Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy

Emma-Jayne Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351982443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

This book examines the ways in which lived religion in Roman Italy involved personal and communal experiences of the religious agency generated when ritualised activities caused human and more-than-human things to become bundled together into relational assemblages. Drawing upon broadly posthumanist and new materialist theories concerning the thingliness of things, it sets out to re-evaluate the role of the material world within Roman religion and to offer new perspectives on the formation of multi-scalar forms of ancient religious knowledge. It explores what happens when a materially informed approach is systematically applied to the investigation of typical questions about Roman religion such as: What did Romans understand 'religion' to mean? What did religious experiences allow people to understand about the material world and their own place within it? How were experiences of ritual connected with shared beliefs or concepts about the relationship between the mortal and divine worlds? How was divinity constructed and perceived? To answer these questions, it gathers and evaluates archaeological evidence associated with a series of case studies. Each of these focuses on a key component of the ritualised assemblages shown to have produced Roman religious agency – place, objects, bodies, and divinity – and centres on an examination of experiences of lived religion as it related to the contexts of monumentalised sanctuaries, cult instruments used in public sacrifice, anatomical votive offerings, cult images and the qualities of divinity, and magic as a situationally specific form of religious knowledge. By breaking down and then reconstructing the ritualised assemblages that generated and sustained Roman religion, this book makes the case for adopting a material approach to the study of ancient lived religion.

1 Introduction

Writing during the late first century BCE, Greek author Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Roman Antiquities 1.38) described how each year on the Ides of May (13th May), a select group of Roman citizens, praetors, and priests were joined by the Vestal Virgins on the Pons Sublicius, a wooden bridge spanning the Tiber. After ‘offering the preliminary sacrifices according to the laws’, members of this group cast 30 rush figures into the river. Connecting the effigies (sometimes referred to by modern scholars as ‘puppets’ or ‘poppets’) with the obsolete practice of human sacrifice, Dionysius describes them as ‘made in the likeness of men, which they call Argei’ and notes that they were bound ‘hand and foot’. Other ancient writers provide subtly different accounts of the same event: Plutarch (Roman Questions 86) labels it the ‘most important ceremony of purification, in which they now throw images from the bridge into the river, but in days of old they used to throw human beings’; Varro (On the Latin Language 7.44) refers to the disposal of 27 rush effigies ‘by the priests, acting on behalf of the state’; whereas Ovid (Fasti 5.621–662) suggests that the task was actually performed by the Vestals when he writes, ‘the Virgin is wont to throw the rush-made effigies of ancient men from the oaken bridge’. Festus (L 450.29) uses the term scirpeus (of rushes) to describe the figures, although in the passage already cited Ovid makes use of both ‘rushes’ and ‘straw’.

It is not entirely clear from any of these accounts what was really happening when this group of people gathered on the wooden bridge in the middle of May, and the rite of the Argei has long posed problems for scholars of Roman religion: Who was present, and did the group always include the flaminica Dialis (the wife of the flamen Dialis) ‘wearing a stern face’, as suggested by Plutarch (Roman Questions 86)? Were the effigies made from rushes or straw? How many were there, and what were their dimensions? It is worth observing that the ancient texts are opaque on this point: Ovid (Fasti 5.621) and Varro (On the Latin Language 7.44) describe them merely as simulacra (‘likenesses’ or anthropomorphic images), while Dionysius and Plutarch, writing in Greek, use eidōla (εἴδωλα), also implying some sort of likeness of an intangible or absent figure. Both leave open the possibility that their dimensions were anywhere between miniaturised and life size. Other questions persist: Were these so-called puppets really intended to act as substitutes for the victims of human sacrifice, or might they instead have represented the bodies of Hercules’ Argive companions (Graf 2000, p. 98; DiLuzio 2016, p. 204; on substitutions for human sacrifice more generally see Prescendi 2007, pp. 199–202)? Not to mention, why was it performed at all?

