Augustan Literature and Religion at Rome

Augustan Literature and Religion at Rome
Celia E. Schultz
University of Michigan
I have taken the invitation to participate in the APA’s panel on Apollo, Augustus, and the
Poets as an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between literature and religion at Rome.
As my students often observe, there appears to be a disconnect between the way the gods are
portrayed in literature, especially poetry, and the way they seem when we look at them through
inscriptions and historical accounts of ritual. How closely connected are those literary portrayals
to contemporary daily religious life? We can see the stories about the gods in the artistic
decoration of temples and altars, and those same stories are present in some of the few examples
of Roman prayers and hymns we possess. But do they reflect real thoughts and beliefs? Are they
related to ritual?
John Miller’s thoughtful and thorough book raises these same questions again as it shows
us how poets writing in the age of the Emperor Augustus presented and re-presented the multi-
faceted figure of Apollo. The god is at once Greek and Roman, citharode, poet, prophet,
avenger, and guardian; he is as malleable and changeable, and as active a locus of intertext as
many other elements in those same works. In the poetry of the Augustan age, Apollo is a site
where “literary and political discourse can intersect.” 1 Accordingly there is a lot in Apollo,
Augustus, and the Poets for literary and cultural criticism, and also for the history of politics.
Yet even though Professor Miller’s book focuses on a god, it is not immediately obvious how
this literary Apollo related to the god worshipped publicly and privately in Italy as early as the
1 Miller (2009), 298.

Schultz 2
seventh century BCE and by the Roman state by at least the late fifth century. 2 Nor is it clear
what effect Professor Miller’s demonstration of the complexities and nuance of poetic discourse
about Apollo should have on current work on Roman religion, by which I mean the study of the
Romans’ thoughts and beliefs about their gods and the rituals they observed in their honor.
This curious disjuncture is in no way the result of any deficiency or oversight in
Professor Miller’s work, nor is it unique to writings about, and rituals for, Apollo. There is a
long-lived tendency in modern scholarship by specialists in all the relevant subfields to treat the
stories of the divine (that is, myths) told by Romans as literary and artistic phenomena rather
than as religious ones. The study of Roman literature and the study of Roman religion have
proceeded along two separate tracks that sometimes run more closely together than others but do
not merge very often. Because this is the case far beyond the confines of Professor Miller’s
work, I will not address in this paper the specific question: what should historians of Roman
religion take away from Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets? I will instead direct my comments
more widely to suggest that the perceived failure of Roman literature and religion to engage with
one another is due largely to the aristocratic bias of our ancient authors and our own proclivity to
follow it with insufficient reflection. The question of the relationship between literature and
religion is a very timely one. At the same Annual Meeting that is hosting this panel, the Society
for Ancient Mediterranean Religion is sponsoring another panel, entitled The Book and the Rock,
that investigates the role of literature in the study of ancient Mediterranean religions. The issue
2 Apollo was not newly imported in 433: Livy 3.63.1-11 and 4.25.3-000 (with Ogilvie’s
commentary) indicate that the site of the temple dedicated to Apollo Medicus in 431 had already
been a cult site for the god for some time. This is the same temple later refurbished by Sosius.
See A Viscogliosi, LTUR I. 49-54, s. v. “Apollo, Aedes in Circo”. Linguistic evidence suggests
that his worship by the Romans and their neighbors extends back a long way. The Etruscan form
of the god’s name, Aplu, has lost the Greek –n, suggesting that Apollo came into Etruria through
Latium rather than from the Greeks directly (Jannot 2005, 144-5).

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is also current among scholars of other religions, especially those working on early Christianity
and Second Temple Judaism. What follows is a sketch of how such an argument might be made
for the integration of literature and religion at Rome: much more remains to be done before the
case will be strong enough to stand on its own. Even so, the initial results are promising.
The difficulty of articulating the relationship between literature and religion at Rome has
been recognized for a long time. The ancients handled the problem by constructing a tripartite
theology (tria genera theologiae), which distinguished poetic, philosophical, and civic ways of
talking about the gods. The idea, developed by Hellenistic Greek thinkers, had widespread and
long-lived influence in antiquity, 3 not just among intellectuals but among the wider populace as
well. James Rives has pointed out that when the Greek orator Dio Chrysostom mentions, and
then plays with, the three theologies in a public lecture delivered to a large, popular audience at
the Olympic Games in the late first century CE, Dio assumes his listeners were already familiar
with it. 4 The earliest known instance of the tripartite theology being applied to Rome came in
late second or early first century BCE by the Pontifex Maximus Q. Mucius Scaevola (cos. 95).
We have his account only at third hand: it is preserved in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei 4.27,
where Augustine seems to be working through an intermediary source, widely presumed to be
Varro’s Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum. Varro wrote this multi-volume work in the 40s BCE,
about the time he was given the task of overseeing the development of Caesar’s Greek and Latin
3 A thorough survey is offered by Lieberg 1973.
4 Rives 2007, 22-23.

