A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, one of our lovely Patreons requested that we talk about archaic Roman religion. Religion is Dr G’s favourite topic, so we decided it was well and truly time for us to chat about what the Romans were up to in their early days.
As with all aspects of the archaic period, it can be difficult to find reliable and detailed source material for certain aspects of religious life. However, the gods were hugely important to the Romans, so there are a variety of sources that we can use to piece together an accurate picture. This includes:
- shrines, temples and tombs
- inscriptions
- votive offerings
- the religious calendar
- artwork, such as frescoes and sculptures
- coinage
- the priestly colleges
- details of rituals
- Records, including from groups like the Arval Brethren, a group of 12 priests who worshipped Dea Dia, an agricultural goddess Â
- Roman law
- Extra special sources like the Iguvine Tablets from the mid to late Republic, which were written in Umbrian
- as well as literary sources Â
Where did religion sit in ancient Rome?
We discuss the nature and role of Roman religion in society, whilst trying to mythbust the belief that the Romans just stole everything from the Greeks.
Archaic Roman religion is fascinating, with deities like Quirinus and Robigo (goddess of grain mildew) seeming to date back a long way. As Rome progressed, the state cults became more formalised and ritualised, and new gods were incorporated. You may recall that when the Romans conquered Veii in 396 BCE, they went to great lengths to coax the resident goddess, Juno Regina, to their city. Roman expansion allowed them to come into contact with a greater variety of deities.
There were several important priestly positions in Rome that we refer to in this episode, so here’s your cheat sheet:
- Rex sacrorum/ Rex sacrificulus – The rex sacrorum was a patrician and seems to have assumed the priestly duties of the kings in the Republic.
- Flamen Dialis (Jupiter)
- Flamen Martialis (Mars)
- Flamens Quirinalis (Quirinus – eventually associated with Romulus)
- Pontifex Maximus (chief pontiff or priest)
- And then there were minor flamens, who served gods such as Vulcan, Ceres and Flora Â
- And, of course, we also talk about the Vestals! Dr G would never leave these ladies out
Image of lararium from the Thermopolium of Lucius Vetutius Placidus. The lares stand on either side of the central figure, the Genius of the household. On the far left and far right stand Mercery and Bacchus. Courtesy of Becks on Flickr.
Getting Personal
On a more personal level, the Romans were also surrounded by the lares, guardian spirits who were seemingly connected to place, such as the hearth, streets, neighbourhoods and boundaries. If you have been to Pompeii or Herculaneum, you may have seen a lararium, or one of the shrines that people could have in their houses for these deities. Their origin is debated, but no one can deny their presence in the Roman world.
Things to Look Out For:
- Augury – and our musings on how the Romans would have responded to kookaburras
- The importance of nature Â
- The invention of a new dessert: Flamines banana
- The sacred tree house where only patricians are allowed Â
Our Sources
Cicero, De natura deorum
Cicero, On the Reply of the Haruspices
Seneca the Younger, Letters, 41.3
Flower, Harriet I. The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner. 1st ed. Princeton ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400888016.
Forsythe, Gary. A Critical History of Early Rome : From Prehistory to the First Punic War. Berkeley, Calif. ; University of California Press, 2005.
Scheid, John, and Clifford Ando. The Gods, the State, and the Individual : Reflections on Civic Religion in Rome. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812291988.
Tellegen-Couperus, O. E. (Olga Eveline). Law and Religion in the Roman Republic. Edited by Olga Tellegen-Couperus. 1st ed. Vol. 336. Leiden: Brill, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004219205.
Warrior, Valerie M. Roman Religion. Cambridge ; Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Sound Credits
Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman.
Automated Transcript
Dr Rad 0:15
P Welcome to the partial historians.
Dr G 0:19
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,
Dr Rad 0:23
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battle’s waged and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr Rad
Dr G 0:33
and I’m Dr G, we consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.
Dr Rad 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.
Dr G 0:59
Hello and welcome to a brand new special episode of the partial historians. I am Dr G, and I am Dr Rad, and today we are talking about ancient Roman religion.
Dr Rad 1:17
If ever there was a topic that is right up your alley.
Dr G 1:19
Dr G, I know I’m so excited. Oh, there are so many things we could talk about, but I’m going to try and contain myself to a very specific time limit.
Dr Rad 1:28
We have got a request from a Patreon, actually, quite some time ago. So sorry about taking so long to do this. But you know, there are just so many books coming out, so many people to be interviewed. We are going to be looking at archaic Roman religion, which is obviously very in keeping with the time period that we have been covering for the last decade.
Dr G 1:51
Yes, it’s an interesting, really interesting period of Rome’s history, partly because of what we simply don’t know, as listeners will be well aware the written historical record doesn’t kick in for quite some time. So the traditional foundation date of Rome is 753 BCE, but our real historiographical style of writing doesn’t really start to crop up until about the second century BCE, and then we only have sort of fragmentary things until we get into the first century BCE. So this means there’s a huge chunk of Romans history’s time where the Romans understand themselves and talk about themselves and maybe write it down, but we don’t have the evidence for it, and this means that trying to figure out what their practices were, what they were into, what they believe, a lot of that is, on some level,
Dr Rad 2:49
unretrievable, absolutely. However, the good news is that, because we are talking about religion, it’s obviously something that is pretty important to the Romans. And so there are certain types of material, certain kinds of sources that we can turn to that give us little clues. So obviously, there are inscriptions, there are certain kinds of records. They’re nothing like a narrative history, but we do have certain kinds of records that seem to have been around for a long time, which might give us some indication. And of course, you can also look at, you know, etymological kinds of tracing things, try and figure out why that name. What would that mean? How can we trace that back? So there are certain types of material that are around, but you know what? Dr, G, I have to go back to an old story at the start of this episode. I know you heard this many times, but for people like me who were raised on the 1950s golden era of Hollywood, kinds of movies about Rome, the impression I think you often get when you watch these sorts of movies is that the Romans didn’t really believe in anything like they do have Gods Absolutely, but they’re not gods that they have any sort of deep investment in. It’s kind of a tokenistic sort of religion. It comes across as just about decadence. And I think that’s because obviously in those sorts of movies, either you have the Romans being very unfavorably contrasted to the Christians, because it’s usually that sort of a storyline, or it just sort of feeds into the general cynicism of Roman characters. Now I am, of course, thinking about Spartacus, in which there is directly a scene in in which the senator Gracchus, who’s kind of a bit of an anti hero, I suppose he’s the best person on the Roman side, which isn’t saying a ton, but he is meant to be kind of a good guy. He says that he publicly believes in the gods, but privately, of course, it’s. He knows it’s rubbish. And so I always kind of had this impression from movies that the Romans, Therefore were not a particularly religious or pious people, that it was just all about, you know, show, and it wasn’t anything particularly important, since studying that is either mental view I’ve had to really overcome, because I kind of think it’s the opposite. What do you think?
Dr G 5:29
Yeah, what a great setup. It is. Definitely not all that it appears. Thanks Hollywood. I would say that what the Hollywood films are really offering us is big Christianity and its propaganda, which has been incredibly powerful over 1000s of years at this point in terms of demonizing what came before in terms of belief systems and relationships with the divine, because what we see In those films is Roman belief systems being positioned as merely idolatry and a veneration of the object and the decadence that you mentioned, but with no substance behind it whatsoever. And this would be a mistake, because the Romans are deeply, deeply spiritual people and will not move a muscle unless they feel confident that they have divine approval on their side.
Dr Rad 6:26
I have a joke for you. Dr, G, why did the chicken cross the road?
Dr G 6:30
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Dr Rad 6:33
You know what? It’s not so much about why it’s that we have to watch the chicken cross the road, and that will tell us what the gods want us to do.
Dr G 6:39
It’s very important, always, always keep a good eye on the birds. One of the things that I will never get over, I don’t think, is the way that the murmuration of birds above the city of Rome, which you can still witness today, gives us a sense of what it must have been like to be an augur in the ancient Roman world, and an augur is the kind of priest who does spend their time watching the patterns of birds. And because murmurations are so patterned across the sky, this beautiful sort of flow effect that’s created by these birds following each other in patterns which you don’t necessarily see everywhere. I’ve never seen a murmuration in Australia, for instance, you don’t have those kinds of birds. We have very different birds here.
