Rome: An Empire's Story (22 page)

If the Roman elite of the middle Republic thought themselves especially pious, and if they attributed success in war to the favour of their gods, is it possible to see this as a driving force in Roman imperialism? That case seems more difficult to make, especially when Rome is compared to other peoples. First, the religion of the Romans does not seem unusual compared to that of other Mediterranean peoples. Many Etruscan and Latin cities had priesthoods very like those of Rome, and some rituals associated with war, like those surrounding the priesthood of the
fetiales
, were probably shared by Italian states. Other cities attributed their success to the gods, and imagined
their
gods to be on
their
side. The statue of Athena spat blood in fury at Augustus’ victory over Actium; the god of the Jews lent support against Babylonian, Seleucid, and Roman imperialists.
²⁰
Nor did Roman religion offer particularly effective means of integrating conquered peoples. Rome’s gods always remained those of the city. Arguably the Roman Empire had no collective ritual system until Caracalla extended the citizenship to all Romans in 212, and the Emperor Decius asked them all in 249 to take part in a
supplicatio
, a collective effort in which all citizens would perform sacrifices to the traditional gods, perhaps in expiation of whatever actions or inactions were held to be the cause of the ongoing military crisis of that period.
²¹

Religion has had a more central place in other imperial expansions. It has been suggested that it was the demands of the Aztec gods for sacrifices that powered the expansion of their power in Mexico, and the divine calling of the Merovingian kings that led to the unification of Frankia and its conversion into the most dynamic and complex of early medieval states.
²²
It is difficult to imagine a plausible account of the Arab conquests that did not give Islam a key role, or a history of the Crusades that did not stress the capacity of the religious authority of the popes to harness the military
energy of medieval Europe. The institutions of the Church were powerful mechanisms for organizing conquered lands and peoples from the Norman conquests in the British Isles and Sicily, through the eastwards expansion of Europe and the settlement of Outremer, right up to the early modern conquest of the Americas. Compared to these phenomena Roman religion seems reactive and inward-looking. Other Roman institutions played a much greater part in promoting and facilitating expansion: patronage and slavery, military alliance, and Roman law are obvious examples. The gods, it seems, were passengers on this journey.

Understanding Empire

What the religious traditions of the Romans did offer, however, were new ways of understanding and coming to terms with their growing power.

Ritual was at the centre of these understandings. There were rituals to mark the departures of generals and their returns, rituals to prepare for battles, the ritual of appealing to a named deity on the battlefield itself, the ritual of hailing a general
imperator
after a victory, the ritual extension of the
pomerium
, the sacred boundary of the city, after Roman territory had been increased, special honours paid to generals who killed their opponents in single combat, and so on.
²³
Most famous are the set of rituals drawn together into the triumph.
²⁴
Battlefield vows often promised a deity a temple in return for victory. As a result the city began to be filled with victory temples, many along the routes triumphal processions followed.
²⁵
Most were rather small. But as the scale of booty increased in the early second century larger complexes were built including great temple complexes for Jupiter, Juno, and Hercules of the Muses by the Circus Flaminius at the southern end of the Field of Mars. Augustus’ temple to Mars the Avenger was the culmination of this tradition.

Another mode of using religion to reflect on expansion was offered by antiquarianism. From the late second century
BC
some writers had become interested in the history of Rome’s many and complex cults. Almost all of what they wrote is lost, as is the most authoritative of all accounts of Roman religion, Varro’s
Antiquities Human and Divine
, which even 500 years later was still the target of St Augustine’s attack on traditional religion in his
City of God
. But many fragments of antiquarian knowledge of religion survived in later texts. From these we can reconstruct a history of the public cults of
the city of Rome in terms of the accumulation of more and more foreign gods and ritual traditions. Varro seems to have thought there was an original core of authentic Roman religion, perhaps the religion established by Numa, the second king of Rome, and Cicero writes about the Lupercalia as older than the city itself. But otherwise the cults of the city had accumulated in historical time. The
haruspices
were believed to have brought from Etruria their art of divining the will of the gods from the entrails of sacrificial victims and other portents. The worship of Apollo and Asclepius had been brought from Greek cities in 433 and 291 respectively. Venus of Eryx came in 217 from Sicily, and Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods, had come to Rome from Pessinus in Asia Minor in 204. Cults which were considered as imported were managed by a particular priestly college, the
decemviri
, and many were worshipped according to what Romans called ‘the Greek rite’, although it corresponded to no actual set of Greek rituals.
²⁶
The Augustan scholar Verrius Flaccus thought that whole series of gods had been brought to Rome through the ritual of the
evocatio
in which the protective deity of an enemy city was persuaded to defect to Rome. The history of religion thus became a way of telling imperial history.

