Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke
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of the arrival of rhetoric at Rome: in 155 B.C.E., Carneades demonstrated the truth of a claim on one day and the truth of the opposite claim on the following day.14 He was driven out of the city, but Greek rhetoric nevertheless attracted Romans in the subsequent decades. It also remained controversial: the setting up of Latin rhetorical schools was forbidden as late as 92. This type of rationalization thus remained insular in two senses: it was denied a large spread, and its successful application was restricted to intellectual discourse in private houses, books, and pleading in the courts. Divination, too, became the object of a discursive tradition, both within and without institutional controls, and, as with rhetoric, this occurred against the backdrop of intensive Greek philosophical discussion. Sacrificial practices, for instance, were hardly subjected to similar systematization or critique.
After a short introduction dealing with the spread of writing (Chapter 6), the chapters of this section focus on the Roman fasti—that is, the calendar (Chapter 7); religious rules and their place in historiographic reflection (Chapter 8); and the late republican attempt at describing the place of religion within a constitution-like charter, the lex Ursonensis (Chapter 9).
Despite their insular character, I argue that the historical cases thus reviewed were not mere attempts at, but indeed successful instances of, rationalization. Giving full weight to that fact is a major concern of this book. Even if such rationalizations must first be attached to formal criteria, primarily to systematization in the mode of language, the question of the problem-solving capacity of such formal rationality—in the eyes of contemporaries—cannot be ignored. On this basis this book will expand upon Claudia Moatti’s original and convincing attempt to locate the “birth of rationality in Rome” in Cicero’s generation, that is, in the first century, through a gestational history and through differentiation of her concept of rationality.15 This opens up a new perspective on a culture that has often been seen as merely transitional and is rarely credited with originality.16 Indeed, it is precisely the opportunity to investigate the development and diffusion of rationality, and the clash of rationalizing and the mythological worldviews (to use the hackneyed characterizations), that constitutes the attraction of my topic.17 Thus the third section will deal with two theoretical genres, antiquarianism and philosophy. A brief introduction to the problems and analytical tools (Chapter 10) will be followed by analyses of two figures whose writings survive only in fragments but who are nonetheless important indicators of religious change, namely Ennius and Varro (Chapters 11 and 12). An analysis of Cicero’s classical philosophical treatments of religion concludes this part (Chapter 13).
As cultural change within cultural exchange becomes a notion of growing importance throughout the book, the final chapter (Chapter 14) will try to map the interrelation of the two processes. The last two centuries of the Republic were characterized by complex processes of expansion and reception, the consolidation of new elites, the formation of insular rationalizations before large-scale alternative worldviews, and sweeping institutional change, all of which cast a petrified tradition into a defensive stance. In this context, “religion” did not go unchallenged. Instead, it grew in importance and in its range of application and systematization. This book’s underlying conviction holds that well into the Augustan and imperial periods, religion can serve as an indicator of historical change.
Chapter 1
The Background: Roman Religion of the Archaic and Early Republican Periods
Historical Sketch
The mapping of change needs a background. However, our knowledge of religion in early Rome is very limited. Contemporary literary sources or reliable later accounts are not available before the second half of the fourth or third century B.C.E. respectively.1 Already by this time, the armies of Rome and its allies had started to build an empire that by the end of the first century B.C.E. comprised the whole of the Mediterranean coast. This is the period under scrutiny in this book. What is more, by the end of the first century C.E. much of the Mediterranean’s hinterland, to wit, the whole of western Europe, including Britain, and much of southeastern Europe, including today’s Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, and Asia Minor as far as Armenia had been added to the empire. Rome defended a hostile border with the Sassanian Persian Empire, influenced patterns in Arabian legislation, North African urbanization, and Celtic artistic representations—and became the seedbed of several major processes of rationalization in religious traditions.
Situated on or near a crossing of the Tiber, a distance of some twenty-five kilometers from the open sea, continuous settlement in the area of the later city of Rome started in the tenth century. The Tiber, even if large compared to other Italian streams, was but one of the relatively short west-flowing rivers that structured the western slopes of the central Italian Apennine chain. By the beginning of the eighth century, the settlements on the Palatine and the Quirinal fused. Urbanization proper begins at Rome only at the beginning of the so-called “late orientalizing period” (c. 650/40),2 indicated by three interconnected processes. First, the Forum Romanum was paved in tamped earth, with some huts removed for this purpose; a stone pavement followed around 625. Second, by the sixth century, the cloaca maxima, a monumental tunnel, was created to drain the area. Developments in domestic architecture, the third step, are somewhat harder to date, but nonetheless, by this time at least, houses of stone with tiled rather than thatched roofs were being built on the slopes of the Palatine and on the Velia. Their form anticipated the later atrium-type with a number of rooms around a courtyard, and some had probably been occupied for centuries.
The Forum was built up relatively quickly. An assembly area of circular shape, comparable to Greek places for political assemblies, was created.3 Facing the Comitium, a building that can be interpreted as the first curia, the meeting place of the Senate, was constructed c. 600 in stone. Around 580 the first stone-built shrine followed in the Comitium. Here, an inscribed five-sided block (cippus) has been found, containing one of the earliest Latin texts, a regulation pertaining to a king (recei [sacrorum?]).4 The foundation deposit beneath this stone includes a fragment of an Attic black-figure vase, dated to c. 575–550, showing Hephaestus, the Greek smith-god, riding a mule. This might point to the identification of the structure as a shrine for the god Vulcan, a Volcanal, an impressive indicator of the material and conceptual presence of Greek culture and religion at the very beginning of Roman religion.5 Another early building marks the southern boundary of the Forum area; the name later applied to this building, Regia, “Royal Palace,” might suggest that this cult center was reserved at the earliest stage for the rex sacrorum and the pontifex maximus.6 Also around 580 the earliest full-fledged podium temple was built on the northern edge of the Forum Boarium, the cattle market near the bank of the Tiber, the nucleus of the (much?) later double sanctuary of Fortuna and Mater Matuta. By the mid-sixth century the temple was decorated with terra-cottas of Greek Heracles and Minerva.7 In the Forum, the (later) “House of the Vestals” (atrium Vestae) was one of the first stone buildings.8 Religious monumentalization reached its first climax with the construction of the temple on the Capitol. Completed at the end of the sixth century, it had a base measuring 61 x 55 meters and must have been one of the largest temples of its time in the entire Mediterranean area. Because of its size, visibility, and choice of deities, the sanctuary was indicative of the culture dominating the Eastern Mediterranean and present in Italy in places like Gravisca or Pyrgi, namely that of the Greeks. The temple was dedicated to Iuppiter Optimus Maximus (Jove the Best and Greatest), Iuno, and Minerva, and competed with the largest Greek sanctuaries in places like Athens, Corinth, and Olympia (Athena, Hera, Zeus). The investment in the quality of the terracotta statuary points to the same intention.9 The temple of the Dioscuri, dedicated in the Forum at the beginning of the fifth century, was smaller, but its foundations were nonetheless impressive, reaching a breadth of c. 29 meters and a depth of c. 39 meters.10 A new wave of monumental additions to the city center had to wait for the new political formation at the end of the fourth century.
The extraordinary size of the city by the end of the sixth century, forming a capital of perhaps 30,000 inhabitants, presupposes economic success and regional military expansion. Economic success is attested by the traces of Etruscan and Greek presence remaining in the Forum