Dr Rad 7:29
So can I say we do have birds that laugh?
Dr G 7:31
We do. We have incredible birds.
Dr Rad 7:34
I am what would the Romans make of that a bird up in the tree laughing?
Dr G 7:38
I am not going to….
Dr Rad 7:39
Just freaked out!
Dr G 7:40
Yeah, the beauty and the magnificence of Australian birds cannot be underestimated, but they are very different from the birds that you would see over the city of Rome today and in the ancient world. And so I can understand how augury developed, and this idea of taking the auspices, because it’s fundamentally embedded in the patterns of nature. And this is where, when we think about archaic Roman religion, the basis in nature is the first place to start. So we’ve got a really beautiful insight from Seneca the younger where he talks about the powerful effects that nature has upon people. And he talks about, if you ever go into a glade of trees, where the trees have grown up so tall and that their canopies intersect with each other in such a way that it feels like you almost cannot see the sky anymore, this will generate within you a very specific type of feeling. And he calls this feeling, the feeling of numen, a sense of the Divine. And likewise, he also talks about, if you are in a cavernous spot where you can see the rock formation naturally created, creating a crevice above which there’s a whole nother section of land, you’re going to have a feeling of awe, a feeling which is described in the Latin as religio, which is where we get our idea and the term religious from.
Dr Rad 9:09
See etymology, etymology.
Dr G 9:12
So, but the Romans think about these things, not necessarily as religion, because I think again, we’re in a very tricky spot as human beings in this point in time, in this point in context where we tend to think about things like a separation between state and religion and all of this kind of stuff. And for the Romans, it wasn’t like that state and religion are not separate things. They are intertwined things. The Divine is everywhere, present in reality. And it’s how do you navigate that? How do you ensure that your relationship with the gods is appropriate? How do you maintain a good relationship with the gods in order to ensure favorable outcomes for yourself and those that you love
Dr Rad 9:56
absolutely and this is where we come back to that very. Wrong idea I had from the 1950s ethics, which is, as you say, Roman religious beliefs, practices. It just permeates every aspect of life like you wouldn’t start any sort of meeting of a political nature without observing the proper rituals, without having certain ceremonies, which would be somewhat unthinkable in certain places in the world today, where we do pride ourselves on having those things quite separate, although sometimes I don’t think they’re as separate as people like to believe. But yeah, definitely the idea that it’s just everywhere, particularly if you even think about things like the lares. The lares are something. They are particularly household gods, which we might get into a little bit later. But they’re also the kinds of gods that you would find out in the streets everywhere, like it’s just everywhere. And if you think about walking around places like Pompeii, the amount of religious imagery you know, relating to gods or mythology, it’s just everywhere. So it just wouldn’t be something that you escaped. It would just be part of your day to day life. But I also want to say how much I loved what you were saying about nature until, yes, Dr rad’s about to get a bit preachy here, but I do think that sometimes people when they look at other cultures, particularly ancient cultures, and they look at their religious beliefs, and the type of religious beliefs, when you bring up things like it being rooted in nature or sort of coming from natural observances, there’s sometimes an attitude that you get from certain types of people where it’s like, oh, how simplistic. You know, they looked at the trees. They looked at the birds. You know, they don’t have an understanding of science and kind of looking down on that sort of belief system as being somewhat primitive compared to what people have access to today in terms of information. Now, obviously it’s illogical to expect people in the ancient times to have a scientific understanding of the world akin to anything like what we have now. They just can’t, obviously. But I also don’t think that it should be dismissed as simplistic or primitive or anything like that. In fact, I think we actually probably need a little bit more of that these days. Now, I am a city girl. I am aware of the dangerous pedestal I am ascending right now, but genuinely, I think that part of our problem when dealing with current environmental issues is that we actually don’t pay enough attention to nature going on around us. And it is actually really miraculous what we have around us, the variety of animal life, the way that this planet functions, the gifts that we are given, and what we’ve been able to turn them into, and how we’ve been able to harness a certain lifestyle from entirely the natural resources around us, we are not paying enough attention to nature and the signals that are being sent to us, and that is a huge problem. We know. You know from so many studies how much nature is connected to human well being, and yet, instead, we turn to other things, rather than just embracing the need, we have to connect with nature and have a deeper, a deeper relationship with nature. And yeah, I just, I just see it as a huge problem. So I don’t see it as simplistic or primitive. I see it as something that actually probably really did bring the Romans something really powerful.
Dr G 13:25
Yeah, definitely. And I see where you’re coming from when we’re thinking about the sustainability of the planet and having an outlook like the early Romans did, I wouldn’t necessarily get on board with maybe their later Imperial cult business, but certainly early, archaic religion from a Roman perspective, very grounded in nature, very grounded in observations about the natural world, and then considering quite carefully, what is our relationship in response to those things, what are these signs from nature trying To tell us about the will of the Divine and and then thinking about what would be the best behavior and the best action to take in order to cultivate the best outcome, not just for yourself, but ultimately for your synergistic relationship with nature. So those things, I think, are really interesting, and in this sense, the ancient Romans share many parallels with a lot of indigenous cultures, and having seen the powerful effects of what nature can do and how you can respond to it and nurture it and care for nature around you, that is something that has a really strong and powerful force which we could harness today, I think, in a much more robust way. One of the things I was thinking about when researching for this topic was the other sort of big misconception that people often bring to the table when I say, Oh, I’m an ancient historian of ancient Rome. And the first thing. A lot of people will say, as a bit of a joke, but with a relative undercurrent of seriousness, is oh well, they just copied everything from the Greeks, and they just stole stuff.
Dr Rad 15:11
Wait, you mean they didn’t,
Dr G 15:15
I mean, the thing is that Rome, as it develops, does really encourage syncretism over time. They are not an exclusive kind of people when it comes to their belief systems. They’re very open minded in this respect. If they come across a group of people practicing something, they are more likely to welcome it into their own space and to incorporate it into their own culture, maybe with some little changes that make sense for them, but they certainly don’t dismiss other people’s gods or other people’s practices. They’re more inclined to bring in rather than push out. So in this sense, by the time we get to our written sources for what ancient Rome is like, the Greek influence has already been there for centuries, and so then it gets very hard to disentangle, because they’ve done a lot of work to be like Jupiter is a bit like Zeus, and Aphrodite is a bit like Venus, and they’ve created and established all of these relational parallels, not like the other Yeah, they’ve done so much work to be like, yes, we can bring it all together that people are like, Oh, well, the Greeks were earlier in history, and therefore the Greeks did it first, and then the Romans were just like,
Dr Rad 16:37
but as you say, you’re totally right, particularly When we’ve been looking at this earlier period for so long, whilst Absolutely, there’s a Greek influence, and that’s also not just because the Greeks literally exists earlier, but as we’ve talked about, the Greeks are in Italy.
Dr G 16:53
They have colonized South Italy. They are in Sicily. They are in Campania. They are in Puglia. The Greeks, you can’t avoid the Greeks. They’re already they’ve already turned up, and they’ve already been like, this place is also ours. And the people who are indigenous to Italy are like,
Dr Rad 17:12
okay, and that’s exactly it. So it would make sense that when the Romans are presumably engaged in trading and coming into contact with these people that they are, of course, exposed to their beliefs, and vice versa, and it’s really hard to trace that exact process, as you said. I mean, even if we turn to Greek sources, we don’t have the complete story of exactly how those interactions go, particularly really early on, certainly not ones that we would stake our lives on, or anything like that. So we do have that. So of course, the Romans have probably incorporated that into their own system. But we absolutely have come across stuff that is decidedly italic and doesn’t come from the Greeks, particularly from these earlier cultures. Because, of course, we’ve got all these little italic cultures, the ones that the Romans keep fighting. So they’ve obviously got the Latins, who they presumably have things in common with, like their language and certain structures that they have in their society, because they’re really, really close to each other. But there are all these other people, the ones that the Romans keep fighting, or having alliances with or fighting again. They also have their own religious beliefs, and it can be hard to trace those too, because they get subsumed by Rome itself. And then, of course, we’ve got the Etruscans to the north, yeah. And we know that a lot of their religious practices and stuff are influenced by the Etruscans, as far as we can tell, including probably augury, which you were just talking about, yeah, definitely.
