Search Results

This chapter looks at examples of individual interpretations of traditional priestly roles from the third until the first century BC. There was innovative behavior not only on the part of the plebeian Pontifices Maximi; among the patricians, there were also individuals who interpret a priestly role not in the traditional way but as a specifically religious role. Both case types demonstrate highly individual behavior. It seems that the actors intended to problematize the relationship between their priestly and political offices or to privilege a specific religious obligation over a political role. In each case, they did this by asserting the obligation of perfect religious performance. Basic, however, to these individual attempts to further develop given roles was a shared conviction: the religious framework of the Roman polity was to be provided by its patrician members in particular.

Rome's religion is not so much about the objects of worship but the institutions that made possible Rome's greatness, among them the two key sacerdotal colleges, the pontifices, who supervised the sacra, the ensemble of rules and rituals which loosely group under the word ‘religion’, and the augures, who had responsibility for the auspicia, a major axis of communication between men and gods. This emphasis upon the importance of the priestly colleges to the maintenance of Roman religion and so of the Roman state reappears elsewhere in the late Republic and early Empire. In keeping with his basic assumption that, though a God of some sort truly pre-exists, civic religion is a thoroughly human creation, Marcus Terentius Varro devotes the three books after the general introduction to an account of the three major sacerdotal colleges. There follow three books on shrines and sacred places, three on festivals and three on rituals public and private.

Chapter 7 examines how dozens of martyr acts composed beginning in the fifth century turned the Capitol into a site of Christian resistance. In these pious fictions, rejection of a fantasy Capitol created a new heritage for the hill. The Capitol was reconstructed out of the “living textuality” of the hill, fragments of inscriptions, and the ubiquitous presence of ruins. Unmoored from the traditional ways of remembering the hill established in the late republic, the Capitol came to play a new role in a distinctly Christian history of a pagan Roman empire. These martyr acts elaborated new ways of knowing the hill and the city of Rome that had almost nothing to do with the classical past. Here, Roman traditions about Christian heroes made the Capitol emblematic of the Roman Empire itself, a symbol of awesome worldly power that could be dramatically neutralized by a battalion of Roman saints.