ancient Roman religion

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Ancient Roman religion was the polytheistic cult-system of the Roman state and household: a religion organized around correct ritual action and the proper maintenance of relations between the community and its gods, rather than around doctrine, scripture, or personal faith. The Latin word religio meant something closer to scrupulous observance — an obligation carefully discharged — than to belief in the modern sense. Cicero, in the De natura deorum, derived the word from relegere, to go over a thing again with care, so that the religiosi were those who attended to the gods’ affairs with exacting attention; the Christian apologist Lactantius would later insist on a different root, religare, to bind, so that religion became the cord tying the soul to God. The two etymologies measure the distance between two worlds. The older sense was the Roman one: not a binding of conscience but a discipline of attention, a refusal to be careless with the divine.

The logic of reciprocity

The governing logic was reciprocity, summarized in the formula do ut des, “I give that you may give.” The gods were owed their due in sacrifice, prayer, and festival; in return they were expected to grant the pax deorum, the peace of the gods, the condition of right relation under which the city’s enterprises prospered. Piety, pietas, was accordingly closer to justice than to devotion — the rendering to each god of what was owed, an accounting kept scrupulously square. A rite performed with the wrong words, an interruption, a flaw in the victim, an ill-omened utterance heard at the altar: any of these could void the act, which then had to be repeated from the beginning, sometimes many times over, until the procedure ran clean. Worship was therefore less a matter of inner conviction than of getting the form exactly right. The system was, in the term that modern scholarship borrows, an orthopraxy — a religion of correct practice — and not an orthodoxy. There was no creed to affirm, no conversion to undergo, no canon of revealed truth; there was the rite, and the rite had to be done correctly.

This put time at the center of the cult. The Roman year was a calendar of fixed days — feriae marked in the fasti, the public register of which days were lawful for business and which were given over to particular gods — so that the city moved through a recurring sequence of obligations as exact as a ledger. The Sacrifice of an animal was the central public act: the victim led to the altar, the grain and wine and salted meal, the killing, the inspection of the organs, the burning of the gods’ portion and the sharing of the rest. The form mattered to the smallest particular. A magistrate sacrificing would veil his head with a fold of the toga (capite velato) and have a flute player sound throughout, precisely so that no chance word or ill sound could break the act and require its restart. Where a name might be wrong — where it was not certain which god governed a place or a power — the Romans hedged with formulae that addressed the deity “whether god or goddess,” sive deus sive dea, rather than risk an offering misdirected. Carelessness, not unbelief, was the cardinal fault.

The priestly colleges and the reading of signs

The public cult was administered not by a separate clergy set apart from the city but largely by the same men who governed it. Priesthoods were offices held by senators alongside magistracies, and the great colleges were boards of the state. The collegium pontificum, the college of pontiffs, oversaw the calendar, the sacred law, the proper forms of rite and burial, and the records of the cult; at its head stood the pontifex maximus, an office of immense authority that Augustus assumed in 12 BCE and that thereafter belonged to the emperor. Within the pontifical orbit stood the rex sacrorum, a priest who inherited the sacral functions the kings had once held, and the flamines, each devoted to the cult of a single god, the flamen Dialis of Jupiter hedged about with so dense a thicket of taboos that his daily life was itself a continuous rite.

Reading the will of the gods was the work of two further specialisms. The augures practiced divination by the auspicia — the signs in the sky, above all the flight, cries, and feeding of birds — and no major public act, no assembly, election, or campaign, could rightly proceed without the auspices first being taken and found favorable. Augury did not predict the future so much as certify whether the gods sanctioned a proposed act here and now. The haruspices, by contrast, practiced extispicy, the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, above all the liver, a discipline the Romans regarded as Etruscan in origin and whose practitioners they continued to summon from Etruria for the gravest readings. A blemished or malformed organ could condemn a sacrifice as unaccepted and demand its repetition. The keeping of the city’s sacred fire fell to the Vestals, six women drawn as girls from old families and bound for decades to tend the hearth-flame of Vesta in the Forum, a fire whose extinction was read as a portent of disaster for Rome and whose guardians lived under a discipline whose breach — the loss of chastity — was punished by burial alive.

