Religion in Republican Italy
314
Religion in Republican Italy
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521863667 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/14/2006 |
| Series: | Yale Classical Studies , #33 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 314 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.87(d) |
About the Author
Paul B. Harvey, Jr. is Associate Professor in the Departments of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, History and Religious Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He has published numerous articles on topics in classics and late antique studies and is a co-author of Vols. II and III of The Laws of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary.
Celia E. Schultz is Assistant Professor of Classics at Yale University and has taught at the Pennsylvania State University, Bryn Mawr College, and the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Women's Religious Activity in the Roman Republic (2006).
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Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-86366-7 - RELIGION IN REPUBLICAN ITALY - by CELIA E. SCHULTZ AND PAUL B. HARVEY, JR
excerpt
Introduction
Celia E. Schultz and Paul B. Harvey, Jr
The study of Roman religion as a topic worthy of scholarly inquiry in its own right – as opposed to being considered a farrago of quaint local traditions, folklore, and stray Etruscan influences (especially ritual) unsystematically presided over by imported Hellenic anthropomorphic deities – was established on firm foundations by Mommsen’s study and explication of the Roman calendar in the first volume of the first edition of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum(1863). Here Mommsen reconstructed the cycle of the Roman religious year by elucidating epigraphic fragments of ancient calendars with information scattered in our surviving literary sources. Mommsen’s edition was followed, in due time, by a revised presentation in the second edition of CIL I (1893) and by Georg Wissowa’s magisterial handbook, Religion und Kultus der Römer (1st edn., 1905; 2nd edn., 1912), still a fundamental reference work supplemented and complemented, not replaced, by K. Latte’s Römische Religionsgeschichte of 1960. At the time Wissowa was preparing a second edition of his handbook, another significant study of Roman religion founded on Mommsen’s work appeared: Ludwig Deubner’s discussion of thedevelopment of religion in early Rome in its own terms, not as a footnote to Greek religion. While from the time of Wissowa and Deubner Roman religion has received consistent scholarly attention – with continuing interest in the Roman calendar and its importance for our understanding of religious activities in the public sphere of Roman life4 – in recent years, the study of religion in ancient Italy has enjoyed a surge of interest. The appearance of many well received works on the subject – to name just a few: D. Feeney’s Literature and Religion at Rome (1998); Religions of Rome, edited by M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price (1998); Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy, edited by E. Bispham and C. Smith (2000); J. Rüpke’s Die Religion der Römer (2001); C. Ando’s Roman Religion (2003); J. Scheid’s An Introduction to Roman Religion (2003); J. P. Davies’s Rome’s Religious History: Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus on their Gods (2004) – suggests the vigor of the field.
Many analysts of religious activities at Rome and elsewhere in central Italy in the eras before the first century BCE have tended to project back into the poorly documented mists of the past the (largely) literary evidence of the ages of Cicero and Augustus. The chapters in this volume were written in response to an invitation issued in the spring of 2002 to explore how recent findings and research inform our understanding of religious observance in Italy in the period from the fourth century BCE down to the last decades of the first century BCE, that is, the period of the middle and late Republic, with a particular emphasis on what (as far as the evidence permits) contemporary written and material evidence can tell us of religious praxis during that period. Our thought was to revisit the modern perception of the nexus of religion and politics in this period, with particular attention to Rome’s interaction with her Etrusco-Italic neighbors – a subject out of favor until very recently, especially among Anglophone classicists. Archaeologists seem never to have forgotten the subject. We may now be able to see the process as involving not just Rome handing her cultural baggage down to lesser communities, but a process of interchange in both directions.
A further aim of this volume was to promote dialogue among groups of specialists that do not communicate as often or as widely as they might: Romanists and Etruscologists; philologists, epigraphers, and archaeologists. The task was taken up enthusiastically by the authors whose works are included here, as is evidenced by the significant number of cross-references among the essays in this collection. Though this volume is not the result of a prearranged conference, it benefited from an opportunity provided by the Department of Classics at Yale University in March 2003 for all the contributors and many others from the scholarly community to meet in a cordial atmosphere to discuss and debate the issues raised herein.
