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