Religion in Ancient Rome

26/12/22, 14:01 Religion in ancient Rome - Wikipedia
Religion in ancient Rome
Religion in ancient Rome consisted of varying imperial

and provincial religious practices, which were followed both by
the people of Rome as well as those who were brought under
its rule.
The Romans thought of themselves as highly religious, and

attributed their success as a world power to their collective
piety (pietas) in maintaining good relations with the gods.
Their polytheistic religion is known for having honored many
deities.
Defaced Dea Roma holding Victory and
The presence of Greeks on the Italian peninsula from the regarding an altar with a cornucopia and
beginning of the historical period influenced Roman culture, other offerings, copy of a relief panel
introducing some religious practices that became from an altar or statue base
fundamental, such as the cultus of Apollo. The Romans looked
for common ground between their major gods and those of the
Greeks (interpretatio graeca), adapting Greek myths and
iconography for Latin literature and Roman art, as the Etruscans had. Etruscan religion was also a major
influence, particularly on the practice of augury, used by the state to seek the will of the gods. According
to legends, most of Rome's religious institutions could be traced to its founders, particularly Numa
Pompilius, the Sabine second king of Rome, who negotiated directly with the gods. This archaic religion
was the foundation of the mos maiorum, "the way of the ancestors" or simply "tradition", viewed as
central to Roman identity.
Roman religion was practical and contractual, based on the principle of do ut des, "I give that you might
give". Religion depended on knowledge and the correct practice of prayer, rite, and sacrifice, not on faith
or dogma, although Latin literature preserves learned speculation on the nature of the divine and its
relation to human affairs. Even the most skeptical among Rome's intellectual elite such as Cicero, who
was an augur, saw religion as a source of social order. As the Roman Empire expanded, migrants to the
capital brought their local cults, many of which became popular among Italians. Christianity was
eventually the most successful of these cults, and in 380 became the official state religion.
For ordinary Romans, religion was a part of daily life.[1] Each home had a household shrine at which
prayers and libations to the family's domestic deities were offered. Neighborhood shrines and sacred
places such as springs and groves dotted the city.[2] The Roman calendar was structured around religious
observances. Women, slaves, and children all participated in a range of religious activities. Some public
rituals could be conducted only by women, and women formed what is perhaps Rome's most famous
priesthood, the state-supported Vestals, who tended Rome's sacred hearth for centuries, until disbanded
under Christian domination.
Contents
Overview
Founding myths and divine destiny
Roman deities
Holidays and festivals
Temples and shrines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_ancient_Rome 1/36
Religious practice
Prayers, vows, and oaths
Sacrifice
Animal sacrifice
Human sacrifice
Domestic and private cult
Religio and the state
Public priesthoods and religious law
The Vestals
Augury
Haruspicy
Omens and prodigies
Mystery religions
Funerals and the afterlife
Religion and the military
Women and religion
Superstitio and magic
History of Roman religion
Religion and politics
Early Republic
Later Republic to Principate
Roman Empire
Eastern Influence
Absorption of cults
Imperial cult
Jews and Roman religion
Christianity in the Roman Empire
Emperor Constantine and Christianity
Transition to Christian hegemony
See also
References
Citations
General and cited sources
External links
Overview
The following is a summary of material dealt with in more detail below.
The priesthoods of most state religions were held by members of the elite classes. There was no principle
analogous to separation of church and state in ancient Rome. During the Roman Republic (509–27 BC),
the same men who were elected public officials might also serve as augurs and pontiffs. Priests married,
raised families, and led politically active lives. Julius Caesar became pontifex maximus before he was
elected consul.
The augurs read the will of the gods and supervised the marking of boundaries as a reflection of universal
order, thus sanctioning Roman expansionism and foreign wars as a matter of divine destiny. The Roman
triumph was at its core a religious procession in which the victorious general displayed his piety and his
willingness to serve the public good by dedicating a portion of his spoils to the gods, especially Jupiter,
who embodied just rule. As a result of the Punic Wars (264–146 BC), when
Rome struggled to establish itself as a dominant power, many new temples
were built by magistrates in fulfillment of a vow to a deity for assuring their
military success.
As the Romans extended their dominance throughout the Mediterranean

world, their policy in general was to absorb the deities and cults of other
peoples rather than try to eradicate them,[3] since they believed that
preserving tradition promoted social stability.[4] One way that Rome
incorporated diverse peoples was by supporting their religious heritage,
building temples to local deities that framed their theology within the
hierarchy of Roman religion. Inscriptions throughout the Empire record
the side-by-side worship of local and Roman deities, including dedications
made by Romans to local gods.[5]
By the height of the Empire,

numerous international deities were
cultivated at Rome and had been
carried to even the most remote
provinces, among them Cybele, Isis,
Epona, and gods of solar monism Augustus as Pontifex
such as Mithras and Sol Invictus, Maximus (Via Labicana
found as far north as Roman Britain. Augustus)
Foreign religions increasingly
attracted devotees among Romans,
who increasingly had ancestry from
elsewhere in the Empire. Imported mystery religions, which offered
initiates salvation in the afterlife, were a matter of personal choice
for an individual, practiced in addition to carrying on one's family
rites and participating in public religion. The mysteries, however,
involved exclusive oaths and secrecy, conditions that conservative
Romans viewed with suspicion as characteristic of "magic",
conspiratorial (coniuratio), or subversive activity. Sporadic and
Cybele enthroned, with lion,
sometimes brutal attempts were made to suppress religionists who
seemed to threaten traditional morality and unity, as with the
cornucopia and Mural crown.
Senate's efforts to restrict the Bacchanals in 186 BC. Because
Roman marble, c. 50 AD (Getty
Museum)
Romans had never been obligated to cultivate one god or one cult
only, religious tolerance was not an issue in the sense that it is for
monotheistic systems.[6] The monotheistic rigor of Judaism posed
difficulties for Roman policy that led at times to compromise and
the granting of special exemptions, but sometimes to intractable conflict. For example, religious disputes
helped cause the First Jewish–Roman War and the Bar Kokhba revolt.
In the wake of the Republic's collapse, state religion had adapted to support the new regime of the
emperors. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, justified the novelty of one-man rule with a vast program
of religious revivalism and reform. Public vows formerly made for the security of the republic now were
directed at the well-being of the emperor. So-called "emperor worship" expanded on a grand scale the
traditional Roman veneration of the ancestral dead and of the Genius, the divine tutelary of every
individual. The Imperial cult became one of the major ways in which Rome advertised its presence in the
provinces and cultivated shared cultural identity and loyalty throughout the Empire. Rejection of the
state religion was tantamount to treason. This was the context for Rome's conflict with Christianity,
which Romans variously regarded as a form of atheism and novel superstitio, while Christians considered
Roman religion to be paganism. Ultimately, Roman polytheism was brought to an end with the adoption
of Christianity as the official religion of the empire.
Founding myths and divine destiny

The Roman mythological tradition is particularly

rich in historical myths, or legends, concerning the
foundation and rise of the city. These narratives
focus on human actors, with only occasional
intervention from deities but a pervasive sense of
divinely ordered destiny. For Rome's earliest period,
history and myth are difficult to distinguish.[7]
According to mythology, Rome had a semi-divine

ancestor in the Trojan refugee Aeneas, son of Venus,
who was said to have 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, Rome's female priesthood. Aeneas, Relief panel from an altar to Venus and Mars
according to classical authors, had been given refuge depicting Romulus and Remus suckling the she-
by King Evander, a Greek exile from Arcadia, to wolf, and gods representing Roman topography
whom were attributed other religious foundations: such as the Tiber and Palatine Hill
he established the Ara Maxima, "Greatest Altar", to
Hercules at the site that would become the Forum
Boarium, and, so the legend went, he was the first to
celebrate the Lupercalia, an archaic festival in February that was celebrated as late as the 5th century of
the Christian era.[8]
The myth of a Trojan founding with Greek influence was reconciled

through an elaborate genealogy (the Latin kings of Alba Longa) with
the well-known legend of Rome's founding by Romulus and Remus.
The most common version of the twins' story displays several
aspects of hero myth. Their mother, Rhea Silvia, had been ordered
by her uncle the king to remain a virgin, in order to preserve the
throne he had usurped from her father. Through divine
intervention, the rightful line was restored when Rhea Silvia was
impregnated by the god Mars. She gave birth to twins, who were
duly exposed by order of the king but saved through a series of
miraculous events.
Romulus and Remus regained their grandfather's throne and set out
to build a new city, consulting with the gods through augury, a
characteristic religious institution of Rome that is portrayed as
existing from earliest times. The brothers quarrel while building the Pompeian fresco; Iapyx removing
city walls, and Romulus kills Remus, an act that is sometimes seen an arrowhead from Aeneas' thigh,
as sacrificial. Fratricide thus became an integral part of Rome's watched by Venus Velificans
founding myth.[9] (veiled)
Romulus was credited with several religious institutions. He

founded the Consualia festival, inviting the neighbouring Sabines to participate; the ensuing rape of the
Sabine women by Romulus's men further embedded both violence and cultural assimilation in Rome's
myth of origins. As a successful general, Romulus is also supposed to have founded Rome's first temple to
Jupiter Feretrius and offered the spolia opima, the prime spoils taken in war, in the celebration of the
first Roman triumph. Spared a mortal's death, Romulus was mysteriously spirited away and deified.[10]
His Sabine successor Numa was pious and peaceable, and credited with numerous political and religious
foundations, including 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 in Numa's time remained closed. After Numa's death, the doors to the Temple of Janus were
supposed to have remained open until the reign of Augustus.[12]
Each of Rome's legendary or semi-legendary kings was associated

with one or more religious institutions still known to the later
Republic. Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Marcius instituted the fetial
priests. The first "outsider" Etruscan king, Lucius Tarquinius
Priscus, founded a Capitoline temple to the triad Jupiter, Juno and
Minerva which served as the model for the highest official cult
throughout the Roman world. The benevolent, divinely fathered
Servius Tullius established the Latin League, its Aventine Temple to
Diana, and the Compitalia to mark his social reforms. Servius
Aeneas urged by the Penates to
Tullius was murdered and succeeded by the arrogant Tarquinius
continue his journey to found
Superbus, whose expulsion marked the end of Roman kingship and
Rome (4th century AD
the beginning of the Roman republic, governed by elected
illustration)[11]
magistrates.[13]
Roman historians[14] regarded the essentials of Republican religion

as complete by the end of Numa's reign, and confirmed as right and lawful by the Senate and people of
Rome: the sacred topography of the city, its monuments and temples, the histories of Rome's leading
families, and oral and ritual traditions.[15] According to Cicero, the Romans considered themselves the
most religious of all peoples, and their rise to dominance was proof they received divine favor in
return.[16]
Roman deities
Rome offers no native creation myth, and little mythography to
explain the character of its deities, their mutual relationships or
their interactions with the human world, but Roman theology
acknowledged that di immortales (immortal gods) ruled all realms
of the heavens and earth. There were gods of the upper heavens,
gods of the underworld and a myriad of lesser deities between. Some
evidently favoured Rome because Rome honoured them, but none
were intrinsically, irredeemably foreign or alien.
The political, cultural and religious coherence of an emergent

Roman super-state required a broad, inclusive and flexible network Twelve principal deities (Di
of lawful cults. At different times and in different places, the sphere Consentes) corresponding to
of influence, character and functions of a divine being could expand, those honored at the lectisternium
overlap with those of others, and be redefined as Roman. Change of 217 BC, represented on a 1st-
was embedded within existing traditions.[17] century altar from Gabii that is
rimmed by the zodiac.
Several versions of a semi-official, structured pantheon were
developed during the political, social and religious instability of the
Late Republican era. Jupiter, the most powerful of all gods and "the fount of the auspices upon which the
relationship of the city with the gods rested", consistently personified the divine authority of Rome's
highest offices, internal organization and external relations. During the archaic and early Republican
eras, he shared his temple, some aspects of cult and several divine characteristics with Mars and
Quirinus, who were later replaced by Juno and Minerva.[18]
A conceptual tendency toward triads may be indicated by the later agricultural or plebeian triad of Ceres,
Liber and Libera, and by some of the complementary threefold deity-groupings of Imperial cult.[19] Other
major and minor deities could be single, coupled, or linked retrospectively through myths of divine
marriage and sexual adventure. These later Roman pantheistic hierarchies are part literary and
mythographic, part philosophical creations, and often Greek in origin. The Hellenization of Latin
literature and culture supplied literary and artistic models for reinterpreting Roman deities in light of the
Greek Olympians, and promoted a sense that the two cultures had a shared heritage.[20]
The impressive, costly,

and centralised rites to
the deities of the
Roman state were
vastly outnumbered in
everyday life by
commonplace
religious observances
pertaining to an
individual's domestic
Three goddesses on a panel of the and personal deities,
Augustan Ara Pacis, consecrated in 9 BC; the patron divinities of
the iconography is open to multiple Rome's various
interpretations neighborhoods and
communities, and the
Bacchus, or Liber, and Ceres,
often idiosyncratic
mounted on a leopard. Fresco in
blends of official, Stabiae, 1st century
unofficial, local and personal cults that characterised lawful Roman
religion.[21]
In this spirit, a provincial Roman citizen who made the long journey from Bordeaux to Italy to consult the
Sibyl at Tibur did not neglect his devotion to his own goddess from home:
I wander, never ceasing to pass through the whole world, but I am first and foremost a faithful
worshiper of Onuava. I am at the ends of the earth, but the distance cannot tempt me to make
my vows to another goddess. Love of the truth brought me to Tibur, but Onuava's favorable
powers came with me. Thus, divine mother, far from my home-land, exiled in Italy, I address
my vows and prayers to you no less.[22]
Holidays and festivals

