"Strikingly ambitious, this new history of Roman religion represents a decisive contribution to the field. Going beyond a conventional history of religion, Jörg Rüpke integrates religion with political, economic, and social developments over more than a millennium—a span no one else has attempted to cover in a single volume. Rüpke's vast erudition, combined with his emphasis on individual experience and agency within this larger context, opens up a new way to understand religion itself, making this book a unique event."--Harriet Flower, Princeton University

"Pantheon is the crowning achievement of a scholar who has dedicated his career to a uniquely engaged exploration of ancient Roman religion in its entirety."--Zsuzsanna Várhelyi, Boston University

Pantheon

A New History of Roman Religion

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

A History of Mediterranean Religion

1. What Is Meant by a History of Mediterranean Religion?

It is the intention of this book to tell the story of an upheaval epochal in its impact. This is the story of how a world well beyond the understanding of most of us was transformed into a world very like our own, at least in one particular. To put it succinctly: we will describe how from a world in which one practiced rituals, there emerged a world of religions, to which one could belong. This is no straightforward story. The changes I shall relate were not inevitable; no one could have foreseen them. Nor were they irreversible: quite the contrary.

To speak of religions — in the plural — seems to us today quite normal. We may in fact define ourselves in terms of a religion. A religion may open doors for us — access to officialdom, to the mass media, to tax offices when it is a question of tax exemptions — or in some cases the doors of a prison. But, although we as individuals may belong to one religion, we can no longer "unthink" the plural form of the term as a concept for describing both present-day and historical societies. And yet, with ever-greater frequency, trends arise that defy such categorization. "New Age" has been one such concept. "Spirituality" increasingly appears to be another, and "mysticism" has a long history as a phenomenon of this kind. Countless Christians, Muslims, andHindus talk quite straightforwardly of themselves as belonging to one (only rarely several) of many religions, but there are good grounds for wondering whether, in many cases, we should not speak of culture and cultural differences rather than of membership of different religions.

When a concept has many different meanings, windows of comparison are opened across space and time, and in many cases it is only then that a meaningful conversation becomes possible. A history, moreover, can be communicated successfully only when the number of concepts in play is limited, when recognizability is vouchsafed to all participants, despite small differences; otherwise, we are faced with a multitude of disparate, sometimes conflicting histories, with results that may be entertaining (think only of the "Thousand and One Nights"), and thoroughly informative and revealing (a thousand every-day stories adding up to a "microhistory"), but with no end, no "moral." This is all the more true of a long history such as the one being attempted here, where the actors change repeatedly, or at least often more frequently than the parameters of religious practices and concepts.

Conceptual harmonization can, of course, add to the difficulty when an effort to achieve such harmony superimposes an appearance on continuity that masks on-going changes and transformations. It then becomes critical to refine our concepts, to notice differences. We begin to see that the world we are describing comprises many geographical spaces, where many different kinds of development are underway: a change that we note in one location may also have taken place elsewhere, but there is no guarantee that it had the same consequences in both settings. Thus, although a history of Mediterranean religion is not a universal history of religion, it must nevertheless always take into account other geographical spaces, must ask what happened there, and must notice instances where ideas, objects, and people broke through those walls erected in our imagination by the metaphor of separated spaces.

My Mediterranean narrative recognizes that comparable transformations with similar outcomes (in religions, in assemblages of practices, in concepts, and in symbols) took place in other epochs and in other realms, where they were perceived by the peoples they affected as being distinctive. I think particularly of western, southern, and eastern Asia. And yet, in the past half-millennium, religion in many of these regions was very different. I maintain that the institutionalization of religion characteristic of the Modern Period in many parts of Europe and the Americas, and the conflict-ridden rigidity of the "religions" or "confessions" of which one may be a member — but only one at a time — rests on the particular configurations of religion and power that prevailed in antiquity, and on their legal codification in Late Antiquity. Not only the Islamic expansion, but above all the specifically European developments of the Reformation and the formation of national states, reinforced the confessional character and institutional consolidation of supraregional religious networks. This model was exported to many, but certainly not all parts of the world in the course of colonial expansion, and frequently in a spirit of arrogance.

