The Archaic Religion of Ancient Rome, Part I

"Perhaps there was never a religion so cold and so prosaic as the Roman. Being subordinated to politics it sought, above all, to secure the protection of the gods for the state and to avert the effects of their malevolence by strict execution of proper practices."

-John Scheid,

The religion of Ancient Rome is one of the oldest institutionalized religions of the world. The Roman religion itself was the religion not of a group of people under a separate political system, but in fact it was the government as well. The "church" and state were inseparable and therefore any attack upon the Roman state was an attack upon the religion of Rome and the Roman gods themselves. These attacks were often provoked by Rome more so than anyone else and the other side retaliated. These retaliations, as time went on, brought about terrible results which led to the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD. Due to countless attacks upon the Roman Empire, and its downfall, a lot of the information that was vital to the religion itself was lost. For example there were the Sibylline books that were always consulted when a disaster or ill omen occurred. No copy of it survives today, in fact the only reason the modern world knows that such books existed is because of the other texts that have survived like Titus Livy's (59BC- AD17) Ab Urbe Condita.

Religion, according to R. M. Ogilvie, is "[something]...concerned with establishing the right relationship with the gods, inducting the gods to co-operate in the successful operation of the process of life and this requires some two-way communication." This is precisely what the Roman religion was all about; one's relationship with the gods. It soon developed itself into a more civic relationship with the divine, that is to say: what was the status of the state of Rome, the populus Romanus with the divine. As Le Glay states in A History of Ancient Rome "In this way a "national" religion was born, turning Rome into a sacred city, very conscious of its religious superiority." The reference of the Roman religion becoming a national one stems from the creation of Rome as a city and its ancient origins of the founders; that is Romulus and Remus. According to Titus Livy, they descended from the heir of Aeneas and Mars, the god of warfare. This gives the Roman state validity, if it was a demi-god, an hear of the divine that has created this state; It is thus blessed by the divine and could eve be seen as sacer. (sacred) "In other words, what was sacer was that which was been dedicated and consecrated to the gods." The "sacred" in the Roman mid was a quality that men appointed to something because men themselves dedicated and consecrated to the gods. This was not an act of divine revelation, but justification by man attributing it to the divine.

The concept of something being "holy" or Sanctus was "applied to anything which it was a religious offence to violate." Many things were considered to be holy. For one thing, the tribune of the people was considered to be sacrosanct. These people and objects that were holy were not fully sacred or fully profane. Instead they were guaranteed preservation because of the status given to them. Anyone who harmed anything that was considered Sanctus, such as a tribune of the people, would be considered an enemy of the Roman state, and could even face execution.

The divine is not one entity but many. The ancient Romans were undoubtedly polytheistic and pantheistic in nature. The pantheon of the Romans consisted of many gods and goddesses, some very similar to that of the Greeks, which represented some sort of force in nature or exceptionally strong human emotion. For example there is the goddess Venus, the goddess of eros, or lust. There is Jupiter who was the head of the gods and his symbol was commonly the lightning bolt. (This is crucial when the discussion of divination comes into play) Strong forces in the ancient world. whether they stemmed from humanity itself or from nature were seen as something divine.

The religion of Ancient Rome itself is thought to have stemmed and have been influenced by the Indo-European tribes, the Etruscans, the native Italians and the Greeks. From all of these influences comes the religion of Ancient Rome. The religion itself has a few unique features to it; that is to say unique to the modern perspective. For the first part, it was a religion without revelation and was ritualistic in nature. There was no sense of orthodoxy and there was no initiation and no general teaching. There was no ethical code and, until the Imperial era, there was no head of the religion. When the age of emperors comes into play, the emperor would be the head of the Roman religion and this, of course, would help lead to the center of Christianity being the city of Rome.

Among all of the practices and teachings of the Roman religion, none is more fascinating nor more Roman than that of divination. This was the one place where mortal men and the gods communicated as one source reports that, "According to Cicero, relations with the gods took place within the framework of two ritual categories, the sacra (principally sacrifices, vows and rites of homage) and divination."

Up next: Roman Divination Practices, Part 2 of The Archaic Religion of Ancient Rome.