Roman calendars show roughly forty annual religious festivals. Some lasted several days, others a single
day or less: sacred days (dies fasti) outnumbered "non-sacred" days (dies nefasti).[23] A comparison of
surviving Roman religious calendars suggests that official festivals were organized according to broad
seasonal groups that allowed for different local traditions. Some of the most ancient and popular festivals
incorporated ludi ("games", such as chariot races and theatrical performances), with examples including
those held at Palestrina in honour of Fortuna Primigenia during Compitalia, and the Ludi Romani in
honour of Liber.[24] Other festivals may have required only the presence and rites of their priests and
acolytes,[25] or particular groups, such as women at the Bona Dea rites.[26]
Other public festivals were not required by the calendar,

but occasioned by events. The triumph of a Roman
general was celebrated as the fulfillment of religious
vows, though these tended to be overshadowed by the
political and social significance of the event. During the
late Republic, the political elite competed to outdo each
other in public display, and the ludi attendant on a
triumph were expanded to include gladiator contests.
Under the Principate, all such spectacular displays came
under Imperial control: the most lavish were subsidised
by emperors, and lesser events were provided by This fresco from outside Pompeii shows
magistrates as a sacred duty and privilege of office. Roman men celebrating a religious festival,
Additional festivals and games celebrated Imperial probably the Compitalia.
accessions and anniversaries. Others, such as the
traditional Republican Secular Games to mark a new era (saeculum), became imperially funded to
maintain traditional values and a common Roman identity. That the spectacles retained something of
their sacral aura even in late antiquity is indicated by the admonitions of the Church Fathers that
Christians should not take part.[27]
The meaning and origin of many archaic festivals baffled even Rome's intellectual elite, but the more
obscure they were, the greater the opportunity for reinvention and reinterpretation – a fact lost neither
on Augustus in his program of religious reform, which often cloaked autocratic innovation, nor on his
only rival as mythmaker of the era, Ovid. In his Fasti, a long-form poem covering Roman holidays from
January to June, Ovid presents a unique look at Roman antiquarian lore, popular customs, and religious
practice that is by turns imaginative, entertaining, high-minded, and scurrilous;[28] not a priestly
account, despite the speaker's pose as a vates or inspired poet-prophet, but a work of description,
imagination and poetic etymology that reflects the broad humor and burlesque spirit of such venerable
festivals as the Saturnalia, Consualia, and feast of Anna Perenna on the Ides of March, where Ovid treats
the assassination of the newly deified Julius Caesar as utterly incidental to the festivities among the
Roman people.[29] But official calendars preserved from different times and places also show a flexibility
in omitting or expanding events, indicating that there was no single static and authoritative calendar of
required observances. In the later Empire under Christian rule, the new Christian festivals were
incorporated into the existing framework of the Roman calendar, alongside at least some of the
traditional festivals.[30]
Temples and shrines

Public religious ceremonies of the official Roman religion took place
outdoors, and not within the temple building. Some ceremonies
were processions that started at, visited, or ended with a temple or
shrine, where a ritual object might be stored and brought out for
use, or where an offering would be deposited. Sacrifices, chiefly of
animals, would take place at an open-air altar within the templum
or precinct, often to the side of the steps leading up to the raised
portico. The main room (cella) inside a temple housed the cult
image of the deity to whom the temple was dedicated, and often a
small altar for incense or libations. It might also display art works
looted in war and rededicated to the gods. It is not clear how
accessible the interiors of temples were to the general public.
The Latin word templum originally referred not to the temple

building itself, but to a sacred space surveyed and plotted ritually Portico of the Temple of Antoninus
through augury: "The architecture of the ancient Romans was, from and Faustina, later incorporated
into a church
first to last, an art of shaping space around ritual."[31] The Roman
architect Vitruvius always uses the word templum to refer to this
sacred precinct, and the more common Latin words aedes,
delubrum, or fanum for a temple or shrine as a building. The ruins of temples are among the most visible
monuments of ancient Roman culture.
Temple buildings and shrines within the city commemorated significant political settlements in its
development: the Aventine Temple of Diana supposedly marked the founding of the Latin League under
Servius Tullius.[32] Many temples in the Republican era were built as the fulfillment of a vow made by a
general in exchange for a victory: Rome's first known temple to Venus was vowed by the consul Q. Fabius
Gurges in the heat of battle against the Samnites, and dedicated in 295 BC.[33]
Religious practice
Prayers, vows, and oaths
All sacrifices and offerings required an accompanying prayer to be effective. Pliny the Elder declared that
"a sacrifice without prayer is thought to be useless and not a proper consultation of the gods."[34] Prayer
by itself, however, had independent power. The spoken word was thus the single most potent religious
action, and knowledge of the correct verbal formulas the key to efficacy.[35] Accurate naming was vital for
tapping into the desired powers of the deity invoked, hence the proliferation of cult epithets among
Roman deities.[36] Public prayers (prex) were offered loudly and clearly by a priest on behalf of the
community. Public religious ritual had to be enacted by specialists and professionals faultlessly; a mistake
might require that the action, or even the entire festival, be repeated from the start.[37] The historian Livy
reports an occasion when the presiding magistrate at the Latin festival forgot to include the "Roman
people" among the list of beneficiaries in his prayer; the festival had to be started over.[38] Even private
prayer by an individual was formulaic, a recitation rather than a personal expression, though selected by
the individual for a particular purpose or occasion.[39]
Oaths—sworn for the purposes of business, clientage and service, patronage and protection, state office,
treaty and loyalty—appealed to the witness and sanction of deities. Refusal to swear a lawful oath
(sacramentum) and breaking a sworn oath carried much the same penalty: both repudiated the
fundamental bonds between the human and divine.[36] A votum or vow was a promise made to a deity,
usually an offer of sacrifices or a votive offering in exchange for benefits received.
Sacrifice
In Latin, the word sacrificium means the performance of an

act that renders something sacer, sacred. Sacrifice
reinforced the powers and attributes of divine beings, and
inclined them to render benefits in return (the principle of
do ut des).
Offerings to household deities were part of daily life. Lares

might be offered spelt wheat and grain-garlands, grapes
and first fruits in due season, honey cakes and honeycombs,
wine and incense,[40] food that fell to the floor during any
family meal,[41] or at their Compitalia festival, honey-cakes
and a pig on behalf of the community.[42] Their supposed Roman relief depicting a scene of sacrifice,
underworld relatives, the malicious and vagrant Lemures, with libations at a flaming altar and the
victimarius carrying the sacrificial axe
might be placated with midnight offerings of black beans
and spring water.[43]
Animal sacrifice
The most potent offering was animal sacrifice, typically of domesticated animals such as cattle, sheep and
pigs. Each was the best specimen of its kind, cleansed, clad in sacrificial regalia and garlanded; the horns
of oxen might be gilded. Sacrifice sought the harmonisation of the earthly and divine, so the victim must
seem willing to offer its own life on behalf of the community; it must remain calm and be quickly and
cleanly dispatched.[44]
Sacrifice to deities of the heavens (di superi, "gods above") was performed in daylight, and under the
public gaze. Deities of the upper heavens required white, infertile victims of their own sex: Juno a white
heifer (possibly a white cow); Jupiter a white, castrated ox (bos mas) for the annual oath-taking by the
consuls. Di superi with strong connections to the earth, such as Mars, Janus, Neptune and various genii –
including the Emperor's – were offered fertile victims. After the sacrifice, a banquet was held; in state
cults, the images of honoured deities took pride of place on banqueting couches and by means of the
sacrificial fire consumed their proper portion (exta, the innards). Rome's officials and priests reclined in
order of precedence alongside and ate the meat; lesser citizens may have had to provide their own.[45]
Chthonic gods such as Dis pater, the di inferi ("gods

below"), and the collective shades of the departed (di
Manes) were given dark, fertile victims in nighttime
rituals. Animal sacrifice usually took the form of a
holocaust or burnt offering, and there was no shared
banquet, as "the living cannot share a meal with the
dead".[46] Ceres and other underworld goddesses of
fruitfulness were sometimes offered pregnant female
Denarius issued under Augustus, with a bust
animals; Tellus was given a pregnant cow at the Fordicidia
of Venus on the obverse, and ritual festival. Color had a general symbolic value for sacrifices.
implements on the reverse: clockwise from Demigods and heroes, who belonged to the heavens and
top right, the augur's staff (lituus), libation the underworld, were sometimes given black-and-white
bowl (patera), tripod, and ladle (simpulum) victims. Robigo (or Robigus) was given red dogs and
libations of red wine at the Robigalia for the protection of
crops from blight and red mildew.[45]
A sacrifice might be made in thanksgiving or as an expiation of a sacrilege or potential sacrilege

(piaculum);[47] a piaculum might also be offered as a sort of advance payment; the Arval Brethren, for
instance, offered a piaculum before entering their sacred grove with an iron implement, which was
forbidden, as well as after.[48] The pig was a common victim for a piaculum.[49]
The same divine agencies who caused disease or harm also had the power to avert it, and so might be
placated in advance. Divine consideration might be sought to avoid the inconvenient delays of a journey,
or encounters with banditry, piracy and shipwreck, with due gratitude to be rendered on safe arrival or
return. In times of great crisis, the Senate could decree collective public rites, in which Rome's citizens,
including women and children, moved in procession from one temple to the next, supplicating the
gods.[50]
Extraordinary circumstances called for extraordinary sacrifice: in one of the many crises of the Second
Punic War, Jupiter Capitolinus was promised every animal born that spring (see ver sacrum), to be
rendered after five more years of protection from Hannibal and his allies.[51] The "contract" with Jupiter
is exceptionally detailed. All due care would be taken of the animals. If any died or were stolen before the
scheduled sacrifice, they would count as already sacrificed, since they had already been consecrated.
Normally, if the gods failed to keep their side of the bargain, the offered sacrifice would be withheld. In
the imperial period, sacrifice was withheld following Trajan's death because the gods had not kept the
Emperor safe for the stipulated period.[52] In Pompeii, the Genius of the living emperor was offered a
bull: presumably a standard practise in Imperial cult, though minor offerings (incense and wine) were
also made.[53]
The exta were the entrails of a sacrificed animal, comprising in Cicero's enumeration the gall bladder
(fel), liver (iecur), heart (cor), and lungs (pulmones).[54] The exta were exposed for litatio (divine
approval) as part of Roman liturgy, but were "read" in the context of the disciplina Etrusca. As a product
of Roman sacrifice, the exta and blood are reserved for the gods, while the meat (viscera) is shared
among human beings in a communal meal. The exta of bovine victims were usually stewed in a pot (olla
or aula), while those of sheep or pigs were grilled on skewers. When the deity's portion was cooked, it was
sprinkled with mola salsa (ritually prepared salted flour) and wine, then placed in the fire on the altar for
the offering; the technical verb for this action was porricere.[55]
Human sacrifice
Human sacrifice in ancient Rome 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 "which had on a previous
occasion [228 BC] also been polluted by human victims, a practice most repulsive to Roman feelings".[56]
Livy avoids the word "sacrifice" in connection with this bloodless human life-offering; Plutarch does not.
The rite was apparently repeated in 113 BC, preparatory to an invasion of Gaul. Its religious dimensions
and purpose remain uncertain.[57]
In the early stages of the First Punic War (264 BC) the first known Roman gladiatorial munus was held,
described as a funeral blood-rite to the manes of a Roman military aristocrat.[58] The gladiator munus
was never explicitly acknowledged as a human sacrifice, probably because death was not its inevitable
outcome or purpose. Even so, the gladiators swore their lives to the gods, and the combat was dedicated
as an offering to the Di Manes or the revered souls of deceased human beings. The event was therefore a
sacrificium in the strict sense of the term, and Christian writers later condemned it as human
sacrifice.[59]
The small woollen dolls called Maniae, hung on the Compitalia shrines, were thought a symbolic
replacement for child-sacrifice to Mania, as Mother of the Lares. The Junii took credit for its abolition by
their ancestor L. Junius Brutus, traditionally Rome's Republican founder and first consul.[60] Political or
military executions were sometimes conducted in such a way that they evoked human sacrifice, whether
deliberately or in the perception of witnesses; Marcus Marius Gratidianus was a gruesome example.
Officially, human sacrifice was obnoxious "to the laws of gods and men". The practice was a mark of the
barbarians, attributed to Rome's traditional enemies such as the Carthaginians and Gauls. Rome banned
it on several occasions under extreme penalty. A law passed in 81 BC characterised human sacrifice as
murder committed for magical purposes. Pliny saw the ending of human sacrifice conducted by the
druids as a positive consequence of the conquest of Gaul and Britain. Despite an empire-wide ban under
Hadrian, human sacrifice may have continued covertly in North Africa and elsewhere.[61]
Domestic and private cult
The mos maiorum established the dynastic authority and

obligations of the citizen-paterfamilias ("the father of the family" or
the "owner of the family estate"). He had priestly duties to his lares,
domestic penates, ancestral Genius and any other deities with
whom he or his family held an interdependent relationship. His own
dependents, who included his slaves and freedmen, owed cult to his
Genius.[62][63]
Genius was the essential spirit and generative power – depicted as a

serpent or as a perennial youth, often winged – within an individual
and their clan (gens (pl. gentes). A paterfamilias could confer his
name, a measure of his genius and a role in his household rites,
obligations and honours upon those he fathered or adopted. His
freed slaves owed him similar obligations.[64] Small bronze statues of gods for a
lararium (1st to 3rd century AD,
A pater familias was the senior priest of his household. He offered
Vindobona)
daily cult to his lares and penates, and to his di parentes/divi
parentes at his domestic shrines and in the fires of the household
hearth.[65] His wife (mater familias) was responsible for the
household's cult to Vesta. In rural estates, bailiffs seem to have been responsible for at least some of the
household shrines (lararia) and their deities. Household cults had state counterparts. In Vergil's Aeneid,
Aeneas brought the Trojan cult of the lares and penates from Troy, along with the Palladium which was
later installed in the temple of Vesta.[66]
Religio and the state

Roman religio (religion) was an everyday and vital affair, a cornerstone of the mos maiorum, Roman
tradition and ancestral custom. It was ultimately governed by the Roman state, and religious laws.[67]
Care for the gods, the very meaning of religio, had therefore to
go through life, and one might thus understand why Cicero
wrote that religion was "necessary". Religious behavior – pietas
in Latin, eusebeia in Greek – belonged to action and not to
contemplation. Consequently religious acts took place wherever
the faithful were: in houses, boroughs, associations, cities,
military camps, cemeteries, in the country, on boats. 'When
pious travelers happen to pass by a sacred grove or a cult place
on their way, they are used to make a vow, or a fruit offering, or
to sit down for a while' (Apuleius, Florides 1.1).[68]
Religious law centered on the ritualised system of honours and sacrifice

