The Peace of the Gods

Elite Religious Practices in the Middle Roman Republic

Craige B. Champion

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400885152
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

The Peace of the Gods takes a new approach to the study of Roman elites' religious practices and beliefs, using current theories in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, as well as cultural and literary studies. Craige Champion focuses on what the elites of the Middle Republic (ca. 250–ca. 100 BCE) actually did in the religious sphere, rather than what they merely said or wrote about it, in order to provide a more nuanced and satisfying historical reconstruction of what their religion may have meant to those who commanded the Roman world and its imperial subjects.The book examines the nature and structure of the major priesthoods in Rome itself, Roman military commanders' religious behaviors in dangerous field conditions, and the state religion's acceptance or rejection of new cults and rituals in response to external events that benefited or threatened the Republic. According to a once-dominant but now-outmoded interpretation of Roman religion that goes back to the ancient Greek historian Polybius, the elites didn't believe in their gods but merely used religion to control the masses. Using that interpretation as a counterfactual lens, Champion argues instead that Roman elites sincerely tried to maintain Rome's good fortune through a pax deorum or "peace of the gods." The result offers rich new insights into the role of religion in elite Roman life.

ONE

Elite-Instrumentalism: Persistence and Paradox

Privately, I believe in none of them; publicly, I believe in them all. So do you.

—Charles Laughton (as “Gracchus”) to John Gavin (as Julius Caesar). Spartacus, Universal Pictures (1960)

A great deal of excellent work on Roman religion has appeared in recent years, but scholars’ understandable desire for comprehensive treatment within a single volume has often led to emphases on monolithic continuity, when attention to change and rupture may be more in order.¹ After all, the history of the Republic as it has been traditionally studied encompasses about half a millennium, and few generalizations about its religions will be able to stand up to scrutiny for that longue durée. This challenge can be brought within manageable limits by imposing narrower temporal parameters, but as Harriet Flower has recently reminded us, periodization in history is not a simple matter. It is not self-evident, it is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, and yet it is essential to the historian’s craft. The chronological frameworks—or, to use her expression, “time maps”—we adopt constantly shape and inform our historical reconstructions. This is a welcome and salutary reminder that historical periods are no more than useful paradigms or models, not to be taken for granted but rather to be tested and probed. Moreover, our “time maps” need not be mutually exclusive. Different chronological orderings can be complementary and help us to illuminate different aspects of the historical societies we seek to understand.²

In agreement with Flower’s precepts, I resist the impulse to press my focus into a tight chronological box, as an immovable unit of time with impermeable temporal boundaries. Instead, I adopt a more flexible perspective, regarding periodization as something that helps us to think about historical problems—nothing more, and nothing less. My particular “time map,” thus loosely defined, is from roughly the second quarter of the third century—leading to Rome’s first titanic struggle with Carthage—to the aftermath of the Gracchan revolution. For the First Punic War we have the text of Polybius, but before that the quality of our source material leaves a great deal to be desired.³ At the other end of the chronological spectrum, I have given less attention to the Social War, the rise of the warlords, and beyond, not because our sources are deficient (indeed, the last generation of the Republic, with the testimony of Cicero’s letters, is the best-documented period in all of Roman history), but rather because I believe that during this period there was a palpable change in elites’ intellectual and practical approaches to religion (though, as we shall presently see, even this change can be overstated). But the main point is that I do not feel shackled by rigid temporal parameters and shall range beyond my chronological focus from time to time for purposes of illustration and contrast.

The bulk of this study concerns the period commonly known as the Middle Republic. I formally conclude with the year 114/13, a dramatic date for our story, as in that year we have the last attested instance of public human sacrifice at Rome. During my chosen period or “time map,” the Roman state experienced unprecedented and sustained political, military, socioeconomic, cultural, and religious pressures, and elites were drawn into deeper and permanent diplomatic and cultural contacts with the Greek world. Exposure to diverse cultural and religious traditions and rapid imperial expansion brought new challenges and stresses to both the Romans’ political system and to their religious institutions.⁴ Elites shouldered the burdens and demands brought on by these changes, and this study examines their religious beliefs in light of their religious behaviors.

This book is primarily concerned with elites in Rome and in service abroad, but they cry out for definition and historical analysis in their own right. Questions concerning the republican ruling class have troubled scholars for over a century, not least because of the fact that we have no ancient definition of the Latin word nobilitas. Matthias Gelzer set the terms of the debate when his prosopographical labors led him to the conclusion that a noble was a man whose ancestors had held the magistracy of the consulate, a dictatorship, or the office of consular tribune. For Gelzer, the Roman nobility was a select group of those who were eligible for these high offices, and in practice, through patronage and social connections, this was a narrow group that formed something close to hereditary monopolies of power, though the political system admitted from time to time “new men,” or novi homines.⁵ Peter Brunt challenged Gelzer’s theory, instead arguing for a looser definition of the nobility, which in his view comprised anyone with the right of the ius imaginum (that is, every descendant of a curule magistrate). He further argued that patrician status alone qualified one as a nobilis, and that the office of the praetorship may in itself have conferred the status of nobilitas. Men who met any of these criteria counted for him as part of the nobility.⁶

Keith Hopkins and Graham Burton spearheaded another debate on the Roman ruling elite. Rather than occupying themselves with issues concerning the definition of the word nobilitas and those who qualified for it, they pursued the questions of the social composition of the governing class, whether it formed something like a closed, quasi-hereditary caste, and the frequency of replacement by non-nobiles.⁷ These are all crucially important issues in studying the Republic and its imperial administration, but, as in the case of chronological parameters, for the purposes of this study I do not wish to put too fine a point on things. I shall refer repeatedly to the “elite,” the “ruling class, “military field commanders,” and, of course, the major “priests.” By these phrases and others like them I mean to say, in general terms, the ruling senatorial aristocracy, the politicians and generals who served the empire at home and abroad, and the same men who held the major priesthoods.