Historians of Roman religion also continue to speculate about the potential connection between the effigies and a series of local shrines located throughout the city, which may have been visited as part of a ritual procession that preceded their disposal in the river, as well as a possible link to the Lemuria festival of the preceding few days, during which the ghosts and spirits of the untimely dead were removed from Roman homes (Holland 1961, pp. 313–31; Graf 2000; Wildfang 2001; Schultz 2006, p. 106; DiLuzio 2016, pp. 203–4). Louise Holland (1961) connected the ritual with the disposal of the remains of the spelt that the Vestal Virgins had spent the weeks leading up to the Ides of May processing into mola salsa (the dry mix of salt and flour that was sprinkled on animal victims as part of all state sacrifices). She concludes (Holland 1961, p. 322) that ‘the hurling from the bridge in the May rites was the final step in a ritual sequence which had the general purpose of ensuring the food supply’, proposing that the leftover materials were bundled into human-like shapes before being safely disposed of in the Tiber, as was common for other forms of sacred waste (stercus) removed from the House of the Vestals (Graf 2000, p. 100). Others have pointed out, however, that linking the Argei to general rites of agricultural fertility leaves the specifically human form of the effigies largely unexplained, and is at odds with the fact that ancient commentators, on the whole, refer more consistently to rushes rather than straw (Wildfang 2001, pp. 239–40, n. 36). Although equally anxious to stress the role of the Vestals, Robin Wildfang (2001) argues that this occasion might be better contextualised in relation to the more general purificatory role of this specialist group of priestesses. Celia Schultz (2006, p. 106), on the other hand, alerts us to the ‘myriad alternatives’ that remain on offer as explanations for the rite on the bridge:

the straw bundles represent a consecrated harvest and the ritual is designed to ensure plentiful crops; the Argean ritual is tied to religion observed by the curia in Rome and to the practice of augury; the ritual fits into a complex of rites observed in May and thus shares their concerns (private feminine matters, public political issues, or the appeasement of spirits of the dead).

Safe to say, it is not my intention to offer any new explanation for the rite of the Argei here. Instead, I draw attention to it because it neatly introduces the key issues and questions that shape the present study, offering us an example of a ritualised activity in which the relationship between humans and a host of other material things was crucial to the performance and experience of Roman religion. This relationship, and why it matters so much for the production of ancient religious knowledge, lies at the heart of the argument I will make over the coming chapters for adopting a more materially aware approach to ancient lived religion. The example of the Argei also offers a good starting point because it exemplifies very well how the religious agency produced when humans and things act together continues to be downplayed, if not entirely ignored, in the attempts of generations of historians and others to understand Roman religious experiences. In reading most modern commentary, intent on interrogating the meaning of the rite on the bridge, you could be forgiven for almost forgetting that real people and real objects came together at a precise moment in time and at a specific location in the urban fabric of the city, in order to perform a range of bodily movements and aural gestures, all whilst actively engaging with intangible divine or otherworldly authorities. Since I will argue that ancient lived religion was in fact produced by active engagements between real people (bodies and minds) and other real things (objects, materials, spatio-temporal locations, and the divine), it is worth spending a little more time with the Argei before delving into the wider aims of this study. Looking more closely at how this particular ritualised event has been studied, and acknowledging what may be missing from investigations that seek its ‘meaning’, serves to highlight not only what I perceive to be the limitations of traditional approaches to Roman religion which disregard the significance of material things, but also the fresh opportunities for understanding that arise when material things are reintroduced to the equation on a more or less equal footing.

Revisiting the rite on the bridge

Studies of Roman religious activities often seek to establish their meaning. This is certainly true for the Argei, as already demonstrated by the attempts cited earlier to determine what the ritual gestures and their accompanying material components (the rush figures) meant, signified, or represented (a parallel example can be found in Harriet Flower’s extended discussion of the woollen balls and dolls of the Compitalia: Flower 2017, pp. 166–74). From this perspective, the significance of the rite of the Argei, for modern historians at least, lies primarily in its presumed connection to the beliefs of the people of Rome – beliefs which, in turn, are considered to be expressed or communicated by these activities and which become detectable to us as a result. The logical next step is to assume that there must be a single ‘right answer’ to our questions about what the effigies, and the act of throwing them into the river, represented or encoded in the minds of Romans that we have yet to fully make out (e.g. DiLuzio 2016, p. 204). After all, what could possibly be the point of including roughly made human-like figures in these activities unless they were a proxy for something else, something potentially more widely ‘meaningful’ than a bundle of rushes, such as an abstract notion of purification, fertility, or expiation, or otherwise physically absent things or persons (the victims of sacrifice, the Argives, the residents of different locales in the city of Rome, a successful harvest)? As a result, it is widely accepted that the anthropomorphic Argei figures and the manner of their disposal must have surfaced or expressed what Harriet Flower (2017, p. 3) has described for Roman religion more generally as ‘the logic and significance behind the actions performed’. That is, they elucidate pre-existing and widely held ideas about what Romans deemed to be necessary at that moment in the calendar or under particular circumstances which should be potentially reconstructable.