Portrait of the emperor
that brought divine blessings, according to the principle do ut des ("I give,
Antoninus Pius (reigned
that you might give"). Proper, respectful religio brought social harmony
138–161 AD) in ritual attire
and prosperity. Religious neglect was a form of atheism: impure sacrifice
as an Arval Brother
and incorrect ritual were vitia (impious errors). Excessive devotion, fearful
grovelling to deities and the improper use or seeking of divine knowledge
were superstitio. Any of these moral deviations could cause divine anger
(ira deorum) and therefore harm the State.[69] The official deities of the state were identified with its
lawful offices and institutions, and Romans of every class were expected to honour the beneficence and
protection of mortal and divine superiors. State cult rituals were almost always performed in daylight and
in full public view, by priests who acted on behalf of the Roman state and the Roman people.
Congregtions were expected to respectfully observe the proceedings. Participation in public rites showed
a personal commitment to the community and its values.[70]
Official cults were state funded as a "matter of public interest" (res publica). Non-official but lawful cults
were funded by private individuals for the benefit of their own communities. The difference between
public and private cult is often unclear. Individuals or collegial associations could offer funds and cult to
state deities. The public Vestals prepared ritual substances for use in public and private cults, and held
the state-funded (thus public) opening ceremony for the Parentalia festival, which was otherwise a
private rite to household ancestors. Some rites of the domus (household) were held in public places but
were legally defined as privata in part or whole. All cults were ultimately subject to the approval and
regulation of the censor and pontifices.[71]
Public priesthoods and religious law
Rome had no separate priestly caste or class. The

highest authority within a community usually
sponsored its cults and sacrifices, officiated as its
priest and promoted its assistants and acolytes.
Specialists from the religious colleges and
professionals such as haruspices and oracles were
available for consultation. In household cult, the
paterfamilias functioned as priest, and members of
his familia as acolytes and assistants. Public cults
required greater knowledge and expertise. The Three flamines in their distinctive pointed headgear,
earliest public priesthoods were probably the grouped to the centre of a panel from the Ara Pacis
flamines (the singular is flamen), attributed to king
Numa: the major flamines, dedicated to Jupiter,
Mars and Quirinus, were traditionally drawn from
patrician families. Twelve lesser flamines were each dedicated to a single deity, whose archaic nature is
indicated by the relative obscurity of some. Flamines were constrained by the requirements of ritual
purity; Jupiter's flamen in particular had virtually no simultaneous capacity for a political or military
career.[72]
In the Regal era, a rex sacrorum (king of the sacred rites) supervised regal and state rites in conjunction
with the king (rex) or in his absence, and announced the public festivals. He had little or no civil
authority. With the abolition of monarchy, the collegial power and influence of the Republican pontifices
increased. By the late Republican era, the flamines were supervised by the pontifical collegia. The rex
sacrorum had become a relatively obscure priesthood with an entirely symbolic title: his religious duties
still included the daily, ritual announcement of festivals and priestly duties within two or three of the
latter but his most important priestly role – the supervision of the Vestals and their rites – fell to the
more politically powerful and influential pontifex maximus.[73]
Public priests were appointed by the collegia. Once elected, a priest held permanent religious authority
from the eternal divine, which offered him lifetime influence, privilege and immunity. Therefore, civil and
religious law limited the number and kind of religious offices allowed an individual and his family.
Religious law was collegial and traditional; it informed political decisions, could overturn them, and was
difficult to exploit for personal gain.[74]
Priesthood was a costly honour: in traditional Roman practice, a priest drew no stipend. Cult donations
were the property of the deity, whose priest must provide cult regardless of shortfalls in public funding –
this could mean subsidy of acolytes and all other cult maintenance from personal funds.[75] For those
who had reached their goal in the Cursus honorum, permanent priesthood was best sought or granted
after a lifetime's service in military or political life, or preferably both: it was a particularly honourable
and active form of retirement which fulfilled an essential public duty. For a freedman or slave, promotion
as one of the Compitalia seviri offered a high local profile, and opportunities in local politics; and
therefore business.[76]
During the Imperial era, priesthood of the Imperial cult offered provincial elites full Roman citizenship
and public prominence beyond their single year in religious office; in effect, it was the first step in a
provincial cursus honorum. In Rome, the same Imperial cult role was performed by the Arval Brethren,
once an obscure Republican priesthood dedicated to several deities, then co-opted by Augustus as part of
his religious reforms. The Arvals offered prayer and sacrifice to Roman state gods at various temples for
the continued welfare of the Imperial family on their birthdays, accession anniversaries and to mark
extraordinary events such as the quashing of conspiracy or revolt. Every 3 January they consecrated the
annual vows and rendered any sacrifice promised in the previous year, provided the gods had kept the
Imperial family safe for the contracted time.[77]
The Vestals
The Vestals were a public priesthood of six women devoted to the cultivation
of Vesta, goddess of the hearth of the Roman state and its vital flame. A girl
chosen to be a Vestal achieved unique religious distinction, public status and
privileges, and could exercise considerable political influence. Upon entering
her office, a Vestal was emancipated from her father's authority. In archaic
Roman society, these priestesses were the only women not required to be
under the legal guardianship of a man, instead answering directly to the
Pontifex Maximus.[78]
A Vestal's dress represented her status outside the usual categories that
defined Roman women, with elements of both virgin bride and daughter, and
Roman matron and wife.[79] Unlike male priests, Vestals were freed of the
A Roman sculpture traditional obligations of marrying and producing children, and were required
depicting a Vestal to take a vow of chastity that was strictly enforced: a Vestal polluted by the
loss of her chastity while in office was buried alive.[80] Thus the exceptional
honor accorded a Vestal was religious rather than personal or social; her
privileges required her to be fully devoted to the performance of her duties, which were considered
essential to the security of Rome.[81]
The Vestals embody the profound connection between domestic cult and the religious life of the
community.[82] Any householder could rekindle their own household fire from Vesta's flame. The Vestals
cared for the Lares and Penates of the state that were the equivalent of those enshrined in each home.
Besides their own festival of Vestalia, they participated directly in the rites of Parilia, Parentalia and
Fordicidia. Indirectly, they played a role in every official sacrifice; among their duties was the preparation
of the mola salsa, the salted flour that was sprinkled on every sacrificial victim as part of its
immolation.[83]
One mythological tradition held that the mother of Romulus and Remus was a Vestal virgin of royal
blood. A tale of miraculous birth also attended on Servius Tullius, sixth king of Rome, son of a virgin
slave-girl impregnated by a disembodied phallus arising mysteriously on the royal hearth; the story was
connected to the fascinus that was among the cult objects under the guardianship of the Vestals.
Augustus' religious reformations raised the funding and public profile of the Vestals. They were given
high-status seating at games and theatres. The emperor Claudius appointed them as priestesses to the
cult of the deified Livia, wife of Augustus.[84] They seem to have retained their religious and social
distinctions well into the 4th century, after political power within the Empire had shifted to the
Christians. When the Christian emperor Gratian refused the office of pontifex maximus, he took steps
toward the dissolution of the order. His successor Theodosius I extinguished Vesta's sacred fire and
vacated her temple.
Augury
Public religion took place within a sacred precinct that had been marked out ritually by an augur. The
original meaning of the Latin word templum was this sacred space, and only later referred to a
building.[45] Rome itself was an intrinsically sacred space; its ancient boundary (pomerium) had been
marked by Romulus himself with oxen and plough; what lay within was the earthly home and
protectorate of the gods of the state. In Rome, the central references for the establishment of an augural
templum appear to have been the Via Sacra (Sacred Way) and the pomerium.[85] Magistrates sought
divine opinion of proposed official acts through an augur, who read the divine will through observations
made within the templum before, during and after an act of sacrifice.[86]
Divine disapproval could arise through unfit sacrifice, errant rites (vitia) or an unacceptable plan of
action. If an unfavourable sign was given, the magistrate could repeat the sacrifice until favourable signs
were seen, consult with his augural colleagues, or abandon the project. Magistrates could use their right
of augury (ius augurum) to adjourn and overturn the process of law, but were obliged to base their
decision on the augur's observations and advice. For Cicero, himself an augur, this made the augur the
most powerful authority in the Late Republic.[87] By his time (mid 1st century BC) augury was supervised
by the college of pontifices, whose powers were increasingly woven into the magistracies of the cursus
honorum.[88]
Haruspicy
Haruspicy was also used in public cult, under the supervision of the
augur or presiding magistrate. The haruspices divined the will of the
gods through examination of entrails after sacrifice, particularly the
liver. They also interpreted omens, prodigies and portents, and
formulated their expiation. Most Roman authors describe haruspicy
as an ancient, ethnically Etruscan "outsider" religious profession,
separate from Rome's internal and largely unpaid priestly hierarchy,
essential but never quite respectable.[89] During the mid-to-late
The bronze Liver of Piacenza is an
Republic, the reformist Gaius Gracchus, the populist politician-
Etruscan artifact that probably
general Gaius Marius and his antagonist Sulla, and the "notorious
served as an instructional model
Verres" justified their very different policies by the divinely inspired for the haruspex
utterances of private diviners. The Senate and armies used the
public haruspices: at some time during the late Republic, the Senate decreed that Roman boys of noble
family be sent to Etruria for training in haruspicy and divination. Being of independent means, they
would be better motivated to maintain a pure, religious practice for the public good.[90] The motives of
private haruspices – especially females – and their clients were officially suspect: none of this seems to
have troubled Marius, who employed a Syrian prophetess.[91]
Omens and prodigies
Omens observed within or from a divine augural templum – especially the flight of birds – were sent by
the gods in response to official queries. A magistrate with ius augurium (the right of augury) could
declare the suspension of all official business for the day (obnuntiato) if he deemed the omens
unfavourable.[92] Conversely, an apparently negative omen could be re-interpreted as positive, or
deliberately blocked from sight.[93]
Prodigies were transgressions in the natural, predictable order of the cosmos – signs of divine anger that
portended conflict and misfortune. The Senate decided whether a reported prodigy was false, or genuine
and in the public interest, in which case it was referred to the public priests, augurs and haruspices for
ritual expiation.[94] In 207 BC, during one of the Punic Wars' worst crises, the Senate dealt with an
unprecedented number of confirmed prodigies whose expiation would have involved "at least twenty
days" of dedicated rites.[95]
Livy presents these as signs of widespread failure in Roman religio. The major prodigies included the
spontaneous combustion of weapons, the apparent shrinking of the sun's disc, two moons in a daylit sky,
a cosmic battle between sun and moon, a rain of red-hot stones, a bloody sweat on statues, and blood in
fountains and on ears of corn: all were expiated by sacrifice of "greater victims". The minor prodigies
were less warlike but equally unnatural; sheep become goats, a hen become a cock (and vice versa) –
these were expiated with "lesser victims". The discovery of an androgynous four-year-old child was
expiated by its drowning[96] and the holy procession of 27 virgins to the temple of Juno Regina, singing a
hymn to avert disaster: a lightning strike during the hymn rehearsals required further expiation.[97]
Religious restitution is proved only by Rome's victory.[98][99]
In the wider context of Graeco-Roman religious culture, Rome's earliest reported portents and prodigies
stand out as atypically dire. Whereas for Romans, a comet presaged misfortune, for Greeks it might
equally signal a divine or exceptionally fortunate birth.[100] In the late Republic, a daytime comet at the
murdered Julius Caesar's funeral games confirmed his deification; a discernible Greek influence on
Roman interpretation.[101]
Mystery religions
Most of Rome's mystery cults were derived from Greek originals, adopted by individuals as private, or
were formally adopted as public.[103] Mystery cults operated through a hierarchy consisting of
transference of knowledge, virtues and powers to those initiated through secret rites of passage, which
might employ dance, music, intoxicants and theatrical effects to provoke an overwhelming sense of
religious awe, revelation and eventual catharsis. The cult of Mithras was among the most notable,
particularly popular among soldiers and based on the Zoroastrian deity, Mithra.[104]
Some of Rome's most prominent deities had both public and mystery rites. Magna Mater, conscripted to
help Rome defeat Carthage in the second Punic War, arrived in Rome with her consort, Attis, and their
joint "foreign", non-citizen priesthood, known as Galli. Despite her presumed status as an ancestral,
Trojan goddess, a priesthood was drawn from Rome's highest echelons to supervise her cult and festivals.
These may have been considered too exotically "barbaric" to trust, and were barred to slaves.[105]
For the Galli, full priesthood involved self-castration, illegal for Romans of any class. Later, citizens could
pay for the costly sacrifice of a bull or the lesser sacrifice of a ram, as a substitute for the acolyte's self-
castration. Magna Mater's initiates tended to be very well-off, and relatively uncommon; they included
the emperor Julian. Initiates to Attis' cult were more numerous and
less wealthy, and acted as assistant citizen-priests in their deity's
"exotic" festivals, some of which involved the Galli's public, bloody
self-flagellation.[106]
Rome's native cults to the grain goddess Ceres and her daughter
Libera were supplemented with a mystery cult of Ceres-with-
Proserpina, based on the Greek Eleusinian mysteries and
Thesmophoria, introduced in 205 BC and led at first by ethnically
Greek priestesses from Graeca magna.[107] The Eleusinian
mysteries are also the likely source for the mysteries of Isis, which
employed symbols and rites that were nominally Egyptian. Aspects
of the Isis mysteries are almost certainly described in Appuleius'
novel, The Golden Ass. Such cults were mistrusted by Rome's
authorities as quasi-magical, potentialy seductive and emotionally
based, rather than practical.
Female figure, veiled and The wall-paintings in Pompeii's "Villa of the Mysteries" could have
seemingly alarmed, from a wall- functioned equally as religious inspiration, instruction, and high
painting usually described as a quality domestic decor (described by Beard as "expensive
narrative from Dionysiac/Bacchic wallpaper"). They also attest to an increasingly personal, even
mystery cult, which might also domestic experience of religion, whether or not they were ever part
involve Ariadne and a marriage. of organised cult meetings. The paintings probably represent the
There is "almost no agreement once-notorious, independent, popular Bacchanalia mysteries,
about how it works in detail". From forcibly brought under the direct control of Rome's civil and
Pompeii's "Villa of the religious authorities, 100 years before.[108]
Mysteries"[102]
A common theme among the eastern mystery religions present in
Rome became disillusionment with material possessions, a focus on
death and a preoccupation with regards to the afterlife. These attributes later led to the appeal to
Christianity, which in its early stages was often viewed as mystery religion itself.[104]
Funerals and the afterlife

