledge—skepticism must be acute. Nevertheless, a rough sketch of the political developments of the sixth to fourth centuries is possible. The period of kingship (partly of Etruscan origins) was ended by 509 and replaced by a system of aristocratic government that allotted to assemblies of Roman citizens the power to distinguish between different candidates, especially for the highest office of two annual consuls, and to give consent to “laws.” As regards domestic politics, the literary tradition narrates above all a conflict between a “patrician” nobility (that might have taken shape only in the transition from monarchy) and a new “plebeian” elite: contingent resolutions in this conflict led to specific institutional changes that either co-opted the nonpatrician elite into existing structures of public authority or accorded status to plebeian institutions kindred to that possessed by institutions of the whole; examples of such changes would include experiments in multiple rulership—namely consular tribunes— and full plebeian participation in the consulate. This process closed only around the turn of the third century, with laws on the opening of priesthoods to plebeian candidates (lex Ogulnia) and the acceptance of the binding force of plebiscites (lex Hortensia). Finally, laws were codified by the mid-fifth century, even if the (now fragmentary) text of the so-called Twelve Tables was stabilized only by the commentaries of the second century.

Regionally, the capture of the Etruscan town of Veii a mere fifteen kilometers from Rome at the beginning of the fourth century and the sack of Rome by the Gauls shortly afterward indicate military vicissitudes. It was rather the decisive defeat of the Latin League in the “Latin Wars” (340–338) that marked the beginning of Roman hegemony over central Italy. With that, the Latin League was dissolved, and the Latins were incorporated into the Roman community. The hegemony of Rome over its neighbors was then expanded to the whole of the peninsula in the centuries to come.

Approaching Early Roman Religion

Interest in early Rome is probably as old as the city. Roman mythological narratives express an intensive interest in the city, taking the form of aetiological myth as well as narratives about formative norms and values that eventually assumed the form of “history.” The universalizing—temporally and geographically—grid of Greek and Hellenistic mythology and history was known at Rome as far back as we have any evidence that could bear upon the issue. Nonetheless, as a framework utilized by Romans for situating themselves in the Mediterranean world, it was embraced only from the third century.¹³ From this time onward, efforts in this direction took the form of Greek “historiography,” which is to say, both the literary form and the language in which it was written were Greek. Latin became the language of historical narrative in the second century. Our, and indeed already the imperial, view on early Roman history is dominated by writers of the late Republic and Augustan age—Cicero, Livy, Vergil, the Greek Dionysios of Halikarnassos—who took part in processes of canonization as well as criticism. In narrating the deeds of the first kings, Romulus and Numa, these authors planted the seeds of both civil war and empire: the killing of Romulus’s brother Remus anticipated later civil strife; the binding of expansion and ecumenical recruitment even from the foundation laid the seeds for empire.

Early Greek attempts to integrate the ascendant city of Rome into their mythological network were not always easily received. Ancestry from Troy, advocated already by the Greek historian Timaios of Sicilian Tauromenion by the beginning of the third century, was not enthusiastically embraced at Rome before the first century. Then, however, the story of the fugitive Trojan prince Aeneas moved into the heart of Roman self-conceptualization. Notwithstanding the massive impact of Greek culture in all areas connected with writing, Roman authors tended to minimize this factor. Instead they stressed differences, despite common ancestry. Rome’s massive reception of Greek culture and religion, whether received directly from Magna Graecia, namely, the Greek settlements of southern Italy and Sicily, or indirectly via the Etruscans or Campanians, is not adequately represented in the literary tradition, for reasons that will become clearer in later chapters.¹⁴ Archaeology demonstrates Greek presence in the temples of the sixth century (as shown above), as well as, for example, the presence of Dionysian imagery in fourth- and third-century Rome.¹⁵

Given the enormous prominence of religion and religious change in their time, the interest in religion of the authors so far named is understandable. Indeed, we may trace this interest as far at least as Polybios. A Greek statesman and historian who in the third quarter of the second century tried to explain Rome’s ascension to world empire to his Greek contemporaries, a rise to power that they had all witnessed, but whose suddenness nonetheless demanded explanation, Polybios had identified Roman piety, which he characterized as superstition, as a central factor in Rome’s military success.

