Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke
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and should not be passed over too quickly. The games were sponsored as an effective means of alleviating tensions in relations with the gods and preventing further catastrophic military defeats or plagues. For this purpose the very best was just barely good enough. The developmental process that this ideological and social-material matrix impelled then demanded greater and greater extravagance overall, as well as the professionalization of the agents involved. Authors formed an official Roman club (collegium poetarum) in the second half of the third century, and even before that professional troupes of actors could be hired from the more intensely Hellenized areas of Italy. Similar processes of professionalization can be observed among the chariot drivers, even though evidence for a cult dedicated to the victors of chariot races can only be found in the imperial period. Scattered and mostly late sources for the late Republic reveal these professionals functioning as the groups to whom the spectators turned with their expressions of approval or disapproval.
I emphasize this point for a particular reason. In a recent study on gladiators,33 Georges Ville has set in the foreground of historical inquiry interactions that took place within the audience, such as the observation of senators or the applauding or booing of individual senators within a space that was increasingly divided according to social status.34 I would by no means deny the importance of these factors, but I find the assumption that secondary functions rather than primary intentions could explain the enormous proliferation of institutionalized “games” unsatisfactory. Beyond that, we must be mindful of the fact that the competitions, especially the chariot races, were the most successful element of the games in the long term. Chariot races completely dominated the games in the imperial period and into late antiquity. At a phenomenological level, we would have to say that their appeal probably arose not out of the unified opinion of the spectators but from differing preferences for specific drivers or parties. One could win points for supporting the favorite driver of one’s girlfriend, even if he was sure to lose. This is admittedly hypothetical, but one can imagine the satisfaction of proving one’s instinct and winning over against a patron’s bet.
The Content of Religious Communication
This leads us to the necessity of addressing the content of organized communication. The entire spectrum of Italic and Greek cultural production was received at Rome, but the meaning of every object, and every form, was radically changed by their relocation. If we consider the display of statues and paintings in triumphal processions, for example, we observe that Greek statues and other “works of art” there had entertainment value, torn as they were from any functional context. This goes for Greek libraries as well. However, Romans did not remain passive recipients only but had their own Greek material, as it were, created for themselves.35 Roman aristocrats were enthusiastic about the technique of bronze casting already at the end of the fourth century.36 Nor did their appetite extend only to objects of art. Dramatic performances of every kind were translated or adapted and staged at festivals, including the Oscan Atellana, New Comedy, tragedies with topics from Greek mythology as well as, soon enough, Roman history. The latter, the Praetexta, was a genre destined to play a subordinate role, which mostly disappeared with the Republic.37 The gods were thus offered more than just exotic animals as entertainment.
Surviving titles and texts from the late third century allow for a more precise view of their contents. Specific contemporary relevance or a close connection to the respective holiday does not at first view play any significant role. This differentiates this type of drama clearly from that of fifth-century Athenian theater. The titles and the few remaining fragments from the two earliest dramatists already mentioned in Rome, Livius Andronicus and Naevius, reveal mostly mythological material drawn from traditional Greek mythological cycles. The series of known titles of tragedies by Livius Andronicus are Achilles, Aegistus, Aiax mastigophorus, Andromeda, Antiopa, Danae, Equos Troianus, Hermiona, Ino, Tereus; for Naevius: Aesiona, Danae, Equos Troianus, Hector proficiscens, Iphigenia, Lycurgos. Naevius also staged plays with clearly Roman topics, such as Clastidium sive Marcellus, about a recent victory over the Celts, and a Lupus and Romulus. Thirty-five titles are known from Naevius’s numerous comedies, beginning alphabetically with Acontizomenos, Agitatoria, Agrynuntes, Appella, Ariolus, Astiologa, Carbonaria, Clamidaria, and Colax.38 The surviving pieces by Plautus or Terence from the following decades confirm the impression left by these titles: plots are set in a Greek world, even when the problems they treat are clearly marked by Rome.39 This mixture could become more Roman in the second century with comedies classified as togatae by Varro, but these did not achieve a lasting dominance.40
How can we interpret these findings? The forms and objects of entertainment are ethnically marked in a multitude of ways. It must have been clear to the majority of spectators that they were consuming Greek (in the broadest sense of the word) entertainment, products from a culture perceived as superior in this regard and therefore attractive. There is another side to this: Rome imported these products often enough against the will of their authors or makers. Art piracy and enslavement were central modes of cultural transfer, and the profits of war served to engage the best free theater troupes and artists.41 In most cases the entertainment was connected to the celebration or commemoration of a military victory.42 In all this, Rome presented itself as the center of the world.
And yet, Rome presented itself as the center of a world outside of Rome and older than Rome. That world was dominated by Greek narrative traditions, and it was above all Greek myth, with its gods moving about, its exiles founding cities, and its adventurous military expeditions, that gave the coastal cities of the Mediterranean a genealogy, a place in Greek history. Thus Rome was understood to have been founded, as Varro worked out on the basis of these traditions, four hundred and thirty years after the fall of Troy. That is where the dates 754/753 for the foundation of Rome came from; year 1 in the history of the city is a date from Greek history. At the same time, religion, and the gods, offered a framework to recenter Rome again. It is the gods with Roman names, not Zeus but Iuppiter, not Hera but Iuno, not Ares but Mars, who received a history, a genealogy, within the plays. Even the demanding and destructive god Dionysos of the Lycurgos was a god so native that his followers only a short time later, in 186, were suspected of being members of a mass movement to overthrow the state.43
Here, in the genealogical ordering and in the working out of the dramatic character of the gods of Roman polytheism, a moment of theoretical rationalization can be detected. The systematization that commenced consolidation from this moment is more recognizable in other types of texts, such as Latin epic, which began with the same two authors. Its content was an “Odyssey” and a “Punic War,” which reach back to Troy and Aeneas. Another example is Roman historiography, which began in the same generation with the work of Fabius Pictor, written in Greek. Both genres were aimed at a mass audience. The epic was most probably recited at upper-class banquets.44 Considering that the language of historiography was changed to Latin only in the second third of the second century, private reading is the most probable form for its reception. The exclusivity of the circulation and performance audience of these latter genres makes it clear that history lessons at Rome took place in the theater.45
Comedy had a quite different goal and effect with its everyday plots. Here the problems of ordinary Roman people were played out, literally, in Greek costumes:46 conflicts about love and money, the superior intelligence of dependent slaves, the laziness of rich heirs, the reckless abandon of soldiers enriched by booty. Thus it comes as no surprise that allusions to daily political life occurred in this context rather than in the tragedies,47 and that these texts, rather than high tragedy, have survived. However, it was not local color but the universalization achieved here that was decisive. That may sound a bit much to attribute to performances that served primarily as light entertainment, but we must not forget that even as light entertainment, just as much as in the soothing of anger, the pieces had to fulfill the standards of graecified gods and were consciously artistic, written in the elevated language of the leading Roman families rather than in everyday Latin.48
Within the period considered, religious rituals had gained a significant and growing share in public communication. The notion of publicus, as used to bring together the members of the nobility, was an expanding concept. This development changed the character of