Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke
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neighboring towns dominate this group. What is more, apart from an important emphasis on caring for personal needs, religious practices at the level of monumental building, interventions in the urban fabric, and the selection of new gods for worship in those sites reflect an elite’s translocal communication: importing statues of gods or ritual practices into Rome amounted to a form of recognition directed toward the regions of their origin.
The communicative dimension is also important for the forms of the representation of the divine. Ritual communication between humans and deities that are not as present, visible, and touchable as human participants in face-to-face communication requires some manner of reinforcement to ensure successful transmitting of messages and to make a positive outcome of the communicative effort more probable. Archaeological findings and later literary descriptions suggest that rituals at Rome shared the spectrum of forms in Mediterranean societies: vegetable and animal sacrifice, libations, votives, with many variations according to material resources, economy, diets, and artisanship. As mentioned before, in votive offerings, representation of the human supplicant was important. We do not know to what degree the homogeneity resulting from mass production was overcome by efforts at individuation or particularization by the addition of painting. Some differentiation was made in terms of sex and, at least roughly, life phase: baby, youth, adult. I tend to interpret this practice primarily in terms of the perpetuation of communication: the temporary, difficult, and uncertain communication with the divine as enacted and defined by visiting a shrine is made to transcend the limitations of time by permanently representing the human actor in a place closer or more visible to the deity. The votive might be deposited directly into a trench or pit. However, archaeologically identified deposits might also be of secondary origin—the results of periodic removal of votives from visible space, thus leading to new ensembles in the deposit space.32
Apart from the representation of a deity’s presence and power by a fenced-off area, the statuary representation of the deity is another—and not mutually exclusive—strategy to improve ritual communication. Such a strategy—not supplanting but supplementing the representation of humans— was present at Rome at least from the late sixth century onward. Life-size or nearly life-size painted terra-cotta statues dominated the period analyzed here,33 more and more rivaled by metal and marble statues later on. Occasionally, wooden statues were used. Such permanent epiphanies tended to be housed in temple buildings, marking the presence of the deity as well as restricting access.34 Ongoing processes of identification of those representations, through attributes and imagery from narratives on the architecture, regularly raised among the ancients the problem of the gods’ own translocal identities and thus encouraged the production of narratives of transfer or spontaneous movement.
In a historical perspective, it is important to remember that, for literary texts as for temples, the reconstruction of potential “meanings” cannot be restricted to the moment of creation but has to cover the long period of usage (and maybe different usages), too.35 Thus, even as the producers, initiators, and actual builders of temples in this period participated in rivalries and networks of exchange at a translocal level—some individuals were no doubt drawn from other towns—so, too, the users and spectators of these built complexes were probably themselves engaged in such rivalries and translocal relationships. In early Rome, important nodes in these networks of exchange would have included Greek and Carthaginian/Punic as well as Etruscan and Latin culture and localities. In many Latin towns, as mentioned above in regard to the so-called princely tombs, artistic techniques were at least as developed as they were at Rome. Apart from the terra-cotta fragments from the San Omobono finds, the terra-cotta acroter statue of Apollo from the Portonaccio temple at Veii and figures from the larger temple of Pyrgi (both in the Museum of the Villa Giulia, Rome) and the statue of Iuno Sospita from Lanuvium give an impression of what the statues in the Capitoline temple might have looked like.
Ritual and Ritual Specialists
Without a reliable textual tradition—the nonfictitious sources of the late republican and Augustan authors that inform our reconstruction hardly antedate the second century or, in the case of Fabius Pictor, the late third century—ritual action is even more difficult to reconstruct than its material ingredients. First-century narratives about the institution of cults by Romulus and Numa are as unreliable as twentieth-century projections of the calendar of festivals (fasti) into the regal period. In fact, the list of festivals was codified in the calendar of the late fourth century and is known from first-century copies only.36 Evidence from Etruscan tombs, for instance the Tomba delle Bighe at Tarquinia or the Tomba della Scimmia at Chiusi, suggests the existence of athletic competitions and processional rites in (at least some) Etruscan towns from the sixth or even seventh century onward.37 Reliefs and vase paintings from the sixth and fifth centuries, for example an amphora from Ponte di Micali, dated 520–510,38 confirm the existence of games that included different types of competitions and, at least by the end of the sixth century, processions. Thus the later Roman narratives about the introduction of circus games by the Tarquins,39 that is, the Etruscan kings of Rome, and of ludi scaenici in the middle of the fourth century, also from Etruria,40 may reflect an important reality, however distorted aetiological tales of one-time culture transfers no doubt are.41 What is more, those Roman narratives find an echo in the picture of early Rome provided by the Greek Dionysios of Halikarnassos, who situates the institution of circus processions at Rome by the beginning of the fifth century.42 Certainly the neighboring town of Veii is credited for comparable competitions in the sixth century.43 There can be no doubt about the “international” character of such games, mirroring the Greek institution and involving members of middle Italian elites. It should be added that gladiatorial games, probably known in Etruria for centuries, were introduced into Roman funeral cult practices only by 264.44
Roman tradition attributed the institutionalization of several priesthoods to the first kings. In this tradition—which has had a significant modern reception—the Roman polity is interpreted as the king’s household writ large. As a family’s cult is focused on the hearth, so the story goes, the king’s daughters (anticipating the priesthood of the Vestal Virgins) care for the city’s hearth (i.e., the fire in the “House of Vesta”).45 In this model, ritual tasks that might have been the duty of the king—notwithstanding the lack of any evidence for such—were in the postmonarchic state performed by the supreme pontiff (pontifex maximus) and the “king of the sacrifices” (rex sacrorum). No conclusion has been reached so far as to whether the rex sacrorum was heir to the sacral duties of the king,46 later to be overshadowed by the pontifex maximus, or whether a rex sacrorum existed already in regal times in order to fulfill at least partly the religious duties of the king, whose legal competences later fell to the pontiffs (who might have antedated the Republic, too). Roman elaborations of this theory, which is to say, the emic tradition, clearly followed the first route.47 That said, attempts to understand Roman state religion as having its origin in a royal household have not proven fruitful.
There is no reliable evidence for Roman priests before the fifth and especially the fourth centuries.48 Here, Italian evidence is not helpful, either. Evidence for the divinatory specialists called haruspices in Latin sources, and netśvis in Etruscan texts,49 does not antedate the fifth century, nor does the evidence for the priestly role of cipen or cepen assumed by magistrates.50 Priesthoods from Italian townships, which at times exhibit striking similarities to Roman institutions, belong to late republican and imperial times; they might have been the result of early exchange processes, in which Rome may have played the role of donor or recipient. The evidence, however, does not offer any clues to the chronology of such exchanges. As the differentiated Roman priesthood of the late Republic need not be postulated for archaic Rome, the question of how to imagine priests in the regal period could be broken down to a limited set of problems.
Specialists in divination (“seers” with a number of different techniques) are attested in a number of Mediterranean societies. Latin tradition developed the figure of the charismatic seer, embodied in the augur Attus Navius, in structural opposition to political power in the shape of king Tarquin.51 Such figures, whether attacked (the Marcius or Marcii of the third century) or derided (the harioli,