Because much of our knowledge about earlier Roman religion rests on these texts—or, as Christopher Smith put it, because “the evidence we have for Roman religion is often ancient interpretation”¹⁶—we must commence by studying the concept of religion these authors entertain. First, it is important to note that they had no coherent concept of “religion.” The existence of the gods and their character, that is, their stance toward humans, were a matter of natural philosophy: physics rather than “metaphysics” or “philosophy of religion” as we would say. Because the existence of the gods was taken for granted, “piety” (pietas) was held as natural and resulted in what could be termed religio: a sense of obligation, the idea that honors should be paid to the gods or to a certain immortal god.¹⁷ These honors took the form of temples, rituals (sacra), and specialists charged to care for these (sacerdotes). Cultus might occasionally be used as an umbrella term. Hence epiphanies (critically reviewed) and divination, the foundations of temples, public rituals, and the foundation and changes in the public priesthoods gained the interest of writers, with special emphasis to ad hoc rites. Exceptional rites in times of crisis gave the opportunity to comment on participation and even on individual ritual activities, an aspect invisible elsewhere. Details of cult, theological speculation, routine rituals, and the daily running of sanctuaries do not figure in the literary tradition. Votive deposits and burial practices, so prominent in the archaeological record, did not enter the tradition of textually transmitted knowledge. More is learned there about the financing of cult than about reflection on divinity, more about institutionalized than embedded or diffused religion.

Given the available evidence, it seems appropriate to adopt a substantivist, or better, relational definition of “religion,” tying its usage to cultural practices and systems of signs that refer to “gods,” which is itself a class of religious signs comprising both names and images. “Religion” as used in the following refers to an ensemble of practices, institutions, habits, and beliefs, of which no internal coherence or consistence is to be expected, and none is here sought. This definition may suffice because the ambition of this work is to bring the place of religious communication within the wider spectrum of communication and institutions in this early society into relief, for purposes of comparison with the later periods.

Finally, both emic and etic perspectives on religious competences are informed by gender and social order. That said, the major competences enjoyed by Roman women in the late Republic,¹⁸ matrons in particular, were not systematically retrojected by our late sources into the earlier period. Female religious activities were thought to be concentrated on the Vestals. In respect to gender, therefore, neither a robust history nor even a comparison between archaic and late republican religion is possible. It was the contrast between patricians and plebeians that for them dominated the reconstruction of early religion.¹⁹ In the early period, activities ranging from the right to perform divination in the form of auspices (the observing of birds, lightning, and so forth) to membership in the priestly colleges, and hence to their role in communicating with the gods lay exclusively with the patricians. It must be stressed that the Ogulnian law in 300, which opened up religious offices to nonpatricians, did not diminish the number of patrician priests but simply added plebeian pontiffs and augurs.²⁰

Modern scholars have often sought to understand Roman society in light of the various face-to-face societies treated in detail by the classics of twentieth-century anthropology. It is thus seen as constituted by age groups, all individuals of which are together subjected to initiation rituals, and as a community whose economic and social activities are granted rhythm by a common and detailed calendar.²¹ I would not wish to deny the notion of “initiation” altogether, but its utility in respect to Rome is at best analogical, and then only if applied to (self-appointed or aristocratically defined) representatives of an age group in a city of some twenty or forty thousand inhabitants.

Cult Sites

Developmental models always risk teleology. A study of rationalization is no exception. The risks with respect to Rome are compounded by two factors. First, evidence for the history of Rome is exceptional, if late. Second, Romanization, in a sociopolitical as well as a cultural sense, seems to have been an irresistible force. Certainly, whatever the causes and practices that furthered it, their effects were heightened by empire.

