If we think this, though, we will be mistaken. Religion was not merely present in the Roman world, not merely important; it was essential, and indeed inseparable from the various forms of flourishing we have been appreciating.
Thus, Polybius, the Greek historian who as a youth had been taken as a captive to Rome, and who later accompanied the distinguished military commander Scipio Aemilianius in the campaign that resulted in the destruction of Carthage, wrote a history addressed to a fundamental and fascinating question: How had Rome risen in such a relatively short time from a sleepy provincial town to become the colossal conqueror and master of the Western world? Polybius’s history pondered the question at length, exploring various dimensions of Rome’s rise to dominance. In the course of these reflections, he called attention to one crucial but (to us) surprising factor: the Romans were religiously superior to their neighbors. Thus, “the sphere in which the Roman commonwealth seems to me to show its superiority most decisively is in that of religious belief.”47
Polybius’s opinion was hardly idiosyncratic. When the Romans received an envoy from the Greek city of Teos, they sent an introductory message declaring that “we [Romans] have totally and consistently held reverence toward the gods as of the highest importance and the truth of this is proved by the favour we have received from them in return. We are also quite sure that our great respect for the divine has been evident to everyone.”48 In a similar vein, Cicero placed in the mouth of a central character in one of his dialogues the following assessment: “If we seek to compare our Roman ways with those of foreigners, we shall find that in other respects we merely match them or even fall below them, but that in religion, that is, in the worship of the gods, we are much superior.”49
The historian J. A. North thus observes that “both the Romans themselves and the Greeks who came to observe them in the later Republican period regarded the Romans as the most religious people in the world.”50
The Religion of the City
This interpretation may seem surprising or incongruous to modern observers, because in most respects (as the foregoing description reflects) the Romans come across as supremely, exquisitely worldly. But are “religious” and “worldly” necessarily incompatible? We might suppose they are—almost by definition. But are we imposing a more modern and inapt conception of “religion” on the Romans? As we will see, far from being contraries, “religious” and “worldly” were in the ancient world nicely integrated and mutually reinforcing. And the revolution by which these terms came to be divorced and even antagonistic to each other—a revolution effected, primarily, by Christianity—has been and continues to be a powerful (and divisive, and much-resented) feature of our modern world.
So we need to take a closer look at Roman religion and its integral connection to the city. In fact, Rome and Roman religion were inseparably bound together from the very beginning, at least in the official accounts. Thus, in the national epic by the poet Virgil, Rome’s legendary ancestor Aeneas movingly recounts the events of the horrific night in which his native city of Troy was destroyed by Ulysses’s wily Greeks, smuggled into the city in the infamous Trojan horse. Aeneas tells how, in desperate fury, he recklessly flung himself against the invaders and yearned for vengeance on Helen, the exquisite instigator of the tragedy, but he was reproved by his divine mother, Venus. “Think,” she commanded. “It’s not that beauty, Helen, you should hate, / not even Paris, the man that you should blame, no. / It’s the gods, the ruthless gods who are tearing down the wealth of Troy.”51
And why had the gods dealt so harshly with his city? Homer had conjectured that the gods brought about the fall of Troy mostly for poetic purposes, “weaving ruin there / so it should make a song for men to come!”52 Virgil, by contrast, explained that the gods had a loftier, less purely lyrical aim in view. Thus, when Aeneas desperately rushes back into the burning city in search of his wife Creusa, who had fallen behind in the family’s frantic flight, he is instead greeted only by Creusa’s ghost, who offers the consolation that “it’s not without / the will of the gods these things have come to pass”; but the specter goes on to explain that the gods’ design is for Aeneas to cross the seas and found a new kingdom in a distant land “where Lydian Tiber / flows with its smooth march through rich and loamy fields, / a land of hardy people.”53
