Res Divinae #1: Religio Romana?

Introduction

In the series Res Divinae, I will attempt to sketch out my approach for conceptualizing “Roman religion”. But since Religious Studies research of the last few decades has clearly shown that the term “religion” is anachronistic and distorting when applied to antiquity¹, I will try to start not from modern categories but from ancient ones. The most general term I can think of that refers to largely the same things that we mean by “Roman religion” is res divinae, ‘divine things’, and so I have chosen to define this as the subject of study. 

¹ see especially Brent Nongbri, Before Religion. A History of a Modern Concept (2013), and Carlin A. Barton & Daniel Boyarin, Imagine No Religion. How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (2016).

But before I set out on the more detailed scholarly work of articulating my approach, I want to use this first post to say something about the people to whom this topic probably matters the most: modern polytheists, pagans, or reconstructionists. Although each of these terms has its detractors, I am referring to what seems to me a relatively coherent subculture of pagans (if you will excuse my using that disputed umbrella term for a moment) that rejects frameworks seen as occultist, esoteric, New Age, or merely psychological (“Jungian”). This does not mean that there is a total break from these other modern traditions – in part because they are themselves internally diverse –, but reconstructionists take a “common sense” view of the gods, if you will: they are real individual beings. Accordingly, they will try to revive historical forms of worship, prayer, etc., rather than using ritual formats developed by, for example, the Order of the Golden Dawn. This is a somewhat crude definition, but it will do for this piece.

Two Paradigms

Now, before I look at the way that reconstructionists of Roman “religion” – practitioners of Religio Romana or Cultus Deorum – define their practice, I want to cite and make a few comments on the introductory paragraph of the Latin Wikipedia article on the subject, because it is the most concise formulation I have seen of what I will call the Nation-Based Paradigm, which was completely dominant in the 19^th century (as to before, I don’t know) and which scholars have only been abandoning gradually in recent decades.

Religio Romana mutabatur. Temporibus antiquioribus Romani et Lares et penates aliosque deos sive deas et numina necnon maiores suos colebant. Deinde multa mutuaverunt ab Etruscis et Graecis, praecipue quae ad cultum mythologiam attinebant. Subditorum quoque populorum deos et deas moniti vel responsis oraculorum vel libris Sibyllinis Romam traduxerunt. Ergo et familia deorum brevi aucta est et dei ipsi Romanorum simillimi Graecis facti sunt. (Vicipaedia s.v. Religio Romana)

Roman Religion was always changing. In the earliest times, the Romans used to worship Lares and Penates and other gods and goddesses, and numina, as well as their own ancestors (maiores). Later, much was changed through (influence from) the Etruscans and the Greeks, especially things that pertained to cult (and) mythology. They also transferred the gods and goddesses of these peoples to Rome at the instruction/warning of the responses of oracles or the Sibylline books. In this way, the family of gods was (much) increased in a brief time and the gods of the Romans themselves became extremely similar to those of the Greeks.

The reason I call this the Nation-Based Paradigm is that it takes for granted that the Romans (a) originally had a culturally pure religion and (b) persist through time as a unified people, or nation. This ignores many basic historical facts, most importantly perhaps that the citizens of early Republican Rome itself, and many of their cults, were in part of Sabine origins. (To say nothing of the demographic diversity of later times.) The Sabines had been a Latin people who lived very close to Rome, and so they shared a common heritage and common developments, but Varro in the 1^st century BCE still regularly notes which gods or institutions were Sabine.

Although Etruscan is neither a Latin dialect nor related to the Latin language, which makes it intuitive to think of Etruscans and Romans as separate peoples that were “in contact”, I think it’s reasonable to say that there is no Rome before and without Etruscans. Whether it really had kings from Etruria or not, even the earliest identifiably Roman stories and practices have to be situated in a context where Etruscan culture was prestigious and exerted great influence. On the other hand, sources from late antiquity still speak about Etruscan ritual experts – whether these were Etruscans in an ethnic sense or only in terms of their education –, even though virtually all inhabitants of Italy had become speakers of Latin and (if male) Roman citizens centuries before. (Of course this does not apply to the vast slave populations.) Etruscan kinds of knowledge had become codified in Rome and under Roman hegemony as Etruscan, rather than simply being assimilated, but it was a part of Roman culture to study it.