Yet inscriptional evidence tells us not only about the flowering of other Italian languages into the first century, but of complex and diverging ritual systems. The Roman solar calendar, in use at Rome since the late fourth century, was employed neither by neighboring Latin townships nor by the Etruscan sacrificial calendar of the liber linteus (“Agram mummy”).²² By the end of the second century, Latin cities like Praeneste or Tibur could still engage in architectural rivalry with Roman temple sites. Some decades later, the allies of the Marsian war imagined an Italian future without Roman hegemony. The fact that the direction of cultural transfer is often far from clear could— positively—be taken as an indicator of a region characterized by intensive cultural exchange. In the following paragraphs some ritual and organizational features of early Roman religion are reviewed within their regional context.

Burial practice is an important index, as it is an archaeologically well-documented outcome of a complex ritual, as well as a mechanism by which material culture was preserved for later inquiry. Its religious importance (in the substantivist sense defined above) is more difficult to assess. Although rituals addressed to deities might accompany burials, there is hardly any evidence to include burial within Roman religious practices. Archaeologically speaking, burial attests to individual religious affiliation only infrequently; for instance, at Rome, inhumation and cremation coexisted for centuries, preferences changing again and again. The concept of the Di Manes, the “good gods” who embody the dead, did not appear regularly on tombstones before imperial times. Yet, for the poorly attested society that forms the subject of this chapter, this concept provides some key evidence. Most significant is the change in burial practice throughout Latium and Etruria during the sixth and fifth centuries. The Orientalizing period (c. 730–630) had produced a number of luxury tombs, princely burials with highly valuable and prestigious objects in sites around Rome (Praeneste, Ficana, Castel di Decima), though (so far) not in Rome itself.²³ Social power had offered the possibility of acquiring wealth and long-distance contacts; such goods and contacts served to further prestige. The following period, characterized at Rome by urbanization and monumentalization—processes, however, that happened earlier in some Etruscan places—witnessed a substantial decline in number and quality of grave goods. In all likelihood, the wealth that might have been spent on ostentatious funerals during this period was instead lavished on “prospective” public display, that is, on aristocratic competition in the form of banquets and entertainments or the building of palace-like houses in stone masonry, rather than on “retrospective” treasure assigned privately to the dead.²⁴ In the long run this would help to create urban centers and public space, and to invest in the latter.

Some cult sites have already been listed for the earliest period. It is important to remember that a sanctuary need not contain a temple building. Open spaces could focus on an altar, and altars did not need to be constructed in stone. A number of votive deposits indicate such places. Such a pit—used either to deposit votive offerings directly or on occasion filled all at once, when a larger number of offerings had to be removed from the premises—allows archaeological identification of a sanctuary. In the city of Rome, such deposits preceded the oldest temple at San Omobono.²⁵ They were widespread in (and beyond) Italy and frequent in Rome’s surroundings. Regionally more characteristic are human—often female—terra-cotta statuettes. At times these statues approached life size, as in Lavinium from the early fifth century onward. Likewise common were heads and busts from the sixth century on and anatomical votives from the fourth century onward. This tradition was supplemented in practice—in the material record—by anatomical votives associated with the Greek cult of Asclepius. Overall, such representations of parts of the body remained characteristic of votive practice down to the first century.²⁶

The practice of temple building was shared by Rome and other Etruscan places from the second half of the sixth century onward. A high podium gave access on one side only, the other sides having neither steps nor wall openings. This base was completed by a building dominated by wooden columns and roof constructions decorated with colorful terra-cotta reliefs. Such a construction clearly marked boundaries of everyday life and set off sacred space.²⁷ Yet it was not restricted to housing a cult statue (besides the statues decorating the tympanon and the roof). A threefold cella at the back of the building offered at least two rooms for different types of activities and does not indicate the veneration of a triad of deities; the rooms of the high podium could likewise be put to different uses. Storage and shop functions of the basement would be completed by storage functions, political assemblies, banquets, and ritual activities above, as architectural forms and later practice suggest.²⁸ “Religion” offered through the form of the temple a defined and public space for different modes of communication.

