Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke

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СКАЧАТЬ in the form of changes in institutions. In this, the rationalization of communication served the feathering of space, and the public religion appeared as an instrument rather than an object of rationalization. This chapter will address the first stages of a process that could be termed the theoretical rationalization of religion, turning religion into something that could be known and discussed and subjected to standards of argumentative coherence, that is, rationality. Although the process is visible in other texts, this chapter will concentrate on those texts that were at the center of the stages of the process analyzed so far: Roman drama.

      Roman drama is best known from two of its earliest playwrights, Plautus and Terence. A recent study has shown how widespread religion is in the plays of Plautus, illustrating the performative properties of Roman ritual and the intricacies of communication with different deities. Although the image of religion thus presented seems quite coherent, and the precariousness of communication between humans and gods is thematized through the frequent dramatization of interrupted rituals, nonetheless, no systematizing critique is offered in the corpus of Plautus.¹ There is a reference to the question of whether the gods care for humans at all at the beginning of Mercator (5–8), but the idea, once voiced, is immediately employed to justify referring to the audience as the primary addressee of the dramatic narrative.² We have to wait for the second half of the second century before we find meaningful change in the nature of religious discourse and the content of critique.

      The sources for the period under consideration are rather sparse. In the few cases where we have contemporary texts—contemporaneity being of particular significance for this investigation—they are short and seldom more than fragments. Polybius, who was at least present in Rome, is Greek and not particularly interested in religion. Nonetheless, his positive evaluation of the function of this superstition,³ as a Polybius today would call it, may be considered an important reflection of theories that were circulating among his interlocutors: members of the Roman upper class like Cato the Elder.⁴

      In the next generation of Roman playwrights, the works of Accius (c. 170–90 B.C.E.) constitute an important point of departure. These are broadly represented by numerous if scattered fragments. A review of all the fragments shows three areas to be significant: critical reflection on the gods, or theology, one could say, in general; description of meteorological and astronomical phenomena, which are treated in theoretical terms according to Greek natural philosophy; and statements about divination, which connect to a comparable theoretical discourse, enabling a distinctive criticism of Roman institutions.

      Theology

      Accius’s dramatic productions contain a divine apparatus of personalized gods in a polytheistic framework, which allows them to move the plot forward. This does not at first glance appear different from the approach of his predecessors. The selection of deities named as agents in the action is not particularly striking, despite the arbitrariness of the material left to us: Iuppiter appears several times (e.g., 535, 646 R = 210, 450 D); Iuno (652 R = 702f. D) and Mars as Mavors (321 R = 157 D), Arquitenens or bow-bearer is used of Diana (52 R = 324 D) and Apollo (167 R = 285 D). Minerva bears the epithet armipotens (R 127). The list is lengthened by the “forest-inhabiting” fauns (237 R = 428 D), Silvanus (405 R = 481 D), and Fortuna and Sol (619 R = 88 D), along with groups of gods such as the di inferi (R 62) and the Cabires (526 R), an apparently typical Roman term for the “great gods” worshipped, for example, on Lemnos and Samothrace.⁵ According to Servius Auctus (Aen. 8.130) the genealogy of Evander, which went back to Maia and her son Mercurius, received extensive treatment in the Atreus (Atreus I R = I D). Vulcan distinguishes himself by being named three times (484, 529, and 558 R = 129, 204, and 233 D as Mulciber).

      A pure or primitive Roman religion that lies beyond any Greek influence does not exist, as Franz Altheim has demonstrated.⁶ At the same time, different forms and stages of assimilation can be identified. Hence, in the context of contemporaneous cult names, it seems striking that it is precisely the offspring from the relationship between the god Zeus and the human Semele, Dionysus, who is referred to by a Greek name, although perfectly usual Latin equivalents were available in Bacchus and Liber:⁷ o Dionyse, optime pater, uitisator, Semela genitus, euhie! (240–242 R). This passage from the Bacchae is not an isolated case. In the Tereus the same god is referred to in a similar manner: Deum Cadmogena natum Semela adfare et famulanter pete (642 R = 445 D). The longest genealogy, from the praetexta Aeneadae sive Decius (fr. I = 676 D), is one of Iuppiter (in the long version of his name): it proceeds in four steps to Anchises. It is completely Greek and ends, significantly, with Anchises, not with Decius.⁸ The aforementioned genealogy of Evander from the Scholia Danielis may have resulted in a decidedly Greek-sounding text (Atreus I R/D). If one sees this as a form of distancing, the very pronounced statement in the Epinausimache (328 R = 139 D) that the children of gods are mortals fits this ontological separation of men and gods well.

      Statements and emphases of this type had contemporary relevance at the end of the second century (the term is used advisedly, since chronological precision in a history of this kind is impossible). In Roman civic theology, there was by this time a long-standing tradition of suppressing or at least eliding genealogical relationships between the gods and especially relationships with humans. Particular attention is paid in this regard to the central god of the community, Iuppiter.⁹ The hypercorrectness on display in the selection of Jove over Iuppiter, linguistically oriented to the Greek, and like “Zeus” refraining from the use of the epithet pater, which was by contrast applied cultically to other gods (Mars Pater or even Marspiter, Ianus Pater), could be a part of this trend (and not something that should be interpreted as a Greek-ism). It is found before Accius in Naevius (active as playwright c. 235–205) and Pacuvius (c. 220–130).¹⁰ It is in opposition to this rationalization of the earlier aristocratic consensus that, at the end of the second century, the claim to divine ancestry is taken up in the public sphere in claims to excellence on the part of individuals, born to politically second-string gentes.¹¹ The advancing of such claims to divine ancestry takes place in the same context of conflict in which the compilation (and invention) of the republican consular fasti occurs—the fasti being themselves both a memorial to and medium of competition for aristocratic distinction with respect to ancestry—and this process will continue into the Augustan period.¹²

      On this basis it is hardly coincidental that the word caelites in the sense of “gods” appears three times in Accian fragments. I interpret this as part of the same trend of ontological separation between men and gods. Accius is not the first to use it. It appears twice in fragments of Ennius’s dramas, and Arcturus introduces himself with this term at the beginning of the prologue of Plautus’s Rudens (1–3):

       Qui gentes omnes mariaque et terras mouet,eius sum ciuis ciuitate caelitum.ita sum ut uidetis splendens stella candida.

      With him who moves all peoples, seas, and lands, I am a fellow-citizen in the city of the heavenly (beings). I am, just as you see, a shining and bright star.

      “Heavenly” means here “inhabitants of heaven” and is to be taken literally, even if the metaphorical meaning “gods” is implied, as the first verse shows.¹³ The same hierarchy of meaning is found in the Hecuba of Ennius in the formulation o magna templa caelitum commixta stellis splendidis (Scaen. 196 Vahlen): gods they may be, but they also dwell in heaven, among the stars. The more narrowly spatial meaning of the term, which was overdetermined by its etymology, is also preserved in the related form caelestes, which dominates completely from Cicero onward. In Accius templum resonit caelitum (Aeneadae X = 686 D) belongs in this category.

      The word gains a new nuance in Ennius’s Telamo. In one passage, which formulates sharp criticism of current religious ideas in several ways,¹⁴ the god Telamo himself remarks, in the face of the death of his mortal son Ajax, that the gods do not care about humans: “For if they did take care, it would СКАЧАТЬ