Roman beliefs about an afterlife varied, and are known mostly for
the educated elite who expressed their views in terms of their
chosen philosophy. The traditional care of the dead, however, and
the perpetuation after death of their status in life were part of the
most archaic practices of Roman religion. Ancient votive deposits to
the noble dead of Latium and Rome suggest elaborate and costly
funeral offerings and banquets in the company of the deceased, an
expectation of afterlife and their association with the gods.[109] As
Roman society developed, its Republican nobility tended to invest
less in spectacular funerals and extravagant housing for their dead,
and more on monumental endowments to the community, such as This funerary stele, one of the
the donation of a temple or public building whose donor was earliest Christian inscriptions (3rd
commemorated by his statue and inscribed name.[110] Persons of century), combines the traditional
low or negligible status might receive simple burial, with such grave abbreviation D. M., for Dis
goods as relatives could afford. Manibus, "to the Manes," with the
Christian motto Ikhthus zōntōn
Funeral and commemorative rites varied according to wealth, status ("fish of the living") in Greek; the
and religious context. In Cicero's time, the better-off sacrificed a sow deceased's name is in Latin.
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 at the site of the cremation. For the less well-off, inhumation with "a
libation of wine, incense, and fruit or crops was sufficient". Ceres functioned as an intermediary between
the realms of the living and the dead: the deceased had not yet fully passed to the world of the dead and
could share a last meal with the living. The ashes (or body) were entombed or buried. On the eighth day
of mourning, the family offered further sacrifice, this time on the ground; the shade of the departed was
assumed to have passed from the world of the living into the underworld, as one of the di Manes,
underworld spirits; the ancestral manes of families were celebrated and appeased at their cemeteries or
tombs, in the obligatory Parentalia, a multi-day festival of remembrance in February.[111]
A standard Roman funerary inscription is Dis Manibus (to the Manes-gods). Regional variations include
its Greek equivalent, theoîs katachthoníois[112] and Lugdunum's commonplace but mysterious
"dedicated under the trowel" (sub ascia dedicare).[113]
In the later Imperial era, the burial and commemorative practises of Christian and non-Christians
overlapped. Tombs were shared by Christian and non-Christian family members, and the traditional
funeral rites and feast of novemdialis found a part-match in the Christian Constitutio Apostolica.[114]
The customary offers of wine and food to the dead continued; St Augustine (following St Ambrose) feared
that this invited the "drunken" practices of Parentalia but commended funeral feasts as a Christian
opportunity to give alms of food to the poor. Christians attended Parentalia and its accompanying Feralia
and Caristia in sufficient numbers for the Council of Tours to forbid them in AD 567. Other funerary and
commemorative practices were very different. Traditional Roman practice spurned the corpse as a ritual
pollution; inscriptions noted the day of birth and duration of life. The Christian Church fostered the
veneration of saintly relics, and inscriptions marked the day of death as a transition to "new life".[115]
Religion and the military

Military success was achieved through a combination of personal and
collective virtus (roughly, "manly virtue") and the divine will: lack of virtus,
civic or private negligence in religio and the growth of superstitio provoked
divine wrath and led to military disaster. Military success was the
touchstone of a special relationship with the gods, and to Jupiter
Capitolinus in particular; triumphal generals were dressed as Jupiter, and
laid their victor's laurels at his feet.[116][117]
Roman commanders offered vows to be fulfilled after success in battle or

siege; and further vows to expiate their failures. Camillus promised Veii's
goddess Juno a temple in Rome as incentive for her desertion (evocatio),
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.[118]
Roman camps followed a standard pattern for defense and religious ritual;
in effect they were Rome in miniature. The commander's headquarters
stood at the centre; he took the auspices on a dais in front. A small building
behind housed the legionary standards, the divine images used in religious
rites and in the Imperial era, the image of the ruling emperor. In one camp, A genius of the legion
this shrine is even called Capitolium. The most important camp-offering (2nd–3rd century CE)
appears to have been the suovetaurilia performed before a major, set
battle. A ram, a boar and a bull were ritually garlanded, led around the
outer perimeter of the camp (a lustratio exercitus) and in through a gate, then sacrificed: Trajan's column
shows three such events from his Dacian wars. The perimeter procession and sacrifice suggest the entire
camp as a divine templum; all within are purified and protected.[119]
Each camp had its own religious personnel; standard bearers, priestly officers and their assistants,
including a haruspex, and housekeepers of shrines and images. A senior magistrate-commander
(sometimes even a consul) headed it, his chain of subordinates ran it and a ferocious system of training
and discipline ensured that every citizen-soldier knew his duty. As in Rome, whatever gods he served in
his own time seem to have been his own business; legionary forts and vici included shrines to household
gods, personal deities and deities otherwise unknown.[120]
From the earliest Imperial era, citizen legionaries

and provincial auxiliaries gave cult to the
emperor and his familia on Imperial accessions,
anniversaries and their renewal of annual vows.
They celebrated Rome's official festivals in
absentia, and had the official triads appropriate
to their function – in the Empire, Jupiter,
Victoria and Concordia were typical. By the early
Severan era, the military also offered cult to the
Imperial divi, the current emperor's numen,
Panel from Trajan's Column depicting the lustral
genius and domus (or familia), and special cult to
procession of the suovetaurilia victims under military
standards
the Empress as "mother of the camp". The near
ubiquitous legionary shrines to Mithras of the
later Imperial era were not part of official cult
until Mithras was absorbed into Solar and Stoic
Monism as a focus of military concordia and Imperial loyalty.[121][122][123]
The devotio was the most extreme offering a Roman general could make,
promising to offer his own life in battle along with the enemy as an offering
to the underworld gods. Livy offers a detailed account of the devotio carried
out by Decius Mus; family tradition maintained that his son and grandson,
all bearing the same name, also devoted themselves. Before the battle,
Decius is granted a prescient dream that reveals his fate. When he offers
sacrifice, the victim's liver appears "damaged where it refers to his own
fortunes". Otherwise, the haruspex tells him, the sacrifice is entirely
acceptable to the gods. In a prayer recorded by Livy, Decius commits
himself and the enemy to the dii Manes and Tellus, charges alone and
headlong into the enemy ranks, and is killed; his action cleanses the
sacrificial offering. Had he failed to die, his sacrificial offering would have
been tainted and therefore void, with possibly disastrous
consequences.[124] The act of devotio is a link between military ethics and
those of the Roman gladiator.
The efforts of military commanders to channel the divine will were on

occasion less successful. In the early days of Rome's war against Carthage,
the commander Publius Claudius Pulcher (consul 249 BC) launched a sea
campaign "though the sacred chickens would not eat when he took the
auspices". In defiance of the omen, he threw them into the sea, "saying that
they might drink, since they would not eat. He was defeated, and on being
bidden by the Senate to appoint a dictator, he appointed his messenger A votive statue of Jupiter
Glycias, as if again making a jest of his country's peril." His impiety not Dolichenus dedicated by a
only lost the battle but ruined his career.[125] centurion for the wellbeing
of the emperor
Women and religion (Carnuntum, 3rd century)
Roman women were present at most festivals and cult observances. Some
rituals specifically required the presence of women, but their active participation was limited. As a rule
women did not perform animal sacrifice, the central rite of most major public ceremonies.[126] In
addition to the public priesthood of the Vestals, some cult practices were reserved for women only. The
rites of the Bona Dea excluded men entirely.[127] Because women enter the public record less frequently
than men, their religious practices are less known, and even family cults were headed by the
paterfamilias. A host of deities, however, are associated with motherhood. Juno, Diana, Lucina, and
specialized divine attendants presided over the life-threatening act of giving birth and the perils of caring
for a baby at a time when the infant mortality rate was as high as 40 percent.
Literary sources vary in their depiction of women's religiosity: some represent women as paragons of
Roman virtue and devotion, but also inclined by temperament to self-indulgent religious enthusiasms,
novelties and the seductions of superstitio.[128]
Superstitio and magic

Excessive devotion and enthusiasm in religious observance
were superstitio, in the sense of "doing or believing more
than was necessary",[129] to which women and foreigners
were considered particularly prone.[130] The boundary
between religio and superstitio is not clearly defined. The
famous tirade of Lucretius, the Epicurean rationalist,
against what is usually translated as "superstition" was in
fact aimed at excessive religio. Roman religion was based
on knowledge rather than faith,[131] but superstitio was
viewed as an "inappropriate desire for knowledge"; in
effect, an abuse of religio.[129]
Mosaic from Pompeii depicting masked
In the everyday world, many individuals sought to divine characters in a scene from a play: two
the future, influence it through magic, or seek vengeance women consult a witch
with help from "private" diviners. The state-sanctioned
taking of auspices was a form of public divination with the
intent of ascertaining the will of the gods, not foretelling the future. Secretive consultations between
private diviners and their clients were thus suspect. So were divinatory techniques such as astrology when
used for illicit, subversive or magical purposes. 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. "Egyptian rites" were particularly suspect:
Augustus banned them within the pomerium to doubtful effect; Tiberius repeated and extended the ban
with extreme force in AD 19.[132] Despite several Imperial bans, magic and astrology persisted among all
social classes. In the late 1st century AD, Tacitus observed that astrologers "would always be banned and
always retained at Rome".[133][134][135]
In the Graeco-Roman world, practitioners of magic were known as magi (singular magus), a "foreign"
title of Persian priests. Apuleius, defending himself against accusations of casting magic spells, defined
the magician as "in popular tradition (more vulgari)... someone who, because of his community of speech
with the immortal gods, has an incredible power of spells (vi cantaminum) for everything he wishes
to."[136] Pliny the Elder offers a thoroughly skeptical "History of magical arts" from their supposed
Persian origins to Nero's vast and futile expenditure on research into magical practices in an attempt to
control the gods.[137] Philostratus takes pains to point out that the celebrated Apollonius of Tyana was
definitely not a magus, "despite his special knowledge of the future, his miraculous cures, and his ability
to vanish into thin air".[138]
Lucan depicts Sextus Pompeius, the doomed son of Pompey the Great, as convinced "the gods of heaven
knew too little" and awaiting the Battle of Pharsalus by consulting with the Thessalian witch Erichtho,
who practices necromancy and inhabits deserted graves, feeding on rotting corpses. Erichtho, it is said,
can arrest "the rotation of the heavens and the flow of rivers" and make "austere old men blaze with illicit
passions". She and her clients are portrayed as undermining the natural order of gods, mankind and
destiny. A female foreigner from Thessaly, notorious for witchcraft, Erichtho is the stereotypical witch of
Latin literature,[139] along with Horace's Canidia.
The Twelve Tables forbade any harmful incantation (malum carmen, or 'noisome metrical charm'); this
included the "charming of crops from one field to another" (excantatio frugum) and any rite that sought
harm or death to others. Chthonic deities functioned at the margins of Rome's divine and human
communities; although sometimes the recipients of public rites, these were conducted outside the sacred
boundary of the pomerium. Individuals seeking their aid did so away from the public gaze, during the
hours of darkness. Burial grounds and isolated crossroads were

among the likely portals.[140] The barrier between private religious
practices and "magic" is permeable, and Ovid gives a vivid account
of rites at the fringes of the public Feralia festival that are
indistinguishable from magic: an old woman squats among a circle
of younger women, sews up a fish-head, smears it with pitch, then
pierces and roasts it to "bind hostile tongues to silence". By this she
invokes Tacita, the "Silent One" of the underworld.
Archaeology confirms the widespread use of binding spells

Bound tablets with magic (defixiones), magical papyri and so-called "voodoo dolls" from a
inscriptions from late antiquity very early era. Around 250 defixiones have been recovered just from
Roman Britain, in both urban and rural settings. Some seek
straightforward, usually gruesome revenge, often for a lover's
offense or rejection. Others appeal for divine redress of wrongs, in terms familiar to any Roman
magistrate, and promise a portion of the value (usually small) of lost or stolen property in return for its
restoration. None of these defixiones seem produced by, or on behalf of the elite, who had more
immediate recourse to human law and justice. Similar traditions existed throughout the empire,
persisting until around the 7th century AD, well into the Christian era.[141]
History of Roman religion
Religion and politics
Rome's government, politics and religion were dominated by an

educated, male, landowning military aristocracy. Approximately half
of Rome's population were slave or free non-citizens. Most others
were plebeians, the lowest class of Roman citizens. Less than a
quarter of adult males had voting rights; far fewer could actually
exercise them. Women had no vote.[142] However, all official
business was conducted under the divine gaze and auspices, in the
name of the Senate and people of Rome. "In a very real sense the
senate was the caretaker of the Romans’ relationship with the
divine, just as it was the caretaker of their relationship with other
humans".[143]
The links between religious and political life were vital to Rome's Dionysus (Bacchus) with long
internal governance, diplomacy and development from kingdom, to torch sitting on a throne, with
Republic and to Empire. Post-regal politics dispersed the civil and Helios (Sol), Aphrodite (Venus)
religious authority of the kings more or less equitably among the and other gods. Wall-painting from
patrician elite: kingship was replaced by two annually elected Pompeii, Italy
consular offices. In the early Republic, as presumably in the regal
era, plebeians were excluded from high religious and civil office, and
could be punished for offenses against laws of which they had no
knowledge.[144] They resorted to strikes and violence to break the oppressive patrician monopolies of
high office, public priesthood, and knowledge of civil and religious law. The Senate appointed Camillus as
dictator to handle the emergency; he negotiated a settlement, and sanctified it by the dedication of a
temple to Concordia.[145] The religious calendars and laws were eventually made public. Plebeian
tribunes were appointed, with sacrosanct status and the right of veto in legislative debate. In principle,
the augural and pontifical colleges were now open to plebeians.[146] In reality, the patrician and to a
lesser extent, plebeian nobility dominated religious and civil office throughout the Republican era and
beyond.[147]
While the new plebeian nobility made social, political and religious
inroads on traditionally patrician preserves, their electorate
maintained their distinctive political traditions and religious
cults.[148] During the Punic crisis, popular cult to Dionysus emerged
from southern Italy; Dionysus was equated with Father Liber, the
inventor of plebeian augury and personification of plebeian
freedoms, and with Roman Bacchus. Official consternation at these
enthusiastic, unofficial Bacchanalia cults was expressed as moral
Temple of Bacchus ("Temple of the outrage at their supposed subversion, and was followed by ferocious
Sun"), c. 150 AD suppression. Much later, a statue of Marsyas, the silen of Dionysus
flayed by Apollo, became a focus of brief symbolic resistance to
Augustus' censorship. Augustus himself claimed the patronage of
Venus and Apollo; but his settlement appealed to all classes. Where loyalty was implicit, no divine
hierarchy need be politically enforced; Liber's festival continued.[149][150]
The Augustan settlement built upon a cultural shift in Roman society. In the middle Republican era, even
Scipio's tentative hints that he might be Jupiter's special protege sat ill with his colleagues.[151] Politicians
of the later Republic were less equivocal; both Sulla and Pompey claimed special relationships with
Venus. Julius Caesar went further; he claimed her as his ancestress, and thus an intimate source of divine
inspiration for his personal character and policies. In 63 BC, his appointment as pontifex maximus
"signaled his emergence as a major player in Roman politics".[152] Likewise, political candidates could
sponsor temples, priesthoods and the immensely popular, spectacular public ludi and munera whose
provision became increasingly indispensable to the factional politics of the Late Republic.[153] Under the
principate, such opportunities were limited by law; priestly and political power were consolidated in the
person of the princeps ("first citizen").
Because of you we are living, because of you we can travel the seas, because of you we enjoy
liberty and wealth. —A thanksgiving prayer offered in Naples' harbour to the princeps
Augustus, on his return from Alexandria in 14 AD, shortly before his death.[154]
Early Republic
By the end of the regal period Rome had developed into a city-state,
with a large plebeian, artisan class excluded from the old patrician
gentes and from the state priesthoods. The city had commercial and
political treaties with its neighbours; according to tradition, Rome's
Etruscan connections established a temple to Minerva on the
predominantly plebeian Aventine; she became part of a new
Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, installed in a
Capitoline temple, built in an Etruscan style and dedicated in a new
September festival, Epulum Jovis.[155] These are supposedly the
first Roman deities whose images were adorned, as if noble guests,
at their own inaugural banquet.
Rome's diplomatic agreement with its neighbours of Latium

