Religions of Rome: Volume 2: A Sourcebook (review)

In Religions of Rome: Volume 1: A History (1998; hereafter RR1), Beard of Cambridge, North of University College London, and Price of Oxford, each of whom had contributed chapters to Cambridge Ancient History, second edition, teamed up to write one coherent analysis of the “religions” of Rome from “the origin of the Lupercalia” to the attack upon those rites by Bishop Gelasius a full thousand years later, though with that impossible-to-fulfill temptation to look back to the origins of Rome itself for origins of “religion(s)” within Rome. The problematic of RR1 was the matter of “religion” itself within the history of the Latin language, as well as within those contemporaneous authors who often had little means of separating what had come to be from what they supposed to have been origins. These editors do not take seriously that “religio” was a concept that only emerged in the second century b.c.e., which affects the kind of Roman history which can be written [Cf. Remus: A Roman Myth, by Timothy Peter Wiseman (Cambridge 1995)]. Nevertheless, several features stand out from RR1: incorporation of concern for Jews and Christians among the others in a manner not typical of some recent narratives of Roman Religion, such as The Cults of the Roman Empire, by Robert Turcan (Blackwell 1996); need for fuller documentation than the limits of one volume permitted, hence boldface reference in notes to entries in this present volume.

Therefore, the editors go a long way in correcting conceptual deficiencies of RR1, though without apparent awareness of full vocabulary implications [even in their Glossary (pp. 365–68)], when they present data that constitutes Religions of Rome: Volume 2: A Sourcebook (hereafter RR2), within 340 typological selections without the necessity for greater chronological precision. They are able to provide in fresh and reliable translation, a major array whereby students of Roman “religions” can grasp what actually is known from sources. Moreover, they have gone beyond the strictly literary to incorporate 75 examples of illustrative materials (indexed pp. 402–4) which frequently say more than the meager or lack of writing on such would imply, and in all these latter cases the editors have added relevant and directly pointed notations (especially to sub-features). Thus, one has in RR2 a major volume of wider usage than would seem to be provided only from the genuinely thorough integration of references back to RR1. Few comparable volumes to RR2 exist; one might still recall Ancient Roman Religion, by Frederick Clifton Grant (Liberal Arts Press, 1957), whose introduction remains superior, whose selections are often more extensive and but occasionally overlapping, yet receives no reference in RR1 or RR2.

In contrast to RR1, whose linear story of sacro-political differentiation and development was told in two halves, each of four chapters, and turned at Augustus, RR2 topically arranges: ¹earliest Rome, ²deities of Rome, ³calendar, ⁴religious places, ⁵festivals and ceremonies, ⁶sacrifices, ⁷divination and diviners, ⁸priests and priestesses, ⁹individuals and gods re life and death, ¹⁰Rome outside Rome, ¹¹threats to Roman order, ¹²religious groups, and final ¹³perspectives. Noteworthily, one observes immediately that the collection peculiarly begins (1.1a “gods without images”) and concludes (13.9 “the old and the new cities of god”) with Varro apud Augustine, though leaving the question how one is to distinguish the critique of Varro’s “god is the or a spirit” from Augustine’s own “god is not a spirit but the creator of spirit.” At a level of minutia, Pelikan (1996: 46) in discussing “choices facing biblical translators,” under the issue of grammar reminds emphatically of the lack of “articles” in Latin. One might ask these classicists to keep their entries precise, or at least to add commentary notes, so that the English-only user grasps what constitutes actual understanding within the temporal frame of the sources—be that of Varro’s first century b...