In short, the gods had decreed that Troy must fall so that Rome might rise. Similarly, Rome grew from a humble beleaguered town to a world empire with the help of the gods, which was a reward for the Romans’ extraordinary piety. According to the historian Livy, writing in the Augustan period, one of Romulus’s first acts, after founding the city and defeating a consortium of enemies, was to erect a temple to Jupiter.54 Later, faced with imminent destruction by the Sabines (whose daughters the Romans had abducted), Romulus desperately appealed to Jupiter again, once again promising a temple, and his troops promptly rallied, “obey[ing] what they believed to be the voice from heaven.”55
Upon Romulus’s somewhat mysterious death, the story came to be that he had been carried up to heaven as a deity (although Livy notes “a few dissentients who secretly maintained that the king had been torn to pieces by the senators”).56 His regal successor, Numa Pompilius, selected with the approval of the augur, was renowned for having established and regularized the religious rites and priesthoods.57 Among the subsequent kings, as Livy retells the stories, some were more and others less pious; overall, though, the role of the gods in Rome’s rise was pervasive, and their favor persisted in the republican period. But in the century of political chaos and violence that brought the republic to an end, the rites and temples may have been neglected, and many attributed Rome’s troubles to such neglect.58 Upon his accession to power, therefore, one of Augustus’s political priorities was to restore the temples, to erect new ones, and to reinvigorate the worship of the gods.59
Of the gods, in the plural. The matter will turn out to be more complex, but at least on its face Roman religion sponsored hundreds and even thousands of gods. A character in a Ciceronian dialogue complains that “the number of gods is beyond counting.”60 So there were the Olympian deities—aegis-bearing Zeus, Hermes the Wayfinder, clubfooted Hephaistos, Poseidon the Earthshaker, and company—endowed now with Latin names: Jupiter, Mercury, Vulcan, Neptune, and so forth. There were numerous exotic gods imported from foreign lands like Egypt, Syria, and Persia; Isis, Serapis, and Cybele (the Mater Magna) were especially popular. Then there were the nature gods: sun, moon, stars, the various gods of rivers, woods, and fields. Also the household or family gods—the lares and penates. And of course, the divine emperors: except for a few who declined the honor (like Tiberius) or whose wickedness was especially egregious (like Nero), emperors were typically, upon their deaths, elevated to divine status and favored with cults and shrines.61 Expiring, the emperor Vespasian sighed: “Oh dear. I think I’m becoming a god.”62
In addition, there was a whole host of deities personifying what would seem to be human qualities (Felicity, Faith, Hope) or contingencies of life—Ops (abundance), Salus (physical and moral welfare), Fortuna. Or, as a Ciceronian dialogue puts it, mere “concepts” (Virtue, Honor, Safety).63 Writing in the early fifth century, as Christianity was displacing overt paganism, Augustine would mockingly report that it took a whole field crew of gods just to raise an ear of corn—one (Proserpine) to germinate the seed, another (Seia) to tend the seed while under the ground, another (Segetia) to nurture the stalk once sprouted, still another (Tutilina) to keep the stalk safe, with Nodotus to protect the plant’s stems and Voluntina, Patelana, Hostilina, Flora, Lacturnus, Matuta, and Runcina to superintend different aspects and phases of the ripening ear of corn.64
This sprawling pantheon provided poets with the characters and materials to create the assortment of captivating and fantastic stories that students of literature today continue to study, and that typically go under the heading of “Greek and Roman mythology.” Homer’s poems were of course a leading source of these stories, but t
hey were fetchingly related for Romans of the Augustan period in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. While regarding the stories as rank superstition, Gibbon nonetheless delighted in this literature, and read and reread it, both as a boy and as a mature adult.65
The crowds of gods had their own affairs to attend to, and they were for the most part not especially concerned about the mundane doings of mortals. And yet the gods did have the power either to bless or to blight, to help or to hinder, so it was essential to maintain good relations with them. The Romans thus devoted massive resources to honoring the gods and retaining their favor; it was in this sense that the Romans deemed themselves religiously superior to all other nations.
