Religion in ancient Rome

• 1. Introduction

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  Religion in ancient Rome was not a private matter of personal belief. It was the connective tissue of an entire civilization, woven into law, politics, military strategy, and the rhythms of daily life. The Romans thought of themselves as the most religious people on earth, and they were not shy about saying so. Cicero, one of antiquity's sharpest legal minds, wrote that religion was simply "necessary". He served as an augur himself, reading divine signs on behalf of the state, while simultaneously doubting much of what he practiced.

  At the heart of Roman religion was a contractual bargain: do ut des, meaning "I give that you might give." Gods were not worshipped out of love or awe alone. They were partners in a reciprocal arrangement. Offer the correct prayers, perform the correct rites, sacrifice the correct animals, and the gods would hold up their end. Neglect any of it, and disaster would follow.

  This was a religion built on knowledge and procedure, not on faith or dogma. Getting the words wrong during a public prayer could force an entire festival to begin again from the start. The historian Livy records exactly that happening when a presiding magistrate forgot to include the "Roman people" among the beneficiaries of his prayer at the Latin festival. The whole ceremony had to restart.

  What happened when this ancient system collided with new ideas flooding in from across the Mediterranean? And what does it tell us that, by 380 AD, Christianity had become the empire's official state religion, installed inside the very framework this older system had built?

• 2. Gods, Myths, and Borrowed Deities

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  Rome offers no native creation myth. Its theology acknowledged that immortal gods ruled all realms of heaven and earth, but unlike the Greeks, the Romans did not invest heavily in elaborate stories explaining how their gods came to be or how they related to one another. What Rome did instead was absorb.

  Greek settlers on the Italian Peninsula had arrived from the beginning of the historical period, and their influence ran deep. The cult of Apollo, for instance, became fundamental to Roman religious practice through this Greek contact. Roman writers and artists reinterpreted their own deities in light of the Greek Olympians, a process called interpretatio graeca. Latin literature and Roman art drew on Greek myths and iconography, as the Etruscans had done before them.

  Jupiter stood at the apex of the Roman pantheon. He was described as "the fount of the auspices upon which the relationship of the city with the gods rested." He shared a temple and certain characteristics with Mars and Quirinus in the archaic era, but those two were later replaced by Juno and Minerva, forming what became the Capitoline triad. This shift was attributed to Rome's first Etruscan king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, and the triad served as the model for the highest official cult throughout the Roman world.

  As the empire expanded, the gods expanded with it. By the height of the empire, deities from across the known world had been carried to even the most remote provinces. Cybele, Isis, Epona, and solar deities such as Mithras and Sol Invictus were found as far north as Roman Britain. Rome did not try to eradicate local worship. It framed local theologies within Roman religious hierarchy, and inscriptions throughout the empire record the side-by-side veneration of local and Roman deities. One particularly striking example survives: a provincial citizen traveling from Bordeaux to consult the Sibyl at Tibur wrote that despite wandering the whole world, he remained first and foremost a faithful worshiper of his own goddess from home, Onuava.

• 3. The Founding Bargain

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  Rome traced nearly all of its religious institutions to its earliest kings. Numa Pompilius, the Sabine second king of Rome, was credited with the most extensive religious foundations: the first Roman calendar, the priesthoods of the Salii, flamines, and Vestals, the cults of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, and the Temple of Janus, whose doors stayed open in times of war but remained closed throughout Numa's peaceful reign.

  Romulus, Rome's legendary first king, founded the Consualia festival and is supposed to have dedicated Rome's first temple to Jupiter Feretrius, offering the spolia opima, the prime spoils taken in war, in what was described as the first Roman triumph. The founding myth embedded both violence and divine authorization into Rome's origins from the very start. Romulus killed his own brother Remus while building the city walls, an act sometimes interpreted as sacrificial. Fratricide became part of the story Romans told about themselves.

  Rome's mythological ancestry reached back further still. According to classical authors, the Trojan refugee Aeneas, said to be the son of Venus, had established the basis of Roman religion when he brought the Palladium, Lares, and Penates from Troy to Italy. These objects were believed, in historical times, to remain in the keeping of the Vestals. King Evander, a Greek exile from Arcadia, was credited with establishing the Ara Maxima, the Greatest Altar, to Hercules at the site that would become the Forum Boarium, and was said to have been the first to celebrate the Lupercalia, an archaic festival in February that was still being celebrated as late as the fifth century of the Christian era.

  These founding myths served a political purpose as much as a religious one. Each of Rome's legendary or semi-legendary kings was associated with specific religious institutions still known to the later Republic, anchoring current practice in divine and ancestral authority.