Dr G 18:41
So we’ve got very few sources actually to help us out that that sort of sit within the realm of sort of written evidence. So it gets quite tricky, but we do have a few things. One of them is Etruscan. So we have a piece of evidence that is called the liber lintius, oh yeah, linen book. And this is an Etruscan piece of evidence, written in Etruscan and dates to the third or second centuries BCE. So even an Etruscan piece of evidence, we’re not talking about it being an archaic piece of evidence, it still sits firmly within Rome’s written historical record, but it does detail things that we think come from earlier periods of Etruscan history, and it talks about a duality of gods. There’s a God of lightness and a god of darkness. This is a concept that we don’t necessarily see come through in later religious practice and details of offerings being made to these gods, things that include roasted barley and oil and fire as a medium for ritual practice, all of which pretty standard in terms of the ancient world and in terms of Italy. Okay, and the other big piece of evidence that we have, it’s a much smaller piece of evidence in comparison, but it’s called the Iguvine tablets.
Dr Rad 20:09
And, oh yes, I did come across these. These are written in ancient Umbrian
Dr G 20:15
so the umbrians are a bit further south and east, and the Etruscans are a bit further north and west, and these two influences give us a sense that there is something different going on in Italy, as opposed to elsewhere. So these tablets include references to a number of Gods which seem to then end up having some parallels with Roman gods. There’s a reference to a god called Iuve which seems to be similar to Jupiter, Marte, a reference to Mars and Vufiune, a reference that ends up being to Quirinus, we think. But we also have animal sacrifice described there, which was not true in the Etruscan evidence, libations being made of both wine and Mead and then some practices also associated with augury. So this idea of watching birds seems to be quite prevalent throughout the Italian peninsula, and whether it came from the Etruscans first, or whether it sort of developed sui generis throughout this period of the archaic Italian epoch, hard to know. But it doesn’t seem like something that has come from somewhere else. It seems very much about what is happening here, and how can we make meaningful understanding of it within this context.
Dr Rad 21:43
Yeah, and we’ve also got things like tombs, which can give a little bit of light. I mean, unfortunately there’s not when you’re talking about tombs, if you’re talking about artwork and things that have been left behind, and the way that bodies have been buried, it’s obviously highly open to interpretation. We don’t have written explanations of what these things mean. But certainly, if we’re going way, way back into the pre regal slash regal period, because we’re not exactly sure when there were kings of Rome, or even if there were kings of Rome. I mean, no, I shouldn’t say that. I think there were.
Dr G 22:17
We wrote a whole book on the kings of Rome. They definitely existed.
Dr Rad 22:21
It’s written down. It must be true. I think we can safely say they were kings, but we don’t know exactly, you know, we can’t be 100% sure about exactly when they were, exactly who they were, and all of that kind of For more details, read our book, exactly, yes. But if we go like way back, there definitely are tombs in this region. We’ve got also tombs from, you know, the etrurian area, which, some of them are extremely lavish. They’re often called princely tombs. And that can tell us a little bit about, obviously, some sort of spirituality and belief systems. And the interesting thing is that, as we start to see, I think, less of these styles of burials, what is suggested to us, at least by the material record, is that we do start to see the erection of these quite monumental temples compared to what has gone before. And we can’t obviously be 100% sure why, but it’s theorized by one of the academics that I read that maybe it’s a shift in terms of the way that the elite in these societies are sort of competing in their displays of wealth and in an effort to obviously demonstrate their power in the community. Maybe previously, one of their ways of showing off was having these extremely lavish burials and tombs and that sort of thing. But as we shift into a different political scenario over the centuries, it becomes more an area of competition of what you can do for the community and how you can have a very physical presence of yourself and your family and also show your dedication to the gods a different way. And so we start to get more of these monumental temples being built. And in spite of the fact that the Romans have this very powerful story about Rome being razed to the ground during the Gallic sack in 390 we do actually have buildings that are referenced that clearly survived that. And a lot of these are obviously things that were pretty substantial, like temples. The most notable one that we’ve talked about a number of times, of course, is the temple of Castor and Pollux, which way back in the early republic, is something that is dedicated after the Roman victory over the Latin league in the Battle of Lake Regillus. And we do also have, in the accounts that we’ve been talking about, it sort of comes up from time to time. Also reference to these spaces which seem to exist, you know, cultic spaces where it’s not just the Romans, it’s something that’s used by the people of the area, and it seems to be where they come together, not necessarily for political reasons, but probably because, you know, socially and culturally, the. This is a cultic space that is important to all of them. So we’ve referenced there’s a particular space which the Etruscan cities and the Etruscan people seem to share. It’s often, I think, probably misrepresented in Livy as a place where they come together for political powerhouse and to plot the demise of the Romans.
Unknown Speaker 25:17
Well, we’re here, guys,
Dr Rad 25:21
but it’s actually probably more likely a cultic space where they come together, maybe for trade, but probably more religious rights and that sort of thing. And we’ve also made reference to spaces like the Temple of Diana, one at arikia oricia, depending on how you want to this was
Dr G 25:38
exactly the one I was going to mention. Now that you’ve brought up sacred space, well,
Dr Rad 25:42
I’ll let you take it over. Dr G, because I am no expert in this area.
Dr G 25:46
It’s not that I have that much to say about it, but Diana of Nemi is positioned within Aricia. And so we’re talking to the southeast of Rome, but we’re going into the Castelli Romani, so we have to hike up a hill a little bit. Your favorite people, the Tusculuns. They’re hanging out there as well. So the Latin people tend to gather in these sacred spaces, usually at particular times of the year, to perform specific rituals that are important to all of the peoples in the area. And it seems that these sorts of places are quite common. And people will travel around to these sacred areas, knowing that these rituals need to perform, be performed at certain times. And Diana of Nemi stands out to me because I made it my mission to find her sacred spot. Various travels to Rome. The local people do not want to tell you the location, but with a little bit of wandering around in the area, you can find the remains of one of her later temples in that area, and there are still people who offer modern ritual offerings into that space, which I think is a beautiful sense of cultural continuity. Oh,
Dr G 27:28
thinking about other evidence that might help us understand archaic religion in this area, the one thing that we do have that stands out as being very specific and different from things like a Greek influence, are the votive offerings that have remained. So we’re quite lucky to have a number of ceramic remains. These votive offerings are really specific to Italy. We don’t tend to see them elsewhere, they’re often in the shape of body parts or internal organs, which are, how did they know? How did they know? Let’s not ask too many questions about that.
Dr Rad 28:14
I hate to spoil it for you. Dr G, but actually what you found is the ancient remains of the Roman version of operation
Dr G 28:22
at all. Everybody was into that game. Everyone had a different addition. So these votive offerings seem to be particularly body parts, often hands, feet, but also organs, and sometimes depictions of swaddled babies. Is the other really common one, and we think that these votive offerings are probably elite offerings, rather than from everyday people, and partly that’s because they’ve been designed to symbolize the object, whereas we think a lot of the votive offerings probably would have been actual objects. So things like an offering of food, an offering of hair, a piece of clothing, a tool doesn’t survive. Yeah, the sorts of things that are probably not going to make it through in the archeological record, just because they’re natural materials, conditions have to be so specific to preserve those for a long period of time, whereas the beauty of ceramic is that it toughens up, it holds up shape, and 1000s of years later can be like, Aha, I found a foot. So we don’t really know what these votive offerings are doing, necessarily. They they seem to be some sort of personal conversation between the offerer and the divine. But what that practice meant, what people might have thought while they were doing it, these are the things that still and probably will always elude us, because we simply don’t have this kind of source material that would. Get inside somebody’s head for things like that, but there’s enough of them that we’re like something’s going on here.
Dr Rad 30:06
Dear Marcia, today I went to the shrine and left a little statue of my foot. Yeah, I’ll leave the guards to decide what that means exactly. I must admit, whenever I’ve thought about votive offerings, because you say it’s not like this is an uncommon practice in many ancient cultures to make these sorts of offerings. I’ve always wondered if it’s some sort of connection to someone suffering in that part of the body, or maybe a relative is suffering in that part of the body, or that part of the body symbolizes something to do with something that’s going on in their life, and that’s what’s sort of going on in this and this is something I think that highlights, perhaps something that probably is true in terms of the way we understand religion, as far as we can tell, in the archaic Roman period. And to be honest, beyond the Archaic period. Roman religion doesn’t exactly offer ethical guidelines in the sense of in the way that someone who comes from a different kind of religious tradition would perhaps understand it, you absolutely have lots of rules and lots of things that are really important in terms of how you live your life. It tells us a lot about cultural taboos. So there are rules and things like that, but it’s not quite the same as, like an ethical code, that this is how you personally need to live your life. Would you agree with that?
