Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion
by jörg rüpke
translated by david m. b. richardson
princeton, 576 pages, $39.95
In August of 410, for the first time in eight centuries, the city of Romen was sacked. While the fall of the ancient capital to an army of renegaden Goths might be reckoned a failure of imperial politics or militaryn strategy, it was also seen by not a few contemporaries as divinen retribution. The Romans, after all, had abandoned their old gods en masse,n and the consequences were plain: In anger at the Christians, the gods hadndeserted the city. The ensuing polemic was the impetus for St. Augustine’s City of God, a defense of the faith against its critics, standingn in a long line of such apologies by Christians. Augustine tells us that hen wrote the text to refute the worshipers of false gods, “or pagans, as wen usually call them.” Neither a suave Neoplatonizing senator sentimentallyn attached to the ancestral rites nor an illiterate peasant praying for hisn crops to grow would have ever thought to call himself a “pagan.” The wordn was strange, and a little derogatory. It was entirely the concoction of annin-group, the Christians, to describe an out-group. We call them.
n The origin of the term “pagan” remains obscure. It came into usage as an designation for polytheists in the fourth century, overlapping with anpreexisting stock of words in Greek (ethnikos, eidôlolatrês, hellên) and Latin (gentilis) for then worshipers of many gods. Maybe “pagan” meant something like “hick,” an country bumpkin who had not yet heard the news that there was a new God inn town; maybe it meant something like “civilian” or “civvy,” someone notn enlisted as a soldier in the army of the true God. The Latin can sustainn either interpretation, and research has not produced a definitive answer.n What is clear is that, by giving a name to it, the Christians gaven definition and form to something that had not theretofore been quite son sharply demarcated. The problem for anyone interested in the history ofn religion is that, once spoken, the word and the idea that it is supposed ton connote are hard to unthink. (Augustine uses paganus only sevenn times in the entire City of God; ordinarily, the pagans are justn “they” or “them.” A cursory search reveals that modern English translationsn of Augustine’s text lean on the word far more regularly.)
It is telling that in Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion,n Jörg Rüpke scrupulously abstains from using the word “paganism.” Rüpken covers more or less the same ground as Augustine: the beliefs, practices,n and media of Roman religion from its obscure Iron Age origins down to then cosmopolitan period of empire. But unlike the bishop of Hippo, Rüpke nevern assumes that there is, fundamentally, any such thing as Roman religion.n Like most recent work in the field, the study is anti-essentializing. Theren is no quintessential nature of Roman religion, stretching across time andn space, genre and medium. Even defining “religion” in neutral terms notnsubtly colored by Christian assumptions is a delicate challenge. Religio is a Latin word; it meant something like the actions andnobservances that accompany a properly reverent sense of piety. Religio did not mean anything quite as grand or encompassing asn the interlocking systems of belief about the cosmos, the fate of the soul,n the totality of ethics, the nature of divinity, and the right worship ofnthe gods. If the Pew Research Center asked an ancient Roman what his religio was, only a befuddled look would have followed. To a largen extent, the work of bundling the disparate parts of human activity andn imagination that we think of as religion into a system happened inn the Roman world. Religion in this larger sense is a product of history, andn specifically the history of the Roman Empire.
n We have had anti-essentializing studies of Roman religion for severaln decades now. The dominant landmark over the last generation has been thensurvey and sourcebook of Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome. Rüpke’s magisterial study is a successor ofn that project, by an erudite and prolific leader in the field who hasn written on everything from the Roman calendar to religion in the Romann army. (I thought it was a typo when I saw Rüpke 2013m cited, but indeed, itn turns out that he refers to thirteen of his own publications just from then year 2013.) If Pantheon were more accessibly written, it wouldn have a good chance of becoming the new standard, and it deserves a widen readership despite its forbidding technical language. Rüpke starts out byn offering a bare-bones working definition of religion as “the extension of an particular environment beyond the immediately plausible social milieu ofn living humans,” and some version of this leaden but precise phrase recursn throughout the book. What he calls “the immediately plausible” is the realmn of interpersonally available observation and experience, what we might calln (in terms of a post-Newtonian universe) “nature.” Religion involves thingsn beyond the directly seen and experienced, particularly the dead and then divine (that which a modern person might call the “supernatural”).n
Pantheon n tells a bracing story because it does not succumb to the entropy that son often overtakes anti-essentialist histories of religion. On the first pagen we are given a narrative arc: “We will describe how from a world in whichn one practiced rituals, there emerged a world of religions, to which one could belong.” The story starts in the Iron Age, with then local religions of the western Italian peninsula. It turns out we know veryn little. Too often, the answer has been to import assumptions from the moren literate world of the contemporary Greeks. But that skews the picture,n leading, for instance, to an overemphasis on the great rituals of animaln sacrifice from the archaic Aegean. Or we retroject later belief andn practice to an earlier time, as scholars from Varro (and politicians fromn Augustus) onward have done. But that, too, is misleading. Rüpke insteadn takes the scant archaeological remains for no more and no less than whatn they hint at: locally oriented agrarian societies, marked by familyn remembrance of the dead, where religion was deeply embedded in everydayn life but not highly specialized or literate. He lets its strangeness standn unresolved.