Our knowledge of cult places and temples at Rome is limited: chance archaeological finds supplement a literary tradition that might be reliable in the sanctuaries that it names, but is in any event hardly complete, even on its own terms. Urban—though not necessarily public—sanctuaries of the period down to the last Latin Wars (340–338) include Iuppiter Optimus Maximus (with Iuno and Minerva) and Iuppiter Feretrius, and in 344 Iuno Moneta on the Capitol hill (resp. in the Arx); Volcanus, Vesta, Saturnus, and Castor in the Forum; the Lupercal and altars for the Carmentae on the slopes of the Palatine; Fortuna and Mater Matuta in the Forum Boarium (San Omobono), and the altar to Hercules nearby; Mercury, Consus (altar), and the “plebeian triad” Ceres, Liber, and Libera in or above the circus valley; Diana, Minerva, and Iuno Regina on the Aventine; Quirinus, Dius Fidius (Semo Sancus), and unidentified votive deposits at Santa Maria della Vittoria and San Vitale on the Quirinal; Iuno Lucina (first a lucus) and Minerva Medica on the Esquiline; and again a cult place characterized by a votive deposit close to the later Colosseum.²⁹ Mars had an altar in the Campus Martius and later a temple directly outside the Porta Capena (388); Fors Fortuna in Trastevere.

The founding of nearly fifty new temples in the century following the Latin Wars³⁰ would seem in itself a clear indicator of accelerated change and likewise of development in the religious and social implications of the act of temple-building and in the communicative functions of these temples. The list comprises a heterogeneous ensemble. Cult places dominated by votive deposits and healing cults (Carmentae, Minerva Medica) mix with cults organized on the principle of exclusion of the other sex (Mater Matuta, Vesta, Hercules) or for special groups (plebeians, Vesta, Fors Fortuna?). Special spatial arrangements, a grotto at the Lupercal, a well for Anna Perenna³¹ and the Carmentae, do without temple buildings. Some cults clearly reflect import (the Capitoline triad, Volcanus, Castor, Fortuna, Hercules, Diana, Iuno Regina). These importations seem to be the result of decisions by the government rather than by immigrant groups. Overall, notionally Greek cults and prominent cults of neighboring towns dominate this group. What is more, apart from an important emphasis on caring for personal needs, religious practices at the level of monumental building, interventions in the urban fabric, and the selection of new gods for worship in those sites reflect an elite’s translocal communication: importing statues of gods or ritual practices into Rome amounted to a form of recognition directed toward the regions of their origin.

The communicative dimension is also important for the forms of the representation of the divine. Ritual communication between humans and deities that are not as present, visible, and touchable as human participants in face-to-face communication requires some manner of reinforcement to ensure successful transmitting of messages and to make a positive outcome of the communicative effort more probable. Archaeological findings and later literary descriptions suggest that rituals at Rome shared the spectrum of forms in Mediterranean societies: vegetable and animal sacrifice, libations, votives, with many variations according to material resources, economy, diets, and artisanship. As mentioned before, in votive offerings, representation of the human supplicant was important. We do not know to what degree the homogeneity resulting from mass production was overcome by efforts at individuation or particularization by the addition of painting. Some differentiation was made in terms of sex and, at least roughly, life phase: baby, youth, adult. I tend to interpret this practice primarily in terms of the perpetuation of communication: the temporary, difficult, and uncertain communication with the divine as enacted and defined by visiting a shrine is made to transcend the limitations of time by permanently representing the human actor in a place closer or more visible to the deity. The votive might be deposited directly into a trench or pit. However, archaeologically identified deposits might also be of secondary origin—the results of periodic removal of votives from visible space, thus leading to new ensembles in the deposit space.³²

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.

