Roman Religion through the Early Republic

Abstract

If Greek culture is late compared to the city-states and empires of the Ancient Near East, Roman culture is late and peripheral to Greek culture. It entered the international stage by the very end of the sixth century bce , but contemporary literary sources or reliable later accounts are not available before the second half of the third or fourth century bce . By this time, the Romans and their allies’ armies started to build an empire that comprised the whole of the Mediterranean and much of its hinterland, that is, the whole of western Europe including Britain and much of southeastern Europe, including modern Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, and Asia Minor as far as Armenia by the beginning of the second century ce . Rome defended a hostile borderline against the Sassanian Persian empire and influenced political and cultural patterns throughout its realm with lasting effects for two millennia. It is this later history that accounts for an interest in Rome’s origins. But such an interest must be disappointed here. Nothing supports the assumption that any of the religious elements from the period before the fourth century bce should be part of a causal explanation of the later expansion of the city-state into a world empire.