Religion in Republican Rome: Rationalization and Ritual Change

14. Greek Rationality and Roman Traditions in the Late Republic

C h a p t e r   Greek Rationality and Roman Traditions in the Late Republic Historical change is a difficult thing to analyze and involves many areas and interacting factors. Previous research on the middle and late Republic has concentrated on only a few of these and has tended to do so from a political, cultural, or literary perspective. Research with a political focus has been concentrated on the elite, on the Roman nobility. Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp’s book on the origins of the Roman nobility is one of the recent rallying points of this approach,1 while subsequent discussion has given the date of 338 b.c.e., the end of the wars against the Latins, an aura of sanctity. By formulating and enforcing a common ethos of aristocratic competition in publicly useful fields only, the patrician and plebeian elite became united and developed an expansionist power that established the Mediterranean imperium. The loss of this internal equality and cohesion in the civil wars of the first century signaled the demise of the Roman Republic—res publica amissa, as the title of Christian Meier’s book puts it.2 With regard to culture, the focus of scholarship has been on Hellenization . This is an older and more diffused tradition of inquiry, including metaphorical variants of defilement, deterioration of vera Romanitas, and modernization. In the fields of archaeology and art history, scholars like Filippo Coarelli and Paul Zanker have shown how Greek art could be used as a medium of aristocratic competition or even interurban competition. The Hellenization of middle Italian townships is the phenomenological expression of the Romanization of their elites.3 As regards religion, the whole process still tends to be seen in terms of deterioration caused by imports and the emptying of traditions by intellectual critique. 206 Chapter  In the area of literature, the number of perspectives remains limited: the rediscovery of ancient drama by ancient historians has produced a number of interpretations that identify Roman values in comedic plays or demonstrate how historiographical texts bolstered national identity. Apart from these—by now—topoi, the consensus appears to be that literature became an increasingly autonomous sphere; despite books like those of Thomas Habinek,4 studies on the interaction between power relations and cultural production—on patronage for example—have largely been con- fined to imperial literature. From a Hellenic point of view, quite often shared by Latinists, Latin literature improved from third- to second-rate Hellenistic literary production in the two hundred years leading to the end of the first century. In his analysis of the Roman ‘‘cultural revolution,’’ Andrew WallaceHadrill has discussed the advantages and limits of the perspectives of Hellenization and Romanization and pointed to their mutual interdependency .5 His choice of the term ‘‘revolution’’ is informed by the period under his consideration, which extends into the second century of the Principate, while his choice of the term ‘‘culture’’ is driven by a focus on areas beyond political history and outside a narrow description of an elite culture.6 One of the main results of his analysis is the discovery of the complexity of the interplay of Hellenistic and Roman developmental vectors : breaking down and redefining identity boundaries, partly reinforcing them, partly opening them, as can be seen in the politics of citizenship and the catastrophe of the Social War.7 This quick tour d’horizon is intended to recall the communis opinio at the beginning of this summarizing and concluding chapter, breaking down and recontextualizing the notion of rationalization. I offer seven perspectives of analysis, the last two forming a sort of historical conclusion to the processes addressed above. My key terms will be ‘‘public,’’ ‘‘Hellenization ,’’ ‘‘ritualization,’’ ‘‘scriptualization,’’ ‘‘rationalization,’’ and finally, ‘‘self-reflection’’ and ‘‘professionalization.’’ These terms do not explain anything in and of themselves. I will instead use them to organize my description of complex cultural changes in the Roman Republic from the third to first century, and thus to point to the places of religion within this process (see Table 1). If ‘‘religion’’ does not denote any unified phenomenon in this period—and this is a claim I have to make—it cannot attain a single place in this model. Rationality and Traditions in the Late Republic 207 Table 1. A Complex Model for Intellectual, Medial, and Political Change in the Late Roman Republic External Competi- Media of Controlled Private eva- Early impein...