The papers published here should be read as reflecting an on-going dialogue among specialists in different fields of the study of ancient Mediterranean societies; these papers may enable, or at least encourage, a richer understanding of religious activities in Republican Rome and contemporary central Italic societies, as well as offering exemplary illustrations from older religious practices and institutions of the continuity in, and influence on, later, better documented eras. The contributors have interpreted the question set before them in various ways: topics range from a review of the evidence for an Etruscan female priesthood to a discussion of the development of a unified imperial culture in the age of Augustus. Even so, these essays form a tightly unified whole in terms of method, focus, and theme. To begin with, one of the fundamental issues addressed in this volume is what was the nature of “Roman,” as opposed to “Latin,” “Italic,” or “Etruscan,” religion in the period in question and, by extension, how these various ethnic categories have been treated in modern scholarship. In pursuit of an answer, each article integrates types of evidence often treated in isolation: literary, epigraphic, and archaeological. Thus, anatomical votives (Glinister), Etruscan and Italic religious traditions as reported by observers themselves and by Romans (Turfa, Lundeen, Schultz), and the archaeological remains of sacred places private and public (Klingshirn, Lundeen, Turfa, Muccigrosso, Harvey, Schultz) are all discussed with reference to the literary tradition and its reliability in testifying to religious practice. One of the most important results of this integrative approach has been that many of the studies here complicate the categories and methodologies traditionally employed in discussing religion in ancient Italy.
Given the dominant political and military role Rome enjoyed during the middle and late Republic, it is perhaps not surprising that another closely related issue addressed consistently throughout this volume is the Romanization of Italy, defined for the purpose of concision as the process by which Roman culture spread to other Italic peoples with varying degrees of ease and acceptance. Romanization has long been a popular topic for scholarly debate: just the last six or seven years have yielded a bevy of important works on Romanization in the wider empire, such as G. Woolf ’s Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (1998), R. MacMullen’s Romanization in the Time of Augustus (2000), the collections of essays edited by S. Keay and N. Terrenato, Italy and the West: Comparative Issues in Romanization (2001), and A. E. Cooley, Becoming Roman, Writing Latin? (2002). The focus of many of these works is on the Romanization of other geographical regions in later periods than those examined here, and on other cultural markers than religious praxis. This circumstance is due perhaps to the fact that cultural transformation is often better documented in the provinces, where the differences between Roman ways and those of native folk are more easily identified than they are between Roman and Italic practices, and in the Imperial period, for which evidence is much more plentiful than it is for earlier centuries.
The Romanization of Italy has received some attention in recent years, most notably in some of the essays in Keay and Terrenato 2001 and other smaller scale studies such as Lomas 1993. For larger scale, broader surveys, one must look back to such works as E. T. Salmon’s The Making of Roman Italy (1985) and the volume Studies in the Romanization of Etruria (1975), edited by P. Bruun et al. As in more recent investigations of Romanization in the provinces, these works focus on military and political issues, municipal and colonial (re)organization, prosopography, and linguistic matters. Though there is no doubt that religion was an equally important avenue for the negotiation of cultural change, it has been a somewhat underappreciated topic. Fortunately this circumstance has now begun to change, as is evidenced by J.-M. David’s The Roman Conquest of Italy (1997), a series of studies by M. Torelli (1999b, 2000a), several contributions to E. Bispham and C. Smith’s volume on Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy (2000), and numerous archaeological reports including those of the Corpus delle Stipi Votive. The present volume engages directly with these works as it strives not only to elucidate as much as possible the impact of Roman institutions and practices on Italic society, but also to demonstrate as far as the sources will allow the reciprocal impact of non-Roman practices and institutions on Roman custom.
In addition to thematic unity, the contributions to this volume are united in their focus on a particular aspect of religious life, namely ritual. The tendency of observers of another society’s religion to focus on those aspects that are visual and liturgical (i.e. ritual), is well documented, and some commonalities can be identified. Often such observations are colored by the shock of encountering the utterly foreign. For example, Bernal Díaz del Castillo (d. 1581), chronicler of Cortes’ conquest of the Aztecs, reported with horror native prayer-houses filled with idols of baked clay and demonic representations of unspeakable sexual acts. He described processions and sacrifices in terms of perversions of Christian sacred spaces (apparent altars) and symbols (apparent crosses). Conversely, observation of a distinct, yet related, ritual tradition can also inspire horror at perceived deviation from expected norms. Charles Woodmason, “Anglican Itinerant,” for example, in 1766, reported on the religious life of Irish Presbyterian emigrants to the Carolina colony. Those folk, he assumed, “had been educated in the Principles of our Church,” yet the emigrants’ religious practices were sorely below standard. What he saw in Carolina, therefore, was “the Scum of the Earth and Refuse of Mankind.”
