Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke
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of the late antique lexicographer Nonius Marcellus, anima signifies an elementary affective drive, in this case aggression caused by anger.22
Statements on geology help to maintain a scientific coolness. The mythological description of volcanism (529ff. R = 204ff. D) is treated with considerable distance through the use of dicitur and dictus – others “say”. Earthquakes, along with thunder and storms, offer primarily problems of perception (479f. R = 289f. D). The famous description of the shepherd in the Medea seeing a ship for the first time is above all precise, and only later in the text are there descriptions of physical processes like wind and waves with a slight shimmer of the mythological (391–402 R = 467–78 D).23 A comparable mode of representation can be found in the description of thunder (223–25 R = 54–56 D).
The astronomical and astrological passages are the most revealing. While in the Clutemestra it is the deum regnator, the lord of the gods, who brings the night, the formulation nocte caeca caelum e conspectu abstulit (“by blind night he removed the sky out of sight”) contains a precise theory of basic processes of perception. It is the lack of light that creates blindness. The conception of the dawn (aurora) as radiorum ardentum indicem (“indicator of burning rays”; 493 R = 9 D) corresponds to this in its general structure, without being a component of a unified theory. Neither here nor in the following passages does Accius’s theoretical achievement go beyond older notions. What is striking, however, is the consistency with which, in comparison with older Latin literature, explanations for natural phenomena in the domain of myth are avoided.24 Another example of this can be found in the description of the zodiac (711–13 D).25
Divination
Accius several times describes situations that are treated as omens, or prodigies that relate to the whole of society,26 whether within the dramatic plot or in contemporary Roman practice. It is not possible to identify a clear position on divination or criticism of divination on the basis of the fragments. What does come through clearly is the effort to apply a clear and precise terminology to the full range of such phenomena, as well as the attempt to formulate the conditions necessary for correct divination. This is shown in the conditional clause si satis recte aut uera ratione augurem (87 R = 644 D: “if I divine sufficiently correct or by true method”), and also in the use of multiple techniques in order to ensure greater accuracy: Principio extispicium ex prodigiis congruens ars te arguit (419 R = 496 D: “First of all the identical answer of inspection and prodigies accused you!”). Even in reference to the golden ram of Atreus, the relationship between portentum and prodigium is precisely defined.27
There are also more bitingly formulated criticisms of teachings on augury, which was at the core of public and political divination in Rome. In the Telephus the question is posed, Pro certo arbitrabor sortis oracla adytus augura (624 R = 92 D: “I shall have for certain lots, oracles, temples, and prophecies”). This criticism is expressed even more stringently in the Astyanax:
Nil credo auguribus, qui auris uerbis diuitantalienas, suas ut auro locupletent domos. (169f. R)
In no wise do I trust augurs, who enrich the ears of others with words, so that they may fill their own houses with gold.
These formulations are reminiscent of criticisms voiced by Ennius and Cato regarding the recourse to “unreliable seers” (harioli),28 but here, by contrast, the possibility that the Roman system should somehow escape criticism by appearing to direct that criticism solely at socially or geographically foreign practices is not left open. The use of assonance in augures, aures, and aurum does not subtract from the argument. Aurum, unlike Ennius’s drachmae, opens up the possibility of a metaphorical interpretation as payment. The context in which these texts were produced and first received is undeniably one in which both the theory and the practice of augury was the basis of controversy: the lex Aelia Sentia, which belongs to the last third of the second century, was an attempt to resolve just those controversies.29 This atmosphere is reflected in another fragment from the Astyanax, in which the seer Calchas is instructed to stop being obstructive (171f. R = 281f. D):
Nunc, Calcas, finem religionum fac: desiste exercitummorari meque ab domuitione arcere tuo obsceno omine.
Now, Calcas, make an end to religious scruples: stop delaying the army and hindering me from returning home by means of your unpropitious sign.
Likewise in the Melanippus, the question of the limits of religious scruple is raised in the remark reicis abs te religionem (430 R = 531 D: “You cast away religious scruple!”), as well as in the question about stains (433 R = 529 D): Crediti’ me amici morte inbuturum manus? (“Do you think I am going to maculate my hands with the death of a friend?”)
The Dream of Tarquinius Superbus
The longest surviving fragment by Accius is the Dream of Tarquinius Superbus, consisting of twenty-two verses in the preface to Brutus (651–72 D). Probably first performed c. 136 after the return of D. Iunius Brutus, the consul of 138, from Spain,30 this fragment demonstrates Accius’s rational engagement with literary and religious topics and the fruitfulness of viewing that engagement in light of a broader understanding of contemporaneous changes in religious practice and discourse.31
The religious-historical motifs of the extract have long spurred interest in the dream.32
What is interesting for an investigation of the history of argumentation is neither the dream motif nor the content of its interpretation but that the interpretation offered by a professional interpreter is introduced by an explicit theory of dreams:
Rex, quae in uita usurpant homines, cogitant, curant, uident,quaeque agunt uigilantes agitantque, ea si cui in somno accidunt,minus mirum est; sed in re tanta haud temere improuiso offerunt. (663–65 D)33
King, if the things that occupy people in life, what they think about, worry about, and look upon, and what they do and busy themselves about when awake, happen to somebody when asleep, it is no wonder; but in a matter of this gravity they do not arise unexpectedly or without cause.
The “theory of dreams” offered here had not been expressed in Latin before.34 In Plautus, for example, detailed dream scenes derive their thematic significance from the similarity of the dream and reality, but the topic of the dream is by contrast the reality immediately following upon the dream.35 Plautus’s “dream theory,” which appears in the demon prologue to the third act of the Rudens as well as in the Mercator, differs in glaring ways from that of Accius:
Miris modis di ludos faciunt hominibus,mirisque exemplis somnia in somnis danunt:ne dormientis quidem sinunt quiescere.36
In wondrous ways the gods play games with humans,
in wondrous fashions they give dreams in sleep:
not even the sleeping do they permit to have their rest.
The gods play their games with humans, and this is “wondrous”: the label serves to bracket the entire phenomenon from rational explanation.
By contrast, when Accius refers to this language, he does so polemically: mirum, the wondrous, is exactly what is negated. Even the avowedly extranormal, which is explicitly the subject of the dream interpreter’s reflections,37 is described by the dream interpreter as following a certain (admittedly vague) necessity: it is “not without cause.” The effort at rational explanation within the framework of a worldview that unquestioningly assumes the existence of the gods is clear enough. Again, a comparable theoretical treatment of the interpretation of dreams is not to be found in earlier Latin literature.38
Also of note in the words of the interpreter of dreams is the connection between the dream and other forms of divination. The content of the dream itself is basically two divinatory events: an animal sacrifice gone wrong and an unusual astronomical event, a change in the course of the sun. These clues serve to disambiguate.39 The private application