Ritual and Ritual Specialists

Without a reliable textual tradition—the nonfictitious sources of the late republican and Augustan authors that inform our reconstruction hardly antedate the second century or, in the case of Fabius Pictor, the late third century—ritual action is even more difficult to reconstruct than its material ingredients. First-century narratives about the institution of cults by Romulus and Numa are as unreliable as twentieth-century projections of the calendar of festivals (fasti) into the regal period. In fact, the list of festivals was codified in the calendar of the late fourth century and is known from first-century copies only.³⁶ Evidence from Etruscan tombs, for instance the Tomba delle Bighe at Tarquinia or the Tomba della Scimmia at Chiusi, suggests the existence of athletic competitions and processional rites in (at least some) Etruscan towns from the sixth or even seventh century onward.³⁷ Reliefs and vase paintings from the sixth and fifth centuries, for example an amphora from Ponte di Micali, dated 520–510,³⁸ confirm the existence of games that included different types of competitions and, at least by the end of the sixth century, processions. Thus the later Roman narratives about the introduction of circus games by the Tarquins,³⁹ that is, the Etruscan kings of Rome, and of ludi scaenici in the middle of the fourth century, also from Etruria,⁴⁰ may reflect an important reality, however distorted aetiological tales of one-time culture transfers no doubt are.⁴¹ What is more, those Roman narratives find an echo in the picture of early Rome provided by the Greek Dionysios of Halikarnassos, who situates the institution of circus processions at Rome by the beginning of the fifth century.⁴² Certainly the neighboring town of Veii is credited for comparable competitions in the sixth century.⁴³ There can be no doubt about the “international” character of such games, mirroring the Greek institution and involving members of middle Italian elites. It should be added that gladiatorial games, probably known in Etruria for centuries, were introduced into Roman funeral cult practices only by 264.⁴⁴

Roman tradition attributed the institutionalization of several priesthoods to the first kings. In this tradition—which has had a significant modern reception—the Roman polity is interpreted as the king’s household writ large. As a family’s cult is focused on the hearth, so the story goes, the king’s daughters (anticipating the priesthood of the Vestal Virgins) care for the city’s hearth (i.e., the fire in the “House of Vesta”).⁴⁵ In this model, ritual tasks that might have been the duty of the king—notwithstanding the lack of any evidence for such—were in the postmonarchic state performed by the supreme pontiff (pontifex maximus) and the “king of the sacrifices” (rex sacrorum). No conclusion has been reached so far as to whether the rex sacrorum was heir to the sacral duties of the king,⁴⁶ later to be overshadowed by the pontifex maximus, or whether a rex sacrorum existed already in regal times in order to fulfill at least partly the religious duties of the king, whose legal competences later fell to the pontiffs (who might have antedated the Republic, too). Roman elaborations of this theory, which is to say, the emic tradition, clearly followed the first route.⁴⁷ That said, attempts to understand Roman state religion as having its origin in a royal household have not proven fruitful.

There is no reliable evidence for Roman priests before the fifth and especially the fourth centuries.⁴⁸ Here, Italian evidence is not helpful, either. Evidence for the divinatory specialists called haruspices in Latin sources, and netśvis in Etruscan texts,⁴⁹ does not antedate the fifth century, nor does the evidence for the priestly role of cipen or cepen assumed by magistrates.⁵⁰ Priesthoods from Italian townships, which at times exhibit striking similarities to Roman institutions, belong to late republican and imperial times; they might have been the result of early exchange processes, in which Rome may have played the role of donor or recipient. The evidence, however, does not offer any clues to the chronology of such exchanges. As the differentiated Roman priesthood of the late Republic need not be postulated for archaic Rome, the question of how to imagine priests in the regal period could be broken down to a limited set of problems.