Similar things can be said about the relation between Rome and the Greeks. Although the early influence of Greek culture on Rome is somewhat cloudy – much was mediated through the Etruscans, for example, including many gods –, in the Hellenistic period the relationship to Panhellenic culture seems to have been much the same as any other place in the Mediterranean, be it Etruria, Asia Minor or Carthage. As Greek ways of thinking about the world and its history became a lingua franca of the region, local peculiarity, even if it was preserved, was defined against a Greek norm. But this was fundamentally the same process that regulated Greek local cultures – a local commonsense coexisted with a transregional commonsense, and they were constantly in conversation with each other, shaping each other.

The rise of Rome meant that, increasingly, local Roman norms became transregional ones as well, and so, much like the Etruscan ritual expertise, many Greek texts and practices were popularized through incorporation into Roman canons and institutions. As with the Etruscans, it does not do to put Greeks and Romans side by side or in succession to one another. In either case, we are likely to overlook the ways that Greek-speakers were enmeshed in Roman structures, living under Roman laws, according to a Roman calendar, participating in the worship of Roman emperors and reading about Roman history. In short, the Hellenization of Jupiter was also the Romanization of Zeus.

Another matter is the literal reception of foreign gods in the form of new cult statues and temples that followed unfamiliar sacral law. But if we want to then speak of “families of the gods”, that has to mean different family-trees drawn up by various people to make sense of these gods, not of a pantheon in the sense of a clearly structured cosmological hierarchy.

I will call the alternative view I have briefly sketched here the Dominant Norms Paradigm.

Example #1: Nova Roma

Let’s move on to the self-definitions of reconstructionists now and compare them to these two paradigms. The first example is from Nova Roma, “an international organization dedicated to the study and restoration of ancient Roman culture”, and can be found here.

Religio Romana 

Roman Religion in Antiquity and Today 

The Religio Romana is the pre-Christian religion of Rome. Sometimes called "Roman Paganism", the modern practice of the Religio Romana is an attempt to reconstruct the ancient faith of Rome as closely as possible, making as few concessions to modern sensibilities as possible. As with other forms of historical reconstructionist paganism, every attempt is made to rely on actual historical and archaeological evidence, and interpolations are made only when the primary sources are silent, and then we strive to be consistent with them. 

The Religio Romana began as the simple earth-based faith of the farmers of the village of Rome. Influenced by their Etruscan (and later Greek) neighbors, the Romans developed a complex State Religion that emphasised duty to the Gods (pietas) and serving them through exactly prescribed rituals. As Cicero stated in his work, "On the Nature of the Gods"-- 

"I am quite certain that Romulus by instituting auspices, and Numa ritual, laid the foundations of our state, which would never have been able to be so great had not the immortal gods been placated to the utmost extent." 

It cannot be approached by inserting Roman deity names into Greek religion, modern Wicca or any other system, for Roman religion is a unique product of the culture that created it. It is a faith that demands steadfastness and devotion to duty. It involves working in harmony with the eternal gods and with universal order, for the benefit not only of ourselves but also the world around us; with right action and attitudes towards the gods, both the State and the individual will prosper. Yet the Religio Romana involves more than pious action and worldly power; there are also Mystery traditions which focus on inner spiritual growth, and these too will be addressed by Nova Roma as we continue to expand and improve our understanding and emulation of our glorious spiritual ancestors.

Clearly, the statement that “Roman religion is a unique product of the culture that created it” is an expression nation-based thinking, and so is the romanticizing of “the farmers of the village of Rome”. But the valorization of early rustic values was a constant refrain of Roman patriotism in antiquity. More modern is the idea of religion as the expression of a culture. In ancient literature, it is not the culture which expresses itself in a (state) religion which prescribes pietas. Rather, pietas and religio are closely linked moral virtues, which apply to people’s interpersonal relationships with both humans and gods. Pietas means following the (often rather nebulous) mos maiorum, the custom of the ancestors, and when this means “inserting Roman deity names into Greek” rituals, as in the “Greek rites” of Ceres at Rome, then that was what was (ideally) done.