Dr G 31:34
Yeah, definitely. And I think for the Romans, that sort of idea of an ethical guideline comes far more through their legal system than it would through their relationship with the gods. This is more a system of acknowledgement that there are greater beings and greater forces at play. And can you establish a strong enough reciprocal relationship that things will work in your favor when push comes to shove and to circle back to this idea that the Romans didn’t care about the gods at all, very, just very pragmatic people just waiting for Christianity to come
Dr Rad 32:12
and get them. They just care about cement and the army. Yeah, as
Dr G 32:17
long as I can build this bridge and hit somebody with my sword, I’m a happy camper. Exactly nothing else matters. Cicero does talk a lot about religion. He wrote a number of books, many things. Thanks Cicero. Whether you love him or whether you think he’s annoying, doesn’t really matter. He does leave us a lot of information that has stood the test of time. And he tells us, in his De natura deorum, On the nature of the gods, that most thinkers have affirmed that the gods exist most and that there are a few outliers, a few who are like not sure, and some who are strongly there are no gods, but the bulk of people, in Cicero’s view, believe in the divine existence. And it’s more a matter of the quibbles about how divinity is having an effect in the world around them, and that is another matter entirely. So yeah, but from the Roman perspective, this starts to firm up as we get more into the historical period, it firms up into a set of behaviors and ritual practices that define the Roman calendar. So the way that they think about time is very much embedded with how they think about the gods and what things need to be done when, whether it’s a matter of preparing for something that’s going to happen in the future. And the gods are also participants in those kinds of actions. And we get to a point where it becomes so formalized that we get situations like we get with the Vestal virgins, where they must be able to speak without impediment, because every word that they say in a ritual practice needs to be said perfectly to align with the needs of the gods in order to ensure the right relationship. So the Romans become more fixated, I would say, with their ritual practices and their relationship with the gods over time, rather than
Dr Rad 34:21
less well, I think it goes back to what we were actually talking about in a narrative episode the other day, which is the other day. Look at me in the same outfit, trying to pretend like we’ve had recorded on two separate days when we were talking earlier today, actually in a narrative episode, we were talking about the fact that we do have these narrative histories. We have the annalist tradition, and we have narrative histories which start to develop as we get into sort of the mid to late Republic. And we’ve also got things like family histories, which actually can tell us things about religion. If you look at someone like Julius Caesar claiming that Venus is his home girl, etc. There are obviously connections between particular families and particular cults and religious practices and that sort of thing, particularly if we’re talking about the elites who we can mostly track in the written sources. But in this late Republican period, when there’s so much conflict, where it obviously seems like things are somewhat coming apart at the seams, and then we have this transition into empire. There is this renewed fascination for the Romans themselves in understanding their ancient past. And so we do also get these records from people who are now referenced as the antiquarians, who are interested into looking into the, I suppose, kind of the minuci in a way, although they give us some really important evidence, but things like explaining place names, explaining practices, explaining why Romans do certain things the way that they do. And we do, obviously get some of our information about religion and cults, and therefore, from these sorts of people. And I think that ties into like Cicero, is very much a part of that time period where there’s that interest in figuring out who they are, what they are, and looking back to their past in particular, to try and understand their own history and practices as well as possible.
Dr G 36:15
Yeah, definitely. And it becomes a matter of formality. It’s ingrained in everyday life. So you talked about the lares, there’s these family gods. So there is a domestic aspect to cult that develops, and probably that, I would say, probably always existed, regardless of what time period we’re in, the way that people personally venerate gods, and then we have things that are much more sort of state run, where it’s like this ritual is happening on behalf of all of the people, and Rome is broken up into a whole bunch of priesthoods by the time we sort of start to get into the mid Republic. And we think some of these priests definitely pre date the Regal period, at least, augurs seem to be crucial to the foundation story of Rome. And so this idea that we’re observing birds comes through the whole time, and augury doesn’t disappear as Roman history progresses. It goes right up to the part where what I think it’s Honorius does something terrible to his chickens. Remember that let’s not talk about when we get into that period of Roman history, many decades from now, but the idea that the birds play a really important role, hugely significant. They end up keeping chickens in order to observe them. Do they eat the food? Do they not eat the food? All of this is very important, but there are priests for just about everything. We think the flamins, of which there are 15, three major flamens, 12 Minor flamens, we think they’re very early in terms of priesthood, and they’re related to the fundamental gods, the Flamen Dialis, connected with Jupiter, the Flamen Martialus, connected with Mars. And the Flamen Quirinalis, relating to Quirinus, a God which is also connected with Romulus. These are really early priests, and they seem to have a lot of restrictions placed upon them. At least the major flamens do in terms of what they’re allowed to wear, where they’re allowed to go, what sort of actions they’re able to participate in. And many of them come in a set, because not only do they run a priesthood specifically related to a particular God, but their wife is also a sacred Priestess of the same God, and they operate as a pair. And if one of them dies, you could get a whole new set one. Can’t just
Dr Rad 38:55
Collect all five!
Dr G 38:56
You can’t just have one. You gotta have two. Well, and this is definitely
Dr Rad 38:57
something interesting to talk about with the interesting to talk about with the priesthoods, because we can’t exactly pinpoint all the details about where these priesthoods come from and exactly when they become in, you know, more and more influential in Roman society. But something that’s interesting, which I hadn’t really thought about, because we, we do have references, obviously, to people who are acting in in certain priesthoods in our narrative accounts, because sometimes, obviously, they intersect, obviously, when we’re talking about those major flamins That you were talking about, or flamines, I don’t know how to say the plural out loud,
Dr G 39:36
Flamines is correct.
Dr Rad 39:37
It sounds like some sort of fancy dessert, you know, like flamines banana
Dr G 39:42
Delicious.
Dr Rad 39:43
They are patricians, which, given all the stuff that we’ve been talking about with this narrative that we’re fed, that very early on in the early republic, there seems to be this real concern by the patrician class, who we. Don’t know who they are. We don’t know where they came from. We’re not even entirely sure if they existed straight away or something that had developed over time. But let’s go with the narrative. Just to keep things relatively simple, they apparently have this real concern about dominating the knowledge about sacred law, sacred practices, and there’s this real impression that things would be sullied somehow if plebeians had access to these roles. And so it’s probably, perhaps no surprise that these major flaminais from patrician background traditionally, and something I hadn’t really thought about is the fact that obviously Rome is all about electing magistrates. They serve their period, and then they move on. You can serve more than once, but you still have to be re elected and that sort of thing. But priests are appointed for life, unless something untoward happens.
Dr G 40:57
Something untoward, yeah. So there is a sense that within the context of the elite of Rome, the patricians, as they like to call themselves, perhaps they’re hard to know it’s one of those chicken or the egg scenarios, like, is it the fact that some people are in charge of these ritual practices and have been given this responsibility, which leads to them becoming focal points for the development of an elite class, or is it the case that these families, through virtue of having greater power from a physical sense, were able to co opt that power into a soft power that was the divine understanding and the ritual knowledge, and it might be a little bit of both. It’s difficult to note, but certainly, once we have this idea that Rome has a set of priesthoods and that there is a way of honoring the gods that is good and appropriate for Rome as a whole, and that’s the point where we start to see a real consolidation of secret knowledge. Because, yes, priests don’t want to have that stuff written down. Or if they do write it down, like we we get sometimes in stories of the early King Numa, if they do write it down, they then immediately hide them somewhere so no one can look at it except for them.
Dr Rad 42:27
It’s a secret clubhouse. You’ve got to have the password.
Dr G 42:30
Yeah, you are not allowed in the tree house.
