Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke
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existed, too. The organization of splendid games, however, was considered to leave a greater impression on the voters than a grandiloquent speech. The rise of the games and public processional rites is as intensively connected to the euergetic habit as seemingly private dinners. What is the mechanism at work?
Religious occasions mean actions substantively involving the gods. Despite the neglect of the religious factor by many ancient historians, the gods were not superfluous or merely traditional paraphernalia. As shown above, the gods were the primary addressees of competitions and dramatic performances and were unmistakably present in place, time, or images—usually all three. Even the gladiatorial spectacles, which were classified neither as games nor as public during the Republic and long thereafter, were nonetheless organized with a view toward future elections; and yet they were labeled munera, duties owed to a dead ancestor. The great men of the late Republic took pains to identify such forebears and did not refrain from constructing long temporal bridges connecting particular munera to a death that had occurred years before. The audience that was thereby created—and an introductory pompa, of course, helped to create such an audience34—did not constitute a private meeting, but rather a semipublic party offering cult to a divine being, that is, the dead person. The performance of munera for the dead was understood to sacralize, however unofficially, the site of their performance. The site became a locus religiosus (though perhaps not sacer).35
The religious character was even clearer for the technically public rituals that were addressed to deities venerated by the res publica, that is, those venerated at its expense. In public religious ritual the axis of interaction between an energetic benefactor (the leading magistrate) and the consumer (the citizens present) was transformed into a complex field of interaction among four parties at least. By cofinancing the spectacles, the polity left no doubt about its role. The presence of the gods was the guarantee that those present would not simply consume the magistrate’s donation. In the ritual the gods were not honored by the leading magistrate, but by the citizenry as a whole. The explicit consumers were the gods, and the citizens became a part of the donating party. Thus the res publica appropriated the ritual action.
Distinction and Control
It has been my argument thus far that the possibility for the refinement, modification, and invention of forms of social differentiation was an important driving force behind the multiplication and enlargement of certain types of expensive audience-oriented rituals. As far as we can see, as regards the history of the rituals, this process was not primarily characterized by the modification of traditional competitions, sacrifices, and the like, but by the creation of new rituals, which opened up opportunities for new agents, usually magistrates, to distinguish themselves. The formation of the new nobility, the integration of patricians and office-holding plebeians from the end of the fourth century, demanded an intensified communication among its members, as between nobles and the populace. The development of a “literary culture” of drama and epic (and the financing of the first) is a consequence of this need for communication and the ritual contexts for their performance, namely banquets and ludi scaenici.36 The populace needed space for communication among itself for other purposes, too. The need was not in the first instance simply to corroborate dominant understandings of citizenship or political association—there were enough blood-soaked possibilities for that. Other problems, however, needed alternative modes of constituting an audience and hence a populace: as the Plautine prologue quoted above demonstrates, such audiences included females and slaves, too.
Distinction was not the only end served by these developments. Control was enhanced too. Probably the same year that witnessed the introduction of drama into the Megalesia (191) saw the introduction of reserved seats for senators.37 Opportunities were at the same time “channels.” As the establishment of a normative framework for political careers channeled the possibilities for martial success or, to put it more broadly, the exercise of aristocratic excellence, so, too, the spectrum of rituals channeled public communication. Social control was produced by forcing the members of the nobility to employ the framework of public rituals and by restricting access to them: the organization of games is restricted to specified magistrates or returning generals, the triumph has to be individually approved by the Senate after discussion of the achievements of the preceding campaign. Control was likewise exerted by the long delay in the construction of permanent theaters, which imposed upon would-be celebrants the high cost of building new, temporary infrastructure for a single ritual, and by new debates about and licenses for places for temples.38 In order to prevent individuals from engaging in wholesale dissent from these new frameworks, the ritual has to be allotted high prestige (e.g., the opening of the most prestigious temple of Iuppiter Optimus Maximus for the triumph, the use of the Circus Maximus, and longer periods for games). But dissent was possible, or, to put it the other way around, social consensus within the nobility remained precarious. Generals continued to organize informal triumphs (the so-called triumphus in monte Albano) without the consent of the Senate, erect statues all over the city, distribute excessive amounts of booty to their soldiers, and give lavish munera, gladiatorial shows, for the people.
The effects of ritual control are seen more clearly if we take into account areas where this control is lacking. Neither the public reports regarding the conduct of war nor the representations of booty carried in triumphs nor the funeral procession and its laudatory speech were ritually directed toward the gods. They aimed rather at the spectators—and were deeply disputed. As passages in Plautus and Cicero demonstrate, in the public communicative acts conducted on these occasions, villages were made into cities and skirmishes turned into decisive battles, heroes were transformed into ancestors and ancestors were made into heroes, raising doubt and instigating debate.39
The games are a somewhat different matter. In these highly public events, the heightened risk of the new communicative praxis impelled structural changes that insulated individuals among the nobility—and the nobility as a whole—from catastrophe. Most particularly, in the middle and late Republic nobles performed neither as actors nor as sportsmen. Competition was entirely left to professionals, and this, at least as regards the races and athletic competitions, appears a change from an earlier practice that seems to have known the participation of nobles from Rome and its surrounding areas. But in the very real competitions staged at large public rituals, a foreigner’s victory or the defeat of a consul’s son would no longer have been acceptable for the patricio-plebeian elite of the middle and late Republic. The truth of these claims may be verified to a point by examination of those competitions in which the elite participated, namely the mock competitions between the Luperci and the Sacravienses. The displacement effected by the use of professionals effectively insulated the organizing magistrate from responsibility for the outcome of any given contest, even if popular favor for a champion might still be disappointed.
The gods did exert censorship nevertheless. Being the primary addressees of the rituals, they enjoyed both the offering itself and the human spectators. The latter—as second-order spectators—watched the gods watching. Thus they could be sure that they were witnesses of cultural products of the highest quality, as indicated by the names of plays listed in this chapter. The gods got Greek or Greek-style cultural products, of the same provenance and style as those selected by the nobles throughout the Italian municipalities for their villas and libraries.40 Nobles and gods seemed to have the same taste. How could the populace not share in admiring it, while not, of course, having command of it? To be sure, many adaptations to local taste were made in producing Greek comedy and tragedy for Italian audiences, even as local centers of production developed to produce Hellenizing wares that carried the genes of local media, local techniques, and local taste. Nonetheless, the elaborated level and enormous presence of Greek language and culture (even if one should not assume the knowledge of Greek originals41) was astonishing. This marked presence was mediated to the audience by the positive reception given to these things by the Roman gods in a manner that could be imitated.
Conclusion: Public and Publicity
My short survey of changes in the ritual portfolio of the Republic has necessarily focused on processes that are visible in our sources or at least pertain to prominent rituals. Only public rites received enough testimony to sustain such scrutiny. Most of the rituals hinted at in the late