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libraries. 5 Varro’s Antiquitates is now fragmentary, preserved mostly in De Civitate Dei, where
it serves as Augustine’s main target for his attacks on Roman religion in Books 4, 6, and 7.
Augustine also preserves Varro’s own formulation of the tripartite theology and launches
a multi-pronged attack upon it in Book 6. In using Augustine as a source for Varro – as the
modern reader is forced to do – caution is warranted. Augustine is writing at a distance of more
than 400 hundred years and from a hostile position: his goal is to show the inconsistencies and
weakness of traditional Roman worship in order to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity. It
is unwise to assume that Augustine presents us with an objective account of what Varro actually
wrote. The situation is further complicated by the closeness with which Augustine engages
Varro, often making it difficult to tell where Augustine ends and where Varro begins. Given all
these caveats, it is fortunate that the relevant passage appears to be a direct quote from Varro
(6.5): Deinde ait: Mythicon appellant, quo maxime utuntur poetae; physicon, quo philosophi;
civile, quo populi (“And then Varro says, ‘They call mythicon the theology paticularly used by
poets, physicon the one used by philosophers, and civil the theology that nations employ.’”).
Continuing on in this same passage, Augustine quotes Varro on the nature of each of the
three. The poetic theology, called mythicon by Varro, is what we think of as Greek and Roman
myth, that is, stories about the gods and their exploits. Varro identifies it is as suited especially to
the stage, and so Augustine glosses it as theologia fabulosa. Varro’s second theology, the
physicon (glossed by Augustine as theologia naturalis), is the province of philosophers who
ponder questions like “what gods there are, where they are, of what kind they are, of what
quality, for how long they have existed, whether they have always existed, whether they are
made of fire, as Heraclitus believes, or of numbers, as Pythagoras thinks, or of atoms, as
5 Suet., Caes. 44.2; Cardauns 2001, 50-60 with bibliography.

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Epicurus says,” (Civ. D. 6.5). 6 This kind of discourse Varro says is appropriate to schools, rather
than to the forum. The forum, the heart of the city, is the location for Varro’s third category,
civil theology: Tertium genus est, inquit, quod in urbibus cives, maxime sacerdotes, nosse atque
administrare debent. In quo est, quos deos publice † sacra ac sacrificia colere et facere quemque
par sit (“The third type, he says, is that which citizens in cities, and especially the priests, should
know and administer. In it is contained what gods it is suitable for each man to worship publicly
and what rites and sacrifices for him to perform.”). 7
The influence of the division has not waned over the centuries. Among Classicists, the
most familiar and influential treatment of the tripartite theology is found in Denis Feeney’s 1998
Literature and Religion at Rome, where Varro’s articulation of the three distinct theological
discourses is presented as a precursor to Feeney’s own explanation of the apparent disjuncture
between literature and religion. Drawing on earlier work by Paul Veyne, Feeney argues for
“brain-balkanization,” wherein “educated Greeks and Romans ... entertain different kinds of
assent and criteria of judgment in different contexts.” 8 An upper-class Roman might think about
the gods one way when sitting in his garden listening to a slave read poetry aloud and in
completely different way when he stands in the crowd of on-lookers at an important public
festival. Professor Feeney is careful to emphasize that he does not subscribe to the notion that
literature and religious thought are two mutually exclusive intellectual activities (“cogs endlessly
revolving without engaging” 9 ), but rather he sees them as two separate spheres that sometimes
6 …dii qui sint, ubi, quod genus, quale est: a quodam tempore an a sempiterno fuerint dii; ex
igni sint, ut credit Heraclitus, an ex numeris, Pythagoras, an ex atomis, ut ait Epicurus (Civ. D.
6.5)
7 The manuscripts are largely in agreement on the text, and what variation there is does not
impair the reader’s ability to follow the gist of the passage.
8 Feeney 1998, 14.
9 Feeney 1998, 21.