It is circum-Mediterranean and increasingly Euro-Mediterranean history post-antiquity that draws our attention to Rome. But our choice of Rome as a hub is mistaken if it is origin myths that we seek. Ancient polytheism and its narrative worlds did not develop anywhere near Rome, but rather in the Middle East, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam connect in Jerusalem, not in the city on the Tiber. Moreover, we have Athens to thank, not the Seven Hills, for the polemical separation of philosophy and religion, virtually a unique marker of Western religious thinking. Even the Latin-language codification of the law, the Corpus iuris civilis, which left its mark on many modern legal systems, emerged from Constantinople, the Rome of the Byzantine Empire, and not from its Italian predecessor. Certainly, the word religio had its origin in Rome. But that has only slight relevance to the change that is the subject of this present narrative.

Origin is not everything, however. Rome was situated in a part of the world with a long history of absorbing cultural impulses rather than initiating them. From the end of the 1st millennium BC onward, the city exported multiple conceptions of religion throughout the Mediterranean. And with the destruction of Jerusalem, Roman power politics became a central factor in the history of various religious identities. The growth of the empire into a multicultural space with a newly stratified power structure, the accelerated exchange of ideas, goods, and people within such a space, the attraction its center had for prophets no less than for philosophers, all of these factors combined to assure that Rome would be a focal point of the first millennium AD. In the centuries prior to this, Rome is to be seen more as one instance of Mediterranean development, one with its own history and timeline, with the consequence that we must constantly question what is to be regarded as typical and what is untypical for other regions. The distinctive strand that will be represented by Rome in the present narrative will thus only slowly emerge from a consideration of Italian and Mediterranean beginnings.

Our attention is thus set free to range widely over religious conceptions, symbols, and activities, an entire spectrum of cultural practices from ancient oriental high cultures to Late Antiquity (and beyond), viewing them all as they undergo substantial processes of development, and all with a multitude of facets in common. From a long-term and global perspective, the development of particular forms in the fields of architecture and the media here assume considerable importance. The Buddhism that emerged from India owes a considerable degree of its imagery to Greek modifications of Egyptian archetypes as can be seen in the art of the Gandhara region. Moreover, the concept of a "pantheon" of deities interacting in a hierarchy, a concept that once again originated in western Asia and the ancient Orient, played an important role in defining the form and personification of Greek and Roman conceptions of the divine, and their adoption in Christianity. The religious history of the Roman period had far-flung ramifications. In the Mediterranean world we have the formation of Judaism with the emergence of Christianity from it, and the dissemination of Christianity's Romanized form via Rome and Constantinople, while Islam arose at the southeastern periphery of the same world, and, with its expansion across the south, increasingly toward the east and even the northeast of that space, in many ways marked the end of antiquity. The processes of dissemination, or more precisely those of mutual exchange on the eastern frontiers and along routes of contact — the Silk Road to Central Asia, shipping routes to southern India — still lie in the shadowy regions of scholarship, and frequently lack even elementary appraisals: a situation that cannot be altered by a focused history such as is intended here.

In any event, however, one decided advantage attaches to a focus on Rome. Already in the Hellenistic Age, the final two centuries BC, Rome was probably the biggest city in the world, growing in the early Imperial Age to a population of half a million, many say one million inhabitants. Such numbers would not be equaled until the High Medieval Period, with cities such as Cordoba in Moorish Spain and Bian (now Kaifeng) in central China, or Peking in the Early Modern Period. When it comes to the function of religion in the life of the metropolis and the role of megacities as intellectual and economic motors, Ancient- and especially Imperial-Age Rome provides a historical "laboratory" with which few other cities in the ancient world can compare. The closest would be Alexandria, the new foundation of Alexander the Great and cultural melting pot on the Nile Delta, and perhaps Antioch, with Ptolemaïs and Memphis next in size. The Latin pejorative term pagani did not describe people merely as non-Christians, but also identified them as country folk. The sentiment that whatever is important takes place in cities — and especially metropolises — is not new, but it has never been thoroughly studied in the case of religions. And so my story of religion here ventures onto new ground. But what exactly is religion?

2. Religion

When it comes to describing transformations in religion, unexamined preconceptions should not be allowed to stand. We normally base our thinking about religion on its plural, "religions." It is even maintained by some that religion actually exists only in terms of that plural form. Religions are understood as traditions of religious practices, conceptions, and institutions, in some contexts even as business or business-like enterprises. According to an important strain of sociological thought that goes back to Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), we are dealing here with social products, products of societies comprised of groups of people normally living together within a territory, for whom the central core of their common existence, their shared orientation, is shielded from daily discussion by being vested in symbolic religious forms. There emerges a system of signs whose immanence is safeguarded by the performance of rituals, and which seeks to explain the world in images, narratives, written texts, or refined dogma, and to regulate behavior by the use of ethical imperatives or by an established way of life, sometimes by recourse to an effective apparatus of sanctions (for instance through the power of the state), but sometimes even without that implied threat.

