Latium

Latium is the plain around Rome, and the atlas keeps it distinct from Rome because early Roman ritual is best read as one Latin tradition among several rather than as a Roman invention that spread outward.

The Latin communities of the plain shared cults before any of them was subordinate to the city. On the Alban Mount, above the lake at the plain's southern edge, the towns held a common festival of Jupiter Latiaris at which each contributed to a shared sacrifice and received a portion; the ceremony continued for centuries after Rome had absorbed the towns politically, with Roman magistrates presiding over what had been a federal rite. Lavinium, near the coast, held altars used by several communities and a cult of the Penates that Roman tradition treated as the origin of its own household gods.

The grove of Diana at Nemi, on a crater lake in the Alban hills, drew worshippers from across the region and beyond it, and votive deposits there include large numbers of anatomical terracottas offered for healing.

The pattern this shows is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to miss under the weight of later Roman material. Roman religion did not begin as the religion of an empire or even of a city. It began as the local practice of one town in a plain of towns that were doing broadly similar things, and much of what became Roman was Latin first.

Rome's expansion over Latium was political before it was religious, and the religious consequences went in more than one direction.

Some cults were moved. The practice known as evocatio, calling a defeated town's protecting deity out and offering it a home in Rome, is recorded for Juno of Veii and appears to have been a formal procedure rather than a metaphor, complete with a vowed temple on the Roman side. Others were absorbed by making the Roman state the sponsor of a rite that had belonged to a league of towns, which is what happened on the Alban Mount.

A third group was left in place and simply visited. Nemi kept its own priest, and the peculiar rule attached to that office, that the priest held it until killed in single combat by his successor, was already an antiquarian curiosity to Roman writers. Its later fame is disproportionate to its importance: James Frazer built The Golden Bough on it in the late nineteenth century and made a small Italian shrine into the hinge of a global theory of religion that specialists no longer accept in that form.

What Latium therefore offers is a controlled comparison. The same religious culture is visible at the level of a small town, a league of towns and an imperial capital, in the same landscape, over roughly a thousand years, which is a rare thing to be able to watch anywhere.