Antiquarian researches were very speculative, but it really does seem that Romans of the third century
BC
were aiming to muster the most powerful cults in the Mediterranean world behind their empire. Each new god arrived following a crisis, but the cumulative effect was to create an annexe of the public cults devoted to the gods of the wider Mediterranean. So the ‘Greek rite’ flags Apollo and the rest as immigrant deities. Cybele, when she was brought to Rome from her Anatolian cult centre, was given a temple on the Palatine and games were set up for her in the Roman festival calendar. But elements of her more exotic rituals were preserved as if to retain a sense that she was a foreigner.
²⁷
Fewer new arrivals are attested after the Hannibalic war, and there were periodic expulsions of new cults that had arrived by private agency rather than through the mediation of the Senate and its priests. The Senate’s ferocious response to the cult of Bacchus in 186 was the first of several such reactions. Attempts were made to exclude Bacchus, Isis, the god of the Jews, and the god of the Christians: all entered Rome during the early empire. One way or another accommodations of new cults and links with foreign sanctuaries accumulated right up until the conversion of Constantine.
²⁸

Finally, there was the emergence of the idea that Roman rule was divinely ordained.
²⁹
By far the most extravagant productions along these lines date to the reign of Augustus, and this is also the point at which the religions of other communities were systematically oriented towards Rome. Yet an air of the divine had long surrounded Rome, and perhaps the emperors did no more than harness the power of the ritual tradition.
³⁰
Octavian began his career as the son of a god, for Julius Caesar had been deified after his death, and had received godlike honours just before it. Greek communities had already given honours of that kind to a number of Roman generals. From the start of the second century
BC
some Greek cities introduced worship of the goddess Roma at home, or else made dedications on the Capitol. There were also cults of the Roman People and of the Universal Roman Benefactors. Less information survives from the west but in Spain some of Sertorius’ followers believed he received prophecies from an enchanted deer, and in Gaul cults sprang up around Caesar after his death.

Fig 8.
Bronze statuette of Cybele on a cart drawn by lions, 2nd half of 2nd century
AD

It is not surprising, then, that Octavian’s success at Actium was marked almost immediately by a victory stele at Philae in Egypt on which his name was inscribed in hieroglyphics within a cartouche, a sign that he was considered a pharaoh, nor that offers of godlike honours from the Greek cities of Asia followed soon after. The Shield of Virtue and the title Augustus awarded by the Senate and people of Rome pointed in the same direction. Honours from Italian and provincial communities followed, from client kings like Herod of Judaea and Juba of Mauretania, and from Roman colonies like Tarragona. If some were apparently spontaneous, in most cases it looks as if careful negotiation preceded cult so as to establish exactly what would prove acceptable. In a few cases, such as the creation in 12
BC
of a great altar at Lyon where representatives of the Gallic communities met once a year to elect a high priest and hold gladiatorial games in honour of Rome and Augustus, it seems as if an imperial prince took the initiative. There was no single empire-wide cult of the emperors. Each community found their own way to indicate his proximity to heaven.
³¹

The creation of emperor worship has seemed a watershed in Roman religion. It seemed so to some aristocratic Roman writers who generally deplored and ridiculed it. The emperors were their relatives, and they were all too aware of their very human failings. Poetry was an easier medium in which to suggest connections between Roman destiny, the will of the gods, and the person of Augustus. Virgil’s
Aeneid
presented a hero led by the gods to found the Roman race, took him on a tour of the site of the future city, a place already pregnant with future history and ancestral cult, and then took him to the Underworld for a glimpse of great Romans waiting to be born. The most explicit and most quoted statement of Rome’s imperial destiny is put into Jupiter’s prophecy promising Rome
imperium sine fine
, power without limits. Augustan monuments deployed the globe prominently alongside traditional symbols of victory, and thousands of identical portraits of the emperor were produced and placed in every conceivable public and private context. The central public spaces of cities in Italy and the west were transformed by the creation of monumental temples and precincts. Greek inscriptions celebrate unprecedented honours and ceremonial. The personality cult of Augustus evokes inescapable echoes of those of the leaders of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century: the capacity to mass-produce one man’s face in a pre-industrial age is even more impressive.
³²

Many imperial nations have come to understand their rule as divinely ordained and sustained. Our idea of the mandate of heaven is Chinese in origin: the sons of heaven mediated between men and gods, and their position depended on the support of the latter. But almost every empire has claimed cosmic sanction. Persian shahs attributed their success to Ahura Mazda. Alexander came to be believed the son of Zeus, and received godlike honours. Max Weber termed the idea that the powerful were powerful by heaven’s will ‘the theodicy of good fortune’: such beliefs offer reassurance that human society is justly ordered and history meaningful. Like all ideologies, beliefs of this kind comfort rulers as well as make their rule seem less arbitrary to their subjects. If we look at early empires more closely we find it is very common that the same emperors sought support from different gods in different parts of their realms. The Achaemenids patronized Marduk in Babylon, Apollo in Greek Asia Minor, and the god of the Jews in Jerusalem. Alexander won support from the oracle of Ammon in the Siwah Oasis west of Egypt. The Macedonian Ptolemies who ruled after him in Egypt became pharaohs. What would have been really innovative was a secular concept of empire.

Further Reading

Catharine Edwards’s
The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome
(Cambridge, 1993) has transformed our understanding of Roman morality, inviting us to see moral discourse not as an expression of a particular group of prejudices, but as a highly politicized set of practices central to competition among the elite. Rebecca Langlands’s
Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome
(Cambridge, 2007) explores the key virtue of
pudicitia
.

The best introduction to Roman religion is now
Religions of Rome
(Cambridge, 1998), a collaboration between Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price. Also recommended are Jörg Rüpke’s
Religion of the Romans
(Cambridge, 2007) and James Rives’s
Religion in the Roman Empire
(Malden, Mass., 2007). Mary Beard’s
The Roman Triumph
(Cambridge, Mass., 2007) explores in vivid detail the complex relationships between war and ritual in Rome and the Roman imagination. Paul Zanker’s
Power of Images in the Age of Augustus
(Ann Arbor, 1988) brings out the phenomenal visual impact of imperial rituals in Rome, Italy, and the empire.