confirmed the Latin league and brought the cult of Diana from
Aricia to the Aventine.[156] and established on the Aventine in the
"commune Latinorum Dianae templum":[157] At about the same Wedding of Jupiter King of the
time, the temple of Jupiter Latiaris was built on the Alban mount, Gods, and Juno, Queen of
its stylistic resemblance to the new Capitoline temple pointing to Heaven and goddess of marriage,
Rome's inclusive hegemony. Rome's affinity to the Latins allowed and women. Fresco in Pompeii
two Latin cults within the pomoerium.[158] The cult to Hercules at
the ara maxima in the Forum Boarium was established through
commercial connections with Tibur.[159] The Tusculan cult of Castor as the patron of cavalry found a
home close to the Forum Romanum:[160] Juno Sospita and Juno Regina were brought from Italy, and
Fortuna Primigenia from Praeneste. In 217, the Venus of Eryx was brought from Sicily and installed in a
temple on the Capitoline hill.[161]
Later Republic to Principate
The introduction of new or equivalent deities coincided with Rome's

most significant aggressive and defensive military forays. Livy
attributed the disasters of the early part of Rome's second Punic
War to a growth of superstitious cults, errors in augury and the
neglect of Rome's traditional gods, whose anger was expressed
directly through Rome's defeat at Cannae (216 BC). The Sibylline
books were consulted. They recommended a general vowing of the
ver sacrum[162] and in the following year, the living burial of two
Greeks and two Gauls; not the first nor the last sacrifice of its kind,
according to Livy.
In 206 BC, during the Punic crisis, the Sibylline books

recommended the introduction of a cult to the Magna Mater (Great
Mother) from Pessinus, supposedly an ancestral goddess of Romans
and Trojans. She was installed on the Palatine in 191 BC.
A fresco from Pompeii depicting
Hercules, Hyllus, Deianira, and the Deities with troublesome followers were taken over, not banned. An
centaur Nessus from Greco- unofficial, popular mystery cult to Bacchus was officially taken over,
Roman mythology, 30-45 AD restricted and supervised as potentially subversive in 186 BC.[163]
The priesthoods of most

Roman deities with clearly
Greek origins used an invented version of Greek costume and ritual,
which Romans called "Greek rites." The spread of Greek literature,
mythology and philosophy offered Roman poets and antiquarians a
model for the interpretation of Rome's festivals and rituals, and the
embellishment of its mythology. Ennius translated the work of
Graeco-Sicilian Euhemerus, who explained the genesis of the gods
as deified mortals. In the last century of the Republic, Epicurean
and particularly Stoic interpretations were a preoccupation of the
literate elite, most of whom held – or had held – high office and
traditional Roman priesthoods; notably, Scaevola and the polymath
Varro. For Varro – well versed in Euhemerus' theory – popular
religious observance was based on a necessary fiction; what the
people believed was not itself the truth, but their observance led
them to as much higher truth as their limited capacity could deal
with. Whereas in popular belief deities held power over mortal lives,
the skeptic might say that mortal devotion had made gods of
mortals, and these same gods were only sustained by devotion and Mars caresses Venus enthroned.
cult. Wall-painting in Pompeii, c. 20 BC
– 50s AD
Just as Rome itself claimed the favour of the gods, so did some
individual Romans. In the mid-to-late Republican era, and probably
much earlier, many of Rome's leading clans acknowledged a divine
or semi-divine ancestor and laid personal claim to their favour and cult, along with a share of their
divinity. Most notably in the very late Republic, the Julii claimed Venus Genetrix as an ancestor; this
would be one of many foundations for the Imperial cult. The claim was further elaborated and justified in
Vergil's poetic, Imperial vision of the past.[8]
In the late Republic, the Marian reforms lowered an existing

property bar on conscription and increased the efficiency of Rome's
armies but made them available as instruments of political ambition
and factional conflict.[164] The consequent civil wars led to changes
at every level of Roman society. Augustus' principate established
peace and subtly transformed Rome's religious life – or, in the new
ideology of Empire, restored it (see below).
Sissel Undheim has argued that, with their Religions of Rome

Fresco of Neptune and Salacia, volumes, Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price dismantled the
Pompeii well-established narrative of the decline of religious in the late
Republic, opening the way for more innovative and dynamic
perspectives.[165] Towards the end of the Republic, religious and
political offices became more closely intertwined; the office of pontifex maximus became a de facto
consular prerogative.[88] Augustus was personally vested with an extraordinary breadth of political,
military and priestly powers; at first temporarily, then for his lifetime. He acquired or was granted an
unprecedented number of Rome's major priesthoods, including that of pontifex maximus; as he invented
none, he could claim them as traditional honours. His reforms were represented as adaptive, restorative
and regulatory, rather than innovative; most notably his elevation (and membership) of the ancient
Arvales, his timely promotion of the plebeian Compitalia shortly before his election and his patronage of
the Vestals as a visible restoration of Roman morality.[166] Augustus obtained the pax deorum,
maintained it for the rest of his reign and adopted a successor to ensure its continuation. This remained a
primary religious and social duty of emperors.
Roman Empire
Eastern Influence
Under the rule of Augustus, there existed a deliberate campaign to

reinstate previously held belief systems amongst the Roman
population. These once held ideals had been eroded and met with
cynicism by this time.[167] The imperial order emphasized
commemoration of great men and events which led to the concept
and practice of divine kingship. Emperors postceding Augustus
subsequently held the office of Chief Priest (pontifex maximus)
combining both political and religious supremacy under one
title.[104]
Bellerophon, Pegasus, and Athena
Absorption of cults (Minerva), fresco of the 3rd style
from Pompeii, first half of the 1st
The Roman Empire expanded century
to include different peoples
and cultures; in principle,
Rome followed the same inclusionist policies that had recognised
Latin, Etruscan and other Italian peoples, cults and deities as
Roman. Those who acknowledged Rome's hegemony retained their
own cult and religious calendars, independent of Roman religious
law.[168] Newly municipal Sabratha built a Capitolium near its
Mithras in a Roman wall painting
existing temple to Liber Pater and Serapis. Autonomy and concord
were official policy, but new foundations by Roman citizens or their
Romanised allies were likely to follow Roman cultic models.[169]
Romanisation offered distinct political and practical advantages, especially to local elites. All the known
effigies from the 2nd century AD forum at Cuicul are of emperors or Concordia. By the middle of the 1st
century AD, Gaulish Vertault seems to have abandoned its native cultic sacrifice of horses and dogs in
favour of a newly established, Romanised cult nearby: by the end of that century, Sabratha's so-called
tophet was no longer in use.[170] Colonial and later Imperial provincial dedications to Rome's Capitoline
Triad were a logical choice, not a centralised legal requirement.[171] Major cult centres to "non-Roman"
deities continued to prosper: notable examples include the magnificent Alexandrian Serapium, the
temple of Aesculapeus at Pergamum and Apollo's sacred wood at Antioch.[172]
The overall scarcity of evidence for smaller or local cults does not always imply their neglect; votive
inscriptions are inconsistently scattered throughout Rome's geography and history. Inscribed dedications
were an expensive public declaration, one to be expected within the Graeco-Roman cultural ambit but by
no means universal. Innumerable smaller, personal or more secretive cults would have persisted and left
no trace.[173]
Military settlement within the empire and at its borders broadened the context of Romanitas. Rome's
citizen-soldiers set up altars to multiple deities, including their traditional gods, the Imperial genius and
local deities – sometimes with the usefully open-ended dedication to the diis deabusque omnibus (all the
gods and goddesses). They also brought Roman "domestic" deities and cult practices with them.[174] By
the same token, the later granting of citizenship to provincials and their conscription into the legions
brought their new cults into the Roman military.[175]
Traders, legions and other travellers brought home cults originating from Egypt, Greece, Iberia, India
and Persia. The cults of Cybele, Isis, Mithras, and Sol Invictus were particularly important. Some of those
were initiatory religions of intense personal significance, similar to Christianity in those respects.
Imperial cult
In the early Imperial era, the princeps (lit. "first" or "foremost"

among citizens) was offered genius-cult as the symbolic
paterfamilias of Rome. His cult had further precedents: popular,
unofficial cult offered to powerful benefactors in Rome: the kingly,
god-like honours granted a Roman general on the day of his
triumph; and in the divine honours paid to Roman magnates in the
Greek East from at least 195 BC.[176][177]
The deification of deceased emperors had precedent in Roman The Maison Carrée in Nîmes, one
domestic cult to the dii parentes (deified ancestors) and the mythic of the best-preserved Roman
apotheosis of Rome's founders. A deceased emperor granted temples. It is a mid-sized
apotheosis by his successor and the Senate became an official State Augustan provincial temple of the
divus (divinity). Members of the Imperial family could be granted Imperial cult.
similar honours and cult; an Emperor's deceased wife, sister or
daughter could be promoted to diva (female divinity).
The first and last Roman known as a living divus was Julius Caesar, who seems to have aspired to divine
monarchy; he was murdered soon after. Greek allies had their own traditional cults to rulers as divine
benefactors, and offered similar cult to Caesar's successor, Augustus, who accepted with the cautious
proviso that expatriate Roman citizens refrain from such worship; it might prove fatal.[178] By the end of
his reign, Augustus had appropriated Rome's political apparatus – and most of its religious cults – within
his "reformed" and thoroughly integrated system of government. Towards the end of his life, he
cautiously allowed cult to his numen. By then the Imperial cult apparatus was fully developed, first in the
Eastern Provinces, then in the West.[179] Provincial Cult centres offered the amenities and opportunities
of a major Roman town within a local context; bathhouses, shrines and temples to Roman and local
deities, amphitheatres and festivals. In the early Imperial period, the promotion of local elites to Imperial
priesthood gave them Roman citizenship.[180]
In an empire of great religious and cultural diversity, the Imperial cult offered a common Roman identity
and dynastic stability. In Rome, the framework of government was recognisably Republican. In the
Provinces, this would not have mattered; in Greece, the emperor was "not only endowed with special,
super-human abilities, but... he was indeed a visible god" and the little Greek town of Akraiphia could
offer official cult to "liberating Zeus Nero for all eternity".[181]
In Rome, state cult to a living emperor acknowledged his rule as divinely approved and constitutional. As
princeps (first citizen) he must respect traditional Republican mores; given virtually monarchic powers,
he must restrain them. He was not a living divus but father of his country (pater patriae), its pontifex
maximus (greatest priest) and at least notionally, its leading Republican. When he died, his ascent to
heaven, or his descent to join the dii manes was decided by a vote in the Senate. As a divus, he could
receive much the same honours as any other state deity – libations of wine, garlands, incense, hymns and
sacrificial oxen at games and festivals. What he did in return for these favours is unknown, but literary
hints and the later adoption of divus as a title for Christian Saints suggest him as a heavenly
intercessor.[182] In Rome, official cult to a living emperor was directed to his genius; a small number
refused this honour and there is no evidence of any emperor receiving more than that. In the crises
leading up to the Dominate, Imperial titles and honours multiplied, reaching a peak under Diocletian.
Emperors before him had attempted to guarantee traditional cults as the core of Roman identity and
well-being; refusal of cult undermined the state and was treasonous.[183]
Jews and Roman religion
For at least a century before the establishment of the Augustan

principate, Jews and Judaism were tolerated in Rome by diplomatic
treaty with Judaea's Hellenised elite. Diaspora Jews had much in
common with the overwhelmingly Hellenic or Hellenised
communities that surrounded them. Early Italian synagogues have
left few traces; but one was dedicated in Ostia around the mid-1st
century BC and several more are attested during the Imperial
period. Judaea's enrollment as a client kingdom in 63 BC increased
the Jewish diaspora; in Rome, this led to closer official scrutiny of
their religion. Their synagogues were recognised as legitimate
collegia by Julius Caesar. By the Augustan era, the city of Rome was
Jewish ritual objects in 2nd- home to several thousand Jews.[184][185] In some periods under
century gold glass from Rome Roman rule, Jews were legally exempt from official sacrifice, under
certain conditions. Judaism was a superstitio to Cicero, but the
Church Father Tertullian described it as religio licita (an officially
permitted religion) in contrast to Christianity.[186]
Christianity in the Roman Empire
Roman investigations into early Christianity found it an

irreligious, novel, disobedient, even atheistic sub-sect of
Judaism: it appeared to deny all forms of religion and
was therefore superstitio. By the end of the Imperial era,
Nicene Christianity was the one permitted Roman
religio; all other cults were heretical or pagan
superstitiones.[187]
After the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, Emperor Nero

accused the Christians as convenient scapegoats, who The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer, by Jean-
were later persecuted and killed. From that point on, Léon Gérôme (1883)
Roman official policy towards Christianity tended
towards persecution. During the various Imperial crises
of the 3rd century, "contemporaries were predisposed to
decode any crisis in religious terms", regardless of their allegiance to particular practices or belief
systems. Christianity drew its traditional base of support from the powerless, who seemed to have no
religious stake in the well-being of the Roman State, and therefore threatened its existence.[188] The
majority of Rome's elite continued to observe various forms of inclusive Hellenistic monism;
Neoplatonism in particular accommodated the miraculous and the ascetic within a traditional Graeco-
Roman cultic framework. Christians saw these practices as ungodly, and a primary cause of economic and
political crisis.
In the wake of religious riots in Egypt, the emperor Decius decreed that all subjects of the Empire must
actively seek to benefit the state through witnessed and certified sacrifice to "ancestral gods" or suffer a
penalty: only Jews were exempt.[189] Decius' edict appealed to whatever common mos maiores might
reunite a politically and socially fractured Empire and its multitude of cults; no ancestral gods were
specified by name. The fulfillment of sacrificial obligation by loyal subjects would define them and their
gods as Roman.[190][191] Apostasy was sought, rather than capital punishment.[192] A year after its due
deadline, the edict expired.[193]
Valerian singled out Christianity as a particularly self-

