Roman thinking about illicit versions of religious practices, which might threaten the religious and hence socio-political order, is the theme of this chapter. Laws defined illicit use of'drugs’ for poisoning and magic (11.2) and illicit forms of divination (11.7); a law regulated clubs and associations (11.9), and trials were held for foreign superstitio (11.10). In the republican period there were fears about foreign Pythagorean philosophy (11.1), and in the empire about the magi (11.3), the Jews (11.8), the Christians (11.11) and the Manichees (11.12). We also present here texts that reveal something of the actual practices that were so condemned: love magic (11.4), curse tablets (11.5) and magical revelation (11.6). Other chapters explore these practices further: divination (7.7), Judaism (12.6) and Christianity (12.7). But the conversion of Constantine in A.D. 312 changed the old rules: the Christian church now received imperial benefactions (11.13), and towards the end of the fourth century it was now traditional sacrifice that was banned as a superstitio (11.14).

See further: Vol. l,ch.5.

Burning of the Books of Numa (181 B.C.)

Apart from the action against the followers of Bacchus (12.1), there was little attempt under the Republic to destroy or repress un-Roman practices. But five years after the Bacchanalia affair there seems to have been further reaction against a foreign ‘threat', the philosophy of the Greek Pythagoras: Pythagorean treatises supposedly discovered in the tomb of King Numa (1.2) were burned on the order of a magistrate. There are problems with the story: Numa predated Pythagoras by 150 years, and the sources disagree about the number and content of the books; there is however no disagreement that some books were destroyed. It may be that the ‘discovery’ of the books was a deliberate attempt on the part of some members of the Roman elite to foist some new religious or philosophical doctrine on the Romans under the guise of attributing them to Numa.

See further: Delatte (1936); Gage (1955) 328-38; Pailler (1988) 623-703; Gruen (1990) 158-70*; other sources: Varro in Augustine, The City of God Vli.34; LivyXL.29; Plutarch, Life of Numa 222-5.

There was no such thing as ‘the Roman priesthood', no single definition of'the Roman priest'; there were instead many different types of priesthood at Rome, involving large numbers of different religious officials, attached to different deities and cults, with different duties, obligations and privileges. This chapter starts from the priests of the official state cult - their varied and (even to the Romans) puzzling origins (8.1), their political role (8.2) and day-to-day duties (8.3); and it examines, in particular, the only major group of female cult officials of Roman state religion, the Vestal Virgins (8.4). It then considers the position of the Roman emperor in relation to the traditional priesthoods - focusing both on the role of the emperor himself as a priest (8.5) and on new priesthoods associated with the worship of emperors (8.6). The second half of the chapter turns to alternative models of priesthood: not only those of the socalled ‘oriental’ cults at Rome - the priests of Magna Mater (8.7) and of Isis (8.8) - but also the changing pattern of aristocratic priestly office-holding in the later imperial period (8.9). The chapter ends with the conflict between paganism and Christianity and Christian attacks on pagan priests (8.10).

For the role of priests in rituals, festivals and sacrifice, see 4.5; 5.4; 5.5d; 5.7b; 6.4; 6.5; 6.6a and b; for priests and officials of'oriental’ cults, 5.6; 6.7; 12.3; 12.4c and e; 12.5; see further (for general discussions of Roman and other ancient priestly office holding, as well as of specific priesthoods) Beard and North (1990)*; Scheid (1993b)*.

The earliest Roman priesthoods

The origins of most of the priesthoods of the traditional Roman state cult are lost in the very earliest history of the city. The Romans themselves generally attributed their priestly organization to their legendary second king - Numa (1.2); but even for them (at least by the late Republic) there was much disagreement, conjecture and obscurity about the origins of particular priests and their titles.

As Roman religion developed, religious pluralism became more important: individuals faced a wider range of religious choices, and increasingly joined groups which were specifically devoted to a particular god or goddess. These groups interacted with the civic cults and to an extent with each other. This chapter starts from the hostile reaction of the Roman senate to one of the earliest attested religious groups in the cult of Bacchus (12.1), and regulations that governed a very different kind of society - a burial ‘club’ under the patronage of Diana and Antinous (12.2). The bulk of the chapter concerns the group worship of a series of individual deities during the imperial period: Jupiter Dolichenus (12.3); Isis (12.4); Mithras (12.5); Jahveh (12.6); and the Christian god (12.7); documents relating to the cult of the Magna Mater are given elsewhere (2.7, 5.6 a-b, 6.7, 8.7). The focus of the selection is on the internal organization and social location of the cults, as well as their different cosmologies. We have drawn evidence from Rome where possible, though we have included some material from other places to illustrate regional spread and local differences.

