Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke

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СКАЧАТЬ coordinated rather than subordinated. There was no central administration of these activities. Lists of ritual dates, ferialia, for every group or priesthood would regulate such complex activities. The fasti did not serve as an instrument of any detailed centralized regulation.⁹

      Despite the heavy ritual demand on the Ides (and Nones and Calends), around 30 percent of the triumphs of both the third and the second centuries were staged on these days, too, concentrating on the first and last months of the year. Here, clearly, individual strategies to maximize the impression made on the public led to the choice of the date—despite the existence of concurrent events. It has to be added that exactly the same dates, Calends and Ides in particular, were used to celebrate birthdays.¹⁰ Thus another substantial portion of the urban population had—and must have used—alternative contexts for merrymaking.

      Monopoly by Procession

      To judge by the size of the temple of Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, Rome must have already been a large city by the beginning of the Republic in the late sixth century: “la grande Roma dei Tarquini.”¹¹ A city of about thirty thousand inhabitants (to give a rough idea of its size),¹² Rome was large enough to house several festivals at public temples and hundreds of private parties at the same time. Conditions would have improved (or, from another perspective, worsened) with the growth of the city’s population to several hundred thousand by the time of the Punic Wars, and perhaps half a million by the end of the first century. How could a ritual gain the attention of a significant portion of this population? The answer was the same at Rome as in ancient Mesopotamia and archaic Athens: processions.¹³

      Processions were a staple of Roman ritual life. In the first half of the second century, Cato describes the ritual of the lustratio agri, where sacrificial animals were led around the property.¹⁴ One would imagine that the lustratio urbis comprised a similar procession, copying the annual amburbium as a crisis rite to cope with prodigia. Yet the evidence to corroborate Paulus Diaconus’s etymological definition, amburbiales hostiae dicebantur, quae circum terminos urbis Romae ducebantur—“the victims that were led around the boundary markers of the city of Rome were called ‘amburbiales’ ” (5.3–4 L)—is feeble. The fantastic economy of ancient references to the rite does not exclude anything: references to the lustratio do not exceed the phrase urbe lustrata or urbem lustrat.¹⁵ The route is difficult to reconstruct: for the amburbium Strabo gives a precise location, six miles out of Rome; the luci of Robigo and Dea Dia were about five miles away from Rome; according to Ovid, the Terminalia were celebrated at the sixth milestone on the via Laurentia.¹⁶ A processional route on this periphery would have a length of at least thirty kilometers. This is unimaginable for a one-day procession with animals to be led around and intermittent rituals. A circumambulation of Rome of the so-called Servian wall, including the Capitoline, Porta Collina, Porta Caelemontana, and Raudusculana (that is, the Aventine), would cover a minimum of ten kilometers as well—again, hardly imaginable for a large-scale procession, and difficult even for a small group of religious specialists with all their apparatus.

      Scattered evidence suggests that the priesthood of the Salii did cover distant parts of the city with their dancing processions and the changing public location for their dinners, which were possibly a daily occurrence.¹⁷ Yet these ritual movements, which underline the unity of the city, covered the whole of the month of March. Apart from a few topographical foci (such as the Quinquatrus, a special ritual on March 17 that included other religious agents), spectators would be involved only occasionally, perhaps by chance.

      Another possible candidate for an old processional rite is offered by the dedication of the spolia opima, a procession attributed already to Romulus, which featured the armor and arms of a hostile general. It is impossible to isolate a clear image of an early ritual underneath the assimilation of the spolia opima to the later triumph in the Augustan sources. However, the probably fictitious sacral regulation assigned to the ritual in these late sources implies different temples as destinations, including the Temple of Mars on the Campus Martius. The latter destination would not have made for a grand procession; the same was true in its way of Iuppiter Feretrius on the Capitol.¹⁸

      In order to find a ritual that not only conveys the idea of a unified and unitary city but actually tries to universalize that ideal through, in part, the attraction of the whole city’s interest, one has to wait for the pompa circensis, the opening procession to the circus, and the actual games, the ludi circenses. Here, obviously, the older type of competitive races and other types of competition—which would find their culminating form in the ludi circenses— were combined with a long procession that involved more than a large number of marching participants. Many deities were also displayed, in the form of statues, busts, or symbols, and their presence at least implied that many temples were involved (as the natural places to store such items), even if the procession proper started from the Capitol. It is significant that the starting days of games in the late Republic do not compete with other spectacular events, but rather create such an event by monopolizing the public stage.

      When did these processions originate? The author of the most detailed description, the Augustan Greek antiquarian and literary critic Dionysios of Halikarnassos (7.72.1–14), claims to base his description on Fabius Pictor, a late third-century author. Although Dionysios’s avowed interest in providing a Greek origin for Roman culture might incline us to suspicion on this point, the many elements of the pompa that clearly parallel or even imitate Greek practices are plausible for the time of Fabius.¹⁹ I follow the skeptical position of Mommsen in postulating annual games only from 367/66 (the date being indicative rather than precise) onward; Frank Bernstein’s arguments for an earlier date (following Livy’s dating to the regal period)²⁰ rely heavily on the Varronian theory that anthropomorphic cult statues were an invention of the late regal period only and hence related to the cult of Iuppiter Optimus Maximus and his Capitoline Temple. The lack of an annual ritual that included cult statues from many temples does not exclude the possibility that ritual agents or high-ranking spectators were transferred by chariots (as perhaps depicted on an architectural frieze of the Capitoline Temple), but makes a full-fledged procession for the earlier phase less probable. The conversion of the pompa circensis into a spectacular procession would have been a development of the fourth and third centuries. Such a date would explain the rise of processions as an attempt to compete with contemporary Hellenistic rituals. Similarly, as I will argue in Chapter 5, the triumphal procession and— following Harriet Flower—the pompa imaginum of noble funerals hardly antedate the second half of the fourth century.²¹

      Dionysios’s description of the pompa circensis reveals how spectators were attracted:

      Before beginning the games the principal magistrates conducted a procession in honour of the gods from the Capitol through the Forum to the Circus Maximus. Those who led the procession were, first, the Romans’ sons who were nearing manhood and were of an age to bear a part in this ceremony, who rode on horseback if their fathers were entitled by their fortunes to be knights, while the others, who were destined to serve in the infantry, went on foot, the former in squadrons and troops, and the latter in divisions and companies, as if they were going to school; this was done in order that strangers might see the number and beauty of the youths of the commonwealth who were approaching manhood. These were followed by charioteers, some of whom drove four horses abreast, some two, and others rode unyoked horses. After them came the contestants in both the light and heavy games, their whole bodies naked except their loins. . . . (5) The contestants were followed by numerous bands of dancers arranged in three divisions, the first consisting of men, the second of youths, and the third of boys. These were accompanied by flute-players, who used ancient flutes that were small and short, as is done even to this day, and by lyre-players, who plucked ivory lyres of seven strings and the instruments called barbita. . . . (6) . . . The dancers were dressed in scarlet tunics girded with bronze cinctures, wore swords suspended at their sides, and carried spears of shorter than average length; the men also had bronze helmets СКАЧАТЬ