Such a formalism implies a very firm belief in the existence of the gods. The dealings of a man with the gods are quite as really reciprocal as his dealings with his fellow citizens. But on the other hand though the existence of the gods is never doubted for a moment, the gods themselves are an unknown quantity; hence out of the formal relationship an intimacy never developed, and while it is scarcely just to characterise the early cult as exclusively a religion of fear, certainly real affection is not present until a much later day.
The potentiality of the gods always overshadowed their personality. But this was not all loss, for the absence of personality prevented the growth of those gross myths which are usually, found among primitive peoples, for the purer more inspiring myths of gods are not the primitive product but result from the process of refining which accompanies a people's growth in culture. Thus the theory of animism illumines the religious condition of that borderland.
According to that pleasant fiction of which the ancient world was so extremely fond--the belief that all institutions could be traced back to their establishment by some individual--the religion of Rome was supposed to have been founded by her second king Numa, and it was the custom to refer to all that was most antique in the cult as forming a part of the venerable "religion of Numa. But it is a convenient term if we mean by it merely the old kingdom before foreign influences began to work.
The Romans of a later time coined an excellent name not so much for the period as for the kind of religion which existed then, contrasting the original deities of Rome with the new foreign gods, calling the former the "old indigenous gods" Di Indigetes and the latter the "newly settled gods" Di Novensides. For our knowledge of the religion of this period we are not dependent upon a mere theory, no matter how good it may be in itself, but we have the best sort of contemporary evidence in addition, and it is to the discovery of this evidence that the modern study of Roman religion virtually owes its existence.
Religion in ancient Rome - Wikipedia
The records of early political. Many centuries later when the calendar was engraved on stone, these revered old festivals were inscribed on these stone calendars in peculiarly large letters as distinguished from all the other items.
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Thus from the fragments of these stone calendars, which have been found, and which are themselves nineteen centuries old, we can read back another eight or ten centuries further. By the aid of this "calendar of Numa" we are able to assert the presence of certain deities in the Rome of this time, and the equally important absence of others.
And from the character of the deities present and of the festivals themselves a correct and more or less detailed picture of the religious condition of the time may be drawn. This calendar and the list of Indigetes extracted from it form the foundation for all our study of the history of Roman religion. The religious forms of a community are always so bound up with its social organisation that a satisfactory knowledge of the one is practically impossible without some knowledge of the other. Unfortunately there is no field in Roman history. But without coming into conflict with any of the rival theories we may make at least the following statements.
In the main the community was fairly uniform and homogeneous, there were no great social extremes and no conspicuous foreign element, so that each individual, had he stopped to analyse his social position, would have found himself in four distinct relationships: We may go a step further on safe ground and assert that the least important of these relations was that to himself, and the most important that to his family.
The unit of early Roman social life was not the individual but the family, and in the most primitive ideas of life after death it is the family which has immortality, not the individual. The state is not a union of individuals but of families. The very psychological idea of the individual seems to have taken centuries to develop, and to have reached its real significance only under the empire.
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Of the four elements therefore we have established the pre-eminence of the family and the importance of the state as based on the family idea; the individual may be disregarded in this early period, and there is left only the clan, which however offers a difficult problem. The family and the. It is a pleasant theory and one that has a high degree of probability that there may have been a time when the clan was to the family what the state is when history begins, and that when the state arose out of a union of various clans, the immediate allegiance of each family was gradually alienated from its clan and transferred to the state, so that the clan gave up its life in order that the state, the child of its own creation, might live.
If this be so, we can see why the social importance of the clan ceases so early in Roman history. The centre therefore of early religious life is the family, and the state as a macrocosm of the family; and the father of each family is its chief priest, and the king as the father of the state is the chief priest of the state. As for the individual the only god which he has for worship is his "double," called in the case of a man his Genius and in that of a woman her Juno , her individualisation of the goddess Juno, quite a distinct deity, peculiar to herself. But even here the family instinct shows itself, and though later the Genius and the Juno represent all that is intellectual in the individual, they seem originally to have symbolised the procreative power of the individual in relation.
The family and the state, however, side by side worshipped a number of deities. In the primitive hut, the model of which has come down to us in so many little burial urns of early time for example those that have recently been dug up in the wonderful cemetery under the Roman Forum , with its one door and no window, there were several elements which needed propitiation; the door itself as the keeper away of evil, the hearth, and the niche for the storage of food.
The door-god was the god-door Janus, the ianua itself; the hearth was in the care of the womenfolk, the wife and daughters, so it was a goddess, Vesta, whom they served; and the storage-niche, the penus , was in the keeping of the "store-closet gods" Di Penates. The state itself was modelled after the house. It had its Janus, its sacred door, down in the Forum, and the king himself, the father of the state, was his special priest; it had its hearth, where the sacred fire burned, and its own Vesta, tended by the vestal virgins, the daughters of the state; and it had its store-niche with its Penates.
At a later date but still very early there was added to the household worship the idea of the general protector of the house, the Lar, which gave rise to the familiar expression "Lares and Penates. The Lares were originally the group of gods who looked after the various farms; they were in the plural because they were worshipped where the boundary lines of several farms met, but though several of them were worshipped together, each farm had its one individual Lar.
