Rome: An Empire's Story (21 page)

No crisis was greater than the civil wars that convulsed the state between the murder of the Gracchi and Octavian’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium. Naturally these wars came to be explained in terms of collective moral failure, perhaps the effects of the corrupting luxury
brought by imperial success. The period saw its fair share of contested omens and struggle for control of religious institutions.
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Trials of Vestals were held not long after the murder of Gaius Gracchus, and one source reports the Romans even resorted to human sacrifice as well. A sequence of public panics—we might almost call them episodes of religious hysteria—also gave rise to some wider feeling that failures in moral conduct were in some sense the root of the troubles of the late Republic. Livy addressed this in the preface to his great history, itself a product of the crisis, but not completed until the reign of Augustus. He begins by sketching out the narrative arc of how Rome grew from small beginnings to the point where it is now overburdened by its greatness, contrasts its pristine virtue to the terrible contemporary circumstances, and asks the reader to reflect on

the way of life and customs, and the sort of men and means by which good order at home and empire abroad was won and extended: then as decline sets in, let him reflect on how standards began to slip little by little, then began to slide faster and faster and eventually collapsed until we reach the situation today, where we can bear neither our vices nor the remedies they call for.
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Livy’s interpretation was not exactly Augustan: the closing phrase is altogether too pessimistic. But the huge investment Augustus put into moral rearmament suggests that ideas of this kind were fairly widespread.
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So too does the way reconciliation took place in the years after the battle of Actium brought the civil wars to an end. In 27
BC
, the Senate and people of Rome presented Octavian with a great shield on which were listed Courage, Justice, Mercy, and Piety towards the gods and his country. Courage translates
virtus
, the origin of our notion of virtue, but meaning something rather different to Romans.
Virtus
was not a condition but an active force, one connected to manliness, a power that might transform the world. Justice and Mercy were conventional regal qualities. Piety,
pietas
, was the set of dispositions that held Rome’s hierarchical society together.
Pius
was the signature virtue of Virgil’s Aeneas, repeatedly displayed towards the gods and his father. Freedmen and clients owed
pietas
to their former masters and patrons. It includes recognition of duties, as well as respect for persons. Augustus had displayed these qualities, the Shield proclaims: perhaps the senators also hoped he would continue to display them. The battle of Actium was presented as a ‘secular miracle’:
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by winning it Octavian had saved the state. The title ‘Augustus’ was awarded to him around the same time. It was not an office, not did it already have some established meaning, but its
connotations were easily understood as religious. Augustus’ virtues had saved the state, and Rome might now return to a Golden Age.
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The original shield, itself made of gold, was hung in the Curia Julia in Rome, where the Senate often met. A copy made in Italian marble, and measuring a metre across, has been found at Arles in southern France, where a colony of veteran soldiers had been recently established. A few years later an issue of denarii, the coin in which soldiers were paid, carried an image of the shield. Other coins bear the image of the civic oak crown, a traditional reward for saving the life of a fellow citizen. That too had been awarded to Augustus. Signs of this kind formed both a rationalization of recent history and a manifesto for the future. Rome, they declared, was back on track.

Religious Imperialism?