interact in complicated ways. Even so, their integration is only occasional and far from
complete.
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Varro’s formulation of the three theologies – the poetic, the philosophical, and the civic –
is the bedrock on which modern arguments for the separateness of religion and literature have
been built. His understanding is treated as if it were applicable to the whole of Roman religious
life, but a close examination of Varro’s own words reveals an aristocratic, urban bias common
among ancient authors. The extent to which this is the case is often insufficiently appreciated.
Varro does not include the whole of the Roman religious experience: personal, private worship
and worship in the countryside have no place among his three divisions. Even his theologia
civilis, the concern of cives in urbibus, addresses only the public observance of rites and
sacrifices. The political nature of the third branch of theology is even clearer in Scaevola’s
formulation in which the civil theology is said to belong to principibus civitatis (Civ. D. 4.27).
How widespread was this bias in favor of public ritual is reflected in the fact that what we
know about personal acts of worship at household shrines and in sanctuaries comes almost
entirely from archaeological and epigraphic evidence. The inscriptions and offerings that have
survived the centuries are left to us by the Romans who rarely appear in the literary sources:
those not engaged in the political life or the high culture of the urban centers. The absence of
personal worship in the literary sources is not evidence that it did not happen; the mass of
archaeological and epigraphic material dating from nearly all periods of Roman history makes
that clear. What we can draw from the literary sources is that personal worship was not
something that interested our authors, all male and almost all from, or at least with access to, the
highest echelons of Roman society. They were, on the whole, not interested in the mundane and

Schultz 7
the politically irrelevant. For example, they also did not often preserve information about how a
Roman selected a pair of shoes, or what was the proper etiquette when using a public toilet, or
what games and with what toys Roman children played. Yet we know that the Romans wore
shoes, used public toilets, and that youthful play is a universal mammalian trait.
The focus of Varro’s interest is reflected not just in what he includes and excludes in the
tria genera, but also in how he values each genus. Augustine says Varro preferred the
philosophical approach (Nihil in hoc genere culpavit, quod physicon vocant et ad philosophos
pertinet) 10 and advocated greater adherence to it. In contrast, Varro is largely critical of the
theology of the poets. 11 In a quote that echoes the sentiments of earlier thinkers, including Plato
and Scaevola, Varro explains that this is because the poets present the gods in unflattering and
undignified ways. They make them not only like men, but like men of the lowest sort: denique in
hoc omnia diis adtribuuntur, quae non modo in hominem, sed etiam quae in contemptissimum
hominem cadere possunt.
The distinctions Varro draws among the three theologies get a lot of attention. Scholars
have often overlooked, however, the fact that Varro acknowledged that the theologies were not
entirely separate and indeed even influenced each other. Augustine gets excited about this part
of Varro’s argument: it is a powerful weapon in his arsenal that Varro himself links the unworthy
gods of myth with the gods who stood at the center of the state cult. Augustine treats the topic at
great length (all of 6.6 and 6.7 are dedicated to it), but there is very little of Varro in all this: most
10 “He finds no fault in that which they call physical theology that is the province of
philosophers.”
11 On Varro’s preferences among the tria genera, see Van Nuffelen 2010, 185-6.

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of the discussion comprises Augustine’s rebuttal. 12 There is, however, one passage in which he
quotes Varro directly on this point:
Denique cum memoratus auctor civilem theologian a fabulosa et naturali tertiam
quandam sui generis distinguere conaretur, magis eam ex utraque temperatam
quam ab utraque separatam intellegi voluit. Ait enim ea, quae scribunt poetae,
minus esse quam ut populi sequi debeant; quae autem philosophi, plus quam ut ea
vulgum scrutari expediat. “Quae his abhorrent, inquit, ut tamen ex utroque
genere ad civiles rationes adsumpta sint non pauca. Quare quae erunt communia
cum propriis, una cum civilibus scribemus; e quibus maior societas debet esse
nobis cum philosophis quam cum poetis.” (Civ. D. 6.6)
Finally, although our aforementioned author strives to distinguish the civil
theology from the poetic and philosophical as a third type unto itself, he wishes it
to be understood that it is more mixed with each of the other two than it is distinct
from them. For he says that what the poets write is baser than what the people
ought to follow, and what the philosophers write is more than what it is beneficial
for the crowd to investigate. He says, “There are elements in civil theology that
are inconsistent with those two, yet more than a few aspects of each of them are
taken up by it. Thus I will write about what the civil theology shares with them,
and what is exclusive to itself. From this it will be clear that we ought to maintain
a closer connection with the philosophers than with the poets.”
Unfortunately, we do not know where Varro saw the influence of literature on the state religion.
We know that Augustine saw it in theatrical productions: following on the passage just quoted,
he delivers a lengthy diatribe against the shameful presentation of the traditional gods on the
stage. Is Augustine right? Did the Romans regularly present the gods on stage? And if they did,
was it religion?
It is understandable if you answer those questions in the negative. In contrast to Greek
religion, where the centrality of cultic drama is widely acknowledged, its role in Roman religion
is little understood and discussed even less. A survey of the indices of many of the handbooks of
Roman religion that have appeared in the last 15 years reveals that the topic is usually
12 Wiseman 1998, 17-24, is more certain that Augustine’s rebuttal follows Varro closely than I
think Augustine’s text allows. Wiseman offers an excellent treatment of the little literary
evidence available on the topic of cultic drama at Rome.

