Pompeii (53 page)

We now tend to take the images of ancient gods too much for granted. We are usually interested to spot the key attribute that will identify the deity concerned (if it’s a thunderbolt, it must be Jupiter) and to move on. This is to underestimate the cultural and religious work that these images did in the ancient world. No one then debated, as we might do, whether there existed a divine power in the world. Atheism would have been barely comprehensible as an intellectual or religious position. In fact, apart from among Jews and Christians, the idea that there was only one god, rather than many, would have seemed almost equally eccentric in the first century CE, although it became a commoner view, even among pagans, later. But this did not mean that ancient polytheism was without its disputes and controversies. Romans could disagree violently, not about whether the gods existed (that was a fact rather than a belief), but about what they were like, how the different deities related to one another, and about how, when and why they intervened in the lives of humans. It was perfectly possible to wonder, for example, if the gods really did have a human form (or exactly
how
like humans were they?), or whether they were concerned with the lives of mortals at all. How did they reveal themselves to people? Just how capricious, or benevolent, were they? Friends, or always potential enemies?

In this sense, many of the images of gods and goddesses that Pompeians saw around them in their daily lives were much more meaningful than we assume. Standardised, funny, expensive or exotic, they were also ways of imagining the divine inhabitants of the world in material form. Size, shape and appearance could all matter. A colossal statue, like the vast Jupiter, was not merely a bombastic creation, it was also a way of reflecting on the power of the god, and on how he might be pictured – literally or metaphorically – in physical form. Ancient religion set great store by images.

A religion without the book

The traditional religion of ancient Rome and Italy was unlike most religions of the modern world in many important respects. The fact that there were many gods and that their number was not fixed (more deities might always be discovered at home, or imported from abroad) are only two of the things that make Roman religion so strikingly different from Judaism, Christianity or Islam. It is also the case that there were no tenets of belief that an individual would be expected to hold, no equivalent of the Christian creed and no authoritative sacred texts which laid down doctrine. That did not mean that there was a complete religious free-for-all. There were, no doubt, many more options than in a modern ‘religion of the book’. But the crucial fact is that the community’s adherence to its religion was demonstrated through action and ritual rather than words. As we shall see shortly, the act of animal sacrifice, at Pompeii as elsewhere, was the most important action of all.

The focus of the religious system was much more on the community as a whole than on its individual members. True, many Pompeian men and women might claim some kind of personal relationship with one or more of the gods. They might detect the influence of the gods on their lives and might turn to them in crises great and small. Many written traces of this survive from the city. In one of the corridors of the theatre, a graffito asks Venus to look kindly on a young couple. ‘Methe, slave of Cominia, from Atella, loves Chrestus. May Venus of Pompeii be kind to them and may they live together happily ever after.’ Two people in the House of Julius Polybius recorded their vow to the household gods: ‘For the well-being, return and success of Caius Julius Philippus, Publius Cornelius Felix and Vitalis, slave of Cuspius here made a vow to the Lares.’ This was a standard formula used at all levels of Roman religion, public and private: a vow made to the gods, which would be paid with an offering or sacrifice to them, in the event of the desired outcome. Here, these humble servants must have been praying that one of the masters of the house made it home safely from wherever he had been. Nonetheless, for all the expressions of private devotion that we find, it was the links between religion and the city or the state as a whole that gave Roman religion its distinctive character.

To put it at its simplest, the official line was that the gods protected and supported Rome or, on a smaller scale, Pompeii, so long as they received due worship. If they were neglected, disaster would surely be the result. In these terms – far from the nineteenth-century Christian idea that the eruption of Vesuvius was punishment for the paganism, or for the pagan immorality, of the local populations – the Pompeians themselves would have been much more likely to take the final destruction of their city as a sign that the worship of those pagan gods had not been properly carried out. There was a certain instrumentality in Roman dealings with the gods: ‘you scratch the divine back and the gods scratch yours’ can sometimes seem to have been the main guiding principle of Roman religion. But we might perhaps better understand it in terms of the
reciprocity
of patronage, honour and benefaction that we have already seen in the relations between the Pompeian elite and the rest of the citizens. One of the ways the inhabitants of Pompeii envisaged their gods was as larger-than-life, and infinitely more powerful,
duoviri
.

Exactly which community the gods belonged to could be a tricky question. Since the Social War, Pompeii’s religion was both Roman and Pompeian. As elsewhere in the Roman world, there was a trade-off between the centralising tendencies of Rome and a tremendous degree of local distinctiveness. This meant that what is for us the ‘same god’ (Minerva, Apollo, Juno or whoever) could actually be significantly different in different towns. The Venus of Pompeii (
Venus Pompeiana
), who was asked to bless the partnership of Methe and her Chrestus, is a good example of this. For Pompeii’s Venus had a classic Roman aspect which would be recognisable all over the Roman world and was sometimes associated with her role as the patron goddess of Sulla’s colony. But she also had distinctive local Pompeian traits, powers and associations, as well as a compound title, ‘Venus Fisica’, which may have gone back to the Oscan period (what it means, we honestly do not know for sure). Even more striking divergences are found in religious rituals and festivals. Although there was some overlap between Rome and Pompeii, and although animal sacrifice was found everywhere in the Roman world, many festivals were local events, following a local calendar, according to local custom.