Dr Rad 42:34
But the thing I’d never realized before, because as I say, it’s not really a thing like I know obviously how important religion is, because it comes into our accounts all accounts all the time in terms of the Romans being out of kilter with the gods or being blessed by the gods. It’s all about maintaining that relationship, and this is where, obviously priests would play a really important role. Because whilst Roman religion might not provide like an ethical code of conduct in the way that say, maybe Abrahamic kind of religions do. It does have those rules, and it’s almost like the Public Religion, the kind of state religion it is about like the joint wellness of the community and observing what needs to be observed in order to maintain peace and prosperity, which makes total sense when you think about it, working as a community to make sure that you all benefit from a state. And if something goes wrong, well, you know you need to get to the bottom of that and fix the relationship so that things prosper again.
Dr G 43:37
And at the root of that is a real fundamental truth, which is that natural signs are telling us things. Yes, so if we look at the most fundamental and earliest understanding of augury, bird movement in the sky is telling us something absolutely and I, like you, am a city girl, I could not tell you what the birds might be trying to tell me. But if we think about people who are less certified than ourselves, much more ancient, what are the things that they have to hold on to in terms of their understanding of the natural world? One of these things that can reliably be seen and then hopefully reliably interpreted, is the movement of various animals, including birds. I would say birds would not be the only animals that you’d be interested in observing, for sure, but they’re showing you something very clear. They do different things at different times of the year. They can be a good indication of what is happening seasonally, or what is about to happen seasonally, in the same way that observing the trees could be very useful as well. So keeping in touch with the landscape, being aware of river systems, the Tiber floods all the time, but not without a pattern. So when the snow melts further up. And then you get in, or you get a high flow of rain. In another part of Italy, you’re going to have a flood with the Tiber. And if you’ve got somebody who is able to sort of pick out the signs around that, start to maybe make some judgment calls ahead of time about when might be important to move a little bit further away from the edge of that river. All of those things become really important. We know that the forum consistently flooded for centuries, and it’s very low lying, and it’s only after they do some dramatic earthworks that they’re able sort of to minimize the flooding that happens to the forum, which is kind of incredible because it’s their it’s their meeting place, like, let’s just go down the hill.
Dr Rad 45:45
Any other Wellingtons on? Not looking good out there today. Yeah, I can’t believe we’ve
Dr G 45:49
got another meeting and all this mud.
Dr Rad 45:52
Damn Wellingtons really don’t match my toga.
Dr G 45:55
Why can’t we do it on a hill? For a change? We’ll have none of that around here, Valley or bust. But all of these things mean that as we get further and further into the modern world, we feel more and more removed from these kinds of observations. The Tiber still floods, but because the walls have been built around the Tiber to prevent the flood from having a destructive capacity, by and large, you notice the river rising, but you don’t notice the effects of a flood. Yeah, things like that change the way you engage with a landscape. The same sort of thing as a comparison would be the flooding of the Nile and fundamental to ancient Egyptian way of life and understanding of the crop cycle. And yet that river system has been completely altered by modern technology to the point where it’s no longer recognizable as a life giving River in the way that it would have been to the ancient Egyptians.
Dr Rad 46:50
Yeah, and I’d say there’s a certain logic to me. I mean, we were joking about the fact that, oh, the Romans aren’t really these really pragmatic people, but in a way, it is pragmatic. It is completely logical to pay attention to the world around you and the well being of the planet that you depend on. And if something really unusual happens, like a really crazy storm, happens in a way that doesn’t normally happen, or, as you say, something’s flooding at a time it doesn’t normally flood, you actually stop and pay attention to it and think, why is that happening, and what can we do to fix it, rather than just ignoring it or claiming it’s some sort of government conspiracy. That’s illogical, that’s dumb. Where’s my insurance? Yeah, if you have bushfires happening abnormal amounts of times. If you have a number of record days hitting massively high temperatures in a country, if you have animals dropping dead from the sky in huge numbers, if you have fish that are dying in rivers that they would not normally die in en mass, then yes, you should be paying attention to that and trying to do something about that as a community. That’s just logical, the way that we live our lives, not logical because we actually know exactly what’s happening. We have exactly the tools we need to fix it, and yet not happening, having to fight these ridiculous battles. But anyway, I’m getting sidetracked to go back to the priests, the Roman priests. One thing I hadn’t realized, and this obviously suggests the very archaic nature of certain aspects of Roman religion. I have to admit, I always thought it was kind of funny that Roman priests were called flamen. Again, it sounds kind of disgusting. It sounds kind of like a side effect of a disease that you might get like, oh, just get so much flamen. And I never really understood why Roman priests had that title, and I don’t think I can offer a full explanation of it, but it was really interesting that one of the academics I suggested that I read, suggested that it comes from the Hindu priestly title of Brahman, which would obviously take it way back, in terms of Going right back to very antique times. And also, similarly, when we think about Quirinus. So Quirinus being like an embodiment of, you know, Romulus, in a way, and having associations, and therefore being a very specifically Roman God, not something stolen from the Greeks, but the idea that that like the sort of stem of that name, the Quir- bit of the of the Latin might sort of come from a Sanskrit word, again, making it seem really, really ancient, and maybe being something that was brought to the area by people who sort of moved in there. I mean, that makes it even more archaic than I could possibly have imagined, if it’s true? Obviously, this is all speculative.
Dr G 49:43
But well, these are the things I mean, the Indo-European language branches. They’re all really interesting. The one that seems to struggle to fit into them is the Etruscan and aside from that, even there, there are some sort of crossover. Over, but we do get a sense that there are at least some connections to a broader east to west cultural movement. And it’s happening really gradually, it seems. But it does end up definitely in Italy, and we get some connections also with the idea of fire. And I can’t remember the root term for that right now, but that concept of fire in the Sanskrit coming across, gradually hitting Greece, getting to Italy, and then we get things like Hestia in Greek and Vesta in the Latin, yeah. And even though those two goddesses are both virginal and are both associated with the hearth fire, there’s also lots of differences between how the ritual practice associated with the two goddesses in the different cultures plays out. So there’s a sense in which we might be looking at sort of an independent, sort of flourishing of ideas in two different locations. But the root language behind both is similar. The other god, which seems to be distinctly Roman, is Janus, the two faced God,
Dr Rad 51:23
yeah. We’re in the month of January at the time of recording.
Dr G 51:25
At the time of recording, we are in Janice’s special time.
Dr Rad 51:29
We are, hey, Janice
Dr G 51:32
and I do like that. There are little moments that come through for us where we’re like we we can’t quite pair Janus up to anything else, and we’re like, Aha, this might be a hint, whereas, definitely there seems to be ideas about Gods and ideas about their areas of influence, which seem to have gradually moved east to West. And so things like Apollo and Artemis become Apollo and Diana, that seems to be something that has come across. And the Etruscans have a pairing that is very similar, although slightly different in name, and we see this with also things like Dionysus and Bacchus. And it’s like you look at those two words, they don’t look anything alike, but there is a real overlap in sort of how they end up being even if they started off being slightly different, they end up becoming quite similar over time.
Dr Rad 52:32
So, and let’s face it’s not like Dionysus was something that the Greeks invented, like, like, he’s definitely considered to be a god that migrated from elsewhere, exactly.
Dr G 52:41
And then we’ve got the idea that Rome does seek out foreign gods as well. When we get further into the historical record in the mid and late Republic, they’re encouraging and sometimes taking foreign gods. I mean, like you see that sacred rock you’ve got that represents that particular goddess, Cybele, come with me, get in this boat. We’re heading to Rome. So they do also have moments where they’re like, We don’t have enough gods to deal with the specific issues that we’ve got right now. The ones that we’ve got are not enough.
Dr Rad 53:15
The world is not enough. Yeah,
Dr G 53:16
expand the Pantheon. Expand.