But the care of the farm included also the protection of the house on the farm, so that the Lar of the farm became also the Lar of the house, first of course of houses on farms, and then of every house everywhere even when no farm was connected with it. Aside from Vesta, the Genius, the Lar, and the Penates, possibly the most important element in family worship was the cult of the dead ancestors. This cult is, of course, common to almost all religions, and its presence in Roman religion is in so far not surprising, but the form in which it occurs there is curious and relatively rare.
On the contrary as death is the great leveller and the remover of individuality, so the double of the dead was not thought of at first as an individual double but merely as forming a part of an indefinite mass of spirits, the "good gods" Di Manes as they were called because they were feared as being anything but good. It is therefore very misleading to assert that the Romans had from the beginning a belief in immortality, when we instinctively think of the immortality of the individual.
The thing that was immortal was not the individual but the family. It is thoroughly in keeping with the practical character of the Roman mind that they did not concern themselves with the place in which these spirits of the dead were supposed to reside, but merely with the door through which they could and did return to earth. We have no accounts of the Lower World until Greece lent her mythology to Rome, and imagination never built anything like the Greek palace of Pluto.
But while they did not waste energy in furnishing the Lower World with the fittings of fancy, they did keep a careful guard over the door of egress. This door they called the mundus , and represented it crudely by a trench or shallow pit, at the bottom of which there lay a stone.
On certain days of the year this stone: There were a number of these days in the year, three of them scattered through the. August 24, October 5, November 8; and two sets of days: February and May 9, 11, The February celebration, the so-called Parentalia , was calm and dignified and represented all that was least superstitious and fearful in the generally terrifying worship of the dead.
The Lemuria in May had exactly the opposite character and belongs to the category of the "expulsion of evil spirits," of which Mr. Frazer in his Golden Bough has given so many instances. In this connection it is interesting to notice two facts which stand almost as corollaries to these beliefs. One fact is the religious necessity for the continuance of the family, in order that there might always be a living representative of the family to perform the sacrifices to the ancestors.
It was the duty of the head of the family not only to perform these sacrifices himself as long as he lived but also to provide a successor. The usual method was by marriage and the rearing of a family, but, in case there was no male child in the family, adoption was recurred to. Here it is peculiarly significant that the sanction of the chief priest was necessary, and he never gave his consent in case the man to be adopted was the only representative of his family, so that his removal from that family into another would leave his original family without a male representative.
In cases of inheritance the first lien on the income was for the maintenance of the traditional sacrifices. These exceptional inheritances, without the deduction for sacrifices, were naturally desired above all others and the phrase "an inheritance without sacrifices" hereditas sine sacris became by degrees the popular expression for a godsend. The other fact of interest in this connection is that, inasmuch as ancestors were worshipped only en masse and not as individuals, that process could not take place in Roman religion which is so familiar in many other religions, namely that the great gods of the state should some of them have been originally ancestors whose greatness during life had produced a corresponding emphasis in their worship after death, so that ultimately they were promoted from the ranks of the deified dead into the select Olympus of individual gods.
This has been a favourite theory of the making of a god from the time of Euhemerus down to Herbert Spencer. There are religions in which it is true for certain of the major gods, but there are no traces of the process in Roman religion, and the reason is obvious in view of the peculiar character of ancestor worship in Rome. We have now seen the principal elements which went to make up the family religion and that part of the state religion which was an enlargement and an imitation of the family religion.
But even in the most primitive times a Roman's life was not bounded by his own hut and the phenomenon of death. His religion was not only coincident with every phase of private life, it was also closely related to the specific occupations and interests of the people, and just as the interests of the community, its means of livelihood, were agriculture and stock-raising, so the gods were those of the crops and the herds.
Some years ago the late Professor Mommsen succeeded in extracting from the existing stone calendars a list of the religious festivals of the old Roman year, and also in proving that this list of festivals was complete in its present condition at a time before the city of Rome was surrounded by the wall which Servius Tullius built, and that it therefore goes back to the old kingdom, the time of what has been called the "Religion of Numa. It must not be forgotten also that this list is not absolutely complete, because it represents merely the official state festivals, and not even all of them but only those which fell upon the same day or days every year, so that they could be engraved in the stone to.
All state festivals, of which there were several, which were appointed in each particular year according to the backward or forward estate of the harvest, were omitted from the list, though they were celebrated at some time in every year; and naturally the public calendars contained no reference to the many private and semiprivate ceremonies of the year, with which the state had nothing official to do, festivals of the family and the clan, and even local festivals of various districts of the city.
In this list of peaceful deities of the farm there is one god whose character has been very much misunderstood because of the company which he keeps; this is the god Mars. It has become the fashion of late to consider him as a god of vegetation, and a great many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to show his agricultural character. But the more primitive a community is, the more intense is its struggle for existence, and the more rife its rivalries with its neighbours. Alongside of the ploughshare there must always have been the sword or its equivalent, and along with Flora and Ceres there must always have been a god of strife and battle.
That Mars was this god in early as well as later times is shown above all things by the fact that he was always worshipped outside the city, as a god who must be kept at a distance. Naturally his cult was associated with the dominant interest of. Walter Pater has so exquisitely described at the opening of Marius the Epicurean. But he was regarded as the protector of the fields and the warder off of evil influences rather than as a positive factor in the development of the crops. Then too in the early days of the Roman militia, before the regular army had come into existence, the war season was only during the summer after the planting and before the harvest, so that the two festivals which marked the beginning and the end of that season were also readily associated with the state of the crops at that time.
