Ancient religions

229 rome
concerned, there was no question of choosing between religious objectives and
political objectives, between church interests and state interests; most activities
were involved with rituals of some kind, and their validity was automatically
wrapped up with religious issues.
Another negative perception is that the religion described above was a public
ritual system, which ignored or destroyed the needs of individuals for “real”
religious experience. Previous scholars reacted to this state of affairs either by
vilifying the whole religion as impoverished or by assuming that private religious
needs were satisfied in private or family cults about which we know very
little. The strong version of this second position is to say that all religions must
cater to individual emotional needs; where there are no records of the means
used, we must assume that the records are defective. There can, in fact, be little
doubt that our knowledge of the religion of the Romans is partial and concentrates
on the affairs of the state and public institutions. But forcing all religions
into the same mold ignores the possibility that different societies can operate in
profoundly different ways. “They must have been like us” is not a good principle
for writing religious history.
Origins and development of the Roman religious system
Our understanding of the whole Roman religious system is essentially derived
from information about its character in the 2nd and 1st centuries bce and the
1st century ce, from writers of the late Republic and early imperial periods. To
a limited extent, we can be confident in projecting this picture backward in
time to earlier periods: the names of gods, rituals, festivals, priests, and so on
were seen by the Romans as of the greatest antiquity, and we know that they
were sedulous in preserving all the details they could of their religious formulas
and rituals. But over the course of centuries we also know that the society of
Rome and its physical appearance were radically transformed. However conservative
they sought to be about the details, religion must have changed as the
life of the Romans changed.
In some respects it is quite clear how such changes might have come about.
Given the close connection between the religious order and the political system,
it must always have been likely that political changes would produce religious
consequences. Thinking along these lines, it can be seen that the religious
system of the later republican period echoed the political system in having
no sharply established focus of consistent authority. Religious decisions were
split between the Senate and the priestly colleges; and, although the colleges
had senior members, they acted in important matters as a corporation; no
priest was normally in more than one college, so an accumulation of authority
was difficult if not impossible. But once the position of emperor was established
by Augustus and his successors, then the emperor began to acquire an irresistible
concentration of religious authority; he became pontifex maximus
(senior priest of the college of pontifices), held all the other priesthoods as well,
and combined these with an unprecedented degree of political authority, both