The Romans themselves were subject to similar scrutiny, though the prejudice of race and class is far less acerbic than in the Christian examples above. Greek scholars observing Roman rituals noted their character, their foreignness, and the devotion of the participants, but in this case the observations were always made with a certain amount of respect, even if grudging. Polybius, who famously commented on Roman attitudes toward the gods, at several points in his Histories indicated his distaste for religious credulity in general (e.g. VI.56.13–15; XVI.12.6–7). As for the Romans in particular, their attitude and inclination was remarkable; indeed, it could be described by the term (not necessarily of positive connotation) deisidaimonia: “religious devotion bordering on superstition” (Polybius VI.56.6–7). Another outsider looking in, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, identified religious traditions and legends about the Romans and other Italic peoples in order to support (one might say “document”) his understanding of Roman foundations. Plutarch composed an essay of Roman Questions, paralleled by his Greek Questions and Barbarian Questions (the latter no longer extant), in which he explored the causes (αἰτίαι) of practices he found curious.
The Romans also exhibit these habits in their own observation and interpretation of ritual. For example, we find an apt parallel to Polybius’ assessment of the Romans in Livy’s description of Etruscans as “a race dedicated more than all others to religious matters” (Livy V.1.6: gens itaque ante omnes alias eo magis dedita religionibus). Furthermore the Romans were interested in explicating their own religious customs, as evidenced by the flowering of antiquarian literature in the last century of the Republic, most notably that of Varro. This emphasis by ancient authors, both Greek and Roman, on Roman praxis and a relative lack of interest in belief, even at an official level, is often identified as a hallmark of Roman society. The focus of our literary sources, compounded by the fact that archaeological evidence for religious life largely comprises the remains of ritual, has necessarily directed the study of religion in the period of the Republic to questions of ritual, even though those rituals are not for us, as the Aztec and Irish Presbyterian rituals were for Díaz del Castillo and Woodmason, truly visible.
The unity of the essays collected here left the editors with various options for the arrangement of them. We have eschewed a strict chronological arrangement in favor of a thematic arrangement that permits a richer development of ideas across the volume. The contributions are arranged so that essays addressing at least one of three prominent themes are grouped together: the role of religion in the negotiation of identity; the importance of place in shaping the forms of religious observance and in determining a ritual’s identification as Roman or not; and the close relationship between political power and religious action.
We begin with a group of essays that examine the way religious praxis helped to define ethnic identities, in the minds of both the ancients and modern scholars. In “Reconsidering ‘religious Romanization’,” Fay Glinister focuses on the current debate about Roman influence in religious praxis throughout the Italian peninsula, in particular the anatomical votives that have come to be viewed as sure evidence of Roman influence in a given region. Glinister integrates three different trends in the study of anatomical votives: examination of these items as evidence for medical knowledge in Hellenistic Italy, art historical analysis of votives from individual sites, and political interpretation of the phenomenon. Her study undermines the now commonplace assertions that the practice of offering anatomical votives was introduced to Italy through Roman expansion and that it is a hallmark of specifically Roman identity. She makes a strong case for terracotta anatomical representations as a wider Italic phenomenon.
In her chapter “In search of the Etruscan priestess: a re-examination of the hatrencu,” Lesley E. Lundeen examines what we know, or think we know, about the hatrencu, a group of Etruscan women who have traditionally been understood as members of a female priesthood. Lundeen’s article highlights the assumptions with which the relevant epigraphic material for the hatrencu has been approached. Most importantly, her study demonstrates the heavy reliance on extrapolation from Roman female religious activity, and she points out the tenuousness of those Roman models and of their application to an Etruscan context. The comparative approach can be expanded, Lundeen argues, beyond a religious and Roman context; she suggests looking further abroad to Asia Minor for comparanda outside the religious sphere.
Continuing with things Etruscan, Jean MacIntosh Turfa’s contribution, “Etruscan religion at the watershed: before and after the fourth century BCE,” surveys the evidence for Etruscan religion both before and after the important period of the late fifth century to fourth century BCE. Early archaeological evidence reveals a close personal relationship between worshippers and their gods, a picture that stands in contrast to the public aspect of Etruscan religion so prominent in Roman literary sources. Continuity and how it has been interpreted for Etruscan society by Roman observers and modern scholars is the important methodological issue this discussion brings to the fore.
