Evidently, from the mid-fourth century onward these festival practices were supplemented rather than supplanted by complex rituals that are characterized by centralized rites, designed to attract a larger share of the population (that is to say, around an eighth to a quarter of the inhabitants of Rome) and also spectators from the surrounding towns.44 Large processions and competition among professionals were typical. The number of days dedicated to these “games” rose continually. At the end of the second century up to twenty-eight days may have been regularly reserved for scenic performances (including the mime),45 a type of ritual that even dominated the circus games.46 These rituals enabled and enforced a complex process of communication, the necessity for which seems to have been arisen from enormous expansion and military strain, as well as from internal processes of social differentiation and conglomeration. The rituals made it possible to extol individuals, in particular magistrates leading processions of different kinds (see below, Chapter 5), as well as to control and force them into the public framework, incorporating and transcending the citizens present. The latter themselves were constituted as a differentiated society that marked symbolic center and periphery. In the imperial era, this type of ritual became the standard language of religious communication of the emperor with the population of Rome, in large measure because its formal aspects had developed precisely to articulate the central importance of some individual within a larger community. Naturally, in the republican period, stress had been laid upon the public frame, while under the empire the centrality of the emperor, and his paradigmatic status as a performer and sponsor of ritual, became a dominant theme of religious communication.
As a consequence of the changes I have outlined, religion acquired a political importance it had not had at the start of the period analyzed. By involving the gods in large-scale communication, such communication was enabled, and a normative framework was at the same time given to it, which defined the interaction between prominent nobles and a large populace as “public.” This holds true even in the case of priestly banquets, when audiences were present only by medial discourse about the event. To state my thesis most clearly, religion captured and defined “public” space. This form of procedural systematization had two consequences. First, ritualization— forcing action into public space and religious forms—became an important form of social control. This process is the central concern of Chapter 5. Before this, however, the second consequence of this change must be addressed: the amount of religious communication grew dramatically. Growing complexity, new topics, and self-reflexivity followed; space or, better, contexts for the reception of Greek thinking on religion were available. Formulated in Latin on Roman stages, it could not but refer to Roman religion, and surely did so intentionally. This form of theoretical rationalization is the subject of the next chapter.
Chapter 4
Incipient Systematization of Religion in Second-Century Drama: Accius
So far systematization has been observed in the form of changes in institutions. In this, the rationalization of communication served the feathering of space, and the public religion appeared as an instrument rather than an object of rationalization. This chapter will address the first stages of a process that could be termed the theoretical rationalization of religion, turning religion into something that could be known and discussed and subjected to standards of argumentative coherence, that is, rationality. Although the process is visible in other texts, this chapter will concentrate on those texts that were at the center of the stages of the process analyzed so far: Roman drama.
Roman drama is best known from two of its earliest playwrights, Plautus and Terence. A recent study has shown how widespread religion is in the plays of Plautus, illustrating the performative properties of Roman ritual and the intricacies of communication with different deities. Although the image of religion thus presented seems quite coherent, and the precariousness of communication between humans and gods is thematized through the frequent dramatization of interrupted rituals, nonetheless, no systematizing critique is offered in the corpus of Plautus.1 There is a reference to the question of whether the gods care for humans at all at the beginning of Mercator (5–8), but the idea, once voiced, is immediately employed to justify referring to the audience as the primary addressee of the dramatic narrative.2 We have to wait for the second half of the second century before we find meaningful change in the nature of religious discourse and the content of critique.
The sources for the period under consideration are rather sparse. In the few cases where we have contemporary texts—contemporaneity being of particular significance for this investigation—they are short and seldom more than fragments. Polybius, who was at least present in Rome, is Greek and not particularly interested in religion. Nonetheless, his positive evaluation of the function of this superstition,3 as a Polybius today would call it, may be considered an important reflection of theories that were circulating among his interlocutors: members of the Roman upper class like Cato the Elder.4
In the next generation of Roman playwrights, the works of Accius (c. 170–90 B.C.E.) constitute an important point of departure. These are broadly represented by numerous if scattered fragments. A review of all the fragments shows three areas to be significant: critical reflection on the gods, or theology, one could say, in general; description of meteorological and astronomical phenomena, which are treated in theoretical terms according to Greek natural philosophy; and statements about divination, which connect to a comparable theoretical discourse, enabling a distinctive criticism of Roman institutions.
Theology
Accius’s dramatic productions contain a divine apparatus of personalized gods in a polytheistic framework, which allows them to move the plot forward. This does not at first glance appear different from the approach of his predecessors. The selection of deities named as agents in the action is not particularly striking, despite the arbitrariness of the material left to us: Iuppiter appears several times (e.g., 535, 646 R = 210, 450 D); Iuno (652 R = 702f. D) and Mars as Mavors (321 R = 157 D), Arquitenens or bow-bearer is used of Diana (52 R = 324 D) and Apollo (167 R = 285 D). Minerva bears the epithet armipotens (R 127). The list is lengthened by the “forest-inhabiting” fauns (237 R = 428 D), Silvanus (405 R = 481 D), and Fortuna and Sol (619 R = 88 D), along with groups of gods such as the di inferi (R 62) and the Cabires (526 R), an apparently typical Roman term for the “great gods” worshipped, for example, on Lemnos and Samothrace.5 According to Servius Auctus (Aen. 8.130) the genealogy of Evander, which went back to Maia and her son Mercurius, received extensive treatment in the Atreus (Atreus I R = I D). Vulcan distinguishes himself by being named three