Ritual and Personal Morality in Roman Religion

WJ. Tatum: Ritual and Morality in Roman Religion 13 RITUAL AND PERSONAL MORALITY IN ROMAN RELIGION W. Jeffrey Tatum Until recently it was common for students of Roman religion to echo Varro in lamenting the fall from grace of the ancestral religion, which, before the corrupting influence of Greek practices set in, eschewed even such concessions to groundling faith as sacred images, hi 191 1 W. Fowler could pronounce that by the second century B.C. Roman worship had become meaningless : "the outward form of the cults may be maintained," he wrote, "but as a religious system expressing human experience we have done with these things," the then prevailing dogma, much repeated, and made canonical in K. Lane's Handbuch.1 To some degree this belief was grounded in Roman sources, especially those reporting the need for religious revival during the age of Augustus.2 But the cardinal inspiration, as S. Price has made undeniably clear, for the doctrine of the degeneration of Roman religion has been the imposition of Christianizing assumptions about the nature of religion—at least true religion~on our analysis of Roman religio? Emphasis on beliefand on the criterion of religious emotions is particularly, perhaps uniquely, Christian, as scholars of religious studies had recognized for some time before Price brought the word to classicists languishing in the darkness.4 And even before the advent of Price's important book, scholars like J.A. North and M. Beard, to name only two, were laboring in the vineyards revising our understanding of civic religion in the Roman republic, with the result that we now appreciate how inappropriate it is to 1 Varro: Aug. CB. 4.31. W.W. Warde Fowler, G?« Religious Experience of the Roman People (London 1911) 353; cf. G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, 2nd ed. (Munich 1912) 70ff. K. Latte, Römische Religionsgeschichte (Munich 1960) 264ff. Parallel sentiments could easily be multiplied. 2 E.g., Horace, Carmina 3.6, a typical specimen. The ancient theories of Rome's moral decline, not all of which stress decline in the state religion, are discussed by D.C. Earl, The Moral and Political Tradition ofRome (London 1967) 17ff. 3 Rituals andPower. The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge 1984) 7-15. 4 E.g., M.E. Spiro, "Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation," in M. Banton (ed.). Anthropological Approaches to the Study ofReligion (London 1966) 85-126. 14SyIIecta CIassica 4 (1993) demand of the Romans sincere confessions of faith or proofs that their hearts were strangely warmed.5 What mattered in Roman religio was the pax deorum, the reciprocal relationship with the gods sustained by exact ritual performance. Ritual, there can be no doubting, constituted the essential kernel ofRoman religion, or, as S. Price has put it: "Ritual is what there was."6 But before one dogma replaces another in the classicist's creed, it is worthwhile examining a general problem thatremains unsettled: What was the role of personal morality in Roman religion? One approaches the question with wariness, since the Romans constantly bemoaned (and endeavored to document) their own moral decline and since, certainly in the Augustan age, this supposed moral decline came to be associated with the need for religious revival, a state of affairs too schematic to trust unexaminedly and one too easily accommodated to Judeo-Christian assumptions about the relationship between religion and morality.7 "Jupiter is called Greatest and Best," Cicero wrote in his De Natura Deorum , "not because he makes us just or sober or wise but healthy and rich and prosperous," and this unquestionably reflects the traditional and prevailing Roman sentiment.8 Indeed, one eminent authority has laid down the law: "The divine powers were satisfied by the correct and punctilious performance of traditional rites; they did not seek any particular state of mind either in the performer or in the group on whose behalf the rites were performed."9 Yet Polybius, writing about 150, saw things somewhat differently; he observed that Roman magistrates excelled their Greek counterparts in their personal morality because they took seriously the oaths they swore, promises whose execution was supervised by the gods themselves.10 To be sure, Polybius' frame of reference...