Foreign Cults in Rome

Abstract

This study of the Roman reaction to foreign cults explores how religion contributed to the Romans’ need to reshape their community and their sense of what it meant to be Roman in the wake of Roman expansion from a single city to the dominant power in the Mediterranean basin. Roman religion is a particularly useful field within which to study Roman self-definition, for the Romans considered themselves to be the most religious of all peoples and ascribed their imperial success to their religiosity. The Romans were remarkably open to outside influences, installing foreign religious elements as part of their own religious system. However, the inclusion of so many foreign elements posed difficulties for maintaining a clear notion of what it meant to be Roman, and those difficulties became acute at the very moment when a territorial definition of Romanness was becoming obsolete. Using models drawn from anthropology, this book demonstrates that Roman religious activity beginning in the middle Republic (early third century b.c.e.) contributed to redrawing the boundaries of Romanness, allowing the Romans to maintain a clear sense of identity that could include the peoples they had conquered, especially the communities of Roman Italy. The book concludes with a brief look at the reforms of the first emperor Augustus, whose actions laid the foundation for further developments under the Empire.