Above the gods of household and field presided the Capitoline triad — Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Juno, and Minerva — enthroned together in the great temple on the Capitoline hill, the cult-center of the state and the goal of the triumphal procession, where a victorious general rode to lay his laurels in the lap of the god. When prodigies broke the ordinary order of the world — a rain of stones, a hermaphrodite birth, lightning on a temple, a speaking ox — the Senate could order the libri Sibyllini, the Sibylline Books, consulted. These were not the later Jewish and Christian hexameters that wear the Sibyl’s mask but the Roman state’s own collection of oracular verses, guarded by a college (the quindecimviri sacris faciundis) who searched them for the rite that would expiate the prodigy and restore the pax deorum. The Books did not foretell; they prescribed remedies — a new temple, a foreign cult imported, an extraordinary games — by which the breach between city and gods could be mended.

The religion of the house

Alongside the public cult ran the religion of the home, smaller in scale and continuous in time. The household honored its Lares, the protective spirits of the place, and its Penates, the guardians of the storeroom and the family’s sustenance, before whom offerings were set at a shrine, the lararium, often painted with the twin Lares flanking the genius of the paterfamilias — the indwelling divine power of the head of the family, embodied frequently as a serpent. The dead were not gone but transformed into the di manes, the ancestral spirits, honored at fixed festivals of the dead such as the Parentalia and the Lemuria, when the family discharged its debts to those who had gone before. Birth, marriage, the assumption of the toga, death: each passage of the domestic life had its rite, its presiding powers, its required correctness. The home was a cult-place no less than the temple, and the paterfamilias its officiant.

Absorption and its limits

Roman religion was markedly absorptive, and its openness was a function of its logic. If the gods were real powers whose favor the city required, then the gods of others were powers too, to be identified, conciliated, and where useful brought inside the walls. By the practice the Romans called interpretatio they matched their own gods to those of conquered peoples — Jupiter to the Greek Zeus, and across the empire’s frontiers to a long roster of local sky-gods — a habit of translation that ran throughout the ancient Mediterranean and that aligned the Roman pantheon with the Greek and, more distantly, with the older star-and-temple cults of the East (the divine genealogies and astral powers of the Mesopotamian world reached Rome chiefly through this Greek mediation). New cults could be imported by formal act of state. In 204 BCE, with Hannibal still in Italy and the Sibylline Books consulted after a shower of stones, Rome fetched the black meteoric stone of the Great Mother, Magna Mater or Cybele, from Asia Minor and installed her on the Palatine, her arrival followed within the year by Scipio’s victory and her cult honored thereafter with the games called the Megalensia — though her ecstatic, self-castrated galli priests were kept at the margins and Roman citizens long barred from their ranks. Later the rites of Isis came from Egypt with their processions and water drawn from the Nile, and the mysteries of Mithras spread through the army and the trading towns, their underground cult-rooms scattered from Syria to the Wall in Britain. The deification of dead, and eventually living, emperors added an imperial cult: a deceased princeps judged worthy could be voted divus by the Senate in an act of apotheosis and given his temple and priesthood, a cult that bound the provinces to Rome and made loyalty legible as worship.

This openness had a boundary, and the boundary was political rather than doctrinal. A cult became intolerable not when its gods were strange but when its organization seemed to constitute a power within the state answerable to itself. The clearest case is the suppression of the Bacchanalia. In 186 BCE the Senate moved against the secret rites of Bacchus that had spread through Italy, alarmed by reports of nocturnal assemblies, mixed initiations, and conspiracy; the historian Livy records executions running into the thousands, and a bronze tablet survives — the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus — carrying the decree that broke up the cult’s chapters, forbade its officers and common funds, and made any future gathering subject to the Senate’s prior license. The rite itself was not abolished but brought under control: domesticated, capped at a handful of participants, stripped of its self-governing structure. The lesson the episode teaches about the system is exact. Rome could absorb almost any god, provided the cult of that god did not become a body that escaped the city’s supervision of its own relation to the divine.