As stressed in the Introduction, the pervasiveness of religious concerns at Rome and the senatorial aristocracy’s monopoly of executive religious authority under its republican systems are beyond question. As we have seen, both of these indisputable aspects of Roman republican religion led earlier observers to formulate an elite-instrumentalist interpretation, according to which the ruling class crassly and duplicitously manipulated religious symbols as a means of controlling naïve and credulous masses. The idea seems to have infiltrated popular ideas about ancient Rome, as in this chapter’s epigraph, dialogue from the blockbuster 1960 film, Spartacus. But in recent decades scholars—if not the general, nonspecialist, lay reader—have distanced themselves from it.⁸ In doing so, they have often downplayed the question as to whether Roman aristocrats in some sense “believed” or “had faith” in their gods, deeming such questions to be misconceived and/or entirely irrelevant. They have asserted that earlier scholarly questions of belief or faith were based on nothing more than misguided Christianizing assumptions.⁹ Questions of orthopraxy—meticulous attention to the correct performance of ritual practices—should be seen as the proper object in the study of the Romans’ religious life, not faith. In the words of Monica Linder and John Scheid, Roman religion was a matter of savoir-faire, rather than savoir-penser.¹⁰

In this more recent approach, which we may call the “ideological variant approach,” elites do not necessarily stand outside of the “false consciousness” of religion. Elite religious practitioners may be a part of the ideological belief system. In the earlier instrumentalist model, by contrast, elite religious practitioners consciously, willfully, and cynically manipulate a religious charade simply in order to control nonelites. This distinction—elites’ participation or non-participation in the belief system—is important, but in both models religion sustains elite power; and in both models there is little or no concern with the subjective mental operations and internal psychological processes of elite religious practitioners. For our purposes, both models fall under the rubric of elite-instrumentalism, broadly defined, but in the pages that follow I shall primarily engage with the earlier, starker formulation as a counterfactual, interpretative tool.

The result of the “ideological variant approach” has muted questions about elite practitioners’ “belief”; about what their religious practices meant to them subjectively; about what they thought they were doing in performing them.¹¹ Moreover, while the terms and emphases of scholarly analysis have shifted, the implication of consciously self-serving elite manipulation of religious symbols frequently remains. As Clifford Ando has observed, “To a skeptic, the subsequent dominance within the field of what we now call the ‘polis-religion’ model looks little different from earlier generations’ cynical descriptions of magistrates manipulating rituals for political ends, except that we now speak not of hypocrisy but of ideology, and not of politics but of power.”¹²

In order to understand elite religious institutions, practices, and the question of “belief” among the Roman aristocracy in our period, we first have to realize that (1) scholars have been too willing to take unrepresentative and/or anachronistic ancient sources at face value (especially Polybius, Cicero, and Varro); and (2) they have worked under the influence of erroneous, anachronistic conceptual presuppositions developed in subsequent centuries. Skeptical traditions, beginning in antiquity and running through to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment rationalizing, secularist postulates implicitly undergird a long-lived, class-based misinterpretation of elites’ religious institutions and practices. While the most recent work of the leading authorities has demonstrated that religious practices were meaningful and important to those who performed them, elite-instrumentalist interpretations of Roman religion, as we shall see, are still with us.

But first let us briefly consider some recent scholarship in the field, and situate the approach of this work within it. The modern study of Roman religion has focused on what has been called “polis religion,” emphasizing the matrices in which public or civic religion was tied to, or embedded in, political and social orders. According to this tradition, polis religion was an integral element in creating civic identity, and to the degree that it foregrounds religion’s function as an instrument of power in preserving political and socioeconomic hierarchies, we can consider the polis religion concept as a form of elite-instrumentalism. To be sure, we have begun to move away from such a model. For example, the European Research Council has funded a project called “Lived Ancient Religion” (LAR), for the period from 2012 to 2017. This collaborative scholarly effort aims to put the individual and individual experience back into the study of ancient religions. The LAR team identifies three methodological problem areas that current research must address: (1) the individual, who needs rehabilitation as a religious agent; (2) “Cults” and “Religions,” and how these “essentialised” categories have hampered research;¹³ and (3) archaeological investigations of religion, often shackled to the notion that the goal is simply an archaeology of belief systems. Instead, the scholarly consortium of the LAR initiative “focuses on the actual everyday experience, on practices, expressions, and interactions that could be related to ‘religion.’ Such ‘religion’ is understood as a spectrum of experiences, actions, and beliefs and communications hinging on human communication with super-human or even transcendent agent(s), for the ancient Mediterranean usually conceptualised as ‘gods.’”¹⁴

Insofar as this research agenda is concerned with individual experience and individuals’ conceptualization of and relationship to the divine, it has affinities with the orientation of the present study. But there are some key distinctions in the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this book that I should stress at the outset. The first has to do with the notion of “experience.” In contradistinction to the understanding of “experience” as conceived by the “Lived Ancient Religion” coalition, which, it seems to me, finds religious experience in the quotidian interfaces of people, who were usually not religious experts, and formal religious institutions, religious authorities, and the channels through which religious power traveled, my focus is on the interiorized, subj...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Studying Elite Religion in the Middle Roman Republic
• Chapter One: Elite-Instrumentalism: Persistence and Paradox
• Chapter Two: Domi: Priesthoods, Politics, and the People
• Chapter Three: Militiae: Commanders, Elite Religion, and Fear of Military Disaster
• Chapter Four: Domi et Militiae: Elite Religion at Rome in Response to External Triumphs and Crises
• Chapter Five: Understanding Elites’ Religious Behaviors in the Middle Roman Republic
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index Locorum