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. The opening act is told as a deposition: Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, last of the kings, driven out, and the kingship itself abolished — replaced by two consuls holding power for a single year, the first of them, by tradition, Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. The closing act is the mirror of it. Having mastered the field after a century of civil wars, Octavian handed his extraordinary powers back to the Senate and people in January 27 BCE and received in return a new name, Augustus — the revered, the consecrated — along with the substance of rule under the cover of restored Republican forms. For nearly five centuries between those bookends 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 pull apart.

What the Romans abolished in 509 was the office of king, not the king’s sacred work. That work was parceled out so that no one man could hold it whole. A rex sacrorum — a king of rites — was kept on to perform the sacrifices a king once performed, but hedged from politics, barred from magistracies, a royal title emptied of royal power. The auspices that had belonged to the king passed to the magistrates the city elected. The result was a constitution in which the right to act in public and the right to consult the gods were the same right, divided and re-divided so that authority and divine sanction were never separable.

The colleges and the calendar

Roman religion in this period was less a matter of belief than of correct practice — what the Latin called religio, an obligation scrupulously discharged. The state maintained colleges of priests, drawn from the same governing class that filled the magistracies, so that the men who ran the city’s politics also ran its dealings with the gods. Four colleges stood above the rest. The pontifices, headed by the pontifex maximus, oversaw the sacred calendar, the forms of sacrifice, the law of burial and of vows, and the archive of precedent that told the city how a rite must be done; under their authority stood the rex sacrorum, the flamines who served single gods (three of the first rank, for Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, and twelve lesser), and the Vestals who kept the city’s hearth-fire. The augures read the will of the gods in the flight and feeding of birds, in lightning, in other signs — their competence was not to predict the future but to certify whether the gods assented to a proposed act. The quindecimviri sacris faciundis, the Board of Fifteen (ten earlier), guarded the Sibylline Books and supervised the foreign rites the city admitted. A fourth college, the epulones, managed the sacred banquets. Outside these stood the haruspices, diviners of Etruscan training who read the entrails of sacrificial victims and the meaning of lightning-strikes — a discipline Rome imported wholesale and consulted without ever quite domesticating, the foreign expert kept on retainer.

These were not pastors of a flock. They were custodians of procedure. The deeper logic of the system was reciprocity, the relationship caught in the formula do ut des, I give that you may give: the gods received sacrifice, prayer, and festival, and in return granted the pax deorum, the peace with the gods that kept the city standing. A rite spoiled by the wrong word, a flaw in the victim, an interruption, was void and had to be begun again from the start. The point of priesthood was to get the form exactly right, every time, because the form was the treaty’s instrument. (The doctrinal anatomy of that cult — its gods, its sacrifices, its household worship — belongs to ancient Roman religion; what concerns the Republic is how the cult and the state were the same machine.)

The auspices as precondition

Nothing of public consequence was undertaken without first asking the gods whether they assented. No magistrate took up an army, summoned an assembly, held an election, or founded a colony without first taking the auspices — a ritual inquiry, normally into the sky, into whether the moment was favorable. The auspices were attached to office itself: a magistrate held the auspices the way he held imperium, and to act without them, or against them, was to act outside the constitution. This made divination not an ornament of Roman public life but its enabling condition. A consul who joined battle after the sacred chickens refused to eat — the standard field-auspice, the birds’ appetite read as the gods’ answer — had begun his campaign against the signs, and a defeat could be laid at that door and the command itself impugned on that ground alone. The famous case is preserved as a warning: a commander who threw the chickens overboard when they would not eat, declaring that if they would not eat they could drink, and whose disaster afterward was read as the obvious consequence.

The instrument cut both ways, and the Romans knew it. A presiding magistrate who announced that he was watching the sky for omens could halt an election or block an assembly; the report of an unfavorable sign could undo a law already passed. Augury was thus, among other things, a constitutional brake — a way for divine sanction to enter, and stall, the ordinary business of politics. This was not, in the Roman understanding, fortune-telling. It was the maintenance of a treaty, conducted in the only language in which the parties could be sure they were heard: exact, repeatable, witnessed procedure.

Opening the gates: the Sibylline Books and the foreign rite

Set somewhat apart from the auspical machinery stood the Sibylline Books, a collection of Greek prophetic verses kept under guard — on the Capitol, in the temple of Jupiter — and consulted only by order of the Senate, in moments of plague, prodigy, or crisis. The verses did not predict; they prescribed. The quindecimviri who read them characteristically returned the same kind of answer: a rite was owed, a god to be propitiated, and very often a foreign rite was to be adopted. By this channel the Republic took in gods from beyond its own tradition under the warrant of its own oldest authority — the strangeness of the import licensed precisely by the antiquity of the book that commanded it. (Those official Roman books, lost when fire took the Capitoline temple in 83 BCE and afterward reassembled from collected verses, are not the later Sibylline Oracles — the Greek hexameters composed by Jewish and Christian writers in the Sibyl’s borrowed voice, a different corpus that grew in their shadow.)