See further: Vol. 1, 95-6, 215-16, 221-7, ch. 6 passim North (1992)*; for further translated texts see R C. Grant (1953) 116-23, M. Whittaker (1984) 229-68 and Meyer (1987).

The cult of Bacchus

The spread of the cult of Bacchus (in Greek, Dionysos) from southern Italy to Etruria and Rome triggered a violent reaction on the part of the Roman senate in 186 B.C. This is the earliest attested specifically religious group in the Roman world - though its exact nature is hard to understand, since the reports of its activities are uniformly hostile, stressing the immorality of the cult and its political threat to Rome.

See further: Vol. 1, 91-6, 98; Nilsson (1957); Henrichs (1978); North (1979)*; Pailler (1988).

Roman discovery of the cult of Bacchus (186B. C.)

Livy s account of the discovery of the Bacchic cult enlarges on the danger of its practices: magic, theft, immorality, fraud, even murder. These were common accusations against secret religious groups, being made later (for example) against the Christians (11.1 Id).

Animal sacrifice, the ritual killing of an animal and the offering to the gods of parts of its body, burnt on the altar, was a (perhaps the) central element of Roman ritual. But its forms were more complex and varied than that simple description suggests; and it carried a range of symbolic meanings that extended far beyond merely ‘honouring the gods'. This chapter starts from a reconstruction of the ‘ideal’ form of Roman public sacrifice (6.1), and the record of sacrifices undertaken on one particular occasion by a group of official Roman priests (6.2); and it then considers various aspects of private sacrifice (6.3) and ‘bloodless’ offerings to the gods, not involving animal slaughter (6.4). The second half of the chapter turns to irregular, extraordinary or transgressive forms of the ritual: the so-called ‘Sacred Spring’ (6.5), human sacrifice (6.6) and the taurobolium in the cult of Magna Mater (6.7). The final section (6.8) focuses on the debates over sacrifice in the conflict between paganism and Christianity.

See further: for general theories of sacrifice (focused largely on Greek material), Burkert (1983); Price (1984) 227-31*; Hamerton-Kelly (1987)*; Detienne and Vernant (1989).

The stages of sacrifice

Traditional Roman animal sacrifice was a lengthy process, involving much more than the killing of the sacrificial victim. There were six main stages in the ritual: (a) the procession (pompa) of victims to the altar; (b) the prayer of the main officiant at the sacrifice, and the offering of wine, incense etc. (as a ‘libation’) at the altar; (c) the pouring of wine and meal (mola salsa) over the animal's head by the main sacrificant; (d) the killing of the animal by slaves; (e) the examination of the entrails for omens; (f) the burning of parts of the animal on the altar, followed normally (except in some cases where the whole animal was burnt) by a banquet taken by the participants from the rest of the meat. The following illustrations, drawn from various Roman monuments, offer a composite view of these different stages.

Finding the religion of the early Romans

The origins of Roman religion lay in the earliest days of the city of Rome itself. That, at least, was the view held by the Romans — who would have been very puzzled that we should now have any doubt about where, when or how most of their priesthoods, their festivals, their distinctive rituals were established. Roman writers, from poets to philosophers, gave detailed accounts of the founding of Rome by the first king Romulus (the date they came to agree was — on our System of reckoning — 753 B.C.): he consulted the gods for divine approval of the new foundation, carefully laying out the sacred boundary (the pomerium) around the city; he built the very first temple in the city (to Jupiter Feretrius, where he dedicated the spoils of his military victories); and he established some of the major festivals that were still being celebrated a thousand years later (it was at his new ritual of the Consualia, for example, with its characteristic horse races and other festivities, that the first Romans carried off the women of the neighbouring Sabine tribes who had come to watch - the so-called cRape of the Sabines’).

But it was in the reign of the second king Numa that they found even more religious material. For it was Numa, they said, who established most of the priesthoods and the other familiär religious institutions of the city: he was credited with the invention of, among others, the priests of the gods Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus (the three flamines), of the pontifices, the Vestal Virgins and the Salii (the priests who danced through the city twice a year carrying their Special sacred shields — one of which had fallen from the sky as a gift from Jupiter); and he instituted yet more new festivals, which he organized into the first systematic Roman ritual calendar. Henceforth some days of the year were marked down as religious, others as days for public business. Appropriately enough, this peaceable character founded the temple of Janus, whose doors were to be shut whenever the city was not at war.

'Religions of Rome’ - the traditional, polytheistic religions of the city of Rome and its empire - have a history of over 1, 200 years. It is a history that stretches from the city's origins in the eighth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D., when Christianity was firmly and officially established as the religion of the Roman empire. This book draws on material from throughout this long period, arranging it largely by theme — gods, the calendar, temples, divination, religious officials, and so forth. Of course, the character of Roman religion changed enormously during that time, as Rome itself developed from a small village in central Italy to the capital of a world empire, incorporating a wide diversity of religious traditions and beliefs. This book recognizes those changes, but does not attempt to present a chronological account. For that the reader should turn to our companion volume, Religions of Rome 1: A History.

