Flamen

The Roman flaminate was organized as a fixed college of fifteen priests, each permanently attached to one deity rather than rotating through general priestly duties the way some other Roman religious offices did. Three flamines maiores stood at the top of the college: the Flamen Dialis, priest of Jupiter, the Flamen Martialis, priest of Mars, and the Flamen Quirinalis, priest of Quirinus, the deified Romulus, a grouping that pairs Rome's chief sky god with its two most prominent early war-and-founding figures and that scholars of Roman religion have long read as preserving a very old core of the state cult, possibly predating much of the rest of the developed Roman pantheon in its present form. These three major flamens were traditionally reserved for patricians, and appointment to them, particularly to the Flamen Dialis, was regarded as a significant, if also genuinely burdensome, honor.

The twelve flamines minores served a wider and more varied set of deities, including figures such as Volcanus, Flora, Pomona and Carmenta, gods and goddesses tied to specific agricultural, seasonal or civic concerns rather than to the state's central mythic-historical narrative the way Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus were, and these positions were generally, though not exclusively, open to plebeians. All fifteen flamens, major and minor alike, answered to the authority of the pontifex maximus, the head of the wider college of pontiffs, which placed the entire flaminate inside Rome's larger, centrally coordinated priestly hierarchy rather than leaving individual cults to operate independently of it.

No Roman priesthood is as extensively documented in its restrictions as the Flamen Dialis, priest of Jupiter, whose daily life was governed by an unusually long list of prohibitions recorded chiefly by the second-century writer Aulus Gellius in the Noctes Atticae and, from a Greek perspective, by Plutarch in his Roman Questions. The Flamen Dialis could not touch or even name a goat, a dog, raw meat, ivy, or beans; could not touch or be in the presence of iron except a ritual knife; could not ride a horse or even touch one; could not see an army under arms, take an oath, or wear a knotted garment or ring; could not spend a single night away from his own bed in Rome; and if his wife, the flaminica, who held a parallel and equally restricted ritual role, died, he was required to resign the priesthood entirely, since the office and the marriage were treated as a single ritual unit rather than as separable.

Historians of Roman religion read this extraordinary catalogue of taboos in different ways: some treat the Flamen Dialis as a kind of living embodiment of Jupiter himself, so sacrally charged that ordinary contact with iron, death, or the military had to be excluded from his person entirely, while others read the restrictions as evidence of an unusually old priesthood, preserving taboo-based religious logic that most of Roman public religion, generally more focused on correct ritual performance than on personal purity taboos, had already moved away from by the historical period in which Gellius and Plutarch were writing about it as something already unusual and worth explaining to their own readers.