Valentina Livi (“Religious locales in the territory of Minturnae: some aspects of Romanization”) offers us a detailed study of the evidence of religious life in Minturnae both before and after Roman intervention in the area. Archaeological evidence indicates that, while the Romanization of the region had significant effect on the religious life of its inhabitants, it did not completely disrupt the traditional religious life of the indigenous Aurunci. Within the Roman colony of Minturnae, traditional Roman gods and temples were established. Outside the colony, Auruncan sanctuaries continued to be frequented by worshippers as they had been for centuries. Romanization in this instance did not mean the obliteration of local traditions, as our literary sources would have it.
In “Religion and memory at Pisaurum,” Paul B. Harvey, Jr., studies a well known set of archaic Latin dedications from Pisaurum on the eastern coast of Italy. He suggests how those dedications may reveal something of the people who populated the original colony and, by extension, of evolving Roman colonial policies. This chapter then looks forward several hundred years to the Antonine age and to the appearance of an unexpected Latin deity in an inscription from Pisaurum. In light of the Latin origin of many of the colonists and of the revitalized interest in Latin antiquities in the time of Antoninus Pius, Harvey sees the existence of cultores Iovis Latii at Pisaurum in this late period as an example of “epigraphic memory” of municipal origins.
W. E. Klingshirn also traces out continuity in religious tradition, though he is equally interested in the development of that tradition over time and space. His chapter, “Inventing the sortilegus: lot divination and cultural identity in Italy, Rome, and the provinces,” takes us from archaic Italy to imperial north Africa as it surveys the evidence for practitioners of lot divination. He demonstrates a shift in the nature of lot divination and the status of its practitioners when this practice is removed from its traditional locale.
Ingrid Edlund-Berry’s article, “Hot, cold, or smelly: the power of sacred water in Roman religion, 400–100 BCE,” examines the importance of place, particularly of watery places in Italic religion. The role of water is a rarely discussed aspect of ancient Italic religion, an unfortunate oversight given the ubiquity of water as a ritual ingredient and the sacredness of lakes, rivers, and springs in the Italic mind. Not the least of Edlund-Berry’s accomplishments here is to assist our understanding of the sulphur spring deity Mefitis and to bring to our attention the association of pastoral herding (transhumance) and holy places associated with water.
The interplay of politics and religious action has often attracted the scrutiny of students of Roman religion. Wissowa, for example, was alert to the relationship among specific divinities, loci of worship, and the Romans active in promoting that worship. More recently, R. E. A. Palmer has analyzed the evidence for so-called female shrines in Roman topographical and political context, as well as explicating the locales, political personalities, and antiquarian lore associated with an obscure Etrusco-Roman fertility deity.
Celia E. Schultz’s discussion of “Juno Sospita and Roman insecurity in the Social War” takes a different approach to the question of Romanization. Though the process is usually presented on the model of the exportation of cultural habits, this discussion reminds us that Romanization could also mean the appropriation of another people’s deity by the Romans. Schultz’s essay looks at the episode of the refurbishment of Juno Sospita’s Roman temple in 90 BCE, placing it in the context of Rome’s military and political situation at the time. This discussion recalls the tension between the metropolis and Rome’s presumably long-since incorporated old Latin allies. The religious undertones of that tension have not often been accentuated in studies of the Social War.
The celebration of Secular Games in 17 BCE has often been discussed, but primarily for the role the poet Horace played: carmen composuit Q. Horatius Flaccus. A. E. Cooley fittingly concludes this collection by focusing on the ludi saeculares to consider the impact of Rome’s religious institutions on Italy in the Augustan period. In “Beyond Rome and Latium: Roman religion in the age of Augustus,” Cooley shows how Augustus and his circle adapted the model of Rome’s earlier integration of Latin peoples in the fourth century BCE to their needs for the creation of a “universalizing culture.” One important aspect of Rome’s effort to unify disparate ethnic groups was the minimizing of differences between Roman and Latin religious calendars. Under Augustus, Roman and Latin calendars were increasingly assimilated. Another important aspect of Augustus’ efforts to create a unified imperial culture was the exportation of ‘august(an)’ gods throughout the empire.
On balance, what this collection demonstrates is that simple opposing categories of Roman and Etruscan, Italic and Etruscan, public and private are insufficient for analysis. We suggest that these discussions illustrate very well, to use William James’s famous phrase, “the varieties of religious experience” in ancient Italy and that those varieties were not only mutually influential across space and time, but also witness a flourishing, many-faceted koiné of religious experience in ancient Italy.
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