Divine Institutions

Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691200828
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

How religious ritual united a growing and diversifying Roman Republic Many narrative histories of Rome's transformation from an Italian city-state to a Mediterranean superpower focus on political and military conflicts as the primary agents of social change. Divine Institutions places religion at the heart of this transformation, showing how religious ritual and observance held the Roman Republic together during the fourth and third centuries BCE, a period when the Roman state significantly expanded and diversified.Blending the latest advances in archaeology with innovative sociological and anthropological methods, Dan-el Padilla Peralta takes readers from the capitulation of Rome's neighbor and adversary Veii in 398 BCE to the end of the Second Punic War in 202 BCE, demonstrating how the Roman state was redefined through the twin pillars of temple construction and pilgrimage. He sheds light on how the proliferation of temples together with changes to Rome's calendar created new civic rhythms of festival celebration, and how pilgrimage to the city surged with the increase in the number and frequency of festivals attached to Rome's temple structures. Divine Institutions overcomes many of the evidentiary hurdles that for so long have impeded research into this pivotal period in Rome's history. This book reconstructs the scale and social costs of these religious practices and reveals how religious observance emerged as an indispensable strategy for bringing Romans of many different backgrounds to the center, both physically and symbolically.

1

Introduction

ONE STATE, UNDER THE GODS

WRITING TO THE RESIDENTS of Teos in 193 BCE, the praetor M. Valerius Messalla boasted that the Romans “have wholly and constantly attached the highest importance to piety towards the gods . . . our own high respect for the godhead has become manifest to everyone.”¹ Although it is not known what the Greeks of Teos made of Messalla’s swagger, we know of at least one Greek who quite enthusiastically bought into the notion of Romans as peculiarly and uniquely pious: Polybius. In a famous and much-commented digression in the Histories, Polybius praised the Roman state as “distinguish[ing] itself best of all in observance towards the gods” and trumpeted “religious scrupulousness” (deisidaimonia) as the practice that “held the Roman state together” (sunechein ta Romaion pragmata). “Among the Romans,” he added, “their magistrates handle large sums of money and diligently perform their duty because they have given their word on oath”; among the Greeks, by comparison, “men who hold public office cannot be trusted with the safekeeping of so much as a single talent.”² Many centuries later, Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes separately mined this Polybian musing for insight into religion’s efficacy for securing collective obedience.³

It is customary nowadays to gloss Polybius’s remarks as a nakedly utilitarian reflection on the political and social utility of Götterfurcht, or what Craige Champion in a recent monograph has pointedly branded “elite-instrumentalism.”⁴ One might also take these remarks, and late-republican and early Imperial glorifications of Roman piety, as the workings of a relatively straightforward ideological discourse for justifying Roman imperial domination. This book aims to show that there is substantive institutional content both to Messalla’s brag and to Polybius’s over-the-top praise. In separate but complementary ways, Messalla and Polybius were witnesses to a process: how the Roman state remade and retooled itself into a republic defined and organized around a specific brand of institutionalized ritual practices and commitments. This book argues that this process was a major driver of the Roman Republic’s state formation during the years c. 400–200 BCE, conventionally designated as the “middle Republic.” Periodization is important; I will come back in a moment to why these two centuries, which open with the ultimately successful siege of the Etruscan city-state of Veii at one end and conclude with the victorious resolution of the Second Punic War at the other, should be understood as a self-contained historical unit. The major focus of this book will be on the cultivation of religious mechanisms for soliciting and affirming internal cohesion, in ways that enabled and were in turn enabled by various forms of collective action. I will demonstrate that it was through these mechanisms that the middle Republic vaulted itself into a new kind of statehood.

At the outset, I should be forthright about what I mean by “state,” “statehood,” and “state formation,” all terms that have launched a thousand ships of scholarly enterprise. Following in the footsteps of Michael Mann and Charles Tilly, I define the state as a coercion-wielding organization that is clearly differentiable from households or kinship groups and that projects authority from a center over all other organizations within a demarcated territory.⁵ This definition is not without its critics,⁶ but it has the virtue of clarity. By statehood, I mean the attributes that combine to form a state, decomposable according to the definition just provided: organization, the capacity to wield coercion, recognition as different from households and kinship groups, and centralizing preeminence over a describable expanse of geographic space. Finally, state formation is the process whereby entities with these characteristics are “made and remade.”⁷

This terminology and its conceptual accessories have increasingly been brought to bear on the Roman Republic in recent decades, not without some dispute. Depending on the criteria used, the middle Roman Republic either does not make the cut as a full-fledged state, is a full-blown state with all the requisite appurtenances, or is too slippery to be shoehorned into taxonomies of statehood.⁸ Perhaps unavoidably, it has been objected that even to ascribe statehood to Rome is to court oversimplification.⁹ But while the notion of the “state” itself—with all its early modern Euro-American constructedness—does not necessarily correspond in whole or even in part to how premodern communities thought of themselves or their adventures in governmentality,¹⁰ the absence of statehood as a conceptual or experiential category in the cognitive universe of the middle Republic by no means vitiates the usefulness of statehood as a heuristic device, provided one is explicit about the heuristic’s fundamentally etic aspect.