• 4. Priests, Augurs, and Vestals

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  Rome had no separate priestly caste. The men who held priestly offices were the same men who served as magistrates, generals, and senators. Julius Caesar became pontifex maximus before he was elected consul. There was no principle analogous to separation of church and state.

  The augurs held particular power. They read the divine will through observations made within a specially marked sacred space, the templum, before, during, and after acts of sacrifice. For Cicero, writing in the mid first century BC, the augur was the most powerful authority in the late Republic. A magistrate with the right of augury could adjourn all official business for the day if he deemed the omens unfavorable. Conversely, a negative omen could be reinterpreted as positive, or deliberately blocked from sight.

  The haruspices worked alongside the augurs but occupied a different social position. Most Roman authors described haruspicy as an ancient, ethnically Etruscan "outsider" profession, essential but never quite respectable. They examined the entrails of sacrificed animals, particularly the liver, and interpreted omens, prodigies, and portents. During the late Republic, the Senate decreed that Roman boys of noble family be sent to Etruria for training in haruspicy, on the theory that men of independent means would be better motivated to maintain a pure practice for the public good.

  The Vestals occupied a category entirely their own. Six women served as Rome's most famous priesthood, tending the sacred hearth of the state. Upon entering office, a Vestal was emancipated from her father's authority, and in archaic Roman society these priestesses were the only women not required to be under the legal guardianship of a man. They answered directly to the Pontifex Maximus. Their dress combined elements of virgin bride, daughter, Roman matron, and wife. A Vestal who lost her chastity while in office was buried alive. Augustus raised their funding and public profile; they were given high-status seating at games and theatres. They retained their religious and social distinctions well into the fourth century, after political power had shifted to the Christians. It was Theodosius I who finally extinguished Vesta's sacred fire and vacated her temple.

• 5. Sacrifice, Prayer, and Daily Rite

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  Pliny the Elder declared that "a sacrifice without prayer is thought to be useless and not a proper consultation of the gods." The spoken word was, in his telling, the single most potent religious action. Accurate naming of a deity was vital; invocations had to hit the right divine title to tap the right divine power, which is why Roman deities accumulated so many cult epithets.

  Even private prayer was formulaic, a recitation chosen for a specific purpose rather than a spontaneous personal expression. Public prayers were delivered loudly and clearly by a priest on behalf of the whole community. Any error in the ritual might require starting the entire ceremony over.

  Animal sacrifice, typically cattle, sheep, and pigs, was the most potent offering. The victim had to appear willing and had to be quickly and cleanly dispatched. The entrails, comprising the gall bladder, liver, heart, and lungs in Cicero's enumeration, were examined for divine approval. The gods received the entrails and blood; the meat was shared among the people in a communal meal.

  Extraordinary circumstances called for extraordinary measures. During one of the many crises of the Second Punic War, Jupiter Capitolinus was promised every animal born that spring, to be rendered after five more years of protection from Hannibal and his allies.

  Human sacrifice was rare but documented. After the Roman defeat at Cannae, two Gauls and two Greeks were buried under the Forum Boarium, in a stone chamber that had, according to Livy, "on a previous occasion also been polluted by human victims." A law passed in 81 BC characterized human sacrifice as murder committed for magical purposes. Despite an empire-wide ban under Hadrian, the practice may have continued covertly in North Africa and elsewhere.

  At home, worship was no less structured. Each household maintained its own shrines to the lares and penates. The Lares might be offered spelt wheat, grain-garlands, grapes, first fruits, honey cakes, wine, and incense, or food that fell to the floor during any family meal. The malicious and vagrant Lemures, their supposed underworld relatives, might be placated with midnight offerings of black beans and spring water.

• 6. Mystery, Magic, and Suspicion

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  Most of Rome's mystery cults were derived from Greek originals. They operated through hierarchies built on secret rites of passage, which might employ dance, music, intoxicants, and theatrical effects to provoke an overwhelming sense of religious awe and eventual catharsis. The cult of Mithras was among the most notable, particularly popular among soldiers and based on the Zoroastrian deity Mithra.

  Magna Mater arrived in Rome to help defeat Carthage in the second Punic War, bringing her consort Attis and their joint foreign priesthood, known as the Galli. Full priesthood for the Galli involved self-castration, which was illegal for Romans of any class. Citizens could instead pay for the costly sacrifice of a bull, or a lesser sacrifice of a ram, as a substitute. Magna Mater's initiates tended to be very well-off; they included the emperor Julian.