One essential component of this propitiatory investment was the regular ritual sacrifice of animals—of bulls, goats, sheep, pigs. In his early reign, before he became unhinged, Caligula sacrificed over 160,000 animals in less than three months’ time—a display of piety publicly regarded as “splendid,” as the historian Suetonius observed.66 Sacrificial ceremonies were performed with rigorous exactitude; any deviation from the proper language and form would make the sacrifice unacceptable to the deity being addressed.67 An emperor himself might on occasion recite the prayers and preside over the ceremony in which he and his attendants would anoint the sacrificial animal and then stun it with an axe blow before slitting its throat, collecting its blood, and carving up its body.68
Unlike a modern church service, a sacrifice was not merely a sober liturgy or a ponderous homily but also a feast, typically involving heavy eating and even heavier drinking by the devotees.69 There were sights and smells to stimulate and assault the senses. Ramsay MacMullen quotes an ancient observer who reported that “the priest himself . . . stands there all bloody and like an ogre carves and pulls out entrails and extracts the heart and pours the blood about the altar.”70 The religious festivities spilled over beyond temple precincts into noisy and colorful processions that encircled and enthralled Roman cities and towns. The worship of the imported deities Atargatis, Isis, and Cybele, MacMullen observes, “made use of inspired, mad dancing and produced a great impression on observers and was also easily and often seen, since its practitioners wandered about in public in search of an audience. To the sound of rattles, tambours, and shrill pipes, with their heads tipped back or rolling wildly on their shoulders, accompanied by their own howls and yells, they whirled about and worked themselves into a state of frenzy.”71
The stories about the gods were also regularly acted out, through plays and ballets, in theaters built to seat thousands of spectators. These were not stodgy performances; they were, as Robin Lane Fox remarks, “enormous fun.”72
MacMullen explains that “the entire range of musical instruments . . . was called into the service of the gods in one cult or another, along with every conceivable style of dance and song, theatrical show, prose hymn, lecture or tractate philosophizing, popularizing, edifying, and so forth.”73 To a more prudish eye, in fact, the theatrical performances to the gods were so lascivious, so lewd, as to amount to a form of thinly sacralized pornography. That at least was Augustine’s mature view74 (although by his own account he had delighted in going to the theater as a younger man).75
Another vital element of the civic religion was divination, or the taking of the auspices, by which leaders sought to determine the will of the gods with respect to pending military or political decisions. The entrails of animals or birds were carefully scrutinized, and the portents or “prodigies” (such as lightning strikes, a deformed child at birth, or a mole with teeth on it)76 were studied, in quest of clues to the divine agenda. Livy relates the story of an early and skeptical king, Tarquin, who sought “to ridicule the whole business of omens” by ordering an augur, Attius Navius, to say whether what the king was privately thinking at the moment was actually possible. The augur consulted the birds and then answered in the affirmative, upon which the king triumphantly declared that what he had been wondering was whether the augur could cut a whetstone in half with a razor. And then, Livy recounts, “Believe it or not: without a moment’s delay Navius did it.”77 A statue was erected in honor of the feat, and Livy observes that “whatever we may think of this story, the fact remains that the importance attached to augury and the augural priesthood increased to such an extent that to take the auspices was henceforward an essential preliminary to any serious undertaking in peace or in war: not only army parades or popular assemblies, but matters of vital concern to the commonwealth were postponed, if the birds refused their assent.”78
When Rome encountered more serious difficulties, so that deeper counsels were needed, a different guild of priests pored over the cryptic Sibylline texts (which in the murky past had been delivered to King Numa by a mysterious old crone).79 Or unusual rites might be attempted—burying a few foreigners alive, for example.80
The business for which the gods’ help was sought emphatically included military affairs. A battle was not fought without consulting the sacred chickens: if the chickens ate the pellets scattered for them, good fortune awaited, but if they declined, defeat loomed. One impatient general, Publius Claudius, who during the first war with Carthage had rashly chosen to disrespect a flock of uncooperative chickens—he had them drowned, commenting in exasperation that since they refused to eat, they could instead drink—was duly paid with military disaster.81 And upon approaching an enemy city, the Romans performed a ritual, called evocatio, calculated to lure the city’s gods over to the Roman side with promises of superior cultic worship.82
The ritual sacrifices and the auspices were conducted by men who were at once high political officials and members of one or another public priesthood. Thus, the political leaders of the Roman state—the consuls, the prefects, later the emperors—simultaneously served as officials within the four major public priesthoods, with the emperor himself filling the role of head pontiff, or pontifex maximus.
