The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 10.1. Excavation of the Neronian Meta Sudans between the Palatine, the Flavian amphitheater, and the arch of Constantine. It has brought to light remnants of Republican cult deposits that demonstrate the presence of individual votive religion in the center of the city. (Photo by J. Rüpke.)

Despite the term “crisis ritual,” the rituals under discussion formed part of a sequence rather than being isolated events. Biographies of individual Romans reveal sequences of actions, typically starting with familiarity with the deity concerned (as a result of individual or family tradition), prayers, and consultations, the fulfilling of the vow and its documentation, the resulting publicity, and the propensity for a new engagement with the divine. Such sequences, while not restricted to any individual god, would normally be enacted within the circle of gods available in the person’s familiar surroundings. However, special traditions, publicity, success, and an inviting local environment (baths, for instance) did favor the growth of certain cults of regional or even supraregional importance. Lavinium and the sanctuary at Ponte di Nona attracted thousands of worshippers on a regional scale. At Rome, on an island in the Tiber, a sanctuary of the healing god Aesculapius (Greek Asklepios) was established; the date of the transfer of this cult from Epidaurus in Greece is 293 B.C.17 Together with famous oracular cults (again Lavinium, later on Praeneste with its great centre of Fortuna), such healing cults formed a religious infrastructure that transcended political boundaries.

Other areas of individual worship are less accessible to us. When Cato the Censor wrote De agricultura (On Agriculture) shortly before the middle of the second century B.C. he produced a normative text on the investment in and managing of an Italian farm. Religion was part of the enterprise, a technical and social necessity for the farmer. Cato and some antiquarian writers offer us a glimpse of the minimal daily routine of burning scraps of food in the hearth and praying to the tutelary spirits of the house (lares) or to the head of the family (genius). Rituals surrounding childbirth, name giving, coming of age, marriage, death, and burial are hardly ever described, and then only in texts written several hundred years after the supposed practice was current. Archaeology, for example in Ostia, does not encourage the view that any architectural structures like house altars, let alone sumptuous ones, were common in middle- and lower-class homes.18 It is always reasonable to expect a broad range of attitudes toward religious traditions and their traditional obligations, even in a premodern society, and it is difficult to determine exactly what these attitudes were during the Republic.

It is even more difficult to determine the level of participation of the populace in public ritual. Judging by occasional literary references and institutional features, the New Year’s festivities on January 1 (kalendae Ianuariae), the festival of the Saturnalia in December, and other celebrations that encouraged local festive activities in families and neighborhoods must have had a high level of participation. The splendor and the material rewards of watching a triumph must also have produced a huge number of spectators.

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