Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke
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and Intensification
Processions must be judged a highly effective means of creating publicity for a ritual and centralizing a highly diverse urban sacral topography. Otherwise, the powerful attraction of the triumph for many—but by no means all24 —republican generals could not be understood. However, watching a procession along a processional route—even a route more and more monumentalized in itself25—implied certain limits and deficits.
The first limit is temporal. The importance of a procession could be indicated by its length, but velocity and the duration of natural light put limits on that. Triumphal processions experimented with two-day processions starting in the early second century and reached a maximum of three days in the first, but normal reactions seem to have taught the organizers of the latter to create successions of thematically varying booty and war representations—for example, by organizing separate triumphs over different peoples and regions— rather than indefinitely prolonging a unified course of people and images.26 The prolongation of the competitions or scenic spectacles of the games was easier. By the time of the calendar of Antium, nine days each were marked for the Ludi Magni in September and the Ludi Plebeii in November.
Another type of ritual reached even greater lengths, namely supplications. This was a decentralized ritual, with the opening of all (or at least, many) temples to enable sacrifices and ensuing banquets throughout the city, in the second century even throughout Italy.27 An exceptional ritual of petition or thanksgiving, usually lasting one to three days in the middle Republic—again the annalistic historiography is not reliable enough to enable the identification of an exact starting point—exploded during the last century of the Republic. Three supplications of fifty days in the years 45, 44, and 43 mark the acme of this trend. Obviously, as I have already observed, such a duration would not allow the difference between exceptional ritual status and everyday life to be maintained. Thus it is easy to see why this form lost its importance from Augustus onward. Yet the sustained focus of this book on pragmatic and political aspects of the history of religion, and above all on changes in the nature, structure, and cohesiveness of the nobility, should not cause us to neglect a consequence in ritual of long-lasting, even permanent importance. I would maintain that the phenomenon of daily cult in the form of small daily sacrifices, hymns, or lamps, known from some temples and of growing importance in the imperial period, derives in part from this idea of enlarging ritual efficacy through an ever prolonged daily cult at the same temples.28
Processions imply a second restriction beyond the temporal: interaction between participants is limited, though of course spectators did interact among themselves. Ovid knew about this: the Ars amatoria recommends to its male audience theaters, circuses, munera, and triumphs as places to make new female acquaintances and imagines the verbal interactions that would take place in such spaces.29 The prologue of Plautus’s comedy Poenulus (1–45) gives an even livelier picture:
I have a mind to imitate the Achilles of Aristarchus; from that tragedy I’ll take for myself the opening: “Be silent, and hold your tongues, and give attention, for the general bids you listen”—the head-manager, that with a good grace you may be seated on the benches, both those who have come hungry and those who have come well filled. You who have eaten, have done so most wisely by far: you who have not eaten, be filled with the Play. But he who has something ready for him to eat, ’tis really great folly for him to come here to sit fasting for our sakes. Rise up, cryer! Bespeak attention among the people: I’m now waiting to see if you know your duty. Exercise your voice, by means of which you subsist and take care of yourself; for unless you do cry out, in your silence starvation will be creeping upon you. Well, now sit down again, that you may earn double wages. How fine a thing it is that you obey my commands! Let no worn-out debauchee be sitting in the front of the stage, nor let the lictor or his rods be noisy in the least; and let no seat-keeper be walking about before people’s faces, nor be showing any to their seats, while the actor is on the stage. Those who have been sleeping too long at home in idleness, it’s right for them now to stand contentedly, or else let them master their drowsiness. Don’t let slaves be occupying the seats, that there may be room for those who are free; or else let them pay down the money for their places; if that they cannot do, let them be off home, and escape a double evil, lest they be striped both here with scourges, and with thongs at home, if they’ve not got things in due order when their masters come home. Let nurses keep children, little brats, at home, and let no one bring them to see the Play, lest both they themselves may be athirst, and the children may die with hunger, or lest they go bleating around here in their hungry fits, just like young goats. Let the matrons see the piece in silence, in silence laugh, and let them refrain from screaming here with their shrill voices; their themes for gossip let them carry off home, so as not to be an annoyance to their husbands both here and at home. And, as regards the managers of the performance, let the palm of victory not be given to any player wrongfully, nor by reason of favour let any be driven out of doors, in order that the inferior may be preferred to the good ones. And this, too, besides, which I had almost forgotten: while the performance is going on, do you, lackeys, make an attack on the cookshops; now, while there’s an opportunity, now, while the tarts are smoking hot, hasten there. These injunctions, which have been given as the manager’s command, it will be well, by Hercules, that every man remembers them for himself.30
The Circus Maximus offered seats, but, by virtue of their smaller size, theaters—which for most of the Republic were temporary structures, sometimes set up within a circus—enabled more intensive communication among the audience as a whole. The enormous growth of the ludi scaenici during the second century cannot be separated from this fact. Even if modern theorizing about the political functions of dramatic performance at Rome rests mostly on Ciceronian observations, any unbiased description must acknowledge that the intensity of political communication exploded in this kind of ritual.
Rituals in smaller circles not identical with primary groups like families offered even more intensive forms of communication.31 Banqueting had been an aristocratic practice, offering opportunities for the display of luxury in the aristocracies of early Latin cities. Now it was either revived or intensified as a social practice. The proliferation of villas in the areas surrounding Rome offered a growing space for elaborate dining. Professional poets like Ennius offered attractive and envied forms of entertainment. This was no purely secular form of festival. Literary dialogues usually imagined religious dates as the opportunities for banquets. According to the Fasti Praenestini, the newly introduced cult of the Great Mother of the Gods gave birth to mutitationes, mutual invitations for dinner among the nobility. The sweeping changes taking place in banqueting as a site of social display and differentiation are obliquely attested in the prominence of sumptuary legislation in this period, which sought to limit expenditure and force banqueting groups into open, that is, controllable, space.32 This development started long before the 190s. The reforms of the priestly colleges enacted by the lex Ogulnia in 300 transformed the colleges into “banquetable” circles of nine persons (three to each triclinium); the longest extant fragment of the protocols of the pontifex maximus gives details of a pontifical dinner.33 When a new priesthood was created in 196, the only such innovation to achieve the prestige of the augurs, pontiffs and (quin-)decimviri, it was the tresviri epulonum, whose duties basically consisted in supervising the senatorial banquets connected with the great Iuppiter festivals in September and November.
Donation and Appropriation
The dinner attested in the records of the pontifex maximus just mentioned was organized to celebrate the inauguration of a Flamen Martialis in about 70. We need not doubt the existence of other luxurious banquets. However, if a Roman of the first century wished to stress the lavishness, he would speak of cenae sacerdotalis (priestly meals). Of course, an event that is marked out as religious can also offer an occasion for intensified social interaction, however much communicative practice on such occasions was constrained by formal and informal rules specific to the event. This is not to contrast “secular” and “religious.” And yet the drawing of lots in order to determine the first voting unit, a randomized procedure that left the decision in the hands of the gods, did not transform electoral or legislative assemblies into religious meetings; contiones