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ROMAN RELIGION

At every stage that we know it, Roman religious practice was an amalgam of native Latin elements with foreign influence and overlay. Because religion in all societies is conservative and because Rome was an unusually conservative society, survivals of archaic practices in the later Roman state religion provide precious clues about the practices and beliefs of the earliest Roman community.

The native Roman religion consisted of rituals designed to protect or enhance the agricultural and family life of the household on the one hand and the integrity of the community on the other. The Romans perceived all functions, social as well as natural, as manifestations of a divine power. Indeed, the divine power was as much present in the function as it was in control of it. Such powers could be negative as well as positive. That is, the Romans understood a destructive process as resulting from the presence of a negative force, rather than the absence of its opposite. Rituals were intended either to encourage a positive power in its activity or to ward off a dangerous or destructive power.

Some of the best-known powers include the Lares and Penates, which protected the household and its contents. The genius presided over the reproductive continuity of the family and was associated specifically with the male. Juno originated as a spirit of female fertility. Vesta protected the hearth and its fire. St. Augustine preserves a long list of agricultural functionaries, remarking that the Romans were not satisfied with a single god of agriculture, but recognized separate powers for each process, from seed to fruit. The most frequently cited example of a negative functionary is robigus, the power that attacked crops in the form of a rusty mildew. On the level of the community, terminus guaranteed the integrity of boundaries between one household and the next. The cult of Vesta, presided over by the young women of the household, had its urban counterpart in the college of Vestal Virgins.

Religious ceremonies marked the changing of the seasons, both natural and civil. The fontinalia celebrated the power of springs and wells. The tubilustrium protected the trumpets used to summon the people to assembly, while the armilustrium purified weapons after their return from hostile territory.

It follows from the narrowly functionary nature of these divine powers that the native Roman religion was not anthropomorphic and that there was no mythology. From the earliest known times, however, this native religion was overlaid with elements assimilated from Rome’s neighbors. According to Roman tradition, an Etruscan dynasty seized power during the 6th century b.c., bringing with them religious traditions of Greek as well as Etruscan origin. Whether the Etruscans were a pre-Italiote native people or immigrants from Asia Minor remains a subject for debate. In either case, it was under Etruscan domination that the Romans first built a temple and installed on the capital their tutelary deities — Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. The names are Latin, and Jupiter at least derives from the primordial Indo-european sky-father; but the anthropomorphic conception, with the attendant notion that these powers required a temple, is something new. So great was the Etruscan influence on religious matters that the Roman word from which we derive our word “sacred,” which is not linguistically Latin, may be of Etruscan origin.

After the expulsion of the Etruscans, during the early Republican period, the Romans continued to welcome deities of foreign origin. The Greek cities of southern Italy were the single most significant influence, but the Romans also received deities of Semitic (Phoenician) origin during the wars with Carthage. Some of these deities came to Rome through the procedure known as evocaton, whereby the tutelary power of an enemy city was “called out” and invited to take up residence in Rome. An example is the Phoenician goddess Astarte, brought from Sicilian Eryx under the Greek name of Aphrodite and assimilated with the native Venus. By another process, during the Second Carthaginian War, in response to an oracle allegedly found in the Sibylline books, the Romans brought with great ceremony from Asia Minor a black stone in which resided the power of the Great Earth Mother.

While most of these importations were carefully controlled by Roman religious officials, the city was also of course exposed to influences brought by immigrants and travelers. The most famous example is the cult of Bacchus, or Bacchanalia, outlawed by the Roman senate in 186, but permitted to non-Romans under controlled conditions. This was the first of many so-called mystery religions that developed during the Hellenistic period from more traditional cults such as that of Demeter at Eleusis and Isis in Egypt. Resistance to such religions by the Roman elite was futile, and we know of no further attempts to legislate against them after 186, until the short-lived and sporadic attempts to extirpate Christianity (and Manicheanism) during the late 3rd and early 4th century.

With the rise of these more individualistic religions, traditional Roman religion seems to have declined, at least within the city itself. The emperor Augustus, whose program included restoration of traditional values and traditional religion, boasts of having restored some 82 cults in one year alone. At the same time, he fostered a new cult of Roma, especially in the eastern provinces, with which his own person was closely associated. Nevertheless, while it became customary to honor the emperor’s genius, the emperor was not himself (a few megalomaniacal exceptions aside) directly worshipped while still alive. The Roman senate would honor the memory of a deceased emperor of whom they approved by declaring him to be of semi-divine status and establishing a cult in his honor.

Despite the ruse of the mystery religions and the evidence for decline of traditional cults during the turmoil of the late Republic, the resilience and vitality of the traditional Roman religion must not be underestimated. The traditional religion was closely associated with the idea of Rome itself, and the Roman elite clung to it long after the emperors themselves had embraced Christianity. In rural areas, traditional dedications to the traditional gods persisted against all efforts of the later empire to suppress them. Evidence of the ancient Roman religion can still be found in Europe today. Shrines at the crossroads dedicated to a Christian saint are the direct descendant of the ancient Roman compitalia. The Church of the Virgin Mary on Mt. Eryx in Sicily is the modern counterpart of the Phoenician cult of Astarte, adopted by the Romans as Venus. The practice of associating each Christian saint with cognizance over some specific activity, such as health or travel, may be regarded as the descendant of the ancient Roman “functionary” conception.

Bibliography. C. Bailey, Phases in the Religion of Ancient Rome (1932, repr. Westport, Conn., 1972); J. H. W. G. Liebeschutz, Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford, 1979); R. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven, 1981); L. H. Martin, Hellenistic Religions (Oxford, 1987); R. M. Ogilvie, The Romans and Their Gods in the Age of Augustus (New York, 1970); H. J. Rose, Religion in Greece and Rome (New York, 1959).

Alden A. Mosshammer

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

ROMAN RELIGION

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)