The Peace of the Gods: Elite Religious Practices in the Middle Roman Republic by Craige B. Champion

Abstract

416 PHOENIX In Chapter Four Gladhill reveals how “Vergil constructs his entire epic according to a series of foedera struck by Aeneas, which organizes and motivates the narrative” (118) and culminates in Aeneas’ sacrifice of Turnus at the poem’s end. On a larger scale, the violation of foedera struck between Europe and Asia underlies the poem’s entire poetic landscape. Within this structure, Gladhill shows how certain patterns, such as altar violation, emerge as a norm, as in the stories of Sychaeus, Laocoon, Priam, Dido, etc., and Gladhill draws usefully on Servius in fleshing out this and other aspects of his argument. His overall conclusion in this chapter, however, resembles what is commonly said about the conclusion of the Aeneid, i.e., that it is ambiguous: “the death of Turnus and the consequent enactment of the foedus leave the reader in a state of interpretive aporia, which has continued from the Aeneid’s publication to the present moment” (154). Chapter Five on Lucan’s Bellum Civile provides the book’s climactic counter-example. Whereas in the texts examined in earlier chapters the foulness shadowing foedera is contained in various ways, “Lucan constructs a narrative not of ritual alliance, but of ritualized foeditas” (168) in depicting the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. The narrative arc of foeditas in the poem extends from Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon at the poem’s opening to the decapitation of Pompey near its close. In this world, “scelus is law and nefas is pervasive” (170) and the reader watches as the narrative of civil war unfolds via a “unified and coherent poetics of inversion and destruction” (171). The subversion of the foedera mundi in the poem finds its most memorable expression in the witch Erictho’s ability to reanimate a dead man. At moments of concordia in the poem, such as the foedus struck by the armies of the Pompeians and Caesar at Ilerda in Book 4, foedera humana and civilia may be revitalized, but these moments quickly pass as the poem rushes on to the passage in Book 9 (1018–27) where Pompey’s foul severed head becomes the basis of the foedus that ends the civil war. Overall, this book represents a significant contribution to the reading of classical Latin literature in its broader cultural context, one of the most interesting and productive areas of Latin literary studies at present. Faults aside, Gladhill’s study has much to offer scholars working in this general area as well as on the individual authors whom he treats. University of Michigan Basil Dufallo The Peace of the Gods: Elite Religious Practices in the Middle Roman Republic . By Craige B. Champion. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2017. Pp. xxv, 270. This book argues that Roman elites of the middle republic believed in their gods in the sense that they accepted that there were supernatural forces with whom they could negotiate in order to influence the course of events. Champion begins from the premise that what he calls “elite-instrumentalism,” the idea that skeptical elites manipulated religion to control their social inferiors, lies behind much contemporary scholarship on Roman religion, including the current orthodoxy of “belief denialism” (x). The Peace of the Gods, by contrast, explores what religious rituals meant to elite practitioners, especially in times of political, military, or social crisis. As Champion acknowledges, it is a “methodological impossibility” (7) to recover the subjective mental state of a historical agent. Even so, he contends that an individual’s behavior can serve as an indicator of what his or her mental state was likely to have BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 417 been. Throughout much of the book, Champion engages with elite-instrumentalism as a “counterfactual interpretive strategy” (ix), asking whether a ritual action undertaken by a member of the elite individually, or by the aristocracy collectively, makes sense when understood as a cynical attempt to exert control over the masses. In nearly every case, he finds that Roman elites acted from a genuine conviction that the scrupulous performance of religious ritual could secure divine favor in matters of great importance. Chapter One (“Elite-Instrumentalism: Persistence and Paradox”) provides a history of elite-instrumentalist interpretations...