Roman Religion

Roman public religion was concerned with getting things done correctly rather than with what anyone thought. A votum was a conditional undertaking: if the god granted what was asked, the payment promised would be made, and its discharge was recorded. Prayers were formulaic and specified which god was addressed and under which name, with catch-all phrasing added in case the right name was not known. If a rite was disturbed by a wrong word, an interruption or an unfavourable sign, it was repeated from the beginning, a procedure called instauratio, and the repetition of entire festivals is recorded.

The aim was the pax deorum, a working peace with the gods on which the community's success was held to depend. Defeat, plague, famine or a run of prodigies indicated that something in the relationship had gone wrong, and the response was procedural: identify the fault, consult the appropriate authority, expiate it. There is little in the public record to suggest the gods were thought to demand moral reform, and there was no scripture setting out what they wanted. What existed was accumulated precedent, kept by the priestly colleges.

Those colleges were organs of the state. The pontifices oversaw the calendar and sacred law, the augurs the taking of auspices, the flamines the cult of individual gods, and the Vestals the fire of Vesta, an unusual lifelong office held by women. Membership was held by men who were also senators, generals and consuls. Julius Caesar held the office of pontifex maximus while pursuing an ordinary political career, and no Roman regarded that as a conflict of interest. Religion was not a separate sphere on which politics might encroach; it was one of the things the state did.

Rome did not chiefly use divination to learn the future in general terms. It used it to ask whether a specific proposed action had divine approval, which made it an instrument of public decision-making with real procedural force.

The auspices were the standard form. A magistrate about to take public action observed the sky, or watched the feeding of sacred chickens, and reported whether the signs permitted him to proceed. An adverse report could halt an assembly or postpone business, and the announcement of unfavourable signs was open to obvious political use, Roman writers say so themselves. Extispicy, the inspection of the entrails of sacrificial animals, was practised with the help of haruspices, specialists drawn from an Etruscan tradition that Rome treated as foreign expertise and consulted for centuries without ever quite absorbing.

Prodigies were reported to the Senate: lightning striking public buildings, deformed births, statues that sweated or moved, showers of stones. The Senate decided whether each was a matter of public concern and, if so, ordered the appropriate expiation. The Sibylline Books, a collection of oracles kept under guard and consulted only on the Senate's instruction, were reserved for the gravest cases, and the remedies drawn from them sometimes brought new gods and new rites into the city.

Educated Romans argued about all of this. Cicero, himself an augur, set out a thorough case against the reliability of divination in a dialogue on the subject while defending the institution's public utility. That combination, scepticism about the mechanism, insistence on the practice, is characteristic, and it is a further reason not to read Roman rites as expressions of private conviction.

Alongside the state cult ran a domestic religion that most Romans met far more often. The Lares and Penates guarded the household and its stores, Vesta its hearth, and the genius of the head of the family received offerings on his birthday. Shrines have been found in houses across the social range at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Birth, marriage and burial were family business, the dead were tended at fixed points in the calendar, and burial societies and trade associations gave poorer Romans a funeral and a commemoration they could not otherwise have afforded.

Rome imported gods with little anxiety. The habit of identifying a foreign god with a Roman one (Jupiter with Zeus, Mercury with Gaulish and Germanic gods, Sulis with Minerva at Bath), meant that conquest usually produced fusion rather than replacement. The cults of Isis and of Mithras spread through the empire on that basis. Mithras is a standing warning about interpretation: the cult left hundreds of underground meeting rooms and a remarkably consistent iconography, but nothing written by its own members, so every account of what initiates were taught is a reconstruction from images.

Where Rome did act against a cult, the stated grounds were public order, secrecy, conspiracy, or practices held incompatible with Roman custom, rather than false belief. That is also the frame within which Christians were treated as a problem, since a refusal to sacrifice looked to Roman officials like withdrawal from a civic obligation rather than a theological position.

Almost none of this is known from Roman religious literature, because there was very little. The great antiquarian survey by Varro is lost except where later writers quote it, and much of what survives of it comes through Christian authors quoting it in order to attack it. The most direct evidence is calendars, priestly records, inscriptions and dedications.