  Rome's mystery cult of Ceres-with-Proserpina was based on the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries and Thesmophoria, introduced in 205 BC and led at first by ethnically Greek priestesses from Graeca magna.

  Such cults were mistrusted by Roman authorities as quasi-magical and emotionally based. The Senate had moved to suppress the Bacchanalia in 186 BC, viewing their secrecy and exclusive oaths as characteristic of conspiracy or subversion. Astrologers and magicians were officially expelled from Rome at various times, notably in 139 BC and 33 BC. In 16 BC Tiberius expelled them under extreme penalty because an astrologer had predicted his death. In AD 19, Tiberius repeated and extended the ban against Egyptian rites with extreme force.

  Yet magic and astrology persisted among all social classes. Tacitus, writing in the late first century AD, observed that astrologers "would always be banned and always retained at Rome." Archaeology confirms the widespread use of binding spells, magical papyri, and voodoo dolls from a very early era. Around 250 binding spells have been recovered from Roman Britain alone, in both urban and rural settings.

• 7. War, Empire, and the Imperial Cult

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  Military success was the clearest proof of divine favor. Triumphal generals were dressed as Jupiter and laid their victor's laurels at his feet. The Roman triumph was at its core a religious procession in which the victorious commander displayed his piety and willingness to serve the public good by dedicating a portion of his spoils to the gods.

  Commanders made vows before battle and expiation after failure. Camillus promised Veii's goddess Juno a temple in Rome as incentive for her desertion, a practice called evocatio. He conquered the city in her name, brought her cult statue to Rome "with miraculous ease," and dedicated a temple to her on the Aventine Hill.

  Roman military camps were laid out as Rome in miniature, with the commander's headquarters at the center and a small shrine behind it housing the legionary standards and divine images. The most important camp-offering appears to have been the suovetaurilia performed before major battle: a ram, a boar, and a bull were ritually garlanded, led around the outer perimeter of the camp, and then sacrificed. Trajan's column shows three such events from his Dacian wars.

  The most extreme offering a Roman general could make was the devotio: a vow to offer his own life in battle along with the enemy. Livy records the devotio carried out by Decius Mus in detail. Before the battle, Decius is granted a prescient dream revealing his fate. When he offers sacrifice, the victim's liver appears "damaged where it refers to his own fortunes." He charges alone into the enemy ranks and is killed; his death cleanses the sacrificial offering.

  Augustus transformed all of this into a new political theology. Public vows formerly made for the security of the republic were redirected to the well-being of the emperor. The Imperial cult expanded the traditional veneration of the ancestral dead and of the Genius, the divine tutelary spirit within every individual. Rejection of the state religion became tantamount to treason. A thanksgiving prayer offered to Augustus in Naples harbor on his return from Alexandria in 14 AD captures this transformation precisely: "Because of you we are living, because of you we can travel the seas, because of you we enjoy liberty and wealth."

• 8. Death, Memory, and the Christian Turn

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  Roman beliefs about an afterlife varied. The educated elite expressed their views through the philosophical schools they favored. For everyone else, the care of the dead and the perpetuation of their status after death belonged to the most archaic practices of Roman religion.

  In Cicero's time, the better-off sacrificed a sow at the funeral pyre before cremation. The dead consumed their portion in the flames of the pyre, Ceres her portion through the flame of her altar, and the family shared a meal at the site. For the less well-off, a libation of wine, incense, and fruit or crops was sufficient. On the eighth day of mourning, the family offered further sacrifice on the ground; the shade of the departed was assumed to have passed into the underworld as one of the di Manes. The ancestral manes were celebrated and appeased at cemeteries or tombs during Parentalia, a multi-day festival of remembrance held in February.

  As Christianity spread, the older practices and the newer ones coexisted in unexpected ways. Tombs were shared by Christian and non-Christian family members. The traditional funeral feast found a partial match in the Christian Constitutio Apostolica. Customary offerings of wine and food to the dead continued among Christians, to the concern of St Augustine, who feared such practices encouraged the "drunken" spirit of Parentalia while hoping the funeral feast could be redirected toward giving alms of food to the poor. Christians attended Parentalia in sufficient numbers for the Council of Tours to forbid their participation in AD 567.

  When the Christian emperor Gratian refused the office of pontifex maximus, he began the formal dissolution of the old priesthood. Theodosius I extinguished Vesta's sacred fire and vacated her temple. Christianity became the official state religion in 380. But the binding spells, the local festivals, and the household shrines persisted across the empire in similar traditions until around the seventh century AD, long after the official conversion was complete.