which seems to correspond to the term Kultus in the title [Religion und Kultus der Römer (Religion and Cult of the Romans)]. Just as he finished the historical portrait, around 1890, Wissowa had discovered that this way of studying Roman religion could no longer suffice. At the request of Mommsen, Wissowa was reading the proofs of the second edition of the first volume of the corpus of Latin inscriptions, the one that contained the Roman calendars.12 In doing so he realized that one could not continue to write religious history by confining oneself to speculation about archaic rites whose names are written in big letters on the calendars, relying on the similarly speculative interpretations of poets and mythographers. He appears to have realized that there existed an entire other part of Roman religion that had theretofore escaped study, that of the festivals and rites of the supposedly cynical and decadent era, which were also recorded on the calendars.13 A second influence confirmed him in this discovery: his reading of the volumes of Mommsen’s Römisches Staatsrecht (Roman Public Law), which had appeared at regular intervals during the early part of Wissowa’s labors.14 It was at this time that Wissowa decided to devote more attention to rites, to all rites, and not just those of the archaic period, as well as to Roman sacred law. These studies, which took ten years to complete, effectively shape the second, most innovative part of his handbook, which has ever since constituted the foundation of all expert study on Roman public cults.
As it happens, it is precisely this part of the book that shocked, and not the historical one, which was extremely conventional, as I have emphasized. The common reproach was that he had reduced Roman religion to cult, and public cult at that. In so doing, ran the critique, Wissowa’s manual came to describe collections of priestly rules, of festivals conducted by magistrates and the elite, but presented nothing truly religious. One detects in this reproach the odor of secularist criticism against small-minded, small-town religion of the sort that Mommsen had identified with Rome in its decadence: a religion of a people devoted to (one might even say “lost in”) the counting of rites to be observed and benefits sought and received, but deprived of true religiosity. We will return to this point, because the attack is in itself revealing. Let it suffice for now to study Wissowa’s reply, which is in my view excellent: he responded that he claimed the right to pose the question whether the concept of “religiosity” was indeed “a concept wholly fixed and constant for all times and peoples.”15 For his part, he thought that the reproach directed at the book should in fact be directed at the object of study, which is to say, at Roman religion, as if to signify that it was itself responsible for this quality of his portrait. In so writing, he did not specify exactly what he thought in petto of Roman ritualism. According to the first part of his handbook, decline had already commenced by the dawn of the empire. Like his teacher Mommsen, he was compelled to render a rather negative judgment on the ritualistic and self-interested piety of the Romans, even if he also tendered them a little more indulgence. For Mommsen, who was agnostic, Roman religion strongly resembled the Catholicism that he encountered during his travels in Rome and Italy. Because of his education in the Lutheran tradition, he abhorred this type of religion. The Catholic Wissowa ought to have been less radical, although, at the base, he had to share Mommsen’s opinion. He nevertheless claimed the right to study Roman religion and piety in their historical context, even as he thought that all people had a right to their own beliefs. Perhaps his Catholic conscience had been affronted by the Lutheran bent of the critique. We will return to the confessional subtext, to Wissowa’s choice, and to the critiques leveled against his work, and to those that are still leveled today against his wish to emphasize the alterity of Roman religion and against those who defend the same position.
Beyond the possibility that “religiosity” did not have the same form everywhere and always (the quotation marks are Wissowa’s), and bracketing his desire to separate out the influences exerted on Roman religion and place them in historical sequence, the major contribution of Wissowa consists in his description of Roman religion under the republic, from the fifth to the first century BCE. He basically describes public religion, because it is about this above all that the ancient sources speak and which in any event deserves closer study. At times, when the sources permit, Wissowa remarks equally on private rites. Overall, he recuperates a description of the religion of the Roman people under the republic in the same terms as Roman historians, orators, and thinkers, by seeking to reconstitute the rules and behaviors that can still be reconstituted. The imperial era does not concern him except insofar as it still adheres to this normativity, at least in the first century of the empire. Moreover, it is important to observe that Wissowa did not align himself with the ethnographic comparativism developed by Wilhelm Mannhardt or James G. Frazer, who proposed an alterity of a different type.16 I cannot say whether Wissowa imagined a different form of comparativism, or if he rejected for whatever reason the way in which Anglo-French ethnology of that era analyzed ethnographic material, but the overall tone of his handbook appears to invite such an explanation.17
The Main Objections to the Theory of Polis-Religion
What are the modern criticisms of polis-religion? A first fact surprises. The term in question is always Greek polis, a surprising fact, and not the Latin term civitas. The explanation for the use of this terminology surely lies with the criticisms directed at an article written by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, published in 1990 in a collective volume, that summarized the chief aspects of the religion of the Greek polis as it had been analyzed in Paris and Great Britain over the previous two decades.18 The strange neglect of the term (and concept) of civitas and also of the Romans is due to the fact that, according to conventional representation, the polis was dead by the third century BCE and the Roman civitas had already been left behind by the political, institutional, and demographic developments of the imperial republic. In any case, to apply the term polis-religion to a religious domain that was in fact much larger and which underwent an important evolution after the birth of the Greek polis is reductive and would seem to imply that historians of Roman religion who use this approach implicate themselves in an archaic model of limited chronological applicability.
A first criticism addressed to the works of such people concerns the social context of the rituals of public cult.19 Polis-religion is described as a “civic compromise” that sought to establish a close link between sacrifice, euergetism—a form of public charity, or private funding of public goods—and domination. This model of priesthood and cult was imposed by the elite on its inferiors. The rural population would not have known the sacrificial system of the elites, which is to say, the cultic acts and distributions of meat in which all members of the polis were supposed to participate. Such a view is extraordinarily reductive. It signally neglects a fact that, indeed, critics of the civic model of religion always pass over in silence, to wit, that the population—the entire population—understood perfectly this system of sacrifice, because they practiced it in their families, in villages as well as the rural territories of city-states, and in the grand rural sanctuaries.
A second criticism urges that the masses would not actually have accepted the religious model of the elite. The gods who manifested themselves to ordinary people would have been more disquieting, more dominating than those of public cult, who worked for the well-being of all. The rapid expansion of the cult of Asclepios/Aesculapius is taken as testimony in favor of this argument, as well as the appearance of healer-heroes, the proliferation of small oracles and private mysteries, and the miracle workers and magicians. This expansion of the religious marked the limits of acceptance on the part of the masses of the cultic model imposed by the elite.
Such views must be qualified. First of all, the religious opposition between masses and elites, which hints at the importation of much later, Romantic ideas of Herder and Schlegel on the hidden riches of popular belief and folklore, must be questioned, because many of the cults in question were in fact introduced at Rome by the elites themselves. It was the Roman Senate that caused Asclepios/Aesculapius to come to Rome, and it was through the creation of Roman colonies—a statal act par excellence—that his cult was spread in northern Italy and through the Danubian territories. This devotion rapidly became a standard part of the cultic life of the Roman city. Second, and most important, to interpret