interested and subversive foreign cult, outlawed its
assemblies and urged Christians to sacrifice to Rome's
traditional gods.[194][195] In another edict, he described
Christianity as a threat to Empire – not yet at its heart
but close to it, among Rome's equites and Senators.
Christian apologists interpreted his eventual fate – a
disgraceful capture and death – as divine judgement.
The next forty years were peaceful; the Christian church
Nero's Torches, by Henryk Siemiradzki (1876). grew stronger and its literature and theology gained a
According to Tacitus, Nero used Christians as higher social and intellectual profile, due in part to its
human torches own search for political toleration and theological
coherence. Origen discussed theological issues with
traditionalist elites in a common Neoplatonist frame of
reference – he had written to Decius' predecessor Philip the Arab in similar vein – and Hippolytus
recognised a "pagan" basis in Christian heresies.[196] The Christian churches were disunited; Paul of
Samosata, Bishop of Antioch was deposed by a synod of 268 both for his doctrines, and for his unworthy,
indulgent, elite lifestyle.[197] Meanwhile, Aurelian (270-75) appealed for harmony among his soldiers
(concordia militum), stabilised the Empire and its borders and successfully established an official,
Hellenic form of unitary cult to the Palmyrene Sol Invictus in Rome's Campus Martius.[198]
In 295, Maximilian of Tebessa refused military service;

in 298 Marcellus renounced his military oath. Both were
executed for treason; both were Christians.[194] At some
time around 302, a report of ominous haruspicy in
Diocletian's domus and a subsequent (but undated)
dictat of placatory sacrifice by the entire military
triggered a series of edicts against Christianity.[199] The
first (303 AD) "ordered the destruction of church
buildings and Christian texts, forbade services to be
held, degraded officials who were Christians, re-
enslaved imperial freedmen who were Christians, and The Victory of Faith, by Saint George Hare,
reduced the legal rights of all Christians... [Physical] or depicts two Christians in the eve of their
capital punishments were not imposed on them" but damnatio ad bestias
soon after, several Christians suspected of attempted
arson in the palace were executed.[200] The second edict
threatened Christian priests with imprisonment and the third offered them freedom if they performed
sacrifice.[201] An edict of 304 enjoined universal sacrifice to traditional gods, in terms that recall the
Decian edict.
In some cases and in some places the edicts were strictly enforced: some Christians resisted and were
imprisoned or martyred. Others complied. Some local communities were not only pre-dominantly
Christian, but powerful and influential; and some provincial authorities were lenient, notably the Caesar
in Gaul, Constantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine I. Diocletian's successor Galerius maintained
anti-Christian policy until his deathbed revocation in 311, when he asked Christians to pray for him. "This
meant an official recognition of their importance in the religious world of the Roman empire, although
one of the tetrarchs, Maximinus Daia, still oppressed Christians in his part of the empire up to 313."[202]
Emperor Constantine and Christianity
The conversion of Constantine I ended the Christian persecutions.

Constantine successfully balanced his own role as an instrument of
the pax deorum with the power of the Christian priesthoods in
determining what was (in traditional Roman terms) auspicious – or
in Christian terms, what was orthodox. The edict of Milan (313)
redefined Imperial ideology as one of mutual toleration.
Constantine had triumphed under the signum (sign) of the Christ:
Christianity was therefore officially embraced along with traditional
The Aula Palatina of Trier, religions and from his new Eastern capital, Constantine could be
Germany (then part of the Roman seen to embody both Christian and Hellenic religious interests. He
province of Gallia Belgica), built passed laws to protect Christians from persecution;[203] he also
during the reign of Constantine I (r. funded the building of churches, including Saint Peter's basilica. He
306-337 AD) may have officially ended – or attempted to end – blood sacrifices to
the genius of living emperors, though his Imperial iconography and
court ceremonial outstripped Diocletian's in their elevation of the
emperor as somehow more than human.[204]
Constantine promoted orthodoxy in Christian doctrine, so that Christianity might become a unitary force,
rather than divisive. He summoned Christian bishops to a meeting, later known as the First Council of
Nicaea, at which some 318 bishops (mostly easterners) debated and decided what was orthodox, and
what was heresy. The meeting reached consensus on the Nicene Creed.[205][206] At Constantine's death,
he was honored as a Christian and as an Imperial "divus".[207] Later, Philostorgius would criticize those
Christians who offered sacrifice at statues of the divus Constantine.[208]
Transition to Christian hegemony
Christianity and traditional Roman religion proved incompatible.

From the 2nd century onward, the Church Fathers had condemned
the diverse non-Christian religions practiced throughout the Empire
as "pagan".[209] Constantine's actions have been regarded by some
scholars as causing the rapid growth of Christianity,[210] though
many modern scholars disagree.[211][212] Constantine's unique form
of Imperial orthodoxy did not outlast him. After his death in 337,
two of his sons, Constantius II and Constans, took over the
leadership of the empire and re-divided their Imperial inheritance.
Constantius was an Arian and his brothers were Nicene Christians.
Monogramme of Christ (the Chi
Constantine's nephew Julian rejected the "Galilean madness" of his
Rho) on a plaque of a marble
upbringing for an idiosyncratic synthesis of neo-Platonism, Stoic
sarcophagus, 4th century CE
asceticism and universal solar cult. Julian became Augustus in 361 (Musei Vaticani, here in a
and actively but fostered a religious and cultural pluralism, temporary exhibition at the
attempting a restitution of non-Christian practices and rights.[213] Colosseum in Rome, Italy)
He proposed the rebuilding of Jerusalem's temple as an Imperial
project and argued against the "irrational impieties" of Christian
doctrine.[214] His attempt to restore an Augustan form of
principate, with himself as primus inter pares ended with his death in 363 in Persia, after which his
reforms were reversed or abandoned. The empire once again fell under Christian control, this time
permanently.
In 380, under Theodosius I, Nicene Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire.
Christian heretics as well as non-Christians were subject to exclusion from public life or persecution,
though Rome's original religious hierarchy and many aspects of its ritual influenced Christian forms,[215]
and many pre-Christian beliefs and practices survived in Christian festivals and local traditions.
The Western emperor Gratian refused the office of pontifex maximus, and against the protests of the
Senate, removed the altar of Victory from the Senate house and began the disestablishment of the
Vestals. Theodosius I briefly re-united the Empire: in 391 he officially adopted Nicene Christianity as the
Imperial religion and ended official support for all other creeds and cults. He not only refused to restore
Victory to the senate-house, but extinguished the Sacred fire of the Vestals and vacated their temple: the
senatorial protest was expressed in a letter by Quintus Aurelius Symmachus to the Western and Eastern
emperors. Ambrose, the influential Bishop of Milan and future saint, wrote urging the rejection of
Symmachus's request for tolerance.[216] Yet Theodosius accepted comparison with Hercules and Jupiter
as a living divinity in the panegyric of Pacatus, and despite his active dismantling of Rome's traditional
cults and priesthoods could commend his heirs to its overwhelmingly Hellenic Senate in traditional
Hellenic terms. He was the last emperor of both East and West.[217][218]
See also
Ancient
Rome
portal
Hellenistic religion
History of atheism#Classical Greece and Rome
Italo-Roman neopaganism
Sibylline Oracles
References
Citations
1. Jörg Rüpke (2007). "Roman Religion – Religions of Rome". In A Companion to Roman Religion.
Blackwell,. p. 4.
2. Apuleius, Florides 1.1; John Scheid, "Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors" in A Companion to Roman
Religion (Blackwell, 2007), p. 279.
3. "This mentality," notes John T. Koch, "lay at the core of the genius of cultural assimilation which
made the Roman Empire possible"; entry on "Interpretatio romana" in Celtic Culture: A Historical
Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio, 2006), p. 974.
4. Rüpke, "Roman Religion – Religions of Rome", p. 4; Benjamin H. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in
Classical Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2004, 2006), p. 449; W.H.C. Frend, Martyrdom and
Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (Doubleday,
1967), p. 106.
5. Janet Huskinson, Experiencing Rome: Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire
(Routledge, 2000), p. 261. See, for instance, the altar dedicated by a Roman citizen and depicting a
sacrifice conducted in the Roman manner for the Germanic goddess Vagdavercustis in the 2nd
century CE.
6. A classic essay on this topic is Arnaldo Momigliano, "The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a
Universal State", Classical Philology 81.4 (1986) 285–297.
7. Alexandre Grandazzi, The Foundation of Rome: Myth and History (Cornell University Press, 1997),
pp. 45–46.
8. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 1; 189–90 (Aeneas and Vesta): 123–45 (Aeneas and Venus as Julian
ancestors). See also Vergil, Aeneid.
9. T.P. Wiseman, Remus: A Roman Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1995), passim.
10. Or else was murdered by his resentful Senate, who successfully concealed their crime. See Beard
et al., Vol. 1, 1; Vol. 2, 4.8a for Livy, 1.9 & 5–7 (Sabines and temple to Jupiter) and Plutarch,
Romulus, 11, 1–4.
11. Illustration of Vergil, Aeneid 3.147; MS Vat. lat. 3225, folio 28 recto
12. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 1–2 & Vol. 2: 1.2, (Livy, 1.19.6): 8.4a (Plutarch, Numa, 10). For Augustus'
closure of Janus's temple doors, see Augustus, Res Gestae, 13. Festus connects Numa to the
triumphal spolia opima and Jupiter Feretrius.
13. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 3, and footnotes 4 & 5.
14. The Augustan historian Livy places Rome's foundation more than 600 years before his own time.
His near contemporary Dionysius of Halicarnassus appear to share some common sources,
including an earlier history by Quintus Fabius Pictor, of which only a terse summary survives. See
also Diocles of Peparethus, Romulus and Remus and Plutarch, The Parallel Lives, Life of Romulus,
3. Loeb edn. available at Thayer's site: [1] (https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plut
arch/lives/romulus*.html). Fragments of an important earlier work (now lost) of Quintus Ennius are
cited by various later Roman authors. On the chronological problems of the kings' list, see Cornell,
pp. 21–26, and 199–122.
15. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 8-10; Cornell, pp. 1–30; Feeney, in Rüpke (ed.), 129–42, on religious themes in
Roman Historiography and epic; Smith, in Rüpke (ed.), 31–42 for broad discussion of sources,
modern schools of thought and divergent interpretations.
16. Cicero, On the Responses of the Haruspices, 19.
17. Rüpke, in Rüpke (ed.) 4 and Beard et al., Vol. 1, 10–43; in particular, 30–35.
18. The reasons for this change remain unclear, though they are attributed to Etruscan influence. For a
summary of Jupiter's complex development from the Regal to Republican eras, see Beard et al.,
Vol. 1, 59–60. Jupiter's image in the Republican and Imperial Capitol bore regalia associated with
Rome's ancient kings and the highest consular and Imperial honours. Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus
were collectively and individually associated with Rome's agricultural economy, social organisation
and success in war.
19. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 134–5, 64–67.
20. Orlin, in Rüpke (ed.), 58. For related conceptual and interpretive difficulties offered by Roman
deities and their cults, see Rüpke, in Rüpke (ed.) 1–7.
21. Rüpke, in Rüpke (ed.), 4–5.
22. CIL 13.581, quotation from Van Andringa, in Rüpke (ed.), 91.
23. Beard et al., 6–7; those titled in capital letters on Roman calendars were probably more important
and ancient than those titled in small letters: it is not known how ancient they were, nor to whom
they were important. Their attribution to Numa or Romulus is doubtful. The oldest surviving religious
calendars date to the late Republic; the most detailed are Augustan and later. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 6:
a selection of festivals is given in Vol. 2, 3.1–3. For a list of Fasti, with bibliography and sources,
see Degrassi, Inscriptiones Italiae, Vol. XIII – Fasti et elogia, fasc. II – Fasti anni Numani et Iuliani,
Rome, 1963. See also Scullard, 1981.
24. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 134–5, 64–67: citing Cicero.
25. Rüpke, in Rüpke (ed.), 4.
26. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 47–49, 296.
27. Beard et al., Religions of Rome, p. 262.
28. Beard et al., Vol. 2, 6.4a; Vol. 1, 174–6 & 207–8.
29. Carole E. Newlands, Playing with Time: Ovid and the Fasti (Cornell University Press, 1995),
passim; "Transgressive Acts: Ovid's Treatment of the Ides of March", Classical Philology 91.4
(1996) 320-338.
30. See the Calendar of Filocalus (AD 354), cited in Beard et al., Vol. 1, 250, and that of Polemius
Silvius. See also early and later Christian festivals in Beard et al., Vol. 1, 378 – 80, 382–3.
31. Clarke, 1, citing Frank E. Brown, Roman Architecture, (New York) 1961, 9.
32. Beard, et al., Vol. 1, 321 – 3
33. "The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome", v. 1, p. 167
34. Pliny, Natural History 28.10.
35. Halm, in Rüpke (ed.), 235–236 et passim. The Roman belief in the power of the word may be
reflected also in the importance of persuasive speech, formally oratory, in political life and the law
courts.
36. Halm, in Rüpke (ed.), 241–2.
37. Hahn, in Rüpke (ed.), 239–45.
38. Livy, 41.16.1.
39. Hahn, in Rüpke (ed.), 235–6.
40. Orr, 23.
41. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 28, 27.
42. Lott, 31: Dionysius of Halicarnassus claims the Compitalia contribution of honey-cakes as a Servian
institution.
43. Ovid, Fasti, 2.500–539. See also Thaniel, G., Lemures and Larvae, The American Journal of
Philology, 94.2, (1973) 182–187: the offering of black beans is distinctively chthonic. Beans were
considered seeds of life. Lemures may have been the restless dead who had not passed into the
underworld, and still craved the life they had lost. Beans were a ritual pollution for Jupiter's
priesthood, possibly because his offerings must be emasculated and thus devoid of generative
power.
44. Halm, in Rüpke (ed.), 239.
45. Scheid, in Rüpke (ed.), 263–271.
46. Though the household Lares do just that, and at least some Romans understood them to be
ancestral spirits. Sacrifices to the spirits of deceased mortals are discussed below in Funerals and
the afterlife.
47. Jörg Rüpke, Religion of the Romans (Polity Press, 2007, originally published in German 2001), p.
81 online. (https://books.google.com/books?id=fcsynr0fQIoC&pg=PA81&dq=piaculum&cd=3#v=one
page&q=piaculum&f=false)
48. William Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People (London, 1922), p. 191.
49. Robert E.A. Palmer, "The Deconstruction of Mommsen on Festus 462/464 L, or the Hazards of
Interpretation", in Imperium sine fine: T. Robert S. Broughton and the Roman Republic (Franz
Steiner, 1996), p. 99, note 129 online (https://books.google.com/books?id=wEtE8c1jGY4C&pg=PA9
9&dq=piaculum&cd=6#v=onepage&q=piaculum&f=false); Roger D. Woodard, Indo-European
Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult (University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 122 online. (https://boo
ks.google.com/books?id=EB4fB0inNYEC&pg=PA122&dq=piaculum&lr=&cd=16#v=onepage&q=pia
culum&f=false) The Augustan historian Livy (8.9.1–11) says P. Decius Mus is "like" a piaculum when
he makes his vow to sacrifice himself in battle (devotio).
50. Hahn, in Rüpke (ed.), 238.
51. Beard et al., Vol 1, 32-36.
52. Gradel, 21: but this need not imply sacrifice as a mutual contract, breached in this instance.
Evidently the gods had the greater power and freedom of choice in the matter. See Beard et al., 34:
"The gods would accept as sufficient exactly what they were offered – no more, no less." Human
error in the previous annual vows and sacrifice remains a possibility.
53. Gradel, 78, 93
54. Cicero, De divinatione 2.12.29. According to Pliny (Natural History 11.186), before 274 BC the heart
was not included among the exta.
55. Robert Schilling, "The Roman Religion", in Historia Religionum: Religions of the Past (Brill, 1969),
vol. 1, pp. 471–472, and "Roman Sacrifice", Roman and European Mythologies (University of
Chicago Press, 1992), p. 79; John Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Religion (Indiana University
Press, 2003, originally published in French 1998), p. 84.
56. Livy 22.55-57
57. Livy, 22.57.4; Plutarch, Roman Questions, 83 & Marcellus, 3. For further context and interpretive
difficulties, see Beard et al., Vol. 1, 81: the live burial superficially resembles the punishment of
Vestals who broke their vows. A living entombment assuages the blood-guilt of the living: the guilty
are consigned to earth deities. But the Vestals are entombed outside the city limits, not its centre;
no sacrificial victims are burned in either case, and the Gauls and Greeks appear to be personally
guiltless.
58. Welch, 18-19: citing Livy, summary 16.