Dr Rad 53:20
It’s so funny, isn’t it, that when we actually look at Rome’s history, particularly the period that we’ve been looking at, as you say, we’ve not that long ago, dealt with the Romans, inviting Juno to come with them from they come to them, but they also, even though they promised her lots of things, they’re also like, we’re not going to put your temple inside the pomerium. We don’t trust you yet, the way that they do these sorts of things, it does actually kind of go against that popular image that we have of Rome, of being a representative of very intolerant imperialism, and understandably so, in the sense that there are a few notable exceptions to the embracing attitude of the Romans. But I don’t think that people know exactly how that particular relationship with notably, say, Judaism and Christianity, have actually evolved from that early period into when the Romans obviously themselves start becoming more Christian and eventually officially adopt Christianity as a state religion, because it is that complex relationship between the communal well being being tied to religious well being and political well being, like you can’t separate those things, and that’s partly why we do have these notable clashes between People of certain faiths and the Romans, it’s not just, oh, they don’t like your religion and they don’t understand it. It’s very different, obviously, but there are efforts made to under to have some sort of a relationship with obviously, Jewish people in Rome. It doesn’t go well overall. But there are efforts. It’s made. But yeah, it’s that complex overlap of the politics of the situation, the religion of the situation, and how they all feed in together, on top of which just probably the very particular people that are alive at that moment, making those decisions, which I think lead to the combustive situations that we get. I think
Dr G 55:20
there’s also a bigger systemic matter at plays, because, if we’re thinking about because we’ve been talking predominantly about sort of archaic and also touching on some Republican ideas about Roman beliefs, and Cicero falls into that category as well. But I think we’re dealing with a very, very different ball game when we get into the idea of the imperial period of Rome, totally, yeah. And we’ve moved into the idea of the Imperial cult, and that produces a top down Roman hierarchy, yeah, of this is how it is, yeah. And if you don’t like how it is, we’re gonna, we’re gonna have some problems.
Dr Rad 55:59
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. No, you’re right. It is. It is. It is completely different. But I do want to take you back to the beginning, Dr G, because I do have some questions. If we’re talking about priests and the people who are very significant in early Roman religion, we actually can’t avoid talking about the Roman kings and also this very shady character of the Rex sacrificulus, and also, eventually the Pontifex Maximus, a part of Roman religion that obviously still has something of a legacy to this day, because that is the title of the Pope lives in the Vatican.
Dr G 56:38
Hello, Mr. Pope. He has a long and storied history, the Rex sacroficulus, yeah, and I sort of a parallel to that. Might be the Rex sacrorum as well. So there seems to be a priest that is aligned with a specific building called the Regia, which is also got all of this monarchical connotation about it, this weird, little trapezoidal building that is on the Via Sacra, right near vesta’s Temple and the rec sacrificius hangs out in this building. We’re not really sure what he’s up to, necessarily most of the time, but there does seem to be a sense in which this priest functions as a sacrificial victim, or a figure in which you can place the idea of communal pollution upon, and then they will carry that pollution away from Rome. So it’s not necessarily a huge honor to become the wrecked sacrificial list, because you often will end up dead at some point.
Dr Rad 57:41
Sounds pretty gross. It’s part of the deal gotta be done. Someone’s got to do it. Someone’s got to take one for the team.
Dr G 57:47
Yeah. In the same way that a lot of the behaviors and ritual practices are designed for the right relationship with the gods, the Romans also have this conception of pollution being quite an issue, which is fair enough, because if you don’t look after the mess, it leads to disease outbreak and all sorts of things. And so that really dictates, like, where you can place dead bodies. This is why they’ve got to be placed outside the pomerium. All of these things make sense from a practical measure, but also from a divine one, ultimately, and the rec sort of fits into that category. Sometimes somebody comes into that role, and they’re not necessarily a high level, elite person, but what their job is is to live a really rich life like a king, and they’re treated as such for the time that they’re in office, right up until the point where it’s time for their role to
Dr Rad 58:44
come to an end. Well, that’s kind of what the name implies. Isn’t it like the sacrificial King, the
Dr G 58:48
sacrificial King, and I kind of love this. This is something that fades out of Roman practice at a certain point
Dr Rad 58:55
well, and it’s something the link to the kings, obviously, is that it’s thought that this is something that comes into being when the Kings go,
Dr G 59:01
right, yeah. So the king has a whole bunch of priestly functions. And so if we think about Romulus, he was an augur king. He was able to read the signs, and he was also somebody who ruled, and as they got further into the king,
Dr Rad 59:16
so he says, I don’t know if Remus would agree with you on that one.
Dr G 59:20
Remus himself may also have been an auger king, but only for like, one day. Yeah, it did not work out for him. But Romulus certainly has this idea like associated with him, of being able to read the signs of the birds and to be able to rule that flows on to NUMA as well, to a certain extent, because he hangs out with the augurs as part of the process of deciding whether he’ll take on the kingship. So he becomes a bit of an auger king as well. But that concept fades out, and we then start to see a split between augurs and people who rule. So instead of having all of the powers enmeshed in one single person, they tend to split them up and. And so when the kings are eventually expelled from Rome, there is a whole bunch of ideas around priestly things that are still embedded in the concept of the king, even though they’ve tried to split them up a little bit. And this seems to be where figures like the rax Rex, sacrificulus and the Rex sacrorum, who may or may not be the same person, may or
Dr Rad 1:00:24
may very shady characters.
Dr G 1:00:26
We really don’t know a lot about them. They’re both really fascinating, but they could be the same figure, we’re not sure. Certainly, they’re both connected with the Regia, and they sit underneath the Pontifex Maximus, and I kind of love the Pontifex Maximus. What a dude. We need, a man in charge of priests.
Dr Rad 1:00:47
Yeah. I mean, this is such an interesting idea, because eventually, and we’re not going to go into this, but eventually, that’s also something that Augustus will take on, as one of his many things that he takes on.
Dr G 1:00:59
Well, he has to, because Caesar was Pontifex Maximus, of course.
Dr Rad 1:01:05
So yeah, it’s really it’s interesting that it remains significant, but obviously I feel like the nature of it changes a bit. But certainly the Pontifex Maxis is someone we should talk about, especially because I’m hoping you’ll also use this as a bit of a segue to talk about another important Priestly College, which is, of course, the
Dr G 1:01:23
vestals Don’t mind if I do. So we’re not sure why the Pontifex Maximus becomes so important, like, by the time we get to Augustus, he makes a big deal about it, yeah, and it seems to be a big deal, but we’re not sure why. Over time it’s become such a big deal because the pontifices are a college, yeah? And then there’s one pontificate, there’s the pontificate, Pontifex Maximus
Dr Rad 1:01:48
One ring to rule them all!
Dr G 1:01:49
exactly, exactly, but he’s just the chief of the college. But it seems that as Rome’s religious practice develops, that college becomes in charge of other colleges, right? So they’re a hierarchy of sorts develops.
Dr Rad 1:02:04
And so isn’t the name something to do with bridges? Yes, yes.
Dr G 1:02:08
Very important. A Pont and a Pontifex, yeah, and yes, nobody agrees about that either, but it is a possible etymological connection that they’re interested in bridges. And of course, bridges are very important, because how do you cross
Dr Rad 1:02:22
a river? I again, it’s something I never think about, and I should think about more. Yeah, quite important.
Dr G 1:02:28
Yeah. And bridges are hard to make. I would not want to have to try and make a bridge.
Dr Rad 1:02:33
They bring people together, just like a lot of these religious practices that we’re talking about in the Archaic period, it’s about the community.
Dr G 1:02:40
Man, just build a bridge and get over it exactly. So the Pontifex ends up being in charge of other priests, in addition to having their own Priestly College, which is in itself quite interesting. But then obviously, as we get further along, the pontefx Maximus is seen as the chief of all of the priests. Essentially his name implies, yes, well, but why wouldn’t there be a Flamen Maximus,
Dr Rad 1:03:05
you tell me? Dr, G, you tell me. Well,
Dr G 1:03:07
yeah, that’s the thing. And it’s like, because we do have other colleges and we’ve got the augers, why isn’t there an auger? Maximus? Maybe there is. And so this is the thing we’re like, why is this guy the head of all of them ultimately, does he become that that kind of sitting above them all, when each of the colleges will have their own chief priest within it? So even the vestals have their own chief Vestal, absolutely so. But she’s not in charge of everybody.
Dr Rad 1:03:36
Gotta have a head nun. How do you have the sound of music without a head nun? I’m waiting for the Vestal version of that story.
Dr G 1:03:44
So the Pontifex Maximus ends up being in charge of the Pontifical college. And the pontificate seem to be a pretty politicized priesthood by the time we get into the historical record, and their job seems to be overseeing other priesthoods by and large and making sure everything is running correctly. How bureaucratic? Yeah, like the flamens sit underneath them, the arval Brethren sit underneath them.