The Romans’ public religiosity was conspicuously manifest in their architecture. The capital city was rife with elegant temples dedicated to the various deities; as you walked from your domus to the baths or the games, you would surely have passed by any number of them. The same was true for other cities in the empire. Edward Watts illustrates the pervasiveness of these religious structures with the example of Alexandria in the later empire. A fourth-century catalogue, he notes, “lists almost 2,500 temples in the city, nearly one for every twenty houses.”83 In one sense, though, this estimate of one temple for every twenty houses is a gross understatement: the actual ratio was more like one to one. That is because every house was in a sense a minitemple containing its own shrine dedicated to the household gods: the lares and penates.84 In A World Full of Gods, his imaginative portrayal of the Roman world, Cambridge historian Keith Hopkins has his fictional time travelers report back: “There were temples and Gods, and humans praying to them, all over the place: at the entrance to the town, at the entrance to the Forum; there were altars at crossroads, Gods in niches as you went along, with passersby just casually blowing a kiss with their hands to the statue of a God set in a wall. And of course, here in the Forum, the ceremonial center of the town, there were temples, altars, Gods, heroes just about everywhere we looked. . . . Our end of the square was filled by the grand Temple to Jupiter, with Vesuvius magnificently snowcapped behind. And all the rest of the buildings looked as though they could be temples too.”85
Religion was pervasive not only spatially but also temporally. The calendar was structured around the major religious festivals—the Lupercalia, Parlia, Robigalia, Saturnalia, and various others—and was administered by the priestly college of pontiffs.86 All in all, 177 days of the year were designated as holidays or festivals, in honor of thirty-three different gods or goddesses.87
But then, what about the images of worldliness we noted earlier—the gladiatorial games and chariot races? And the extravagant sexuality? We have already noted how military and political activities were infused with religion. The theatrical performances, likewise, were
dedicated to the gods.88 And odd though it may seem to moderns, the games were religious exercises as well; before the gladiators and the wild animals were brought out and cheered on as they slaughtered each other, the games were dedicated to the honor of the gods.89 In hard times, when Roman leaders felt an urgent need for the gods’ assistance, they would sometimes sponsor a special set of games ordained to the gods.90 So for all their fatal ferocity, these were essentially religious rites.
Perhaps surprisingly, a similar description could fit the city’s rampant sexuality—the brothels and the sex slaves and the ubiquitous phalluses. We will say more on that subject momentarily.
In sum, public or civic religion was pervasive in the Roman world. City and religion were thoroughly integrated, coextensive, inseparable. “There was a religious aspect to every communal action,” the historian John Scheid explains, “and a communal aspect to every religious action.”91
Sex and the City
Rome’s pervasive and unembarrassed sexuality likewise had both a religious and a civic dimension. In the Roman Empire, sexual morality reflected two broad premises. First, sexual fulfillment is not only natural and pleasurable and presumptively acceptable; it is also a kind of ecstatic religious performance. But, second, sexual behavior and fulfillment are constrained by the city—or by the demands of social and political life.
The Divine Imperative. The historian Kyle Harper’s recent study shows how these premises informed the attitudes and economy of the empire. “Male sexual energy was a definite quantity that had to be expended, somewhere,” Harper explains;92 consequently, “any hard restrictions on male sexual exertion in the years after puberty were considered implausible.”93 Sex provided sensual gratification, of course: the physician-philosopher Galen observed with clinical detachment that “a very great pleasure is coupled with the exercise of the generative parts, and a raging desire precedes their use.”94 Indeed, abstinence was deemed unhealthy (except by a few Stoics):95 it could lead to nausea, fever, and poor digestion.96 But sexual fulfillment was not merely a physical imperative, it was also a sort of religious performance or duty. “The figure of Eros himself, symbol of joy and life, was unfailingly popular,” Harper observes, and “sexual passion was an immanent divine force”97—the “mysterious, indwelling presence of the gods.”98 In a similar vein, Kathy Gaca explains that “in antiquity, sexual arousal, activity, and reproduction were in part immanent divine powers, not simply human forms of energy.”99
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