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This chapter presents a quantitative reconstruction of temple building during the fourth and third centuries, evaluating the scale of the monumental intervention into Rome's topography and the labor demands that it triggered. The temple constructions of the middle Republic exemplify a social commitment to smallness — repetitive smallness. When it comes to size, no temple that was erected during the middle Republic compares to the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Yet what the middle Republic lacks in the size of its temple foundations it makes up for in their sheer number, and in the rhythms that the regularity of their construction imposed on Roman civic life. The chapter then explores the political and economic inputs that had to be coordinated for temples to rise from the ground. It also considers the possibility that the relatively minimal upfront costs of temple construction were a means of veiling the far greater costs of secular monumental projects: the aqueducts and roads that from the period of the Samnite Wars engineered a profound and lasting revolution in how Romans and non-Romans interacted with and conceived the res publica.

This concluding chapter offers a two-part assessment of the book's major findings, first through an examination of one of the institutional religious procedures that arose from the repetitive patterning of those collective commitments surveyed in the previous chapters, and second through the formulation of one final model that attempts to visualize the cumulative force of religious practice on the design and experience of civic time. It begins with the institutional procedure: prodigy expiation. The chapter then illustrates two key dimensions of the middle Republic's timescapes that bear directly on the understanding of Roman state formation during the fourth and third centuries. The first is that religious practice must be mentioned in the same breath as political engagement in any study of what held the res publica together. The second proposition is about method, and about quantitative methods in particular. Systematic quantification is a great boon to those seeking to study the interrelation of religious observance and state formation, and in particular those who are seeking to build bridges between otherwise isolated or (artificially) partitioned bodies of evidence.

This chapter discusses the origins of elite-instrumentalist interpretations of Roman religion by Greek and Roman writers, and how it persists in recent scholarship. It uses a particular “time map,” spanning the period from approximately the second quarter of the third century—leading to Rome's first titanic conflict with Carthage—to the aftermath of the Gracchan revolution. The chapter first provides an overview of the so-called “polis religion,” the focus of the modern study of Roman religion, describing it as a form of elite-instrumentalism. It then considers the elite-instrumentalist interpretation/model, its history, and its paradoxical longevity in order to understand how the Roman ruling elite used religion in the Middle Republic. It also examines some of the main features of elite religion in the Middle Roman Republic. Finally, it introduces definitions, parameters, and theoretical/methodological underpinnings for the chapters that follow.

This chapter compares the perspectives on gift and commerce presented by two comic playwrights, Plautus, writing at the beginning of the middle Republic, and Terence, writing toward the end of the period. Both wrote for broad audiences and so offer views of what a wider range of Romans might have thought. The comedies of Plautus give evidence of a flexible conception of gift and gain like that found in Cato and Ennius, where the pitfalls of gift giving can be seen, as well as an appeal to the virtues of sound and fair commerce. Terence is the first Roman author to use a key word for generosity, liberalitas, and his usage shows its continuing roots in the concept of a social and emotional relationship. He puts a greater emphasis on exchange relationships as part of a social hierarchy, which shows the movement toward a conception of liberalitas as an particularly elite quality, as it was understood in the late Republic.

This chapter offers another passage of summary, but here not in exalted style. Rather, Plutarch uses the medium of a supposed inscription to show the Roman people’s appreciation of Cato the Elder’s censorship, and his moral rescue of the Roman res publica. The historicity of the inscription is extremely doubtful; but the passage shows a fruitful interaction between the austere moral ethos of the Middle Republic (as restored by Cato) and the rich and stylish eloquence of Greek Imperial prose. The passage is not mere hagiography: Cato’s stance on statues has changed. The passage moves away from dense rhythm into a witty and irresistible mot.