But the most interesting and curious thing about this old religion is not so much what it does contain as what it does not. So-called "emperor worship" expanded on a grand scale the traditional Roman veneration of the ancestral dead and of the Genius , the divine tutelary of every individual. The Imperial cult became one of the major ways in which Rome advertised its presence in the provinces and cultivated shared cultural identity and loyalty throughout the Empire. Rejection of the state religion was tantamount to treason.
This was the context for Rome's conflict with Christianity , which Romans variously regarded as a form of atheism and novel superstitio. Ultimately, Roman polytheism was brought to an end with the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the empire. The Roman mythological tradition is particularly rich in historical myths, or legends , concerning the foundation and rise of the city. These narratives focus on human actors, with only occasional intervention from deities but a pervasive sense of divinely ordered destiny. For Rome's earliest period, history and myth are difficult to distinguish.
According to mythology, Rome had a semi-divine ancestor in the Trojan refugee Aeneas , son of Venus , who was said to have established the nucleus of Roman religion when he brought the Palladium , Lares and Penates from Troy to Italy. These objects were believed in historical times to remain in the keeping of the Vestals , Rome's female priesthood. Aeneas, according to classical authors, had been given refuge by King Evander , a Greek exile from Arcadia , to whom were attributed other religious foundations: The myth of a Trojan founding with Greek influence was reconciled through an elaborate genealogy the Latin kings of Alba Longa with the well-known legend of Rome's founding by Romulus and Remus.
The most common version of the twins' story displays several aspects of hero myth. Their mother, Rhea Silvia , had been ordered by her uncle the king to remain a virgin, in order to preserve the throne he had usurped from her father. Through divine intervention, the rightful line was restored when Rhea Silvia was impregnated by the god Mars.
She gave birth to twins, who were duly exposed by order of the king but saved through a series of miraculous events. Romulus and Remus regained their grandfather's throne and set out to build a new city, consulting with the gods through augury , a characteristic religious institution of Rome that is portrayed as existing from earliest times. The brothers quarrel while building the city walls, and Romulus kills Remus, an act that is sometimes seen as sacrificial. Fratricide thus became an integral part of Rome's founding myth.
Romulus was credited with several religious institutions. He founded the Consualia festival, inviting the neighbouring Sabines to participate; the ensuing rape of the Sabine women by Romulus's men further embedded both violence and cultural assimilation in Rome's myth of origins. As a successful general, Romulus is also supposed to have founded Rome's first temple to Jupiter Feretrius and offered the spolia opima , the prime spoils taken in war, in the celebration of the first Roman triumph. Spared a mortal's death, Romulus was mysteriously spirited away and deified.
His Sabine successor Numa was pious and peaceable, and credited with numerous political and religious foundations, including the first Roman calendar ; the priesthoods of the Salii , flamines , and Vestals; the cults of Jupiter , Mars, and Quirinus ; and the Temple of Janus , whose doors stayed open in times of war but in Numa's time remained closed. After Numa's death, the doors to the Temple of Janus were supposed to have remained open until the reign of Augustus. Each of Rome's legendary or semi-legendary kings was associated with one or more religious institutions still known to the later Republic.
Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Marcius instituted the fetial priests. The first "outsider" Etruscan king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus , founded a Capitoline temple to the triad Jupiter, Juno and Minerva which served as the model for the highest official cult throughout the Roman world. The benevolent, divinely fathered Servius Tullius established the Latin League , its Aventine Temple to Diana , and the Compitalia to mark his social reforms. Servius Tullius was murdered and succeeded by the arrogant Tarquinius Superbus , whose expulsion marked the beginning of Rome as a republic with annually elected magistrates.
Roman historians [15] regarded the essentials of Republican religion as complete by the end of Numa's reign, and confirmed as right and lawful by the Senate and people of Rome: Rome offers no native creation myth , and little mythography to explain the character of its deities, their mutual relationships or their interactions with the human world, but Roman theology acknowledged that di immortales immortal gods ruled all realms of the heavens and earth.
There were gods of the upper heavens, gods of the underworld and a myriad of lesser deities between. Some evidently favoured Rome because Rome honoured them, but none were intrinsically, irredeemably foreign or alien. The political, cultural and religious coherence of an emergent Roman super-state required a broad, inclusive and flexible network of lawful cults. At different times and in different places, the sphere of influence, character and functions of a divine being could expand, overlap with those of others, and be redefined as Roman.
Change was embedded within existing traditions. Several versions of a semi-official, structured pantheon were developed during the political, social and religious instability of the Late Republican era. Jupiter , the most powerful of all gods and "the fount of the auspices upon which the relationship of the city with the gods rested", consistently personified the divine authority of Rome's highest offices, internal organization and external relations.
During the archaic and early Republican eras, he shared his temple , some aspects of cult and several divine characteristics with Mars and Quirinus , who were later replaced by Juno and Minerva. These later Roman pantheistic hierarchies are part literary and mythographic, part philosophical creations, and often Greek in origin. The Hellenization of Latin literature and culture supplied literary and artistic models for reinterpreting Roman deities in light of the Greek Olympians , and promoted a sense that the two cultures had a shared heritage.
