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C h a p t e r  Religion in the Lex Ursonensis Compared to the texts analyzed in the previous chapters, the late republican lex Ursonensis professes a type of legal reasoning that, in the first century b.c.e., is new to Roman religious thought.1 Before we continue to consider earlier and less pronounced systematic forms of describing religion in the chapters that follow, the lex Ursonensis offers us the opportunity to examine the development of juridical thinking, one of the most important legacies of Roman culture to later ages. This chapter claims that by the end of the period under consideration another city’s religion could be described in a way that employs Roman semantics and institutions in a rather abstract manner. No new systematic terms are developed, but existing terminology and institutional patterns are aligned to a basic idea about the place of religion in society. Rome—that is, the Roman Senate and Roman magistrates—had had to deal with religion before. By the second century, as we have seen, the role of religious agents included more explicit legislation on religion, from the senatusconsultum de Bacchanalibus (186), with its reflection on gender roles,2 to the leges Aeliae et Fufiae of the late second century and other rulings on augury.3 All these regulations dealt with religion as part of the texture of urban power and politics. Only occasionally, in the repression of the Bacchanalia and Bacchants, for example, or in procuring prodigies external to Rome,4 did Roman politicians have to think about religion outside of Rome. Occasional interventions into foreign religious conflicts, mostly about legitimacy and resources, did not amount to a coherent body of regulations but instead seem to have followed the rationale of preserving or establishing internal structures in the conquered territories that were compatible with Roman aristocratic practices of policy making.5 An argumentum e silentio is weak, but frequently necessary. As far as the lex Ursonensis is concerned, one should not seek models that were much Religion in the Lex Ursonensis 127 older. To be sure, the text is a conglomerate, a composition from norms that might be older.6 Yet it is not very probable that any encompassing legal composition had been prepared more than one or two decades before, if at all. Cicero’s De legibus, an archaizing collection of laws, dates from the 50s; the systematic treatises concerning religion that are prominent in Varro— those by Aelius Stilo, for example—are not much older. The surviving parts of the lex Iulia municipalis, if we identify the second part of the Tabula Heracleensis (lines 83–163) with this Caesarean law of 45,7 do not allow us to posit a direct relationship to the lex Ursonensis. We do not have any indication that religion was a topic of the lex Iulia municipalis. The heterogeneous origin of this collection of norms displayed in the southern Italian city of Heraclea reveals the lack of a comprehensive law: it is composed of norms addressed to the city of Rome, as well as a law for Italian colonies and municipia.8 The incoherence of the charter of Urso suggests that it had only recently been composed, perhaps even at the time it became law. And nothing comparable was to follow. When, in late Flavian times, that is, at the end of the first century c.e., more than a century later, the law was republished on bronze tablets at the same time as the charters of Salpensa and Malaca,9 the probable reason was that it had not been superseded by anything and was a prestigious model itself. Discovered from 1870–71 onward at the Spanish locality of Osuna, the surviving fragments contain about one-third of all of the regulations for the Caesarean colony of Iulia Genetiva Ursonensis, founded in 44 b.c.e. on the initiative of an unknown person who had won the support of the dictator Caesar for his plan to accord this prestigious status (and Caesar’s name) to the reestablishment of the location called Urso.10 The surviving chapters (13–20,11 61–82, 91–109, and 123–34) do not have any explicit overall structure. The same holds true for the fragments of the Flavian municipal laws. At the same time, ordering principles are recognizable in the lex Ursonensis and reveal significant differences from the later texts. Thus it is necessary to deal with the composition of the law before delving...

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