the interest of writers, with special emphasis to ad hoc rites. Exceptional rites in times of crisis gave the opportunity to comment on participation and even on individual ritual activities, an aspect invisible elsewhere. Details of cult, theological speculation, routine rituals, and the daily running of sanctuaries do not figure in the literary tradition. Votive deposits and burial practices, so prominent in the archaeological record, did not enter the tradition of textually transmitted knowledge. More is learned there about the financing of cult than about reflection on divinity, more about institutionalized than embedded or diffused religion.
Given the available evidence, it seems appropriate to adopt a substantivist, or better, relational definition of “religion,” tying its usage to cultural practices and systems of signs that refer to “gods,” which is itself a class of religious signs comprising both names and images. “Religion” as used in the following refers to an ensemble of practices, institutions, habits, and beliefs, of which no internal coherence or consistence is to be expected, and none is here sought. This definition may suffice because the ambition of this work is to bring the place of religious communication within the wider spectrum of communication and institutions in this early society into relief, for purposes of comparison with the later periods.
Finally, both emic and etic perspectives on religious competences are informed by gender and social order. That said, the major competences enjoyed by Roman women in the late Republic,18 matrons in particular, were not systematically retrojected by our late sources into the earlier period. Female religious activities were thought to be concentrated on the Vestals. In respect to gender, therefore, neither a robust history nor even a comparison between archaic and late republican religion is possible. It was the contrast between patricians and plebeians that for them dominated the reconstruction of early religion.19 In the early period, activities ranging from the right to perform divination in the form of auspices (the observing of birds, lightning, and so forth) to membership in the priestly colleges, and hence to their role in communicating with the gods lay exclusively with the patricians. It must be stressed that the Ogulnian law in 300, which opened up religious offices to nonpatricians, did not diminish the number of patrician priests but simply added plebeian pontiffs and augurs.20
Modern scholars have often sought to understand Roman society in light of the various face-to-face societies treated in detail by the classics of twentieth-century anthropology. It is thus seen as constituted by age groups, all individuals of which are together subjected to initiation rituals, and as a community whose economic and social activities are granted rhythm by a common and detailed calendar.21 I would not wish to deny the notion of “initiation” altogether, but its utility in respect to Rome is at best analogical, and then only if applied to (self-appointed or aristocratically defined) representatives of an age group in a city of some twenty or forty thousand inhabitants.
Cult Sites
Developmental models always risk teleology. A study of rationalization is no exception. The risks with respect to Rome are compounded by two factors. First, evidence for the history of Rome is exceptional, if late. Second, Romanization, in a sociopolitical as well as a cultural sense, seems to have been an irresistible force. Certainly, whatever the causes and practices that furthered it, their effects were heightened by empire.
Yet inscriptional evidence tells us not only about the flowering of other Italian languages into the first century, but of complex and diverging ritual systems. The Roman solar calendar, in use at Rome since the late fourth century, was employed neither by neighboring Latin townships nor by the Etruscan sacrificial calendar of the liber linteus (“Agram mummy”).22 By the end of the second century, Latin cities like Praeneste or Tibur could still engage in architectural rivalry with Roman temple sites. Some decades later, the allies of the Marsian war imagined an Italian future without Roman hegemony. The fact that the direction of cultural transfer is often far from clear could— positively—be taken as an indicator of a region characterized by intensive cultural exchange. In the following paragraphs some ritual and organizational features of early Roman religion are reviewed within their regional context.
Burial practice is an important index, as it is an archaeologically well-documented outcome of a complex ritual, as well as a mechanism by which material culture was preserved for later inquiry. Its religious importance (in the substantivist sense defined above) is more difficult to assess. Although rituals addressed to deities might accompany burials, there is hardly any evidence to include burial within Roman religious practices. Archaeologically speaking, burial attests to individual religious affiliation only infrequently; for instance, at Rome, inhumation and cremation coexisted for centuries, preferences changing again and again. The concept of the Di Manes, the “good gods” who embody the dead, did not appear regularly on tombstones before imperial times. Yet, for the poorly attested society that forms the subject of this chapter, this concept provides some key evidence. Most significant is the change in burial practice throughout Latium and Etruria during the sixth and fifth centuries. The Orientalizing period (c. 730–630) had produced a number of luxury tombs, princely burials with highly valuable and prestigious objects in sites around Rome (Praeneste, Ficana, Castel di Decima), though (so far) not in Rome itself.23 Social power had offered the possibility of acquiring wealth and long-distance contacts; such goods and contacts served to further prestige. The following period, characterized at Rome by urbanization and monumentalization—processes, however, that happened earlier in some Etruscan places—witnessed a substantial decline in number and quality of grave goods. In all likelihood, the wealth that might have been spent on ostentatious funerals during this period was instead lavished on “prospective” public display, that is, on aristocratic competition in the form of banquets and entertainments or the building of palace-like houses in stone masonry, rather than on “retrospective” treasure assigned privately to the dead.24 In the long run this would help to create urban centers and public space, and to invest in the latter.
Some cult sites have already been listed for the earliest period. It is important to remember that a sanctuary need not contain a temple building. Open spaces could focus on an altar, and altars did not need to be constructed in stone. A number of votive deposits indicate such places. Such a pit—used either to deposit votive offerings directly or on occasion filled all at once, when a larger number of offerings had to be removed from the premises—allows archaeological identification of a sanctuary. In the city of Rome, such deposits preceded the oldest temple at San Omobono.25 They were widespread in (and beyond) Italy and frequent in Rome’s surroundings. Regionally more characteristic are human—often female—terra-cotta statuettes. At times these statues approached life size, as in Lavinium from the early fifth century onward. Likewise common were heads and busts from the sixth century on and anatomical votives from the fourth century onward. This tradition was supplemented in practice—in the material record—by anatomical votives associated with the Greek cult of Asclepius. Overall, such representations of parts of the body remained characteristic of votive practice down to the first century.26
The practice of temple building was shared by Rome and other Etruscan places from the second half of the sixth century onward. A high podium gave access on one side only, the other sides having neither steps nor wall openings. This base was completed by a building dominated by wooden columns and roof constructions decorated with colorful terra-cotta reliefs. Such a construction clearly marked boundaries of everyday life and set off sacred space.27 Yet it was not restricted to housing a cult statue (besides the statues decorating the tympanon and the roof). A threefold cella at the back of the building offered at least two rooms for different types of activities and does not indicate the veneration of a triad of deities; the rooms of the high podium could likewise be put to different uses. Storage and shop functions of the basement would be completed by storage functions, political assemblies, banquets, and ritual activities above, as architectural forms and later practice suggest.28 “Religion” offered through the form of the temple a defined and public space for different modes of communication.
Our knowledge of cult places and temples at Rome is limited: chance archaeological finds supplement