Specialists in divination (“seers” with a number of different techniques) are attested in a number of Mediterranean societies. Latin tradition developed the figure of the charismatic seer, embodied in the augur Attus Navius, in structural opposition to political power in the shape of king Tarquin.⁵¹ Such figures, whether attacked (the Marcius or Marcii of the third century) or derided (the harioli, “charlatans” of the first century), probably existed throughout Roman history. The high prestige of the college of augurs in the early Republic strongly suggests their institutionalization in some form during the regal period. An early institutionalization likewise renders probable the restriction of this role to patricians by the end of the monarchy. Certainly the right to the auspices seems to have been a kernel of patrician self-definition.⁵²

The existence of an unknown number of religious specialists (not necessarily all male) caring for individual cults and probably cult places can be reasonably assumed. Their name, flamen, points to a much older institutional pattern. In contrast to the augurs or pontiffs, flamines tended to be appointed at a very young age, if third- and second-century evidence can be extrapolated. Groups of aristocratic youths, which is to say, members of an elite close to the king, might well have had the duty to care for some very important cults. The Vestal Virgins would fit such a pattern, as would the Salii and the poorly attested Salian virgins in the cults of Vesta and Mars.⁵³ What is more, if the initiation to banqueting as offered by the Salian priests in the republican period was in fact given to an organized “public” group,⁵⁴ this might well have been related to “the disappearance at the end of the sixth century of terracotta friezes depicting banqueting scenes” that, it has been suggested, reflects “the disappearance of the private banquet as well, as part of the realignment of social affairs consequent on the fall of the last king.”⁵⁵

Associations caring for other cults probably sprang up and died. We have no idea of the origins of such groups as the Mercuriales, Arval Brethren, or Sodales Titii, all securely attested at the end of the Republic.⁵⁶ It cannot be ruled out that the latter went back to the regal period, as was thought in Augustan times.⁵⁷ Over a very long period, as it seems, some of these groups probably came to be regarded as “public priests” (sacerdotes publici) by the time of the late Republic. That said, before the Augustan revival, most of these were socially and politically without importance. It bears emphasis that the associations most prominent in the evidentiary record, namely the Salii and Vestales, existed outside the political realm proper by reasons of sex or age.

Much prestige was given to the pontiffs. There is considerable evidence for patterns of interaction between them and other priesthoods, indeed, of a limited supervisory role over them. This includes not only the appointing or punishing of flamines or Vestals by the supreme pontiff, but also ritual interaction with the Salii⁵⁸ and with the Luperci.⁵⁹ There were also many occasions where they acted together with flamines or Vestals.⁶⁰ The pontiffs, represented by the pontifex maximus,⁶¹ presided over an ancient type of assembly of the curiae, the so-called comitia calata, which was charged with the continuation of families and their cults.⁶² In his important responsibility for regulation of the calendar, the rex sacrorum is paired with a “minor” pontiff on the Calends⁶³ or with the pontiffs on the “Tubilustrium.”⁶⁴ The pontiffs as a prominent public priesthood, hence, were the result of a conscious effort at religious centralization, presupposing the existence of both the comitia centuriata (in order to free the comitia (curiata) calata for their presidency) and a rex sacrorum, which might have been an office existing alongside the (political) king already during the late monarchy. The easiest hypothesis would be to attribute such a step to a major restructuring of society such as might be supposed to have occurred at the termination of the monarchy.⁶⁵ If there had been people called “pontiffs” before, we need not suppose that their role had been comparable. It should be stressed that all the other colleges were modeled on the form of the pontifical college, without necessarily replicating the authority structures obtaining within it. In the case of the augural college, for example, its eldest member served as augur maximus but lacked specific authority; and any institutional role for the college was historically far less important than the power wielded by individual augurs.⁶⁶