Dr Rad 1:04:10
Yes, and they’re potentially very ancient too. Yes, the
Dr G 1:04:13
vestals sit underneath them, although I don’t know that I have much to say about the Arval Brethren at this time, but certainly the vestals run into bureaucratic issues, really, that involve the pontificate
Dr Rad 1:04:26
like you mean burying them alive? No, the paperwork involved. My God, it’s just so frustrating when they interfere with our business. Another vessel has been smiling too much. Does she understand the forms I need to fill out. That’s right, Louise,
Dr G 1:04:43
gonna have to get out my whip and my bed sheet. It’s really annoying.
Dr Rad 1:04:47
The vestals are meant to be very ancient, though, right? I mean, as far as we could tell, the Vestals are meant to be
Dr G 1:04:51
very ancient. The vessels are very ancient, yes, yeah. Their Temple is to is one of the places in Rome that’s considered the center. Of the universe. The other is the Umbilicus. But let’s not muddy the waters too much. Both are circles. It’s fine. But yes, the vessels are considered very ancient, very attached to the location, and they end up very
Dr Rad 1:05:16
Roman, even though they come from elsewhere, seemingly according to the myth.
Dr G 1:05:20
Well, it’s like Each place has its own Vestal group. So each Vestal group becomes very specific to the place where it is located, right? And this is true, I think, for most of the italic peoples, and maybe Rome is the greatest expression of it, in the sense that right. They’re like, this is the landscape in which meaning is possible for us in terms of our relationship with the gods. But if you go across the road and 50 kilometers down the street and you talk to the people there, they’d be like, this is the place where our relationship with the gods is the most important thing. So the location is relative, and so you then get local specificity as a result of that. So Roman vestals are not necessarily completely similar to the vestals of Aricia or other
Dr Rad 1:06:10
places, but as Rome itself becomes more important and gains control over these other places, it allows, I suppose, their Vestal cult to be put into more prominence in historical record and to maybe be made more meaning.
Dr G 1:06:25
Yeah, definitely, yeah. You know, doesn’t ever get over talking about itself.
Dr Rad 1:06:30
So it’s not like they can let me tell you about what they’ve been up to exactly.
Dr G 1:06:36
So even if other places are engaging in similar religious practices, and we have this idea of Romanization that is happening as the Empire expands and expands. People in those different locations may or may not have festivals, but also their practices may or may not be mirrored within what is happening at Rome, because how would they know? You’d really have to be in touch with somebody specific to find out.
Dr Rad 1:07:03
Smoke signals, get it,
Dr G 1:07:08
send the sacred fire.
Dr Rad 1:07:10
For those are not in the know, Vesta is represented by flames, like a lady.
Dr G 1:07:15
Gotta watch the fire. The vest will sit under the Ponte, facts, Maximus, and when something goes wrong, from a row perspective, it’s the Pontifex Maximus that conducts and leads the investigation into what might have happened with the vestals. And we have to assume, although we don’t have heaps of great evidence for it, that if something similar happened in other colleges that sat underneath the remit of the pontificate, they would also investigate that. And I’m not going to make any claims on that front, because that’s not what I’ve specialized in my study, and I don’t know the answers to any questions anyone might have about that.
Dr Rad 1:07:54
Yeah, it’s really fascinating, in such a patriarchal society as Rome, that there is a Priestly College that is female only, even though they still have this man technically sitting above them and obviously monitoring their behavior, etc,
Dr G 1:08:12
yeah, and for the most part, that wouldn’t necessarily be something that played out in any way in your day to day life.
Dr Rad 1:08:18
Exactly so too much flame watching. What can I say?
Dr G 1:08:22
Keep your eyes on the prize.
Dr Rad 1:08:24
Now, something I thought that might be interesting to maybe wrap up with is to maybe go back to this question of the Lares is because I think we’ve kind of established that when we’re talking about this Archaic period, whilst we can’t know for certain what was going through people’s minds, what we can say is that it’s definitely stems from this need for the community to be safe and protected. That’s what these practices are about. And as the Rome, as Rome, develops as a as an institution, as a government, as a political entity, it becomes more of this, like Public Religion, not just beliefs that are common to those people, but we do have this aspect, which we’ve talked about, where there is a level of personal religion, not in the way, again, that People of certain cultural backgrounds will imagine where you’re praying and having, like, a personal relationship with God. But this is where I want to come back to the lares, maybe, to sort of wrap up on, because the Romans themselves didn’t actually really know where the lares came from, and they do seem to be something very present, very important to the Romans.
Dr G 1:09:44
Hmm, definitely. I mean, so we have this sense of like maybe there. I tend to think about it as being sort of split between there being sort of the state apparatus, and then there’s the sort of private veneration. And. And people will have their beliefs regardless of what is happening at the top. So that’s true. Yeah, as we increasingly get into Rome’s historical period, the mid and late Republic, we’ve got a really formalized, public religious setup. There are priesthoods. People get co opted into priesthoods. They hold those priesthoods for life. They have particular sway over certain things. But if you are, let’s see what would be a good name, Lucius. If you’re Lucius, Lucius the Roman, let’s say you’re a butcher. It’s, you know, it’s all fun and games for the fancy highfalutin people to wander around and be like today is the is nefas and there shall be no business people still got to eat. What are you going to do? You’re a butcher, things like that. Maybe there is space always for the personal as well as the public. And I think this is probably where the idea of lares come into it, because nobody can tell you how you pray to your household gods. They’re yours. And you can go and visit a friend, and you can see the way that they’ve set up their shrine to the lares in their house, and you’d be like, Oh, I love that style. And before you know it, it’s like, Instagram beige or whatever. And everybody set up their altar in the same way, and they’ve
Dr Rad 1:11:30
got their little avocado toast, yeah?
Dr G 1:11:32
And it’s like, Oh, I’ve seen, I’ve seen what Sue is up to with her lares. And I’m just thinking I might redesign our altar. So I think there is an element of like what matters to you personally in your own sense of spirituality, because I think all humans have that capacity for spiritual understanding of themselves within the context of the life that they live. And while you might be really on board with the public religious system that is operating around you. There might also be moments where you’re like, I just need to connect with some gods for my own personal benefit. And to what extent this might be connected with the idea of the ancestors, because we know that funerary masks have a big role to play in homes. And this may be true for non elites as much as elites in terms of like commemorating family. And there is that ancestor aspect to what the Romans are doing in their own households as well. And the lares might come into that a bit. And we do see a sense in which Augustus in particular, tries to co op the lares into a more public setting by coming up with the lares competales and setting up local public shrines to lares, exactly as a way of maybe formalizing some of his reconfiguration of the topographical space of Rome and being like, let’s reshape this into a different sort of neighborhood and give people something to hold on to from a collective experience in their own little suburb. And I’m not sure that that would ever have properly replaced people’s personal gods in their own house. The other thing to keep in mind is that every hearth fire is a place of Vesta, so you have the cult of Vesta, obviously, in the very fancy, round temple. And it’s everybody gets to see these priestesses, and they dress very differently from every other type of woman in Rome, so they’re instantly recognizable. And yet every hearth fire is a place where Vesta resides. So within the context of any home that has a fire, you already have a godly presence that can never be taken away unless that fire goes out. And if that fire did go out, well surely you would relight that fire, because the house fire is essential for your capacity to be able to eat good food. So there is always a divine presence in every household. Even if you were like, I only have one lares, whatever got into it, or even if you didn’t have an altar at all, there would still be something that people would immediately associate with, some sort of numinous presence in your household.
Dr Rad 1:14:20
Yeah, no, I just find it so fascinating that when the more I looked into these, because I’ve always known they existed, obviously, I’ve seen lots of larariums, you know, because I’ve been to places like Pompeii and Herculaneum, so I always just thought, yeah, household gods, whatever. But the more you look into it and start to try to unravel who the lares were, where they came from, in Roman religion, it’s such a mystery. The Romans themselves didn’t really know, as you say, like they were everywhere, and they certainly were important. But the Romans themselves didn’t seem to exactly know from whence they came, and there are definitely different opinions amongst the Romans about exactly who they are and how they should be interacted with. And as well as modern scholars about are they some sort of representative of like deceased peoples connected to your family, perhaps? Are they household gods? Are they protective spirits? Are they friendly spirits? What exactly are they? And I never really thought about the fact that the way that the lares commonly are represented visually, they actually don’t look anything like a Roman that you would admire as like a statesman or something like that. You know Roman statesmen, you think about those statues right, with the very impressive drapery being held into place and the very serious face old man wrinkled, Battle Scars everywhere, that’s what the Romans would tend to look at as a figure of admiration. The lares, the way that they tend to be represented, they’re associated with drinking, with feasting, with general good times. That’s partly kind of what the festival that grows up around them is associated with as well. They’re sort of neighborhood festivals you talked about the compitalia, and they’re youthful, and the way that they dress is also much more simple, much more dressed down, maybe even associated with the way that perhaps a slave or someone lower class might dress in, just like a simple tunic. It’s unusual, now that I think about it, that they’re kind of represented that way, when they’re so central to every Roman household look.