The resistance to a conflation of Roman religion with Greek religion is understandable when one conceptualizes a religion as a system (like Wicca) with set beliefs and unified rituals. But the notion of a unified Greek religion is completely ahistorical, and while the Roman official cultus – the type of practices which elite men wrote long books about – was in aspiration one system of rules (much like Roman law) but only presumed a limited set of beliefs, most of them entirely implicit and in a sense extraneous to priestly law.

Religio is the sense of duty that is supposed to motivate people to accord with priestly law and its more private and less codified equivalents in household cults. It is not itself a system of rules and much less “a faith”. Fides, ‘faith, reliability’, is another virtue, again not limited to the sphere of res divina. (She is also a minor goddess.) But to conflate these virtues with the norms of those in power is highly questionable: many acts of religio were regarded as dangerous superstition or subversive magic by officials, and ritual experts who deviated too much from the norms faced the death penalty with some regularity. The private cults of the households were again loci of hierarchy and suppression; the ancient manuals on agriculture, which give instructions for land owners on how to organize their slaves, all concur that they are not to perform their own sacrifices, and that their involvement in the family’s own rites is to be strictly regulated.

And it is not as if “steadfastness and devotion of duty”, “working in harmony with the eternal gods and with universal order” are outgrowths of Roman thought, state-centred or not. All extant Roman literature that deals with duty, and especially Cicero’s great treatise On Duties (De officiis), was written under the spell of Hellenistic philosophical literature on the subject. Both the notion of the eternity of the gods and of a universal order come from again Greek philosophy. Of course, we can see the philosophy as a tool used to articulate traditional ideas more clearly – and I would – but it is impossible to remove the Greek structures and uncover a prelapsarian purely Roman worldview underneath.

Finally, I would like to note two anachronisms that are perhaps less serious. The first is the description of Roman Religion as an “earth-based faith”: this is a term used to define modern paganism (I believe an emic one) which certainly does not come out of reconstructionism, and it oversells the importance of the earth in the Roman cult landscape. Philosophical speculation led to the identification of many other female deities with the earth, but even then, the Romans thought largely in terms of those above (the heavenly gods) and those below (the dead and the gods of the underworld), with the earth itself playing a taxonomically marginal role.

The second anachronism is the language of spirituality, especially of “spiritual growth”. To think of the spiritual as the contrary of the material is an early Christian notion, and the notion of spiritual growth is Early Modern. If there is a similar ancient contrast, it is between things human and things divine, and one would aim for an “assimilation (Gr. homoiosis) to the gods as far as possible for a human” (a favorite phrase of ancient Platonists). It may be appropriate to use spirituality as a lense for constructing and experiencing mystery cults in the present, but it is not helpful in understanding or explaining the extant sources from antiquity.

Example #2: Mos Maiorum

My next example is only an excerpt from a very much longer explanation of the Cultus Deorum (Romanorum) on a German reconstructionist website, Mos Maiorum. Der römische Weg. I will give an English translation:

  What does the Cultus Deorum consist of?

The religion itself is timeless and through its flexibility and adaptability to everyday life fits seamlessly into modern times.

The Romans themselves had very modern attitudes and did not eschew taking over the innovations of conquered people or even their enemies and improving them (“the Japanese of their time”). In their adoption of foreign gods and cultural aspects they accommodated themselves in a flexible way to the given peculiarities of their many provinces, which was key to their success.

No doubt they wouldn’t try to live ossified lives like 2000 years ago, but would be able to enjoy modern times and their achievements. This is why the Cultus Deorum Romanorum is a belief system focused on practice today as it was then, but which can be adapted to the times without bending over backward and filling gaps from fantasy because of the richness of the source material – the gods are timeless and are surely enjoying modernity as much as they did the time 2000 years ago… and are just as much at home here!