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overlooked, or relegated to brief, cursory treatment of ludi scaenici (festivals with a theatrical
component), a ritual form introduced to Rome in 364 when Etruscan dancers (ludiones) were
brought in to give a performance as part of efforts to save Rome from a plague (Liv. 7.2.4-13, a
passage for which Varro is often identified as a source 13 ). The silence of modern scholarship is
reasonable: we simply do not have much in the way of incontrovertible evidence that Romans
regularly watched, in religious settings, dramatic performances of the kind of myths that poets
and playwrights tell. The evidence we do have is subject to multiple interpretations. For
example, Plautus’s Amphitruo, a comedy about the sexual escapades of Jupiter, is certainly an
undignified presentation of the gods, but we do not know if it was performed as part of a
religious event. Beyond this one play, there are only faint traces of other possible cultic
performances, such as the report in Plutarch (Cam. 33.5-7) of the ritual reenactment of the
salvation of Rome in its war with Fidenae by female slaves, or Vitruvius’ instruction to place
temples of Apollo and Liber Pater next to theaters (1.7.1). Theatrical performances were also
part of Augustus’ Ludi Saeculares, but their content is unknown (CIL 6.32323. 100-2, 108-10,
and 155-161). There is ample evidence for the secular performance of plays in Rome over many
centuries, but that is a different thing from the kind of cultic drama Augustine is talking about.
Based on what the literary evidence offers, it seems that Roman ritual drama, if it existed
at all, was of minimal importance to religious life and, therefore, it is reasonable to assume a)
that Varro did not emphasize it in his work and b) that Augustine is misrepresenting Roman
praxis to suit his own ends. But literary evidence (or a lack thereof) is not all we have to work
with. Archaeologists have long known that over the course of the second century BCE,
throughout the Italian peninsula, people in several different towns began building theater-
13 See Oakley 1998, 40-72.

temples. 14 These complexes, some in urban centers and others in rural districts, comprise a
Schultz 10
temple on a raised podium, before which is placed a rounded cavea that serves as the front stairs
of the temple. A few illustrative examples are appended to the end of this document (figs. 1 and
2). The Italic theater-temples differ significantly from the Greek version in that the Italic
arrangement places the altar and the temple behind the cavea (thus allowing the god inside the
temple to watch the performances in his honor), whereas the Greeks arranged their structures so
that the temple and altar were visible to those seated in the cavea.. The crowd of mortal on-
lookers would have been relatively small: Italic theater-temples have caveae large enough to seat
crowds of approximately 1000 spectators. Theaters built for non-cultic performances, such as the
Theater of Pompey after its Augustan re-working or the Theaters of Marcellus and Balbus, could
accommodate many times that number. 15
The most famous theater-temples are the sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste
and that of the Magna Mater on the Palatine hill in Rome. Others have been discovered at towns
close to Rome, such as Gabii (for Juno) and Tibur (Hercules), but also in places further afield,
among them Sulmo in Paelignian territory (Hercules), Pietrabbondante in Samnium (Victoria?),
and Cagliari on Sardinia (Aphrodite?). The complexes are sometimes built at cult sites that had
been in operation for centuries prior. The eventual monumentalization of a theatrical space at
these sites indicates the close connection between ritual and drama in the worship of several
different gods by different ethnic groups.
Many of the theater-temples continued to be used well into the imperial period, but new
instantiations of the architectural form are not found much after the Social War of the late 90s
14 For what follows, I have relied heavily on Hanson 1959 and Nielsen 2002. See also Wallace-
Hadrill 2008, 111-116 and Stek 2009.
15 Nielsen 2002, 197.

