Roman

The Roman gods were organised for use before they were organised into a family. The oldest layer is functional: powers with narrow competences, addressed by exact formula, attached to acts rather than to stories. Only later, and largely under Greek influence, were they given the genealogy that a modern reader now assumes was always there, with Saturn displaced by Jupiter as Kronos was displaced by Zeus.

Sovereignty is unambiguous. Jupiter Optimus Maximus rules from the Capitol, and the temple he shares with Juno and Minerva is the state cult in one building. What makes the Roman arrangement distinctive is not the king at the top but the openness of everything below him. Rome absorbed gods deliberately and as policy. A besieged city's deity could be invited out of it and given a home in Rome, and foreign cults arrived by senatorial decision as well as by drift, the Magna Mater fetched from Asia Minor during the war with Hannibal being the clearest case.

The route from mortal to god was likewise a matter of state. Divus Julius was voted, not discovered, and after Augustus the deification of an emperor became an act the senate performed or withheld. That is a different mechanism from Greek heroic apotheosis, which is a story about merit; the Roman version is an administrative decision with a temple attached and a priesthood to staff it.

The result is a pantheon that reads as an institution. Its gods have offices, its cult has a calendar, and its theology is largely a matter of who is owed what and when.

Almost everything a reader knows about Roman religion arrives through literature written when the old cult was already being self-consciously curated. That is the central problem with the evidence and it is worth naming first.

Virgil, Ovid and Livy are magnificent and they are late. The Aeneid is a poem of the Augustan settlement, the Fasti is a calendar poem written by a man in trouble with the regime that commissioned the mood it flatters, and Livy is reconstructing early Rome centuries after the fact from annalistic material he could not verify. All three are indispensable and none of them is a record of what an archaic Roman thought he was doing at an altar.

The one writer who might have closed that gap is largely lost. Varro's Antiquitates rerum divinarum was an enormous systematic treatment of Roman cult, and it survives mainly in quotation by Christian authors who cited it in order to attack it. What we have of the most important book on Roman religion is therefore a hostile selection from it.

Against that stands the epigraphic and calendrical evidence, which is unglamorous and much closer to practice: dedications, priestly records, the surviving fasti carved on stone, the Arval Brethren's acts. These do not tell stories. They tell you who sacrificed what, to whom, on which day, and they are the reason it is possible to say that Roman religion was orthopraxy before it was mythology.