Dr G 1:16:21
Now, now I’m curious, because I wonder if the lares from elite households might be more fancily dress. I now have questions
Dr Rad 1:16:31
if you if I think about the very fancy larams from places in Pompeii, for example. Now I know the people who are living in the city of Pompeii are not the elite of the Roman world, like the elite Elite. They’re rich people living in a nice place, you know, a middle class and that sort of thing. But generally, I think the way that they’re represented is fairly consistent in the way that they are dressed. And I did not even know that there is actually a figure referenced in written material about like the mother of the lares, who is never represented visually, ever. And yet, there is apparently a mother, and again, we don’t know the exact relationship. Did she give birth to every single lares, ouch, by
Dr G 1:17:23
the too many. Everybody’s got a few Exactly.
Dr Rad 1:17:27
It’s like, what is it? But apparently she receives offerings from the Arval Brothers. So again, one of the, one of these interesting groups that we kind of you know that kind of date back as well. They have a really ancient hymn to the lares. And it does seem to me, to be honest, the more read about the lares, my personal view is that they are protective, and that’s why the Romans are personally invested in them, because they’re protective of spaces that they might have, like property and their homes and their businesses and that sort of thing. So that’s how I kind of look at them personally, even though not everybody would agree with me, but she also, I think, receives some sort of offering and rituals and but she’s never, I don’t think, ever named or visually represented, which I I had actually never heard of that before, until I started looking into this for this episode. Fascinating.
Dr G 1:18:16
Yeah, this is something I haven’t come across before, either.
Dr Rad 1:18:19
Really interesting. Yeah, like, did she just give birth to some lares? And then those lares just like, multiplied, like the broomsticks in Fantasia.
Dr G 1:18:26
Are they? Like the Egyptian shabties, where all of a sudden there’s 1000s of them? Yeah?
Dr Rad 1:18:34
And interestingly enough, there’s obviously talk about, okay, so they have a mother who’s the daddy. Do?
Dr G 1:18:40
Daddy? Always a pertinent question in a paternalistic type of society.
Dr Rad 1:18:48
Well, but it actually takes us back to stories that we’ve told many times now, the idea of, obviously, people being born from the half, like you were talking about, you know, like that, being a place of divinity, I suppose, potential divine origin. We’ve got this idea, obviously, of, you know, Servius Tullius, potentially being born from the fire. He’s one of the kings of Rome. And just yeah, these connections with these stories that we have talked about, and the idea of being born from the hearth, whether that means that Vulcan is your father or like the Lares familiares…. It’s just, there’s just so many questions about exactly how all of this stuff that we’ve got fits together, but the idea that there is a single lady who is like the mother of the lares, it’s just, it’s just weird. It’s something we can’t really fully explain.
Dr G 1:19:39
Well, I think that’s a fantastic note to end on, because the there is always a mother. If you go back far enough, there’s always a mother. The story always starts with a woman.
Dr Rad 1:19:51
Were they born of an interaction between a woman and a fire? Again, again.
Dr G 1:19:59
I’ve seen enough. Fire palaces to last me a lifetime, never again.
Dr Rad 1:20:03
How can we explain all of this? Well, yeah, and there, and there are no myths about them. They just exist, like they’re just there it. And that’s the thing. It’s, I mean, I shouldn’t say no myths, but yeah, there’s no, like, big mythical tales like you get with people, like we’re not
Dr G 1:20:20
people, yeah, Ovid doesn’t devote a story in his Metamorphoses to the lares and things like this. So, yeah,
Dr Rad 1:20:28
all right, so we’ve got it. We’ve got archaic at Roman religion being obviously very ancient, not stolen from the Greeks, not stolen from the Greeks.
Dr G 1:20:38
Greek influence creeps in over time. Colonization is a thing. Be aware everybody. The Greeks colonized Italy first, and then the Romans went and got the Greeks back a few 100 years later, that was a thing. The Romans are very open minded up until a certain point. They encourage gods into their realm. They embrace different traditions, then they become an empire. Things go a bit downhill from there in terms of their relatability and acceptance of others. Then the Christians win the war, and Golden Age Hollywood gives us some tales.
Dr Rad 1:21:16
Guess, have a field day. Yeah, yeah. Look, I think, I think the thing that I’ll take away is that actually, whether we’re talking about public or private religion, if we want to put those labels on it, just to make sense of it in our own head, is that it is about the world around you, and it is about finding safety and security, which I think is still something that most religions are about these days, really, whether it’s internal or external, safety and security are looking for with, I think, the very archaic origins of Rome. I mean, sometimes we think that their gods and goddesses weren’t even represented in like, you know, human figures, like they, you know, were, as you say, more tied to natural world and agriculture and that sort of thing. I even found reference to a goddess of mildew, which I didn’t know existed. There you go. Yeah, I hate mildew. But certainly I think that idea of paying attention to the natural world and even the lares, if we do think of them, as being associated with place, of being protective of your home, of being about boundaries and property, it’s really all about the spaces around you and how you interact with that, and how you observe what’s going on around you in the romancy, that is something very important, being observant and connected to those things and respectful of those things, which I actually don’t think is a terrible thing to take away from this, even though I know we shouldn’t be too presentist about it. There are lots of things about Roman religion I don’t like, but I don’t like animal sacrifice, and I never will Rome. I think that that sort of aspect of it being very about being observant of the world around you, and finding that security and having protection that I can understand.
Dr G 1:22:52
Yeah, definitely. And I think there is really interesting developments along the way in Roman history, in terms of what we can find in the archeological record, what is suggested by the way, other italic peoples are engaging with the divine, because we’ve got little pieces of evidence here and there. Some things from the oscan language, some things from the umbrians, some things from the Etruscans, as well as the Latins and all of this is building a really robust picture of people who are incredibly observant of nature and are looking to understand their place within nature and to take corrective action if it looks like things are not happening in a way that’s appropriate. So if you have a plague, or you have a pestilence that is understood as an interpretive sign that something needs to be done differently and fair enough, because nobody wants to live through a pestilence every year. So what can you do differently? And the way that that transforms, over time, into highly formalized priesthoods that are locked and bound into the elite, is something that we’re going to increasingly see in our narrative episodes as well. And then that next transition into an imperial cult, which is taking another step away from that is, I think, also going to be a really interesting transition period. So it has been a real pleasure.
Dr Rad 1:24:23
Something we probably should mention, as in this wrap up as well, in terms of their observance of what’s going on around them, is the fact that, for if we’re talking about the Archaic period, and these very early times that we’re in, the Romans, are operating on a lunar calendar, and it’s not until 300 BCE that they switch to solar calendar for various reasons. And, yeah, that changes things a little bit as well. I believe that there’s, like, a rise in number of priests. It also means that, as you say, I think, I think things become a bit more formalized in terms of people knowing what days you can and can’t bring legal business and that sort of thing. But it again, means that you, you are looking to. People to tell you how the gods are dictating your day to day life in terms of when you can and can’t do certain things and and how you operate on a on a day to day basis, the gods are everywhere. For the Romans, they are present everything. Of course, you can break the rules, but then being there and you knowing, you knowing about it, that’s that’s definitely like an interaction on a on a day to day basis, which we can often overlook in our grand narratives, where it’s all about, whoa, indeed.
Dr G 1:25:32
Well, it has been an absolute pleasure to discuss Roman religious practices with you. Dr, Rad, I
Dr Rad 1:25:38
always learn so much from these conversations. Dr, G because, as I say, it’s not something I tend to focus on. So thank you.
Dr Rad 1:25:53
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