BCE. Theaters built in the late first century BCE in Italy are on a much larger scale and,
Schultz 11
although associated with temples, are not dominated by them in the same way. The relationship
between Pompey’s temple for Venus Victrix and the massive theater atop which it sat is a
famously vexed question that is further complicated by the fact that the whole complex was
reworked under Augustus. At any rate, the cavea was clearly far larger than anything that came
before it. Augustus’s other great theater, that named for his late son-in-law Marcellus, was
closely associated (though to what extent is not clear) with the Temple of Apollo that had
recently been rebuilt and expanded by the emperor’s friend, Sosius.
This brief survey of the archaeological evidence makes clear that cultic drama of some
variety was sufficiently important to the worship of a range of gods that the Romans and their
neighbors (some, distant) included permanent theater structures in their sanctuaries. Augustine
might not be so far off as he seems when he identifies the stage as the place where poetic and
civic discourses about the gods intersected. That classical authors, including Varro, seem to
have had little or no interest in the topic of ritual theatrical performances, which seem to have
catered to a baser, perhaps more rural crowd, can be attributed to their focus on aristocratic and
urban activities.
My proposed explanation for the apparent failure of Roman literature and Roman religion
to connect draws further strength from a similar silence in the sources about another ritual
practice that is more widely documented in the archaeological record: the offering of terracotta
representations of parts of the body, called anatomical votives in the scholarship (see fig. 3).
These gifts were given not just to what we might call “healing gods,” but to all of them. The
practice is ubiquitous in central Italy, both east and west, from the fourth century BCE onward

Schultz 12
and spread to other areas of Italy over time. Yet even though every god received anatomical
votives, and did so for hundreds of years in hundreds of towns throughout Italy, our ancient
authors are virtually silent about them. The explanation for our authors’ silence is not far to
seek: the votives are not high art but rather are usually stamped terracotta, mass-produced for
sale to the worshippers who visited a god’s sanctuary (including rural sanctuaries) in the hope of
a cure. The only explicit reference to the practice in all of extant Latin literature is also in
Augustine’s Civ. D. (6.9), 16 which perhaps should lead us to appreciate the extent of his interest
in popular religious habits.
In conclusion, there is good reason to think that the disjuncture between literature and
religion at Rome is illusory. It is not a product of mutually exclusive ways of thinking or talking
about the gods, but of our authors’ tendency to present to us the world they lived in: well-to-do
and politically aware, with minimal interaction with the lower classes as they went about their
day-to-day business. As is often the case in the study of Roman religion, we are left wishing we
had more information, more details. It is likely that the Apollo of the Augustan poets was related
somehow to the rituals performed in his temples and shrines throughout the city and to the plays
performed at the Ludi Saeculares, though the details of that relationship are unrecoverable.
16 Two lemmata in Paul. ex Fest. 93L, s.v. ipsilles and 398-9L, s.v. subsilles, may also refer to
the same practice, but other interpretations are possible.

Works Cited
Schultz 13
Cardauns, B. 2001. Marcus Terentius Varro: Einführung in sein Werk. Heidelberg: C. Winter.
Feeney, D. 1998. Literature and Religion at Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hanson, J. A. 1959. Roman Theater-Temples. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jannot, J. R. 2005. Religion in Ancient Etruria. Translated by J. Whitehead. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Lieberg, G. 1973. “Die ‘theologia tripertita’ in Forschung und Bezeugung,” ANRW 1.4.63-115.
Nielsen, I. 2002. Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama. Aarhus Studies in Mediterranean
Antiquity, IV. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
Oakley, S. P. 1998. A Commentary on Livy, Books VI-X, vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ogilvie, R. M. 1965. A Commentary on Livy, Books 1-5. Oxford: Clarendon.
Rives, J. 2007. Religions in the Roman Empire. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Stek, T. 2009. Cult Places and Cultural Change in Republican Italy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
Van Nuffelen, P. 2010. “Varro’s Divine Antiquities: Roman Religion as an Image of Truth,”
CP 105: 162-88.
Wallace-Hadrill, A. 2008. Rome’s Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Wiseman, T. P. 1998. Roman Drama and Roman History. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Figure 1. The temple at Tibur, taken from Nielsen 2002.
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Figure 2. The temple at Pietrabbondante, also taken from Nielsen 2002.
Schultz 15

Schultz 16
Figure 3. Anatomical votives from the collection of the Clendening History of Medicine Library
and Museum at the University of Kansas. Image taken on 14 December, 2011 from the website
http://clendening.kumc.edu/dc/rm/major_ancient.htm.