59. For example, Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 1.379–398; see Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of
Death in Ancient Rome (Routledge, 1998, 2001), p. 59.
60. The sacrifice was demanded by an oracle during the reign of the last king, the Etruscan Tarquinius
Superbus. See Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1.7 & Lilly Ross Taylor, "The Mother of the Lares", American
Journal of Archaeology, 29.3, (July–September 1925), pp 299–313.
61. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 233–4, 385.
62. Gradel, 36-8: the paterfamilias held – in theory at least, and through ancient right – powers of life
and death over every member of his extended familia, including children, slaves and freedmen. In
practice, the extreme form of this right was seldom exercised, and was eventually limited by law.
63. See also Severy, 9-10 for interpretation of the social, economic and religious role of the
paterfamilias within the immediate and extended family and the broader community.
64. Beard et al.et al., vol 1, 67-8.
65. Brent, 62-3.
66. Beard et al., 1997, 2-3, citing Vergil, Aeneid, 8,306-58.
67. Gradel, 9-15: citing legal definitions from Festus (epitome of Verrius Flaccus) "De verborum
significatu" p.284 L: in Wissowa, 1912, 398ff: and Geiger, 1914): see also Beard et al., Vol. 1, 251.
68. Belayche, (verbatim) in Rüpke (ed.), 279.
69. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 217.
70. Gradel, 3, 15.
71. Gradel, 9-15: citing legal definitions from Festus (epitome of Verrius Flaccus) "De verborum
significatu" p.284 L: in Wissowa, 1912, 398ff: and Geiger, 1914): see also Beard et al., Vol. 1, 251.
72. Smith, in Rüpke (ed.), 39–40.
73. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 18–34, 54–61: "[the underlying purpose being that] whoever bore the title rex
should never again be in a position to threaten the city with tyranny." See also Religion and politics
in this article.
74. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 104–8: there can be no doubt that politicians attempted to manipulate religious
law and priesthoods for gain; but were compelled to do so lawfully, and often failed.
75. Horster, in Rüpke (ed.), 331–2.
76. See Gradel, 9-15.
77. Gradel, 21.
78. Gary Forsythe, A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War (University
of California Press, 2005, 2006), p. 141.
79. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 52–53.
80. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 51–54, 70–71, 297. For comparison of Vestal constraints to those of Jupiter's
flamen, see Smith, in Rüpke (ed.), 39–40
81. Forsythe, A Critical History of Early Rome, p. 141.
82. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 50–53.
83. Ariadne Staples, From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion
(Routledge, 1998), pp. 154–155.
84. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 193-4.
85. Smith, in Rüpke (ed.), 36.
86. Beard et al., Vol 1, 12-20.
87. Brent, 17-20: citing Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 2.4.
88. Brent, 21-25.
89. Beard et al., Vol 1, 12-20. See also Scheid, in Rüpke (ed.), 266.
90. Horster, in Rüpke (ed.) 336–7.
91. Cicero finds all forms of divination false, except those used in State rituals; most Romans were less
skeptical. See Rosenberger, in Rüpke (ed.), 300, and Orlin, in Rüpke (ed.), 67.
92. Caesar used his ius augurium to declare obnuntiato to Cicero's disadvantage: and vice versa.
93. Orlin, in Rüpke (ed.), 65–66.
94. Orlin, in Rüpke (ed.), 60.

95. Rosenberger, in Rüpke (ed.), 297.
96. Rosenberger, in Rüpke (ed.), 295–8: the task fell to the haruspex, who set the child to drown in the
sea. The survival of such a child for four years after its birth would have between regarded as
extreme dereliction of religious duty.
97. Livy, 27.37.5–15; the hymn was composed by the poet Livius Andronicus. Cited by Halm, in Rüpke
(ed.) 244. For remainder, see Rosenberger, in Rüpke (ed.), 297.
98. See Livy, 22.1 ff: The expiatory burial of living human victims in the Forum Boarium followed
Rome's defeat at Cannae in the same wars. In Livy's account, Rome's victory follows its discharge
of religious duties to the gods.
99. For Livy's use of prodigies and portents as markers of Roman impiety and military failure, see
Feeney, in Rüpke (ed.), 138–9. For prodigies in the context of political decision-making, see
Rosenberger, in Rüpke (ed.), 295–8.
100. Rosenberger, in Rüpke (ed.), 293.
101. Hertz, in Rüpke (ed.), 315.
102. Beard et al., Vol. 1,3; 161-163
103. Beard et al., Vol. 1,3; 247
104. Roberts, J. M. (John Morris) (1993). History of the world. New York: Oxford University Press.
ISBN 0-19-521043-3. OCLC 28378422 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/28378422).
105. Beard et al., Vol. 1,2; 96-97
106. Gordon, in Rüpke (ed.), 390
108. Beard et al., Vol. 1,3; 161-163
109. Smith, in Rüpke (ed.), 35–6: Rome's Latin neighbours significantly influenced the development of its
domestic and funerary architecture.
110. Smith, in Rüpke (ed.), 35–6.
111. Scheid, in Rüpke (ed.), 267, 270–71.
112. From a Romano-Athenian veteran's tomb; Cagnat, René, Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas
pertinentes. Paris 1906–27, 3.917.
113. Haensch, in Rüpke, (ed.) 186–7.
114. This recommended Christian commemorative rites on the 3rd, 9th & 30th days after death.
115. Saltzman, in Rüpke, (ed.), 114–116.
117. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 44, 59–60, 143.
118. Cornell, T., in Walbank et al., 299, citing Livy 21.8-9 and 22.3-6. Livy describes this as evocatio (a
"calling forth") initiated by Roman soldiers who snatched the goddess's sacrificial portion during her
Veiian rites; the Veiian priest had announced that whoever possessed the sacred entrails would win
the coming battle. Preview via googlebooks [2] (https://books.google.com/books?id=3qXuay2SEtIC
&pg=PA299&lpg=PA299&dq=evocatio+Livy&source=bl&ots=Tw18ellncZ&sig=CCmiclyD6vybeYE6B
n-HlHayjuE&hl=en&ei=VU_pS7C3EJGjsQbymMTjCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8
&ved=0CDEQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=evocatio%20Livy&f=false)
119. Moede, in Rüpke (ed.), 171, & Beard et al., Vol. 1, 326–7.
120. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 324–6.
121. Brent, 268-9.
122. Books.Google.co.uk (https://books.google.com/books?id=r2hBqYtZWNEC&pg=RA1-PA249&lpg=R
A1-PA249&dq=Hadrian+dominus+noster&source=bl&ots=iGyQvK9dmg&sig=vaZeVEzQcQBaBNI5
0TAs25R5b1M&hl=en&ei=-5B8Sp-3HpzLjAedq6SIBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#
v=onepage&q=&f=false), Le Bohec, 249: limited preview available via Google Books
123. Books.Google.co.uk (https://books.google.com/books?id=VqM9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82&d
q=%22mother+of+the+camp%22+severus&source=bl&ots=NhNo0AFEQu&sig=0MDpTCprN9nfkIID
a8eFLwUCbhM&hl=en&ei=Gah8Sp_IO9SG-QbovLVb&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2
#v=onepage&q=%22mother%20of%20the%20camp%22%20severus&f=false), Dixon, 78: limited
preview available from Google Books
124. Livy, 5.21.3., & 8.9.8; Beard et al., Vol 1, 35–36; Hertz, in Rüpke (ed.), 312; Halm, in Rüpke (ed.),
239.
125. Rosenberger, in Rüpke (ed.), 3OO, citing Suetonius, Tiberius, 2.2.
126. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 297.
127. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 296–7. This exclusion prompted prurient speculation on the part of men, and a
scandalous, impious intrusion by Publius Clodius Pulcher.
128. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 297. Ibid 217, citing the obituary of a woman whose virtues included "religio
without superstitio" (ILS 8393.30-31 of "Turia").
129. Rüpke, in Rüpke (ed.), 5.
130. See Beard et al., Vol. 1, 217.
131. Clifford Ando, The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire (University of California
Press, 2008), p. 13.
132. Beard et al., 230–31.
133. Phillips, in Rüpke (ed.), 14.
134. Ogden, in Flint et al., 83: citing Pliny, Natural History, 28.17–18; Seneca, Natural Questions, 4.7.2.
135. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 231–233, citing Tacitus, Histories, 1.22. Tacitus' prediction was accurate: in the
late 3rd century, Diocletian issued a general ban on astrology.
136. Apuleius, Apologia, 26.6.
137. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 30.1–18; see also Beard et al., Vol. 1, 219.
138. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 217–219 & 224, citing Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, I.2, IV.18, V.12,
VII.11,20,33-4,39, VIII.5,7,19,30.
139. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 219–20, citing Lucan, Pharsalia, VI.413–830.
140. Scheid, in Rüpke (ed.), 263.
141. Haensch, in Rüpke (ed.), 186: about 200 of these British defixiones are from Sulla-Minerva's spring
in urban Bath and the remainder from a shrine to a Celtic deity (Nodens), at rural Uley. For
defixiones as direct appeals to divine justice, see Belayche, in Rüpke (ed.), 286. For the
widespread persistence of curse-tablet rituals, see Ogden, in Flint et al., 3–5.
142. During the Augustan era, the city of Rome probably housed around a million people, including an
unknown number of provincials: by Mouritsen's estimate, around 200,000 Roman citizens were
eligible to vote in Rome itself during the late Republican era but during major elections, the influx of
rural voters and the bottleneck of the city's ancient electoral apparatus meant that perhaps 12% of
eligible citizens actually voted. This nevertheless represents a substantial increase from the
estimated 1% adult male enfranchisement rights of 145 BC. At any time, the overwhelming majority
of citizens – meaning the plebs – had minimal direct involvement in central government. See Henrik
Mouritsen, Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 32ff.
144. Orlin, in Rüpke (ed.), –– 60.
145. Belayche, in Rüpke (ed.), 283: citing Plutarch, Camillus, 42. Belayche describes this as a votive
offering (uotum), which "offered a supernatural legitimacy for decisions or actions... [and] entailed
being assisted and reassured, through the forwarding of hopes or dis- appointments, anger or
contentment, to superior powers." See also Versnel, Henrik S., (ed.), "Religious mentality in ancient
prayer," in Versnel, Henrik S., Faith, Hope and Worship: Aspects of Religious Mentality in the
Ancient World, Leyden, 1981, pp 1–64.
146. The collegia were opened to plebs by the Lex Ogulnia of 300 BC.
147. "The change that comes about at the end of the republic and solidifies under Augustus is not
political, but cultural". Galinsky, in Rüpke (ed.), 72: citing Habinek, T., and Schiesaro, A., (eds.) The
Roman Cultural Revolution. Princeton, New Jersey, 1997 & Wallace-Hadrill, A., "Mutatas formas:
the Augustan transformation of Roman knowledge", in: Galinsky, K., (ed.) The Cambridge
Companion to the Age of Augustus, Cambridge, 2005, pp 55–84: contra Syme, R., The Roman
Revolution, 1939.
148. Smith, in Rüpke (ed.), 42.
149. Galinsky, in Rüpke (ed.), 72: "...the change that comes about at the end of the republic and
solidifies under Augustus is not political, but cultural. Most of the members of the priestly colleges in
Augustus’ time continued to be aristocrats, but the real power and control over religion and the
calendar now flowed from professional experts, such as the polymath Varro, because they had the
power of knowledge.
150. Two centuries later, when Decius and Diocletian required universal sacrifice to Roman gods as a
test of loyalty, any traditional gods served the purpose: loyal compliance with Imperial dictat made
them Roman.
151. Scipio did not claim personal connections with Jupiter; but he did not deny rumours to that effect.
Contrary to usual practice, his imago (funeral mask) was stored in the Temple of Jupiter.
153. Otherwise, electoral bribery (ambitus): see Cicero, Letters to friends, 2.3: see also Beard et al., Vol.
1, 65–67.
155. "From Etruria the Romans derived the idea of housing a deity in a temple and of providing him with
a cult statue. ... The most famous... dedicated in the first year of the Republic to the Etruscan triad,
Tinia, Uni and Minerva. Of these deities, however, two were Italian, Juno and Minerva, while Tinia
was identified with Jupiter." Howard Hayes Scullard, (2003), A History of the Roman World, 753 to
146 BC, page 397. Routledge
156. "Her cult at Aricia was first attested in Latin literature by Cato the Elder, in a surviving quote by the
late grammarian Priscian. Supposed Greek origins for the Aricia cult are strictly a literary topos."
Arthur E. Gordon, "On the Origin of Diana", Transactions and Proceedings of the American
Philological Association 63 (1932, pp. 177-192) page 178 note, and page 181.
157. Varro, Ling. Lat. v. 43
158. Pomoerium (https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Pomoeriu
m.html), A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, page 930-1. London, 1875.
159. Ara Maxima Herculis (https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/Italy/Lazio/
Roma/Rome/_Texts/PLATOP*/Ara_Maxima_Herculis.html), A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient
Rome, page 253-4. Oxford University Press, 1929.
160. "Traditionally in 499, the cult of Castor and Pollux was introduced from Tusculum and temple was
erected in the Forum." Howard Hayes Scullard, (2003), A History of the Roman World, 753 to 146
BC, page 398. Routledge
161. Livy, 23.31.
162. Ver Sacrum (https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Ver_Sacru
m.html), A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, page 1189, London, 1875.
163. Dionysius and the Bacchanalia, 186 B.C. (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/romrelig2.html#Li
vy2) from Livy: History of Rome.
164. Orlin, in Rüpke, (ed.), 65
165. Undheim, Sissel (2015). "Review of Religion in Republican Rome: Rationalization and Ritual
Change. (Empire and After), Jörg Rüpke" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/24644883). Numen. 62 (4):
481–483. doi:10.1163/15685276-12341385 (https://doi.org/10.1163%2F15685276-12341385).
ISSN 0029-5973 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0029-5973). JSTOR 24644883 (https://www.jstor.or
g/stable/24644883).
166. Galinsky, in Rüpke (ed.), 76. See also Res Gestae.
167. McLaughlin, Raoul (2010). Rome and the distant East : trade routes to the ancient lands of Arabia,
India and China. London: Continuum. ISBN 978-1-4411-6223-6. OCLC 667274301 (https://www.wo
rldcat.org/oclc/667274301).
168. Pliny the Younger, Epistles, 10.50.
169. As at Narbonne and Salona. See Andringa, in Rüpke (ed.), 89.
170. Van Andringa, in Rüpke (ed.), 89.
171. Beard et al. 1998
172. Van Andringa, in Rüpke (ed.), 88.
173. Haensch, in Rüpke (ed.), 180–3.
174. Kaufmann-Heinimann, in Rüpke (ed.), 200.
175. Haensch, in Rüpke (ed.), 184.

