Roman Republic

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The Roman Republic is the period of Roman history running from the traditional expulsion of the kings in 509 BCE to the settlement of 27 BCE, when the Senate granted Octavian the name Augustus and the Republic gave way in fact, if not in form, to one-man rule. For nearly five centuries Rome was governed by elected magistrates and a Senate, and its public religion was woven so tightly into that government that the two are difficult to separate.

Roman religion in this period was less a matter of belief than of correct practice. The state maintained colleges of priests — the pontifices, who oversaw the sacred calendar and the proper forms of rite; the augures, who read the will of the gods in the flight of birds and other signs; and lesser specialists for particular cults. No magistrate took up an army, summoned an assembly, or founded a colony without first taking the auspices: a ritual inquiry into whether the gods assented to the act. A campaign begun against the signs could be undone on that ground alone. This was not, in the Roman understanding, fortune-telling so much as the maintenance of a treaty — the pax deorum, the peace with the gods that kept the city standing.

Set somewhat apart stood the Sibylline Books, a collection of Greek prophetic verses kept under guard and consulted only by order of the Senate, in moments of plague, prodigy, or crisis. The board of priests who interpreted them often returned the same answer: a foreign rite was to be adopted. By this channel, and others, the Republic took in gods from beyond its own tradition. The Great Mother of the gods, Cybele, was carried from Asia Minor to Rome in 204 BCE in the form of a black stone, on the books’ advice. The cult of Bacchus spread through Italy until the Senate moved to suppress its rites in 186 BCE — an episode that shows how warily Roman authority watched ecstatic and secretive worship even as the city’s religious life kept widening.

It is worth marking what the surviving evidence is and is not. Much of what is known comes from later writers — Cicero on augury, Livy on the early priesthoods, antiquarians reconstructing rites already half-forgotten — so that the Republic’s religion reaches us partly through the eyes of the age that followed it. Modern scholarship tends to read these institutions less as a system of private faith than as the public language in which a city negotiated its standing with the unseen.

The longer interest of the period, for the history of Western esotericism, lies in this openness under control. The mystery cults, the foreign deities, the Sibylline prophecy and the apparatus of divination that the later Mediterranean world inherited all passed through, or were shaped by, the Republic’s habit of absorbing what it conquered while insisting on its own forms. The gods changed; the colleges kept their records.

→ In the library: The Sibylline Oracles (Judeo-Christian, not the Roman books) — Terry 1899

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