Scholarship and the rehabilitation of a religion

For much of the modern period, ancient Roman religion was read as a kind of absence — a dry civic formalism, a machinery of empty rites long since drained of feeling, its hollowness explaining why livelier imports (the mystery cults, the emperor-worship, and finally Christianity) supposedly rushed in to fill it. That reading has been comprehensively overturned. The pivotal modern synthesis is the two-volume Religions of Rome of Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price (Cambridge, 1998): a History paired with a Sourcebook, which traces more than a thousand years of Roman religious life and treats the system not as a failure of belief but as a coherent, evolving way of ordering a community’s relation to powers it could not master. John Scheid’s An Introduction to Roman Religion (translated 2003 from La religion des Romains, 1998) presses the same correction at the level of category: Roman religion, as the discipline now reads it, was a religion without revelation, without dogma, without orthodoxy, in which the central demand was the correct performance of prescribed rites and in which “belief” in the Protestant sense is simply the wrong instrument for measuring piety. To ask whether a Roman “believed in” Jupiter is to import a question the cult did not pose; what it asked was whether the rite was performed, and performed right.

The recovery of the imported cults followed a parallel arc. The study of Mithraism was founded by the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont, whose Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra (1896–99), Les mystères de Mithra (1900), and the broader Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (1911) framed the western cult as a transplanted Persian religion in Roman dress. Cumont’s continuity thesis dominated the field until the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies at Manchester in 1971, after which it was largely dismantled: the current account, associated above all with Roger Beck (The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire, 2006) and Manfred Clauss (The Roman Cult of Mithras, 2000), reads Roman Mithraism as a creation within Roman cultural categories that staged Persian names and trappings as exotic surface rather than inheriting a Zoroastrian doctrine intact. The single surviving ancient philosophical reading of Mithraic cave-symbolism is the late-third-century treatise of Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs — the Neoplatonist’s allegory of the soul’s descent and ascent through the cosmic cave, available in Thomas Taylor’s translation of 1823. A persistent popular claim that the Christian Gospel was copied from Mithraism finds no support in this scholarship: most of its alleged parallels — virgin birth on December 25, twelve disciples, crucifixion and resurrection — do not appear in the Mithraic record at all, and the Roman cult is in any case roughly contemporary with, not prior to, the New Testament.

What ended the old cult was not internal exhaustion but a change in the structure of the state. As the emperors turned to Christianity in the fourth century — and as imperial law withdrew the funds, the priesthoods, and finally the public sanction on which the rites depended — the machinery of the pax deorum lost the city that had operated it. The temples were closed or converted; the fire of Vesta was let to go out; the auspices were no longer taken before the Senate met. The Roman philosophical schools that had given the old gods their most rarefied defense — the Stoics, for whom the gods were the rational order of a living cosmos, and the Platonists whose theology would pass into Neoplatonism and survive the temples’ fall — could articulate the divine but could not by themselves keep the calendar running.

The cult had never asked for faith. It asked for performance, on the right day, in the right words, with an unblemished victim and an unbroken rite, and it measured its success by a single standard: that the relation between the city and its gods should stand in repair, the debt rendered, the pax deorum held for another year. For the better part of a millennium the rites were done, and done again when a syllable slipped, and the peace they secured was the peace within which Rome did everything else it did.

→ In the library: Taylor — Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs (1823)

→ Related: Marcus Aurelius · Neoplatonism · Divination · Jupiter · Juno · Vesta · Isis · Mithraic Mysteries · Sacrifice Ritual · Cult · Sibylline Oracles · Roman Republic · Roman Empire · Stoicism · Christianity · Modern Paganism