The impressive, costly, and centralised rites to the deities of the Roman state were vastly outnumbered in everyday life by commonplace religious observances pertaining to an individual's domestic and personal deities, the patron divinities of Rome's various neighborhoods and communities, and the often idiosyncratic blends of official, unofficial, local and personal cults that characterised lawful Roman religion.
I wander, never ceasing to pass through the whole world, but I am first and foremost a faithful worshiper of Onuava.
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I am at the ends of the earth, but the distance cannot tempt me to make my vows to another goddess. Love of the truth brought me to Tibur, but Onuava's favorable powers came with me. Thus, divine mother, far from my home-land, exiled in Italy, I address my vows and prayers to you no less.
Throughout the life of Rome, a numerous array of "mystery cults" appeared. These cults were generally founded upon legends or sacred stories, such as the tale of Orpheus. Several had a basis in other cultures, such as the Cult of Isis, an Egyptian goddess. The members generally knew the stories were pure legend, but they provided a model for their followers to obey.
These cults had often expensive, long, or trying initiation processes, which differed between cults, but prospective members were promised with a path to a better atmosphere and an atmosphere that fostered social bonds, known as mystai. These bonds were generated due to the fact that most of these cults regularly practiced common meals among members, dances, ceremonies and rituals, and the aforementioned initiations.
The focus of the cult, such as the focus on Orpheus among Orphic cults, did not necessarily dictate the theology of its members. The legendary tales were meant to guide members, but the deities involved tended to be a lesser focus. Mystery cults were present and generally accepted throughout much of Rome and provided a unique theological experience for their members. Roman calendars show roughly forty annual religious festivals. Some lasted several days, others a single day or less: Some of the most ancient and popular festivals incorporated ludi "games", such as chariot races and theatrical performances , with examples including those held at Palestrina in honour of Fortuna Primigenia during Compitalia , and the Ludi Romani in honour of Liber.
Other public festivals were not required by the calendar, but occasioned by events. The triumph of a Roman general was celebrated as the fulfillment of religious vows , though these tended to be overshadowed by the political and social significance of the event. During the late Republic, the political elite competed to outdo each other in public display, and the ludi attendant on a triumph were expanded to include gladiator contests. Under the Principate , all such spectacular displays came under Imperial control: Additional festivals and games celebrated Imperial accessions and anniversaries.
Others, such as the traditional Republican Secular Games to mark a new era saeculum , became imperially funded to maintain traditional values and a common Roman identity. That the spectacles retained something of their sacral aura even in late antiquity is indicated by the admonitions of the Church Fathers that Christians should not take part. The meaning and origin of many archaic festivals baffled even Rome's intellectual elite, but the more obscure they were, the greater the opportunity for reinvention and reinterpretation — a fact lost neither on Augustus in his program of religious reform, which often cloaked autocratic innovation, nor on his only rival as mythmaker of the era, Ovid.
In his Fasti , a long-form poem covering Roman holidays from January to June, Ovid presents a unique look at Roman antiquarian lore, popular customs, and religious practice that is by turns imaginative, entertaining, high-minded, and scurrilous; [31] not a priestly account, despite the speaker's pose as a vates or inspired poet-prophet, but a work of description, imagination and poetic etymology that reflects the broad humor and burlesque spirit of such venerable festivals as the Saturnalia , Consualia , and feast of Anna Perenna on the Ides of March , where Ovid treats the assassination of the newly deified Julius Caesar as utterly incidental to the festivities among the Roman people.
In the later Empire under Christian rule, the new Christian festivals were incorporated into the existing framework of the Roman calendar, alongside at least some of the traditional festivals. Public religious ceremonies of the official Roman religion took place outdoors, and not within the temple building. Some ceremonies were processions that started at, visited, or ended with a temple or shrine, where a ritual object might be stored and brought out for use, or where an offering would be deposited.
Sacrifices , chiefly of animals , would take place at an open-air altar within the templum or precinct, often to the side of the steps leading up to the raised portico. The main room cella inside a temple housed the cult image of the deity to whom the temple was dedicated, and often a small altar for incense or libations. It might also display art works looted in war and rededicated to the gods. It is not clear how accessible the interiors of temples were to the general public. The Latin word templum originally referred not to the temple building itself, but to a sacred space surveyed and plotted ritually through augury: The ruins of temples are among the most visible monuments of ancient Roman culture.
Temple buildings and shrines within the city commemorated significant political settlements in its development: All sacrifices and offerings required an accompanying prayer to be effective. Pliny the Elder declared that "a sacrifice without prayer is thought to be useless and not a proper consultation of the gods. The spoken word was thus the single most potent religious action, and knowledge of the correct verbal formulas the key to efficacy.
Public religious ritual had to be enacted by specialists and professionals faultlessly; a mistake might require that the action, or even the entire festival, be repeated from the start. Oaths—sworn for the purposes of business, clientage and service, patronage and protection , state office, treaty and loyalty—appealed to the witness and sanction of deities. Refusal to swear a lawful oath sacramentum and breaking a sworn oath carried much the same penalty: In Latin, the word sacrificium means the performance of an act that renders something sacer , sacred. Sacrifice reinforced the powers and attributes of divine beings, and inclined them to render benefits in return the principle of do ut des.