Such a conception of religion can explain a lot; it meets its limits, however, when it seeks to explain religious pluralism, the enduring coexistence of different, mutually contradictory conceptions and practices. It can find itself at a loss also when it must decipher the quite distinctive relationship between the individual and his or her religion. It is repeatedly accused of being too closely oriented to "Western," and above all Christian religious and conceptual history, and criticized for its unquestioning "colonialism" in superimposing Western concepts onto other cultures. There are similarly problematic ramifications when we seek to apply this conception to antiquity. The reason for this, too, lies in the present. The dissolution of traditional allegiances that we so frequently observe in our time is read as religious individualism or as the decline of religion, or even as the displacement of collective religion by individual spirituality. This perspective then becomes associated with the complementary assumption that early societies and their religions must have been characterized by a high degree of collectivism. We shall see how this assumption, already problematic in respect of the present day, creates a highly distorted picture of the past.

This does not, however, compel us to abstain from speaking about religion. What we need, rather, is a concept of religion that enables us to describe, with precision, changes both in the social aspects of religion and in its significance to individuals. This can be achieved successfully by conceiving of religion from the standpoint of the individual and of his or her social environment. I shall not focus on the mental systems that have been constructed by both insiders and external observers, for these can in any case never yield more than fragmentary and incomplete particulars about a religion. Instead, my starting point is lived ancient religion — in all its variants, its differing contexts, and social configurations. Only in rare instances — and these will, of course, be given due attention — do the activities of people dealing with one another coalesce into networks and organized systems, or find their way into written texts, so that they take on a life of their own and develop into the massive, autonomous, and often long-lived structures that we normally categorize as religions.

How, then, is religion to be comprehended? We can only hope to gain a perspective on changes in religion, on the dynamics embodied in it and how these produce changes in the social and cultural contexts of religious actors, if we do not assume at the outset that what religion is self-evident. We must, then, seek out boundaries for our subject that take in what it is about religion that interests us — namely those aspects of it that conform to our view of the subject — but at the same time the boundaries must be broad enough to include the deviant, the surprising in the religious practice of a particular time. I see the religion of the epoch we are considering from a situative perspective, as including actors (whether they be described as divine or gods, demons or angels, the dead or the immortal) who are in some respect superior. Above all, however, their presence, their participation, their significance in a particular situation is not simply an unquestioned given: other human participants in the situation might regard them as invisible, silent, inactive, or simply absent, perhaps even as nonexistent. In short, religious activity is present when and where, in a particular situation, at least one human individual includes such actors in his or her communication with other humans, whether by merely referring to those actors or by directly addressing them.

Even in ancient cultures, communicating with or acting in relation to such beings was not simply accepted as a matter of course. In respect of the present day, this will scarcely be disputed: the assertion that transcendent actors are participants, either actual or to be invoked, would be viewed askance in many parts of Europe, would indeed appear quite implausible to many people. Even when a particular human actor is firmly convinced of the immanence of a god, or of something divine, in the presence of others he or she will frequently abstain from making such a claim, in either word or action, for fear of inviting ridicule. Since, in my view, religion consists primarily in communication, I would have to say that in such a situation religion does not occur. The reluctant modern European believer I have described is, however, not a universal figure. The presence of the transcendent is entirely noncontroversial in other regions, and was so in other epochs.

Nevertheless — and this is my point — making such an assertion and/or taking actions compatible with it would be problematic even in the ancient world. It would risk damage to the credibility of the speaker and might put his or her competence into question. This is because the assertion would never be couched as a general statement that gods exist. Instead it would take the form of a claim that one particular deity, whether Jupiter or Hercules, had helped or would help the speaker or other individuals, or that Fortuna (fate) stood behind the speaker's own actions. Such a claim might be borne out, or it might not. "You of all people?," "Venus?" "We want to see that for ourselves!" "But you're not normally so very pious!": the possible demurrals were legion. And religious authority could not simply be acquired by mere prayer: some individuals were successful in their claims and earned a livelihood by them; for others, priesthood remained a spare-time occupation, and in the end might not even secure election to the local council. Ascribing authority to invisible actors and exercising corresponding circumspection in one's actions appears, as postulated by evolutionists, to have been conducive to survival and accordingly favored in human development; but it was a tactic that provided an opening for challenges by fellow humans and its systematic use could provoke organized dissent.