In current work, then, the ritual gesture of sacrifice and disposal, along with the human effigy itself, stood for something else, and it is that ‘something else’ that scholars of ancient religion are frequently interested in accessing. Regardless of how difficult this might actually prove to be, a significant consequence of this search for symbolic meaning is that it downgrades the prominence of the real bodies and real material objects within a lived rite. The potential significance of religion as a lived experience is therefore disregarded when the priests and priestesses who performed the ritual each year merely stand collectively as representatives of different aspects of civic cult, rather than being individual living people of different age, gender, and status whose experiences of the ritual might vary depending upon how their role required them to move, how their senses and memories were stimulated by the location or objects involved, or what they understood themselves to be doing. Similarly, the rush figures become comparatively unimportant once their perceived relevance is embedded in their capacity to materialise something other than themselves: an idea, a belief, a concept, a fear, or a tradition; a real, mythical, or absent human being; an intangible relationship between human and divine – almost anything other than a physically tangible bundle of rushes shaped into human form. But these ritual actions actually occurred in the physically experienced world outside of written texts; indeed, they were actively lived each year by the participants, and if we are to truly understand why they happened – and, moreover, why the experiences they produced really mattered – we must give a sense of materialness back to the group of people and things on the bridge.

Of course, the tendency to privilege representation over action extends beyond both the Argei and studies of ancient religion, pervading the much wider field of historical, archaeological, and cultural anthropological studies connected with the material aspects of human societies. Nicole Boivin (2008, p. 20), for instance, has argued:

The physicality of the world continues to be ignored, as does the way that engagement with that materiality is at the crux of the human enterprise. Instead, what is presented is a world of material surface, to which concepts emerging from a higher plane are attached. What is presented is a notion of material entities as things that represent.

I suggest that we need look no further than the modern scholarly treatment of the Argei figures for a demonstration of the consequences of this attitude to the material world. By disregarding their own materialness, and by thinking of them as mere stand-ins for intangible concepts or absent others, approaches to the Argei reveal precisely how easily things can be ‘robbed of their solidity, their physicality, and their ability to change our lives’, becoming ‘mere consequences of our thoughts, actions, and beliefs’ (Jones and Boivin 2010, p. 337). Researchers concerned with Roman religious practices such as the Argei have therefore yet to fully confront the related concern that by being preoccupied with representation we may have seriously distorted ‘our understanding of how such semiotic entities or structures operate in various processes of material engagement’ (Malafouris 2013, p. 90). The material world of Roman religion is still often relegated to the role of scaffold upon which can be hung the reified beliefs and ideas held by many to be the core of Roman religion. Even scholars critical of this approach perpetuate the idea of fixed religious affiliations, with material culture used to express these pre-existing religious identities and pre-formed ideas, rather than something capable of producing them (e.g. Rebillard 2015). As a result, the Argei figures and other material things subsequently remain a visible expression of human thought, rather than material entities that were important in their own right – something that becomes even more concerning in the context of the study of religion when we remember that there is always more to ritual than mere representation: rites ‘do something rather just say something’ (Boivin 2008, p. 50, original emphasis).

In this case, then, we might legitimately ask, not what did the figurines represent, but what did their material presence do? That is, what did their very materialness accomplish within the ritual performance that would not have been accomplished without them? To that we might add questions about what the consequences of their material form were for the human participants in the rite, or put another way, what did they do to the people involved? How did they stimulate their senses, and how did those lived experiences result in particular forms of religious knowledge? I suggest then, that persistent attempts to decipher what the gesture of throwing figures into the river meant have caused us to forget to consider how it meant (see Moser 2014, p. 16; Van Oyen and Pitts 2017). Revisiting the materialness of the figures provides one way of correcting the skewed understandings that have resulted from an overly restrictive focus on ways in which religious knowledge was represented in the material world, rather than how it was produced in combination with it. To resolve this, it is crucial that we begin to think more carefully not just about what people did with material things in the course of Roman religious activities, but what those material things did to people.

How might we do this? One important first step is to remember that objects must ‘always be “situated” and contextualised within a range of possible situations’, as argued by Rubina Raja and Lara Weiss (2015, p. 140). Beyond this, however, the solution commonly proposed to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Reassembling religion
• 3 Place
• 4 Objects
• 5 Bodies
• 6 Divinity
• 7 Magic
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index