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In this book, Claudia Moser offers a new understanding of Roman religion in the Republican era through an exploration of sacrifice, its principal ritual. Examining the long-term imprint of sacrificial practices on the material world, she focuses on monumental altars as the site for the act of sacrifice. Piecing together the fragments of the complex kaleidoscope of Roman religious practices, she shows how they fit together in ways that shed new light on the characteristic diversity of Roman religion. This study reorients the study of sacrificial practice in three principal ways: first, by establishing the primacy of sacred architecture, rather than individual action, in determining religious authority; second, by viewing religious activities as haptic, structured experiences in the material world rather than as expressions of doctrinal, belief-based mentalities; and third, by considering Roman sacrifice as a local, site-specific ritual rather than as a single, monolithic practice.
After victory at Actium left him master of the Roman world, Augustus represented himself to the city by building a temple to Apollo closely integrated with his own home, a library, and a portico on the Palatine Hill (28 BCE). The poets, however, largely sidestep the political messages of this building complex, instead asserting interpretive liberty by voicing perspectives marginalized by Augustus’ supposed consensus universorum (consensus of all the orders). Propertius’ elegies 2.31 and 32 define an aesthetic and moral code of toleration in tacit resistance to Augustus’ intrusions into private life and attempts to control female bodies. The Danaids of the portico prompt meditation, by Horace and Vergil, on individuals’ moral autonomy in arbitrating among the competing claims of justice, clemency, and obedience to paternal authority. In his revisitation of the Palatine from exile in Tristia 3.1, Ovid shows how Augustus’ self-advertising falls short of reality – not least, with his exclusion of books from the Palatine’s supposedly inclusive public library, quickly corrected by the people’s welcoming hands and private judgment. Together, these poets verbally reconstruct the Palatine as a counter-imperial space that celebrates readers’ mental autonomy even as their bodies and books were coming under patriomonialist control.