If disasters signalled a breakdown in relations with the gods, it followed that success was a sign of divine favour. The general whose battlefield vow was answered paid his dues by building a temple to the god in question. Each triumph culminated in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline. As with morality and history, this could be imagined on a larger scale. Romans certainly came to believe the gods supported their wider hegemony. Virgil’s
Aeneid
plots the rise of Rome as the fulfilment of a divine plan, the will of Jupiter. How early did Romans begin to suspect they were especially beloved of heaven? There are a few tantalizing hints that already in the third century
BC
some Romans had begun to feel that the gods/their gods had some special plan for them, and so that their religious action was not exactly on a par with those of others. In the ruins of the temple of Dionysus on the Greek island of Teos, an inscription was found that records a letter sent by a Roman magistrate in the 190s
BC
confirming the temple’s privileges. It also asserts that the Roman people were the most religious of men.
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It is possible that when Polybius remarked on the exceptional piety of the Romans he was reflecting the self-image of the Roman elite. Was the exceptional religiosity of the Romans already a theme of the lost history written by the senator Fabius Pictor, a work to which we owe (indirectly) our most detailed accounts of Rome’s earliest major festival the
Ludi Romani
?
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Pictor had also been part of a delegation sent by the Senate to the oracle of Delphi after Hannibal’s victory at Cannae in 216
BC
. Polybius had, naturally, many opportunities for observing the religious life of Rome, and ritual was an
important concern for many members of the elite. Many senators held priesthoods, and unlike magistracies these were generally held for life: the most important were regularly signalled in ceremony, and were commemorated long after their death. Caesar, Cicero, and the Younger Pliny all held major priesthoods and their writings show how important this was to them. Priestly colleges co-opted new members on the death of an incumbent: the numbers were tightly restricted, and it was a convention not to co-opt an immediate relative. Support in winning priesthoods established lasting ties of gratitude. The
populares
briefly introduced elections, but the emperors ended this, making priesthoods another of the gifts they might bestow. Their prestige survived these transformations. Both in ritual performances and in the meetings of the colleges and the Senate itself, senatorial priests devoted an extraordinary amount of time and energy to the precise management of cult and to dealing with prodigies and religious problems, such as how exactly to declare war on a distant enemy or what ceremonies should be used to bring a particular new god into Rome. Religious knowledge at Rome consisted of expertise in ritual, not in theology, and rituals were fundamental to the workings of the state.
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Assemblies, meetings of the Senate, even battles could not begin until the auguries had been taken, that is until the approval of the gods had been established, usually by divining from the flight of birds. Once a general had been given his command, his
imperium
, he acquired a whole range of temporary ritual duties and prerogatives. Magistrates too performed sacrifices in the course of their civil duties. The Senate was the ultimate mediator between the Romans and their gods. It has even been suggested that the collective authority of the senatorial aristocracy largely derived from its religious functions.
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All ancient communities had priests, but perhaps in Rome the correlation between political and religious authority was unusually strong.

Yet if we compare the rituals, beliefs, and religious institutions of Rome with those of their neighbours, the Romans seem in many respects very conventional. Most peoples of the ancient world were polytheists: they believed in a plurality of gods, and paid cult to a number of them. A merchant who travelled the Mediterranean around the turn of the millennium would find, in every city he visited, monumental temples, images of the gods, and priests conducting rituals on behalf of the community. The gods were generally treated as powerful social beings—physically close at hand, but of an order of being that transcended the everyday. Rituals were designed to establish their wishes, and to win their support. Winning support almost
always involved animal sacrifice. Mostly the animals that were sacrificed were drawn from that small range of domesticates on which all these economies depended. Processions, purifications, hymns, prayers, and music might be added to involve more people. Festivals took place, generally on an annual cycle but also to mark special events, and might involve games or contests of various kinds. Kings and cities were the focus of the grandest cults, but there were also domestic and village cults and even private, personal vows and offerings made to gods. Oracles of various sorts and healing shrines were ubiquitous. All this was true of Greeks and Etruscans, Phoenicians and Samnites, and most of the other peoples of the Mediterranean world.

Each community had its own cults of course, and there were differences that perhaps mattered enormously to worshippers. A few peculiarities were infamous: the Egyptian gods had the heads of animals; the Jews had only one god; the Druids were rumoured to sacrifice not only animals, but also humans. But these scandals stood out against a background of broad similarity. Many gods were in any case shared among peoples who felt themselves related, so all the Greeks worshipped Athena; and all the western Phoenicians Melqart (originally the great god of Tyre), and so on. The Romans had their own bizarre rituals: Greek scholars like Dionysius and Plutarch, as well as Roman ones, devoted some effort to trying to work out what rituals like the October Horse were all about.
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Quite probably there was no ancient consensus, and the origins of most Roman rituals are now lost, even if we can sometimes see how they functioned in later ages, to mark time, to draw the community together, and to assert the relative status of those who presided, participated, and only watched.