Calendars structure economic, political, and ritual activities. Here the Etruscan Tabula Capuana, a text of some 4,000 letters, dating to the beginning of the fifth century, offers comparative material.⁶⁷ This fragmentary list of rituals, summarily described, corroborates the Roman antiquarian claim that the structuring of the months by the Ides was Etruscan; it shows a system of weeklike periods (though not necessarily of constant length) from full moon to full moon: iśveita—celuta—tiniana—a perta (institutionally corresponding to Latin Idus—Tubilustrium—Kalendae—Nonae). At Rome, these days concentrate routine cultic activities of the rex and regina sacrorum, the Flamen Dialis (priest of Iuppiter), the pontiffs, and Tubicines (trumpeters), engaging in rituals addressed to Iuppiter, Iuno, and the moon, and adapting this civic rhythm to the lunations, as is typical for a lunar calendar. It was only with the reforms of Appius Claudius Caecus and Gnaeus Flavius in the final years of the fourth century that—by codifying the calendar—months of fixed length were introduced. As a result, the months ceased to correspond to the lunar phases; the result was a pure solar calendar, the basis of today’s Julio-Gregorian calendar.⁶⁸

Incipient Change

The early Republic was characterized by internal social and political conflicts. Later Roman tradition resolved the complexity of whatever knowledge and tradition it possessed into narratives structured around a dichotomy of patricians and plebeians. In this way, enormously complex historical changes, comprising processes of institutionalization and codification (e.g., the writing of the so-called Twelve Tables, c. 450), of growing social differentiation, and of the establishment of clan groups, gentes, as structures to ensure inheritance within long-lived social structures larger than families, to name but three, were understood as having been designed to distribute political and priestly positions more evenly, thus reducing strife and frustration.⁶⁹ The specifics of the Roman narrative to one side, it is clear that by the second half of the fourth century, a unified elite had evolved that did not remove the distinction of patricians and plebeians but nonetheless gave equal access to offices to each group. The passing of the lex Ogulnia in 300 opened even the priestly colleges of the augurs and pontiffs to plebeians. More generally, under the pressure of an ideology of citizenship that was necessary for successful warfare and attributed powers of decision to public assemblies, an ethos had developed that oriented the drive for distinction toward “publicly” useful activities and thus enabled, or perhaps furthered, the drive within Roman culture toward external military success.⁷⁰

Social developments would have affected public ritual, too. Hypothetically, an important change in the Roman ludi (games) could thus be explained. If aristocratic competition was restricted to publicly useful fields such as warfare, athletic competition as a means for achieving social distinction might have been scorned. To begin with, the organization of games was monopolized by patrician priests, who staged chariot races in March (Equirria), August (Consualia), or October (Equus October, “October Horse”), but the outcome of the games did not bring prestige to the winners. From this generalization, the “Roman” and the “Plebeian” Games, in September and November respectively, should probably be exempted, as also games organized by returning victors. Second, participation in athletic contests shifted from aristocratic youth to professional or local amusement, as indicated by the ludi Capitolini in October. Finally, the organization of the games—now multiplied and connected with different stages of a magistrate’s career— became a field of rivalry and distinction in itself. From this time on, games were concentrated at Rome, offering financial opportunities for foreign professionals and drawing spectators from its large hinterland,⁷¹ but restricting the field of elite competition to the splendors of organization. This process will be analyzed more closely in the next chapter.

The situation should not be regarded as stable, but—for a long time—as an ever shifting equilibrium. If prestigious display and consumption in the form of grave goods had been widely eliminated by the fifth century, gentilician power had been publicly stressed by the building of monumental houses from the same time onward. By the end of the fourth century, temple building by victorious generals turned into a highly competitive field, even if many of them opted for prestigious consumption in the form of victory games (ludi votivi).⁷² Such activities—and probably likewise the return of a victor into a city and his attempts at the display of statues of himself⁷³—were subjected to public control by ritualization and senatorial decisions. Fighting the ever-heightened social differentiation that resulted from military expansion and direct contact with the cultural and political sophistication of the Hellenistic world became an agenda for centuries. This fight continued to reshape and expand Roman religion, too, for centuries to come.⁷⁴