The Religio Romana is a religion of orthopraxis, i.e. of the right and correct practical conduct. Correct performance and religious practice are of central importance here: the observation of religious and ritual rules, the performance of specific rituals – all this secures the “Pax Deorum”, peace with the gods and their benevolence. Not for nothing was a ritual (primarily in the state cult) aborted and started over when the priest had misspoken or the tibicen, the sacral musician, had played a wrong note. The external form is of great importance. […]

Orthopraxis, the correct performance of actions, is far more important than orthodoxy, right belief, which is of central importance e.g. in the monotheistic religions. […] Gaps in the evidence have to be filled, but this does not happen with fantasy or even mixing with completely different, (neo-)pagan, magical or other eclectic notions, but in as plausible and consistent a fashion as possible and in keeping with the context and framework of what we already know or have been able to reconstruct.

What distinguishes the Cultus from Christianity most of all – apart from the fact that it is a polytheistic religion – is the deep conviction that the gods and goddesses are fundamentally benevolent and friendly towards us humans. The notion of a punishing, avenging god, to whom we will have to be accountable and to justify our sins, was rejected by the Romans as “superstitio” (superstition).

Here, we do not see any interest in reviving Roman culture as a whole (“making as few concessions to modern sensibilities as possible”), but the argument for the timelessness and modernity of the Roman religion is nevertheless made through an interpretation of Roman culture as dynamic and flexible. How this connects to a system primarily concerned with practices that moreover need to be observed with complete exactitude is unclear. At any rate there seems to be something of an inconsistency between the ideal – which would seem to require a substantial set of complete ritual manuals preserved from antiquity – and the optimism about what we actually have: a few complete but inexact descriptions of minor rituals and a broad literature of scattered observations.

The distinction between orthopraxis and orthodoxy that is made here is common, not just among pagans, but also when differences between Christianity and Judaism are discussed. But it is almost always a move from having something look too much like (Protestant) Christianity to making it look too much like the opposite of Christianity. Roman ritual orthopraxis, one could say, was not rooted in orthodoxy, but then why call it a religion? Since conduct and practice are entirely detached from the state here, one gets the impression that the unit which was regulated by orthopraxis was the individual. In reality, priestly law was not a private affair, private acts of worship were subject to a lot of informal control exerted on entire households or larger social units, and the commitment of illegal magical acts was a matter of criminal law, not priestly or sacred law.

The claim that Romans regarded the idea of divine punishment as a superstition is frankly a distortion: a whole range of Roman rituals were aimed at placating the gods, atoning for misdeeds, and not a few at escaping an unpleasant afterlife. Not to mention that superstition was often associated with foreigners, women, and the uneducated – to reassert these kinds of delineations between norm and deviation without critical reflection seems irresponsible.

Summary

Both examples of Roman reconstructionist self-representation (and some others that I ultimately decided to exclude to avoid repetitiveness) show a distinctly Nation-Based Approach. The Romans, the Roman religion, the Roman practices are all conceived of as inextricably linked. Apart from some unwitting reproductions of Christian ideas, the key weakness of these conceptualizations is an unwillingness to reflect about what a Roman was – it is simply taken for granted that everyone already knows.

But it is obvious that a small city cannot produce citizens for an entire empire: and so the “pure”, even the mixed Roman, rather than the rule, is the extreme exception. Like Cicero, most Romans were not from Rome and had no ancestors from Rome. They became Roman by aligning themselves with dominant norms, which included “religious” ones. From the time that the Romans incorporated the Sabines, this meant the creation of ever bigger and more internally diverse communities, not the expansion and diversification of a fundamentally distinct population. In view of this, it is obvious that the question is not of foreign “influence” on a homogeneous society but about how to conceptualize a chimera made up of Greek- and Syriac-speaking slaves forbidden to worship any deity but the household Lar of their master; illiterate female sagaces who performed rituals about which we know practically nothing; trilingual philosophers who spent their money on rare volumes of Egyptian rituals; Greek-language orators from Thrace who went to Rome and gave speeches in honor of the Olympian gods; priests in an Italian city who preserved half-understood books in an extinct dialect in the local temple of Juno but whose education was otherwise based entirely on the intellectual fashions in Rome; and so on, and so on, and so on.