It will be argued here that Max Weber’s concept of rationalization and his typology of rationality provide an enormously useful index for describing religious and cultural change in this period. By “rationality” I refer not to some branch or descendant of Aristotelian logic—itself a type of theoretical rationality—but to the ordering and systematization of concepts, practices, or instruments used to reach particular ends.2 In particular, I define “rationalization” as the attempt to apply ideas to practices and to systematize those practices in order to put them into words and submit them to rules. Rationalization is the systematization—or attempted systematization—of practice.3 By adopting such an analytic framework, I argue, it is possible not simply to analyze changes in different realms comparatively, but also to concentrate investigation intensively on the connections and differences between developments, and the groups that sustained those changes. These are complex claims. Let me attempt to clarify them provisionally at the outset.
Again, it should be emphasized that the particular characteristics of Western rationality are not of primary concern for my analysis. This is so even though classical Greek thought as synthesized in Latin texts of the late Roman Republic—especially those by Cicero and Varro—played a foundational role in European thought up to the early modern period.4 Instead, following Wolfgang Schluchter, I approach Weber’s socioreligious studies as contributions to research on typology and historical change.5 So understood, Weber’s implicit and explicit conceptual tools can be used for the analysis of specific societies, whether Western or not, as well as for their comparative classification. All manner of caution is obviously necessary nonetheless: Weber’s conceptual system does after all proceed from assumptions derived from his work in the field of religion, work that is today considered outdated. But this does not prevent his work from being useful as an interpretive framework, as long as one adopts a critical stance.
In point of fact, it is precisely Weber’s interest in religion that invites the application of his concept of rationality to the analysis of developments of the late Roman Republic.6 Our sources for this period imply that developments in religious practice and reflection on religion played a key role within the larger process of cultural change. In the political communication of the Roman aristocracy, too, religious media played a central role.7 That said, the centrality of religion across these domains of political action and cultural production must be seen as contingent and should be subjected to repeated evaluation in different periods.
Placing changes in the domain of religion at the center of analysis even as one contextualizes those same changes potentially permits an understanding of late Roman republican society to surmount the current interpretation of aristocratic practice in respect to religion with all its implied polarities, that is, as paradox, cognitive dissonance, or hypocrisy. That the pontifex Cotta, a participant in Cicero’s philosophical dialogue On the Nature of the Gods, claims simply to ignore all philosophical skepticism in his priestly activities— seemingly repudiating any imputation of cognitive dissonance8—is not a historical datum, but merely Cicero’s literary solution to the problem of this discrepancy. Theories of balkanization simply cannot provide an adequate description of the behavior of the late republican aristocracy, which experienced the practical success of rationalization firsthand.
Within this approach to rationalization, with its emphasis on communicative practice and the institutionalization of knowledge production and interpretive rule-making, it is essential to identify the contexts of production and performance of our main sources, as well as the communicative practices described in these sources. This includes the communicative function of religious practices that were made the objects of discourse. Hence, to anticipate a thesis I shall defend in what follows, I suggest that the various Greek precedents for rational discourse about religion did not gain acceptance at Rome simply because of their rationality; their success was, rather, dependent on the existence of a public audience that was open to and, indeed, already engaged in the rationalization of religion. In other words, this project cannot proceed solely through the reading of texts and tracing of their reception. We must also study the formation of public audiences and their institutional context. This topic is taken up in the first part of this book, which is dedicated to rituals.
Outline of the Book
A serious history of republican religion has not been written.9 This book fills this gap in scholarship by pursuing an interest in both Roman history and the history of religion, inquiring into the formative period of Rome’s initial experiments with imperial expansion and continuing into the late middle and late Republic. Thus, while the primary focus of this book is on the period from roughly 240 to 40 B.C.E., occasional glimpses into earlier periods are included. Mapping change requires attention to chronology, and this book is structured to shed light on both change and its chronology. While the final chapter (Chapter 14) summarizes the processes analyzed in the previous chapters in depth, Chapter 1 attempts to reconstruct Roman religion at the dawn of our period, as far as is possible from the meager extant evidence.10
The first part of this book (Chapters 2–5) is dedicated to public ritual. The term “public” denotes a large audience that is ideologically identified as the Roman people, even if it is not representative in any legal or statistical manner. As used in this volume, “public” is not a precisely differentiated analytical term but rather a heuristic one. Particularly as an anachronistic term, which is colored by modern ideas of participatory decision-making processes, it raises the question of arenas of communication that indicate “audiences” beyond themselves in the realm of the entire society. In this sense “public,” in the singular, represents an arena of communication that enables open, general communication and association, publicité and communauté. Communicative situations involving audiences of this type are reviewed first (Chapter 2). The rituals of republican religion are then analyzed for changes in their visibility and the size of their audience, as are situations— political and juridical assemblies, to name but two—that might form theaters of communication (Chapter 3). In this ritual context of communication, as arguments were formed or were able to take effect, critical reflection on institutions and further institutionalization arising from those reflections could be articulated.
Dramatic performances, it has been stressed, offered an important communicative space, and the texts performed in that space—objects of brief glances in the opening chapters of this book—receive detailed examination in Chapter 4.11 But the performative aspect of drama should not so occupy our attention that we neglect to consider the circulation of written drama from the later second century B.C.E. onward.12 Some passages preserved among the fragments of the second-century poet Accius will allow important insights into incipient rationalizing interpretations of religion in this period.
At the end of the first part, our focus will shift to the language of ritual. The development of the triumph constitutes an instance of the effects of ritualization in the form of a public ritual as a form of control (Chapter 5).
The second part of this book will directly address texts and the establishment of rules, shifting the focus from the middle to the late Republic. My point of departure is the presence of highly developed practical and theoretical rationalizations: practical in the form of instrumental rationalization, that is, solutions to technical problems, and the rationalization of values; theoretical in the form of causal, for example intellectual, rationalization in epistemological theory and worldviews. Outside the sphere of religion, we might locate such rationalizing tendencies in late republican culture first in the form of Greek schools and texts.13 Greek culture occupied a prestigious position in this period, of course: Roman aristocrats competed to equip their villas with Greek art, and Greek culture dominated on stage. But my focus will be on the forms of rationalization visible within this borrowed Greek culture, and in particular on what I call insular rationalizations, namely, segmental systematizations.
Rhetoric is an example of such insular rationalization. By the second century it had been developed into a teachable art of convincing argumentation. In conformity with the conventions of Roman historical