Hand in hand with the basic political axiom which linked the success of the community with its worship of the gods went the structure and character of priesthood. In most cases (though we shall explore some exceptions towards the end of this chapter), priests were not people with a special religious calling, they were not full-time religious officials, and they did not take any pastoral responsibility for the moral and religious needs of a congregation. Priests of the gods were usually the same men as those who conducted the political business of the city. As Cicero, who was himself both a political leader and a priest, put it, ‘Among the many things ... that our ancestors created and established under divine inspiration, nothing is more renowned than their decision to entrust the worship of the gods and the highest interests of state to the same men.’

The result is that religion is found in several places in Pompeian life where we might not expect it. It is, for example, integrally connected with politics at all levels – so much so that the Roman emperor himself was treated like a god with his own priest. But it is also absent from some areas where we might expect to find it. Most marriages, for example, were not solemnised by any religious ceremony. In fact, a marriage was normally contracted, as the Romans put it, ‘by practice’: that is, in our terms, ‘by cohabitation’. If you lived together for a year, you were married.

It is against this background that the rest of this chapter looks at the remains of religious life in Pompeii. There is some truth in the old joke which says that archaeologists will label anything ‘religious’ that they cannot fully understand, whether that is peculiar holes in the ground or phalluses and snakes daubed on the walls. Nonetheless, we shall be trying to identify the places or objects in the city which counted as religious – starting from its main public temples, priests and rituals and ending with the aspect of Pompeian religion that since the eighteenth century has captured the imagination of most visitors, the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis. But we shall also be wondering what people did and said at the temple or shrine, and even occasionally what might have gone on in their heads when they were there. The most important thing to remember is that the varieties of their response will have been enormous, from cynicism and boredom to piety. Romans were no more unanimous on such things than we are.

City temples

Temples are for us one of the clearest symbols of Roman religion, instantly recognisable with their columns, triangular gables (or ‘pediments’), and steps leading up onto the raised platform (or
podium
), from which a visitor might then gain access, through high doors, to the interior of the building and whatever lay within. Romans had a whole repertoire of different kinds of sacred space, ranging from places where a deity was supposed to be present ‘in person’, as it were, to those from where signs sent by the gods might be observed. We have already come across the traces of an early countryside shrine, or sacred grove, underneath the House of the Etruscan Column (pp. 26–7). And, as we shall see later in this chapter, the final phases of the city included a variety of free-standing altars and other sacred enclosures. But it is the distinctive form of the temple that marks the urban landscape of Pompeii and other Roman towns, much as the parish church is the stamp of religion in an English village.

But if the English village has just a single parish church, Pompeii – as you might expect, given its many gods – had many temples, though by no means one for every god or goddess who might intervene in the lives of its inhabitants. They came in all sizes, in varying degrees of prominence and with very different histories. Some stretched back to the earliest years of the city. The temple of Apollo next to the Forum was established by the sixth century BCE at the latest. So too was the temple of Minerva and Hercules (Ill. 101) in the so-called Triangular Forum (named after the triangular colonnade built around the temple in the first century CE). This, in fact, may long since have been a picturesque ruin at the time of the eruption – though some archaeologists attribute its ruined appearance to the aggressive excavation techniques of earlier generations of diggers (not to mention Allied bombers).

100. This nineteenth-century reconstruction shows the Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, flanked on either side by an arch. It is an accurate drawing, but perhaps gives a rather too grand, monumental and clean impression of the temple and its surroundings.

Most of the rest date to the second century BCE or later. In just one case we can reconstruct the precise circumstances of their building. The small Temple of Fortuna Augusta was dedicated to an almost untranslatable combination of the goddess of Good Fortune or Success (Fortuna) and the power of the emperor (the adjective Augusta can confusingly, or conveniently, refer either to the first emperor Augustus himself, or to imperial power more generally – for subsequent emperors used ‘Augustus’ as part of their titles too). It was funded, according to a surviving inscription, by a local grandee and three-times
duumvir
, Marcus Tullius, and built on his own land, which he donated to the town. He was careful, however, that there should be no misunderstanding about exactly how much land he had made over. Behind the temple there was a stone boundary marker, reading ‘Private property of Marcus Tullius, son of Marcus’.

101. Looking up to the Temple of Minerva and Hercules, in the Triangular Forum, from outside the town. This imaginative reconstruction (note the solitary charioteer out for a spin) gives a good idea of the gradients and different levels on which Pompeii was built.