There is more at stake in this arrangement than simply a choice of chapter headings. By grouping the material thematically across the centuries, we are suggesting that (despite all the changes) the ‘religions of Rome’ did retain certain significant constants over their long history. We are suggesting, for example, that Roman sacrifice of the fifth century B.C. had something important in common with Roman sacrifice of the second century A.D.; and that it can be useful to consider these religious forms synchronically, across time, not only (as we choose to do in the companion volume) as part of a changing, diachronic development.

Any modern analysis inevitably simplifies the complex and changing set of cults, practices, beliefs and experiences that once made up the religions of Rome. So, in this book, the bulk of the material cited comes from the three central centuries of the whole period - the first century B.C. to the second century A.D. Although we have included important evidence from both earlier and later, our choice of entries reflects the facts of survival: more and richer evidence for Roman pagan’ religion (Christian writings are another story …) survives from these three centuries than any other. But, in addition to this chronological bias, we have also (for reasons of space and coherence) focused largely on material concerned with the city of Rome and Italy.

What was the character of the religion of the Romans in the period of the kings - from Romulus, the legendary founder in the eighth century B.C., to Tarquin the Proud, whose expulsion was said to have led to the foundation of the Republic at the end of the sixth century B.C.? This chapter sets out some of the evidence that has been used to answer that question. The material raises different, in some ways more difficiilt, problems than does the rest of the book: for these early phases of Rome's history we have no contemporary literary evidence, only the speculations of Romans living hundreds of years later, combined with the evidence of archaeology and a few early documents that set formidable problems of their own. A few of these survive in their original context (e.g. 1.6b; 1.7b), but most come down to us, quoted, or often misquoted and misunderstood, by later writers.

Modern scholars have sought to plug this gap by bringing into the discussion theories about the development of early societies in general, to try to make sense of the surviving clues. We start this chapter (1.1) by reviewing the evidence for one of the most famous of those theories: that the earliest Roman religion was a form of primitive ‘animism', in which divine power was seen as widely diffused through natural phenomena, not located in superhuman beings (gods and goddesses); and that Rome only gained a mythology, with fully anthropomorphic gods and goddesses, by ‘borrowing’ them from the outside world (particularly Greece). We continue with a Roman account of the origins of their religious organization (1.2), followed by a series of texts which may preserve traces of some of the oldest rituals of Roman religion (1.3 and 4). The next sections explore different contexts of early Roman religion: first (1.5) literary and archaeological evidence for the religion of the early Latins (the inhabitants of the central Italian region of Latium, of which Rome was a part); secondly (1.6) the religious traditions associated with the Roman gens (family or clan). The final sections (1.7-9) are concerned with the evidence for the later regal period.

What was the impact of Roman religion on the provincial communities of the Roman empire? We have already discussed the spread of so-called ‘oriental religions’ outside the city of Rome itself. But what of the ‘officiaT cults? How far did the inhabitants of the empire acquire Roman religious identities? Was the impact of Rome strikingly different in different parts of the empire? Was it different at different periods? Or among different classes and groups of people? As we shall see, the historical development of imperial religion produced some remarkably idiosyncratic effects (the emperor Augustus, for example, depicted in traditional Egyptian style as a pharaoh offering cult to Egyptian gods), as well as some curiously ironic enigmas (as when the Roman governor of Egypt circulated the emperor Claudius’ message to the Alexandrians that they should ∧ö∧worship him as a god - with a covering edict calling him precisely that, £our god Caesar’).1 In what follows, we shall explore such representations as part of the Operation of imperial power across the Roman world.

The point of this chapter is to show, first, that Roman imperialism did make a difference to the religions of its imperial territory; and, second, to explore how we might trace the impact of Roman religion outside Rome, principally in the period after the reign of Augustus. Of course military conquest and the imposition of foreign control (whether in the form of taxation, puppet government or military occupation) inevitably impacts on cultural life - both in the imperial centre and in the provincial territories. No one can be culturally unaffected by imperialism. But its impact comes in a wide ränge of forms, and is experienced very differently by the parties involved - whether conquering or conquered, peasant or aristocrat, the native resistance or the local collaborators. Imperialism is, besides, constantly re-interpretedm culture and religion, as we can see very simply in the different images of the emperor himself that are found throughout the Roman provinces — not just the relatively standardized portraits on the coins that flood the Roman world, but the (to us) almost unrecognizable images from Nile sanctuaries with the emperor in the distinctive guise of Egyptian pharaoh or Ptolemaic king. Religion and culture are regularly put to work on imperialism's behalf, incorporating the conquering power into local traditions.