Over the past two decades, some daylight has opened up between endorsers of Charles Tilly’s precept that wars make states, for whom warfare is the foundational catalyst of state formation, and students of the discursive and ideologically enactive mechanisms of statehood, for whom the frictions and gaps between the rhetoric of power and its quotidian realities stand out as most in need of investigation.¹¹ This book engages with both parties, attending equally to the significance of war’s dialogue with religious practice in the evolution of the mid-republican state and to the distance between the claims staked by this state and their material expression. At the same time, however, Divine Institutions contends that the payoffs of religious practice for the making of the Roman state should not be subsumed under those of constant warfare. Although religion penetrated Roman warfare at every step of preparation and campaigning to such a degree as to hinder their decoupling from each other for analytic purposes,¹² it acted separately to bring about results that could not be realized through warfare alone—much as warfare brought about results that could not be secured through religion alone. On this book’s reconstruction, the mid-republican state formation project is not fully reducible to a Tillean paradigm. Better-fitting models can be recovered from theorists of collective action and from anthropologists.

For many historians laboring in the shadow of Tilly, it made perfect sense to accord primacy to militarized coercion in studies of state formation and to assign ideological integration a secondary role, but the pendulum is now beginning to swing in the other direction as historical examples of “ritual polities” come to light or receive fresh consideration. In these states, religious mechanisms often shoulder the burden of social integration whenever states lack or, for whatever reason, cannot deploy capital- or coercion-intensive instruments.¹³ Even though its affinity for near-constant military campaigning make it an obvious candidate for designation as a coercion-intensive state, the imperializing Roman Republic did not generally leverage fiscal tools or an internal monopoly on violence to engineer social cohesion.¹⁴ What it did do, for the period under discussion in this book, was steadily direct resources toward the regularization of a complex system of ritual performances. Divine Institutions isolates this reliance on religious procedures for maintaining state unity—without having to press the lever on capital- or coercion-intensive procedures—as one of the middle Roman Republic’s primary strategies for bootstrapping itself into statehood.¹⁵

In elucidation of this claim, I argue that during the fourth and third centuries BCE, Roman religious practice comes to the forefront in negotiations of what Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher in their work on early state formation term “quasi-voluntary compliance,” a conceptual instrument more sensitive to the gradations of statehood than Weberian models of domination.¹⁶ The Roman state’s effort to elicit and manage this compliance leaves a tangibly material footprint; much of this book therefore concentrates on what the material record of mid-republican Rome can be made to reveal about this strand of state formation and its distinctiveness relative to earlier and later periods of Roman history. However one classifies the states that flourished in Rome and Latium during the archaic and early-republican periods, not one of those predecessors is recognizable or legible as the classical Republic, for reasons to be detailed below. It is in the course of the fourth and third centuries that Rome develops the institutions and practices that would lend it coherence as a res publica—an entity held in common. This development is fostered by, and to a large degree dependent on, the adoption of public and high-visibility forms of religious experience. The aggregative effect of the sacred commitments under scrutiny in this book was the creation of two representations of statehood, each tightly welded to the evolving identity of the res publica during our period. The first, studied in the opening chapters, was prolific investment in monumental cult to the gods. The second, taken up in chapters 4 and 5, was the city of Rome’s evolution into an enticing place to visit in order to offer cult to the gods. These two representations of statehood will be shown ultimately to align less with a Tillean scheme of war-making as state-making and more with a Geertzian account of statehood as ritual theater.

Before proceeding to a more detailed exposition of my project, I will first lay out its historiographical and methodological stakes. After a brief tour of trends in Republican and specifically mid-republican historiography, I will then offer some comment on recent developments in the study of Roman religion and outline the contents and objectives of this book.

I. The Middle Republic: Era of Transformations

The archaeological turn of early Roman history has made it possible to surmount the difficulties posed by the literary evidence and compose histories of institutional and political transformation that are grounded in the material record of the centuries preceding our period. There is perhaps no clearer and more compelling example of the rewards of an archaeologically focused approach than John North Hopkins’s recent book, whose title, The Genesis of Roman Architecture, belies its far more ambitiously encompassing program of tracking the formation of the early Roman state.¹⁷ In any case, the sheer abundance of material evidence unearthed in numerous excavations in Rome and its Latial environs from the 1800s onward has forced extensive interrogations—and on occasion outright dismissal—of the annalistic literary tradition around which modern historians such as H. H. Scullard, following in the footsteps of Niebuhr and other nineteenth-century historians, constructed their own Livian-styl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• List of Figures, Plates, and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: One State, under the Gods
• PART I. BUILD
• PART II. SOCIALIZE
• Color Plates
• Appendix: The Pocola Deorum: An Annotated Catalog
• References
• Index