Offerings to household deities were part of daily life. Lares might be offered spelt wheat and grain-garlands, grapes and first fruits in due season, honey cakes and honeycombs, wine and incense, [42] food that fell to the floor during any family meal, [43] or at their Compitalia festival, honey-cakes and a pig on behalf of the community. The most potent offering was animal sacrifice , typically of domesticated animals such as cattle, sheep and pigs. Each was the best specimen of its kind, cleansed, clad in sacrificial regalia and garlanded; the horns of oxen might be gilded.
Sacrifice sought the harmonisation of the earthly and divine , so the victim must seem willing to offer its own life on behalf of the community; it must remain calm and be quickly and cleanly dispatched. Sacrifice to deities of the heavens di superi , "gods above" was performed in daylight, and under the public gaze. Deities of the upper heavens required white, infertile victims of their own sex: Juno a white heifer possibly a white cow ; Jupiter a white, castrated ox bos mas for the annual oath-taking by the consuls.
Di superi with strong connections to the earth, such as Mars, Janus, Neptune and various genii — including the Emperor's — were offered fertile victims. After the sacrifice, a banquet was held; in state cults, the images of honoured deities took pride of place on banqueting couches and by means of the sacrificial fire consumed their proper portion exta , the innards. Rome's officials and priests reclined in order of precedence alongside and ate the meat; lesser citizens may have had to provide their own.
Chthonic gods such as Dis pater , the di inferi "gods below" , and the collective shades of the departed di Manes were given dark, fertile victims in nighttime rituals. Animal sacrifice usually took the form of a holocaust or burnt offering, and there was no shared banquet, as "the living cannot share a meal with the dead". Color had a general symbolic value for sacrifices. Demigods and heroes, who belonged to the heavens and the underworld, were sometimes given black-and-white victims. Robigo or Robigus was given red dogs and libations of red wine at the Robigalia for the protection of crops from blight and red mildew.
A sacrifice might be made in thanksgiving or as an expiation of a sacrilege or potential sacrilege piaculum ; [49] a piaculum might also be offered as a sort of advance payment; the Arval Brethren , for instance, offered a piaculum before entering their sacred grove with an iron implement, which was forbidden, as well as after. The same divine agencies who caused disease or harm also had the power to avert it, and so might be placated in advance.
Divine consideration might be sought to avoid the inconvenient delays of a journey, or encounters with banditry, piracy and shipwreck, with due gratitude to be rendered on safe arrival or return. In times of great crisis, the Senate could decree collective public rites, in which Rome's citizens, including women and children, moved in procession from one temple to the next, supplicating the gods. Extraordinary circumstances called for extraordinary sacrifice: All due care would be taken of the animals. If any died or were stolen before the scheduled sacrifice, they would count as already sacrificed, since they had already been consecrated.
Normally, if the gods failed to keep their side of the bargain, the offered sacrifice would be withheld. In the imperial period, sacrifice was withheld following Trajan 's death because the gods had not kept the Emperor safe for the stipulated period. The exta were the entrails of a sacrificed animal , comprising in Cicero 's enumeration the gall bladder fel , liver iecur , heart cor , and lungs pulmones.
As a product of Roman sacrifice, the exta and blood are reserved for the gods, while the meat viscera is shared among human beings in a communal meal. The exta of bovine victims were usually stewed in a pot olla or aula , while those of sheep or pigs were grilled on skewers. When the deity's portion was cooked, it was sprinkled with mola salsa ritually prepared salted flour and wine, then placed in the fire on the altar for the offering; the technical verb for this action was porricere.
Human sacrifice in ancient Rome was rare but documented. After the Roman defeat at Cannae two Gauls and two Greeks were buried under the Forum Boarium , in a stone chamber "which had on a previous occasion [ BC] also been polluted by human victims, a practice most repulsive to Roman feelings". The rite was apparently repeated in BC, preparatory to an invasion of Gaul.
Its religious dimensions and purpose remain uncertain. In the early stages of the First Punic War BC the first known Roman gladiatorial munus was held, described as a funeral blood-rite to the manes of a Roman military aristocrat. Even so, the gladiators swore their lives to the infernal gods, and the combat was dedicated as an offering to the di manes or other gods.
The event was therefore a sacrificium in the strict sense of the term, and Christian writers later condemned it as human sacrifice. The small woollen dolls called Maniae , hung on the Compitalia shrines, were thought a symbolic replacement for child-sacrifice to Mania, as Mother of the Lares. The Junii took credit for its abolition by their ancestor L. Junius Brutus , traditionally Rome's Republican founder and first consul. Officially, human sacrifice was obnoxious "to the laws of gods and men". The practice was a mark of the barbarians , attributed to Rome's traditional enemies such as the Carthaginians and Gauls.
Religion in ancient Rome
Rome banned it on several occasions under extreme penalty. A law passed in 81 BC characterised human sacrifice as murder committed for magical purposes. Pliny saw the ending of human sacrifice conducted by the druids as a positive consequence of the conquest of Gaul and Britain. Despite an empire-wide ban under Hadrian , human sacrifice may have continued covertly in North Africa and elsewhere. The mos maiorum established the dynastic authority and obligations of the citizen- paterfamilias "the father of the family" or the "owner of the family estate".
