social consensus within the nobility remained precarious. Generals continued to organize informal triumphs (the so-called triumphus in monte Albano) without the consent of the Senate, erect statues all over the city, distribute excessive amounts of booty to their soldiers, and give lavish munera, gladiatorial shows, for the people.
The effects of ritual control are seen more clearly if we take into account areas where this control is lacking. Neither the public reports regarding the conduct of war nor the representations of booty carried in triumphs nor the funeral procession and its laudatory speech were ritually directed toward the gods. They aimed rather at the spectators—and were deeply disputed. As passages in Plautus and Cicero demonstrate, in the public communicative acts conducted on these occasions, villages were made into cities and skirmishes turned into decisive battles, heroes were transformed into ancestors and ancestors were made into heroes, raising doubt and instigating debate.39
The games are a somewhat different matter. In these highly public events, the heightened risk of the new communicative praxis impelled structural changes that insulated individuals among the nobility—and the nobility as a whole—from catastrophe. Most particularly, in the middle and late Republic nobles performed neither as actors nor as sportsmen. Competition was entirely left to professionals, and this, at least as regards the races and athletic competitions, appears a change from an earlier practice that seems to have known the participation of nobles from Rome and its surrounding areas. But in the very real competitions staged at large public rituals, a foreigner’s victory or the defeat of a consul’s son would no longer have been acceptable for the patricio-plebeian elite of the middle and late Republic. The truth of these claims may be verified to a point by examination of those competitions in which the elite participated, namely the mock competitions between the Luperci and the Sacravienses. The displacement effected by the use of professionals effectively insulated the organizing magistrate from responsibility for the outcome of any given contest, even if popular favor for a champion might still be disappointed.
The gods did exert censorship nevertheless. Being the primary addressees of the rituals, they enjoyed both the offering itself and the human spectators. The latter—as second-order spectators—watched the gods watching. Thus they could be sure that they were witnesses of cultural products of the highest quality, as indicated by the names of plays listed in this chapter. The gods got Greek or Greek-style cultural products, of the same provenance and style as those selected by the nobles throughout the Italian municipalities for their villas and libraries.40 Nobles and gods seemed to have the same taste. How could the populace not share in admiring it, while not, of course, having command of it? To be sure, many adaptations to local taste were made in producing Greek comedy and tragedy for Italian audiences, even as local centers of production developed to produce Hellenizing wares that carried the genes of local media, local techniques, and local taste. Nonetheless, the elaborated level and enormous presence of Greek language and culture (even if one should not assume the knowledge of Greek originals41) was astonishing. This marked presence was mediated to the audience by the positive reception given to these things by the Roman gods in a manner that could be imitated.
Conclusion: Public and Publicity
My short survey of changes in the ritual portfolio of the Republic has necessarily focused on processes that are visible in our sources or at least pertain to prominent rituals. Only public rites received enough testimony to sustain such scrutiny. Most of the rituals hinted at in the late republican or Augustan calendars are almost never mentioned in historiographic texts or speeches. Where a context is specified, one has to assume continuity at least from the foundation of the respective temple onward. Of course, the idea of a Numan list of festivals is no longer tenable.42 Many of the rites that might go back to the early Republic, or even beyond, were performed by the priests gathered in the larger pontifical college, including the flamines and Vestal Virgins. The monthly sacrifice of a sheep to Iuppiter (ovis idulis), for example, might not have attracted any spectators; nobody, however, complained about that. The actual appeal of many rituals remains obscure, though “popular” rites might indicate popularity. A list of “popular rites” would be rather short but would be led by the Saturnalia together with Kalendae Ianuariae and the Septimontium, the festival of the Seven Hills, celebrated likewise from North Africa to Gallia Transpadana. Such a list would also include the Lupercalia (February 15), perhaps the sequence of Feralia, Parentalia, and Quirinalia, certainly the Matronalia (March 1, including a rite of reversal), and perhaps Anna Perenna (March 15). Attestations for the Liberalia (March 17) are astonishingly vague; the Parilia (April 21) might have been popular. The temple of Mater Matuta would have attracted women on June 11, the Vestalia (June 15) some matrons, as did the rites connected to Ceres.43 The popular character of the Poplifugia (July 5) remains feeble. There is greater certainty in the case of the Neptunalia and Volcanalia, including the construction of temporary huts and bonfires (July 23 and August 23 respectively). Later in the year, one could think of the festivals of fountains and new wine (Fontinalia and Meditrinalia, both in mid-October), though the evidence is meager. Most of these festivals are characterized by decentralized commemoration; for the majority no central rite is known.
Evidently, from the mid-fourth century onward these festival practices were supplemented rather than supplanted by complex rituals that are characterized by centralized rites, designed to attract a larger share of the population (that is to say, around an eighth to a quarter of the inhabitants of Rome) and also spectators from the surrounding towns.44 Large processions and competition among professionals were typical. The number of days dedicated to these “games” rose continually. At the end of the second century up to twenty-eight days may have been regularly reserved for scenic performances (including the mime),45 a type of ritual that even dominated the circus games.46 These rituals enabled and enforced a complex process of communication, the necessity for which seems to have been arisen from enormous expansion and military strain, as well as from internal processes of social differentiation and conglomeration. The rituals made it possible to extol individuals, in particular magistrates leading processions of different kinds (see below, Chapter 5), as well as to control and force them into the public framework, incorporating and transcending the citizens present. The latter themselves were constituted as a differentiated society that marked symbolic center and periphery. In the imperial era, this type of ritual became the standard language of religious communication of the emperor with the population of Rome, in large measure because its formal aspects had developed precisely to articulate the central importance of some individual within a larger community. Naturally, in the republican period, stress had been laid upon the public frame, while under the empire the centrality of the emperor, and his paradigmatic status as a performer and sponsor of ritual, became a dominant theme of religious communication.
As a consequence of the changes I have outlined, religion acquired a political importance it had not had at the start of the period analyzed. By involving the gods in large-scale communication, such communication was enabled, and a normative framework was at the same time given to it, which defined the interaction between prominent nobles and a large populace as “public.” This holds true even in the case of priestly banquets, when audiences were present only by medial discourse about the event. To state my thesis most clearly, religion captured and defined “public” space. This form of procedural systematization had two consequences. First, ritualization— forcing action into public space and religious forms—became an important form of social control. This process is the central concern of Chapter 5. Before this, however, the second consequence of this change must be addressed: the amount of religious communication grew dramatically. Growing complexity, new topics, and self-reflexivity followed; space or, better, contexts for the reception of Greek thinking on religion were available. Formulated in Latin on Roman stages, it could not but refer to Roman religion, and surely did so intentionally. This form of theoretical rationalization is the subject of the next chapter.
Chapter 4
Incipient Systematization of Religion in Second-Century Drama: Accius
So
