Religion in Republican Rome: Rationalization and Ritual Change

Abstract

454 PHOENIX clear. When the evidence is not contemporary, there seems no reason to restrict the amount of change that may have taken place, or to suppose that the consulship was one static element in an otherwise rapidly developing and dynamic state. University of Wales, Trinity Saint David J. H. Richardson Religion in Republican Rome: Rationalization and Ritual Change. By JÈ org RÈ upke. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2012. Pp. vi, 336. It was during the republic that the definitive form of Roman religion took shape. We can see its formidable, unpredictable shadow cast on Augustan and imperial Rome, but the edifice casting the shadow is almost entirely beyond our line of vision. The cause is twofold: first, there is a near-total absence of a written record for the early and middle republic; and second, there is also an absence, to a quite devastating degree, of the remains of this same period’s material culture. The absence of evidence is not evidence for absence, patently so in this case, but our position in understanding the development, not to mention the physical context, of early republican religion is undeniably precarious. Jörg Rüpke’s most recent volume, Religion in Republican Rome, invites a renewed and vigorous scholarly discussion of religion for this period. Rüpke has adopted Max Weber’s theories, with their emphasis on “systemization” of religion, and the development of rational-legal authority, both of which predicate a social motivation for introducing changes in religious practice. This suits Rüpke’s (and most Roman historians’) interest in elite control, and the “pragmatic and political aspects of the history of religion” (43). Always keeping within a larger chronological framework, Rüpke approaches his subjects through innovative thematic analyses; initially, and very productively, through the theme of religion as communication. In processions and dramas performed at festivals, he argues, the religious and historical communication was from the upper class, the victors, the elite, to the passive assembled Roman citizenry. The greater part of his analysis, however, is structured around the dichotomy of patricians and plebeians. It is through this dichotomy that Rüpke tracks the changes in Roman religion, and Roman efforts to manage the complex inherited traditions of religion in light of these changes, from the fifth through the third century. He examines poetry recited at upper class banquets: not ballads, but historical epic, which provided an elevated, Greek-influenced, and exclusive means of communication between members of the elite. From the third century on he focuses on the need of the newly integrated plebeian aristocrats to communicate among themselves as well as with the existing upper class, and on the resultant proliferation of festivals and opportunities for religious banquets. He points out how this growing, but still exclusive, communication facilitated increasing competition, and turned it outward toward public activity. This activity can be seen as early as the fourth century, he argues, when increasing numbers of honorific statues were bestowed upon the city by ambitious men, and the triumphator made his first appearance. Rüpke brings new analysis to each of these topics, and also takes particular care to situate his analysis in a social context. (He argues for instance that the triumphator’s red-painted face was an imitation of, and deliberate replacement for, a personal honorific terracotta statue; this is strikingly original, yet one does wonder about the first general who agreed to be paraded as a statue of himself in lieu of erecting a real one.) Whether BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 455 one agrees with Rüpke or not, it is an advantage that his Weberian approach makes religion inherently part of Roman society. Changes occurred in the world of real people, as a result of these people taking deliberate actions. Two major issues of scholarly concern—the calendar and the use of writing—he deals with decisively. He takes the calendar entirely out of the realm of religion, which reflects in part his understanding of the slow development of writing, and of writing as public communication, in Roman society. By locating Roman religion in a society that wrote, but did not use writing for public record until the third century, he codifies...