He had priestly duties to his lares , domestic penates , ancestral Genius and any other deities with whom he or his family held an interdependent relationship. His own dependents, who included his slaves and freedmen, owed cult to his Genius. Genius was the essential spirit and generative power — depicted as a serpent or as a perennial youth, often winged — within an individual and their clan gens pl. A paterfamilias could confer his name, a measure of his genius and a role in his household rites, obligations and honours upon those he fathered or adopted. His freed slaves owed him similar obligations.
A pater familias was the senior priest of his household. In rural estates, bailiffs seem to have been responsible for at least some of the household shrines lararia and their deities. Household cults had state counterparts. In Vergil's Aeneid , Aeneas brought the Trojan cult of the lares and penates from Troy, along with the Palladium which was later installed in the temple of Vesta. Roman religio religion was an everyday and vital affair, a cornerstone of the mos maiorum , Roman tradition or ancestral custom.
Care for the gods, the very meaning of religio , had therefore to go through life, and one might thus understand why Cicero wrote that religion was "necessary". Religious behavior — pietas in Latin, eusebeia in Greek — belonged to action and not to contemplation. Consequently religious acts took place wherever the faithful were: Religious law centered on the ritualised system of honours and sacrifice that brought divine blessings, according to the principle do ut des "I give, that you might give".
Proper, respectful religio brought social harmony and prosperity. Religious neglect was a form of atheism: Excessive devotion, fearful grovelling to deities and the improper use or seeking of divine knowledge were superstitio. Any of these moral deviations could cause divine anger ira deorum and therefore harm the State. Participation in public rites showed a personal commitment to their community and its values.
Official cults were state funded as a "matter of public interest" res publica. Non-official but lawful cults were funded by private individuals for the benefit of their own communities. The difference between public and private cult is often unclear. Individuals or collegial associations could offer funds and cult to state deities. The public Vestals prepared ritual substances for use in public and private cults, and held the state-funded thus public opening ceremony for the Parentalia festival, which was otherwise a private rite to household ancestors.
Some rites of the domus household were held in public places but were legally defined as privata in part or whole. All cults were ultimately subject to the approval and regulation of the censor and pontifices. Rome had no separate priestly caste or class. The highest authority within a community usually sponsored its cults and sacrifices, officiated as its priest and promoted its assistants and acolytes.
Specialists from the religious colleges and professionals such as haruspices and oracles were available for consultation. In household cult, the paterfamilias functioned as priest, and members of his familia as acolytes and assistants. Public cults required greater knowledge and expertise. The earliest public priesthoods were probably the flamines the singular is flamen , attributed to king Numa: Twelve lesser flamines were each dedicated to a single deity, whose archaic nature is indicated by the relative obscurity of some.
Flamines were constrained by the requirements of ritual purity; Jupiter's flamen in particular had virtually no simultaneous capacity for a political or military career. In the Regal era, a rex sacrorum king of the sacred rites supervised regal and state rites in conjunction with the king rex or in his absence, and announced the public festivals. He had little or no civil authority. With the abolition of monarchy, the collegial power and influence of the Republican pontifices increased. By the late Republican era, the flamines were supervised by the pontifical collegia.
The rex sacrorum had become a relatively obscure priesthood with an entirely symbolic title: Public priests were appointed by the collegia. Once elected, a priest held permanent religious authority from the eternal divine, which offered him lifetime influence, privilege and immunity. Therefore, civil and religious law limited the number and kind of religious offices allowed an individual and his family.
Religious law was collegial and traditional; it informed political decisions, could overturn them, and was difficult to exploit for personal gain. Priesthood was a costly honour: Cult donations were the property of the deity, whose priest must provide cult regardless of shortfalls in public funding — this could mean subsidy of acolytes and all other cult maintenance from personal funds. For a freedman or slave, promotion as one of the Compitalia seviri offered a high local profile, and opportunities in local politics; and therefore business. During the Imperial era, priesthood of the Imperial cult offered provincial elites full Roman citizenship and public prominence beyond their single year in religious office; in effect, it was the first step in a provincial cursus honorum.
In Rome, the same Imperial cult role was performed by the Arval Brethren , once an obscure Republican priesthood dedicated to several deities, then co-opted by Augustus as part of his religious reforms. The Arvals offered prayer and sacrifice to Roman state gods at various temples for the continued welfare of the Imperial family on their birthdays, accession anniversaries and to mark extraordinary events such as the quashing of conspiracy or revolt. Every 3 January they consecrated the annual vows and rendered any sacrifice promised in the previous year, provided the gods had kept the Imperial family safe for the contracted time.
The Vestals were a public priesthood of six women devoted to the cultivation of Vesta , goddess of the hearth of the Roman state and its vital flame. A girl chosen to be a Vestal achieved unique religious distinction, public status and privileges, and could exercise considerable political influence. Upon entering her office, a Vestal was emancipated from her father's authority. In archaic Roman society, these priestesses were the only women not required to be under the legal guardianship of a man, instead answering directly to the Pontifex Maximus. A Vestal's dress represented her status outside the usual categories that defined Roman women, with elements of both virgin bride and daughter, and Roman matron and wife.