The most spectacular admission came in the strain of the war against Hannibal. On the books’ advice, and after consultation of the oracle at Delphi, the Senate sent for the Great Mother of the gods, Cybele, the Magna Mater of Phrygian Pessinus, whose cult-object was not a statue but a black stone, very likely a meteorite. In 204 BCE the stone reached the mouth of the Tiber, and was received at Ostia — the tradition has it carried up to the city by Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, chosen by the Senate as Rome’s most virtuous man, and by the matrons of Rome. A temple was raised for her on the Palatine, dedicated in 191 BCE. Rome had taken into its own sacred heart a goddess served by ecstatic, self-castrated priests, the Galli, whose rites Roman citizens were forbidden to join — the foreign god installed at the center and quarantined at the same moment, welcomed and walled.

The other face of that vigilance is the Bacchanalia. The mystery-rites of Bacchus — the Italian and south-Italian form of the cult of the Greek god Dionysus — had spread through Italy as a private, nocturnal, initiatory worship, mixed in membership and outside the colleges’ control. In 186 BCE the Senate moved against them. The decree survives, cut into bronze — the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, a tablet found in 1640 at Tiriolo in Calabria and now in Vienna, one of the earliest substantial documents of official Latin we possess (the Latin text of Livy’s narrative is held here). It did not abolish the cult so much as seize it: it banned the shrines, the common funds, the male priesthood, the oaths, the large assemblies, and required Senate permission, case by case, for any gathering at all. Livy’s narrative of the affair, told as a tale of secret crime uncovered, reports thousands punished, many put to death. The two episodes, two decades apart, mark the same boundary from opposite sides: the Republic would import an ecstatic eastern goddess by act of the Senate and the Sibylline books, and would crush an ecstatic eastern cult by act of the Senate when it arrived unbidden. What was admitted under control was welcome; what organized itself outside control was a threat — the difference lay not in the god but in who held the procedure.

What the evidence is

It is worth marking what the surviving evidence is and is not. The Republic seldom speaks of its religion in its own present tense; most of what is known comes from writers looking back, and the looking-back was itself a religious project. Cicero is the richest witness, and a peculiar one — himself an augur, who defended the rites of augury and the auspices in De Re Publica and De Legibus as the connective tissue of the commonwealth, yet who in De Divinatione (44 BCE), a dialogue between himself and his brother Quintus, let Quintus mount the Stoic case for divination and then dismantled it from the skeptical side, never doubting for a moment that the public rites should be kept. Belief and practice, in him, are simply different questions: one may grant that the chickens reveal nothing and still hold that the city must consult them. That stance — that a thing can be constitutionally indispensable and philosophically empty at once — is close to the center of how Republican religion worked.

Livy preserves the narratives — the arrival of Cybele, the Bacchanalian purge, the prodigies expiated season after season. And Varro, in the lost Antiquitates rerum divinarum, compiled the whole apparatus into a system, sorting the gods into a threefold theology — the mythical of the poets, the natural of the philosophers, and the civil of the city and its priests — and insisting that the third, the religion actually practiced by the state, was the one that mattered to a Roman. That work survives only because Augustine quoted it in The City of God in order to demolish it; the most complete account of Republican religion reaches us inside the book written to bury it. The pattern repeats across the record: the Republic’s cult is preserved by the ages that came after it and read it through their own lights, whether antiquarian, philosophical, or Christian. Modern scholarship — the two-volume Religions of Rome of Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price (Cambridge, 1998), and John Scheid’s An Introduction to Roman Religion (2003, the English of his 1998 French) — has taught the reading of these institutions less as a system of private faith than as the public language in which a city negotiated its standing with the unseen, ritual before creed, practice before belief.

The longer interest

The longer interest of the period, for the history of Western esotericism, lies in this openness under control. The mystery religions, the foreign deities, the Sibylline prophecy, the incubatory and oracular practices that the later Mediterranean world inherited — the dream-sought healing later traced through pagan and Christian incubation, the omen-craft whose deep roots run back to Mesopotamia — all passed through, or were shaped by, the Republic’s habit of absorbing what it conquered while insisting on its own forms. Cults that arrived later still under the same system, like the mysteries of Mithras that flourished only under the emperors, inherited a city long practiced at receiving foreign gods on Roman terms. When the Republic became the Roman Empire, the colleges did not close; the auspices did not lapse; the calendar kept its festivals. Augustus took the office of pontifex maximus, repaired temples, revived priesthoods that had fallen vacant, and folded the whole sacral apparatus of the old Republic into the person of one man — the priest-king the Republic had spent five centuries refusing to allow.

The gods changed; the colleges kept their records.

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

→ Related: Divination · Mesopotamia · Incubation Pagan Christian · Cicero · Sibylline Oracles · Mystery Religions · Prophecy · Stoicism · Ancient Roman Religion · Roman Empire