From at least the archaic period, there had been attempts to find equivalences between the gods of different peoples—Jupiter and Zeus, Hercules and Melqart, Uni and Astarte, and so on. Those connections were made not only by philosophers, antiquarians, historians, and poets, but also by traders, migrants, and envoys who encountered new gods in the communities they visited and wondered how new they were. The bilingual dedications to Astarte/Uni at Pyrgi described in
Chapter 3
show how closer relations between nearby peoples, in this case Phoenicians and Etruscans, might bring their gods into a new relationship. It was common to behave as if a single divine order lurked behind the myriad local cults.

Eventually some religious leaders made a virtue of this by deliberately asserting syncretisms: the goddess Isis in Apuleius’
Metamorphoses
claims to be known as the Great Mother of the Gods at Pessinus, Cecropian Minerva
in Attica, Venus of Paphos on Cyprus, Dictyan Diana to the Cretans, Stygian Prosperina to the Sicilians, Ceres at Eleusis, and also as Juno, Bellona, Hecate, and the goddess of Rhamnous, but really Queen Isis, the form used by the Ethiopians and Egyptians.
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The Baal of the city of Doliche in Syria spread through the Roman world as Jupiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus. Philosophers reached even more radical conclusions, for example that none of the traditional gods was correctly imagined, or that the gods of the poets were demons, lesser deities created by a greater more perfect god who did not share the passions and social roles of humans. Speculations of this kind played a major part in converting the god of the Jews into the universal deity of the Christians. Most of these developments took place in the early imperial period. But Romans were aware of alien gods and the philosophical debate they inspired from the earliest stages of overseas expansion. Pictor’s visit to Delphi was not unusual. Many Roman governors of Macedonia visited the sanctuary of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace, and during the last century
BC
many prominent Romans were initiated into the mysteries of Demeter and the Maiden at Eleusis; they included Sulla, Cicero, Antony, and Augustus. The literature of the Republic also shows a familiarity with Greek philosophical speculations on the divine: Ennius produced a Latin version of the work of Euhemerus who argued that the gods of myth had once been great men, Lucretius followed Epicurus’ line that the gods were impossibly remote from the material world, or perhaps did not exist at all, Cicero’s philosophical dialogues
On the Nature of the Gods
and
On Divination
bring conventional Roman thought into contact with the major philosophical schools of his day.
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Equivalences of this kind ought to have posed real problems for the management of Roman ritual. If the gods of the Egyptians were the same as those of the Romans (Thoth = Hermes = Mercury for example), then why was it important that Romans follow their own customs when sacrificing? After all, even the name used to address the god mattered enormously in some Roman rituals.
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Equally, if all the Junones of Latium referred to the same goddess (and also to Astarte of Carthage and Uni of Veii) why was it necessary to persuade the Juno of Veii to come to Rome in 396, Juno Sospita to come from Lanuvium in 338, or to establish cults to Juno Lucina in 375 and Juno Moneta in 344? And what about the idea that a city’s gods were in some sense its citizens, and might be expected to give it particular support? Propertius imagined the gods of the Romans ranged against those of the Egyptians at Actium, while the armies of Octavian and Cleopatra fought
below. How could this be related to the idea of a single cosmos? More fundamentally, were the gods of Rome
the gods
, or only the gods of the Romans? No single answer emerged as authoritative. Right up until late antiquity we can find the same Roman senators worshipping a great number of traditional, alien, and syncretized gods, and also debating the minutiae of correct ritual in the priestly colleges. Romans seem to have managed to maintain a mental reservation between a sense of the extreme particularity of individual
cults
and an openness to all sorts of theological and cosmological speculation; between punctiliousness about ritual practice on the one hand, and an apparent lack of concern about belief on the other.
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