The Vestals embody the profound connection between domestic cult and the religious life of the community. The Vestals cared for the Lares and Penates of the state that were the equivalent of those enshrined in each home. Besides their own festival of Vestalia , they participated directly in the rites of Parilia , Parentalia and Fordicidia. Indirectly, they played a role in every official sacrifice; among their duties was the preparation of the mola salsa , the salted flour that was sprinkled on every sacrificial victim as part of its immolation.
One mythological tradition held that the mother of Romulus and Remus was a Vestal virgin of royal blood. A tale of miraculous birth also attended on Servius Tullius , sixth king of Rome, son of a virgin slave-girl impregnated by a disembodied phallus arising mysteriously on the royal hearth; the story was connected to the fascinus that was among the cult objects under the guardianship of the Vestals.
Augustus' religious reformations raised the funding and public profile of the Vestals. They were given high-status seating at games and theatres. The emperor Claudius appointed them as priestesses to the cult of the deified Livia , wife of Augustus. When the Christian emperor Gratian refused the office of pontifex maximus , he took steps toward the dissolution of the order.
His successor Theodosius I extinguished Vesta's sacred fire and vacated her temple. Public religion took place within a sacred precinct that had been marked out ritually by an augur. The original meaning of the Latin word templum was this sacred space, and only later referred to a building. In Rome, the central references for the establishment of an augural templum appear to have been the Via Sacra Sacred Way and the pomerium. Divine disapproval could arise through unfit sacrifice, errant rites vitium or an unacceptable plan of action.
If an unfavourable sign was given, the magistrate could repeat the sacrifice until favourable signs were seen, consult with his augural colleagues, or abandon the project. Magistrates could use their right of augury ius augurum to adjourn and overturn the process of law, but were obliged to base their decision on the augur's observations and advice.
For Cicero, himself an augur, this made the augur the most powerful authority in the Late Republic. Haruspicy was also used in public cult, under the supervision of the augur or presiding magistrate. The haruspices divined the will of the gods through examination of entrails after sacrifice, particularly the liver. They also interpreted omens, prodigies and portents, and formulated their expiation. Most Roman authors describe haruspicy as an ancient, ethnically Etruscan "outsider" religious profession, separate from Rome's internal and largely unpaid priestly hierarchy, essential but never quite respectable.
The senate and armies used the public haruspices: Being of independent means, they would be better motivated to maintain a pure, religious practice for the public good. Omens observed within or from a divine augural templum — especially the flight of birds — were sent by the gods in response to official queries.
A magistrate with ius augurium the right of augury could declare the suspension of all official business for the day obnuntiato if he deemed the omens unfavourable. Prodigies were transgressions in the natural, predictable order of the cosmos — signs of divine anger that portended conflict and misfortune. The Senate decided whether a reported prodigy was false, or genuine and in the public interest, in which case it was referred to the public priests, augurs and haruspices for ritual expiation. Livy presents these as signs of widespread failure in Roman religio. The major prodigies included the spontaneous combustion of weapons, the apparent shrinking of the sun's disc, two moons in a daylit sky, a cosmic battle between sun and moon, a rain of red-hot stones, a bloody sweat on statues, and blood in fountains and on ears of corn: The minor prodigies were less warlike but equally unnatural; sheep become goats, a hen become a cock and vice versa — these were expiated with "lesser victims".
The discovery of an androgynous four-year-old child was expiated by its drowning [97] and the holy procession of 27 virgins to the temple of Juno Regina , singing a hymn to avert disaster: In the wider context of Graeco-Roman religious culture, Rome's earliest reported portents and prodigies stand out as atypically dire. Whereas for Romans, a comet presaged misfortune, for Greeks it might equally signal a divine or exceptionally fortunate birth. Roman beliefs about an afterlife varied, and are known mostly for the educated elite who expressed their views in terms of their chosen philosophy.
The traditional care of the dead, however, and the perpetuation after death of their status in life were part of the most archaic practices of Roman religion. Ancient votive deposits to the noble dead of Latium and Rome suggest elaborate and costly funeral offerings and banquets in the company of the deceased, an expectation of afterlife and their association with the gods.
Funeral and commemorative rites varied according to wealth, status and religious context. In Cicero's time, the better-off sacrificed a sow at the funeral pyre before cremation. The dead consumed their portion in the flames of the pyre, Ceres her portion through the flame of her altar, and the family at the site of the cremation.
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For the less well-off, inhumation with "a libation of wine, incense, and fruit or crops was sufficient". Ceres functioned as an intermediary between the realms of the living and the dead: The ashes or body were entombed or buried. On the eighth day of mourning, the family offered further sacrifice, this time on the ground; the shade of the departed was assumed to have passed entirely into the underworld.
They had become one of the di Manes , who were collectively celebrated and appeased at the Parentalia , a multi-day festival of remembrance in February. A standard Roman funerary inscription is Dis Manibus to the Manes-gods. In the later Imperial era, the burial and commemorative practises of Christian and non-Christians overlapped.