176. Gradel, 32-52.
177. Beard, 272-5.
178. Fishwick, Vol 3, part 1, 3: citing Cassius Dio, 51, 20, 6-7
179. Fishwick, Vol 1, book 1, 77 & 126-30.
180. Fishwick, Vol 1, book 1, 97-149.
182. Gradel, 263–8, 199.
183. Rees, 46–56, 73–4.
184. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 266–7, 270.
185. Smallwood, 2-3, 4-6: the presence of practicing Jews in Rome is attested "at least a century" before
63 BC. Smallwood describes the preamble to Judaea's clientage as the Hellenising of ruling Jewish
dynasties, their claims to kingly messianism and their popular, traditionalist rejection in the
Maccabaean revolt. In Rome, the more "characteristically Jewish" beliefs and customs were
subjects of scorn and mockery.Books.Google.co.uk (https://books.google.com/books?id=jSYbpitEjg
gC&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=Jews+smallwood+actium+Parthia&source=bl&ots=VWsQGlsrv8&sig=1
P-nIzMEdJTf6R0WrQTaT9aMrKo&hl=en&ei=VfooSsKeIZSDjAfBwpn3Cg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct
=result&resnum=5) Ibid, 120-143 for early Roman responses to Judaistic practice; but see also
Tessa Rajack, "Was there a Roman Charter for the Jews?" Journal of Roman Studies, 74, (1984)
107-23; no "Roman charter" for Judaism should be inferred from local, ad hoc attempts to suppress
anti-Jewish acts (as in Josephus' account); Judaism as religio licita is only found later, in Tertullian.
Cicero, pro Flacco, 66, refers to Judaism as superstitio.
186. Smallwood, 2-3, 4-6: superstitio in Cicero, pro Flacco, 66, but legislation by Julius Caesar
recognised the synagogues in Rome as legitimate collegia and Augustus maintained their status.
Josephus infers an early "charter" offering protection to Jews, but Tessa Rajack, "Was there a
Roman Charter for the Jews?" Journal of Roman Studies, 74, (1984) 107-23, finds evidence only
for Rome's official suppression of anti-Jewish activities. Religio licita is first found much later than
this, in Tertullian.
187. Beard et al., vol. 1, 225: citing Pliny the Younger, Letters, 10.96.8, & Beard et al., Vol. 2, 11.11a:
citing Tacitus, Annals, 15.44.5.
188. Leppin, in Rüpke (ed.), 98.
189. Potter, 241-3: see 242 for Decian "libellus" (certificate) of oath and sacrifice on papyrus, dated to
250 AD.
190. Beard et al., Vol. 1, 241.
191. Roman oaths of loyalty were traditionally collective; the Decian oath has been interpreted as a
design to root out individual subversives and suppress their cults: see Leppin, in Rüpke, (ed.), 100.
192. Books.Google.co.uk (https://books.google.com/books?id=8EgCRHxfouQC&pg=PA55&lpg=PA55&d
q=Diocletian+Imperial+cult&source=bl&ots=7_IdIU_pqN&sig=UDSeRqdJLL5vX2gbIktCTtx58Bc&hl
=en&ei=SLN8SqW5EonE-QaVm-1J&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6#v=onepage&q=Di
ocletian%20Imperial%20cult&f=false), Rees, 60. Limited preview available at Google Books
193. Bowman et al., 622-33. Books.Google.co.uk (https://books.google.com/books?id=MNSyT_PuYVMC
&pg=PA627&lpg=PA627&dq=Jews+Decius+exemption&source=bl&ots=uJxdi-Im8_&sig=ek6NFxck
9Orn7SnlYTc62UfwL64&hl=en&ei=w8hxSqjNJ5bLjAf-0LWmDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&re
snum=1), Limited preview available at Google Books
194. Rees, 60.
195. Beard et al., 241.
196. See Leppin, in Rüpke (ed.), 98–99; citing Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 6.19.15; 21.3–4; 36.3
197. Leppin, in Rüpke (ed.), 99; citing Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, 7.29–30: Paul actually remained
in office until "Aurelian's victory over Palmyra in 272, when he was forced to leave the 'building of
the church'... Political conflicts, local rivalry, and theological debates converged in this quarrel."
198. Cascio, in Bowman et al. (eds), 171.
199. Lactantius, II.6.10.1-4. A date of 302 is regarded as likely. Eusebius also says the persecutions of
Christians began in the army; see Eusebius, II.8.1.8.
200. Leppin, in Rüpke (ed.), 103: citing Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, 14.2; Eusebius, Historia
ecclesiastica, 8.6.6.
201. Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 8.2.5, 8.6.10.
202. Leppin, in Rüpke (ed.), 103: citing Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, 34 & 13 &; Eusebius,
Historia ecclesiastica 8.17.3–10 & 8.2.3–4.
203. Kelly, Christopher (2006). The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP.
204. Constantine's permission for a new cult temple to himself and his family in Umbria is extant: the
terms are vague – cult "should not be polluted by the deception of any contagious superstition". See
Momigliano, 104.
205. Morgan, Julian (2003). Constantine Ruler of Christian Rome (https://archive.org/details/constantiner
uler00morg). New York: Rosen Central. ISBN 9780823935925.
206. "Roman Emperor Constantine I" (http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/39053452). Columbia
Electronic Encyclopedia. Retrieved 3 February 2013.
207. Bunson, Matthew (2002). Encyclopedia of the Roman Empire (https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780
816045624) (revised ed.). Facts on File. ISBN 9780816045624.
208. Momigliano, 104.
209. See Peter Brown, in Bowersock et al., Late antiquity: a guide to the postclassical world, Harvard
University Press, (1999), for "pagan" as a mark of socio-religious inferiority in Latin Christian
polemic: [3] (https://books.google.com/books?id=c788wWR_bLwC&pg=PA625&dq=pagus+paganu
s&lr=&as_drrb_is=q&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=&num=100&as_br
r=3&as_pt=ALLTYPES)
210. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman empire. A.D.100-400. Yale University Press. p. 51
211. Paul Stephenson, Constantine: Unconquered emperor, Christian victor (2009) p. 5
212. Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest
Religion (Harper Collins 2011) pp. 169-182
213. A summary of relevant legislation is available online at the Wisconsin Lutheran College website –
FourthCentury.com (http://www.fourthcentury.com/index.php/imperial-laws-chart) (accessed 30
August 2009)
214. See Julian's Against the Galilaeans (trans. Wright, from Cyril of Alexandria's later refutation, Contra
Julianum) at Tertullian.org (http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/julian_apostate_galileans_1_text.htm)
(accessed 30 August 2009). Julian admired the work of the Platonist (or neo-Platonist) Iamblichus.
215. Stefan Heid, "The Romanness of Roman Christianity", in A Companion to Roman Religion
(Blackwell, 2007), pp. 406–426; on vocabulary in particular, Robert Schilling, "The Decline and
Survival of Roman Religion", Roman and European Mythologies (University of Chicago Press,
1992, from the French edition of 1981), p. 110.
216. The correspondence is available online at Internet Medieval Sourcebook: Letter of St. Ambrose,
trans. H. De Romestin, 1896., Fordham.edu (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/ambrose-sym.h
tml) (accessed 29 August 2009)
217. Books.Google.co.uk (https://books.google.com/books?id=JNIOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA66&lpg=PA66&d
q=pacatus+theodosius&source=bl&ots=cS8Cv0vBOb&sig=z2ML87tEYOAa8iZPAJ5iWLX-LQI&hl=e
n&ei=nyaYSunGKKCQjAfHmbWzBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=p
acatus%20theodosius&f=false), Williams & Friell, 65-67. Limited preview at googlebooks
218. Nixon & Rodgers, 437-48: Full text of Latinus Pacata Drepanius, Panegyric of Theodosius (389)
with commentary and context.
General and cited sources

Beard, M., North, J., Price, S., Religions of Rome, Volume I, illustrated, reprint, Cambridge
University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-31682-0
Beard, M., North, J., Price, S., Religions of Rome, Volume II, illustrated, reprint, Cambridge
University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-45646-0
Beard, M., The Roman Triumph, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass., and London, England, 2007. ISBN 978-0-674-02613-1
Clarke, John R., The Houses of Roman Italy, 100 BC-AD 250. Ritual, Space and Decoration,
illustrated, University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton, 1992. ISBN 978-0-520-08429-
2
Cornell, T., The beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars
(c.1000–264 BC), Routledge, 1995. ISBN 978-0-415-01596-7
Feeney, Denis. Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs. New York:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998.
Fishwick, Duncan. The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western
Provinces of the Roman Empire, volume 1, Brill Publishers, 1991. ISBN 90-04-07179-2
Fishwick, Duncan. The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western
Provinces of the Roman Empire, volume 3, Brill Publishers, 2002. ISBN 90-04-12536-1
Flint, Valerie I. J., et al., Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and
Rome, Vol. 2, Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 1998. ISBN 978-0-485-89002-0
Fox, R. L., Pagans and Christians
Lott, John. B., The Neighborhoods of Augustan Rome, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2004. ISBN 0-521-82827-9
MacMullen, R., Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, Yale University Press,
1997. ISBN 0-300-08077-8
MacMullen, R., Paganism in the Roman Empire, Yale University Press, 1984.
Momigliano, Arnaldo, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, reprint, Wesleyan University Press, 1987.
ISBN 0-8195-6218-1
North, J. A. Roman Religion. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000.
Orr, D. G., Roman domestic religion: the evidence of the household shrines, Aufstieg und
Niedergang der römischen Welt, II, 16, 2, Berlin, 1978, 1557‑91.
Rees, Roger. Diocletian and the Tetrarchy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Revell, L., "Religion and Ritual in the Western Provinces", Greece and Rome, volume 54, number 2,
October 2007.
Rüpke, Jörg, ed. A Companion to Roman Religion. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Scheid, John. An Introduction to Roman Religion. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Bloomington: Indiana
Univ. Press, 2003.
Spaeth, Barbette Stanley. The Roman Goddess Ceres. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1996.
Takács, Sarolta A. 2008. Vestal Virgins, Sibyls, and Matrons: Women in Roman Religion. Austin:
Univ. of Texas Press.
External links
Media related to Ancient Roman religion at Wikimedia Commons
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26/12/22, 14:01 Religion in ancient Rome - Wikipedia

Religion in ancient Rome consisted of varying imperial

The Romans thought of themselves as highly religious, and

As the Romans extended their dominance throughout the Mediterranean

By the height of the Empire,

Founding myths and divine destiny

The Roman mythological tradition is particularly

According to mythology, Rome had a semi-divine

The myth of a Trojan founding with Greek influence was reconciled

Romulus was credited with several religious institutions. He

Each of Rome's legendary or semi-legendary kings was associated

Roman historians[14] regarded the essentials of Republican religion

The political, cultural and religious coherence of an emergent

The impressive, costly,

Holidays and festivals

Other public festivals were not required by the calendar,

Temples and shrines

The Latin word templum originally referred not to the temple

Prayers, vows, and oaths

In Latin, the word sacrificium means the performance of an

Offerings to household deities were part of daily life. Lares

Chthonic gods such as Dis pater, the di inferi ("gods

A sacrifice might be made in thanksgiving or as an expiation of a sacrilege or potential sacrilege

Domestic and private cult

The mos maiorum established the dynastic authority and

Genius was the essential spirit and generative power – depicted as a

Religio and the state

Religious law centered on the ritualised system of honours and sacrifice

Public priesthoods and religious law

Rome had no separate priestly caste or class. The

Omens and prodigies

Funerals and the afterlife

Religion and the military

Roman commanders offered vows to be fulfilled after success in battle or

From the earliest Imperial era, citizen legionaries

The efforts of military commanders to channel the divine will were on

Women and religion (Carnuntum, 3rd century)

Superstitio and magic

hours of darkness. Burial grounds and isolated crossroads were

Archaeology confirms the widespread use of binding spells

History of Roman religion

Religion and politics

Rome's government, politics and religion were dominated by an

Rome's diplomatic agreement with its neighbours of Latium

Later Republic to Principate

The introduction of new or equivalent deities coincided with Rome's

In 206 BC, during the Punic crisis, the Sibylline books

The priesthoods of most

In the late Republic, the Marian reforms lowered an existing

Sissel Undheim has argued that, with their Religions of Rome

Under the rule of Augustus, there existed a deliberate campaign to

In the early Imperial era, the princeps (lit. "first" or "foremost"

Jews and Roman religion

For at least a century before the establishment of the Augustan

Christianity in the Roman Empire

Roman investigations into early Christianity found it an

After the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, Emperor Nero

Valerian singled out Christianity as a particularly self-

In 295, Maximilian of Tebessa refused military service;

Emperor Constantine and Christianity

The conversion of Constantine I ended the Christian persecutions.

Transition to Christian hegemony

Christianity and traditional Roman religion proved incompatible.