Tombs were shared by Christian and non-Christian family members, and the traditional funeral rites and feast of novemdialis found a part-match in the Christian Constitutio Apostolica. Christians attended Parentalia and its accompanying Feralia and Caristia in sufficient numbers for the Council of Tours to forbid them in AD Other funerary and commemorative practices were very different. Traditional Roman practice spurned the corpse as a ritual pollution; inscriptions noted the day of birth and duration of life. The Christian Church fostered the veneration of saintly relics , and inscriptions marked the day of death as a transition to "new life".
Military success was achieved through a combination of personal and collective virtus roughly, "manly virtue" and the divine will: Military success was the touchstone of a special relationship with the gods, and to Jupiter Capitolinus in particular; triumphal generals were dressed as Jupiter, and laid their victor's laurels at his feet.
Roman commanders offered vows to be fulfilled after success in battle or siege; and further vows to expiate their failures. Camillus promised Veii's goddess Juno a temple in Rome as incentive for her desertion evocatio , conquered the city in her name, brought her cult statue to Rome "with miraculous ease" and dedicated a temple to her on the Aventine Hill. Roman camps followed a standard pattern for defense and religious ritual; in effect they were Rome in miniature. The commander's headquarters stood at the centre; he took the auspices on a dais in front.
A small building behind housed the legionary standards, the divine images used in religious rites and in the Imperial era, the image of the ruling emperor. In one camp, this shrine is even called Capitolium. The most important camp-offering appears to have been the suovetaurilia performed before a major, set battle.
A ram, a boar and a bull were ritually garlanded, led around the outer perimeter of the camp a lustratio exercitus and in through a gate, then sacrificed: Trajan's column shows three such events from his Dacian wars. The perimeter procession and sacrifice suggest the entire camp as a divine templum ; all within are purified and protected. Each camp had its own religious personnel; standard bearers, priestly officers and their assistants, including a haruspex, and housekeepers of shrines and images.
A senior magistrate-commander sometimes even a consul headed it, his chain of subordinates ran it and a ferocious system of training and discipline ensured that every citizen-soldier knew his duty. As in Rome, whatever gods he served in his own time seem to have been his own business; legionary forts and vici included shrines to household gods, personal deities and deities otherwise unknown.
From the earliest Imperial era, citizen legionaries and provincial auxiliaries gave cult to the emperor and his familia on Imperial accessions, anniversaries and their renewal of annual vows. They celebrated Rome's official festivals in absentia , and had the official triads appropriate to their function — in the Empire, Jupiter, Victoria and Concordia were typical. By the early Severan era, the military also offered cult to the Imperial divi , the current emperor's numen , genius and domus or familia , and special cult to the Empress as "mother of the camp".
The near ubiquitous legionary shrines to Mithras of the later Imperial era were not part of official cult until Mithras was absorbed into Solar and Stoic Monism as a focus of military concordia and Imperial loyalty. The devotio was the most extreme offering a Roman general could make, promising to offer his own life in battle along with the enemy as an offering to the underworld gods.
Livy offers a detailed account of the devotio carried out by Decius Mus ; family tradition maintained that his son and grandson , all bearing the same name, also devoted themselves. Before the battle, Decius is granted a prescient dream that reveals his fate. When he offers sacrifice, the victim's liver appears "damaged where it refers to his own fortunes". Otherwise, the haruspex tells him, the sacrifice is entirely acceptable to the gods.
In a prayer recorded by Livy , Decius commits himself and the enemy to the dii Manes and Tellus , charges alone and headlong into the enemy ranks, and is killed; his action cleanses the sacrificial offering. Had he failed to die, his sacrificial offering would have been tainted and therefore void, with possibly disastrous consequences.
The efforts of military commanders to channel the divine will were on occasion less successful. In the early days of Rome's war against Carthage, the commander Publius Claudius Pulcher consul BC launched a sea campaign "though the sacred chickens would not eat when he took the auspices". In defiance of the omen, he threw them into the sea, "saying that they might drink, since they would not eat.
He was defeated, and on being bidden by the senate to appoint a dictator, he appointed his messenger Glycias, as if again making a jest of his country's peril. Roman women were present at most festivals and cult observances. Some rituals specifically required the presence of women, but their active participation was limited.
As a rule women did not perform animal sacrifice, the central rite of most major public ceremonies. The rites of the Bona Dea excluded men entirely. A host of deities, however, are associated with motherhood. Juno , Diana , Lucina , and specialized divine attendants presided over the life-threatening act of giving birth and the perils of caring for a baby at a time when the infant mortality rate was as high as 40 percent.
Literary sources vary in their depiction of women's religiosity: Excessive devotion and enthusiasm in religious observance were superstitio , in the sense of "doing or believing more than was necessary", [] to which women and foreigners were considered particularly prone. The famous tirade of Lucretius , the Epicurean rationalist, against what is usually translated as "superstition" was in fact aimed at excessive religio.
Roman religion was based on knowledge rather than faith, [] but superstitio was viewed as an "inappropriate desire for knowledge"; in effect, an abuse of religio. In the everyday world, many individuals sought to divine the future, influence it through magic, or seek vengeance with help from "private" diviners. The state-sanctioned taking of auspices was a form of public divination with the intent of ascertaining the will of the gods, not foretelling the future.
Secretive consultations between private diviners and their clients were thus suspect.