n Roman religion, and our knowledge of it, begins to change toward the latern archaic age and in the centuries of the early republic. Giant monumentaln temples went up. Interaction with the east (in the form of selectiven appropriation, rather than passive reception) became an integral part ofn Italian religious culture. Priesthoods were increasingly formalized.n Collective action in the form of public worship (vows and augury, forn instance), banquets, and games developed. Rüpke downplays the idea ofn “civic religion.” On the one hand, he is right to emphasize that there wasn not a coherently organized pantheon, worshiped systematically by the Romann people. Religious affairs were ad hoc, the deities manifold andn incongruent. On the other hand, throughout, Rüpke underestimates then binding power of communal religious practice in the Roman polity. For then Greek observer Polybius, writing in the second century before Christ, itn was “in things concerning the gods” that, above all else, the Romannrepublic was distinctive. Religious fear or superstition (deisidaimonia) was “what holds the Roman state together.” Ofn course, Polybius added, religion was useful in channeling the passions ofn the common people. But in ancient polytheism generally, and the Romann version of it particularly, religion and politics were inextricable. Then Roman people worshiped the Roman gods, and they did so with an exactituden and a punctiliousness that stood out.n
n This Roman seriousness in religious affairs can help us understand then outlook of a late republican figure like Cicero, as well as the pivotaln changes which were to follow. For the patriotic Cicero, religion wasn integral to the good life, but not co-extensive with it. Religion meantn observance of the ancestral traditions, but it was not an arid or merelyn external performance of rituals. It entailed a moral disposition, an deep-seated attitude of reverence that was good for the self and then community. But this disposition was not incompatible with intellectualn skepticism, and it was in the end something less complete, lessn encompassing than philosophy, which was the true guide to living the goodn life.n
n The Roman Empire saw this formula reversed: Religion swallowed philosophy.n As the republic became the empire, the place of religion changed. Evenn apart from the rise of Christianity, the centuries of Roman imperialn dominance might have been one of the most important, and certainly one ofn the most interesting, periods in the annals of religion. It was a heydayn for the gods, both old and new. It has been a long time since then conventional wisdom held that Christianity emerged against a backdrop ofn spiritual despair, moral degeneration, or decrepit civic polytheism.n Rather, Christianity grew up beside, and eventually displaced, a vibrant,n fecund, and loud “paganism” that was by turns a model and a rival for then early Church. Christianity was not a weed that spread in a burned-outn field. Its success in the prolific garden of the early empire has thereforen become harder to explain.
n The long reign of Augustus—a conservative revolutionary—wasn transformational in unpredicted ways. He claimed to revive and restore then old customs, while concentrating religious authority in his person and hisn family. But in doing so, he undercut the already fragile power of then traditional aristocracy. Religious authority was always a diffuse andn dynamic property in Roman society. Rüpke calls attention to recent workn that has highlighted the centrality of prayer to ancientn Mediterranean religion, especially in Rome. There is something inherentlyn democratic about prayer. Prayer is harder to control than the great,n collective acts of animal sacrifice. The Augustan effort to monopolizen religious authority was like grabbing water.
The sociology of the Roman Empire was decisive. Its bustling roads and sean routes were a network of religious knowledge and practice, creating whatn Rüpke calls “new propinquities” that generated religious energy. Wealth,n urbanization, and literacy opened the space for an age of “expertise.”n Religious experts peddling the right formulas for health and happinessn flourished. Rüpke might have used the example of Apollonius of Tyana, an wandering, wonder-working sage with a full-fledged philosophy and n decided opinions about how to worship the gods properly. He traveled then same highways and spoke to the same crowds as the apostles, itinerantn religious experts in their own right. The old public temples thrived, butnthere were also new kinds of private religious associations, from collegia that were in essence collective burial societies ton mystery religions, such as the cult of Isis, that answered the need forn tightly knit communities of worship in cities that were giant demographicn sinks and therefore full of migrants.
n In some ways the most representative text of mature Roman polytheism isn Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass. The only complete Latin novel ton survive from antiquity, it is the work of a North African of the secondn century who was equally devoted to Platonism as a philosophy and then worship of Isis as a mode of religious life. The story is an allegory ofn religious salvation, in which the insatiable curiosity of the mainn character, Lucius, leads him to seek occult knowledge. He accidentallyn turns himself into a donkey, and most of the novel is about his sufferingn in this inferior state. In an hour of final desperation, he throws himselfn upon the benevolence of the gods, and Isis, the queen of heaven, emergesn from the sea under the light of a brilliant moon to redeem him. It is an beautiful story, a specimen of the religious creativity fostered in then Roman Empire. Philosophy and religion are seamlessly interwoven in an syncretistic vision of the cosmos. This vision appealed to the individual’sn hunger for meaning and salvation within the context of a community ofn knowledge, equipped with its own secretive techniques to touch the power ofn the divine (Lucius must dunk himself in the sea seven times before he hasn his divine vision, and he must eat a rose to be transformed to a highern state—sacraments by a different name). And, inevitably, Lucius’s journeyn ended in the city of Rome.n
n Rüpke’s study misses the opportunity to situate the rise of Christianityn within the framework he has prepared. Early Christianity winds in and outn of the last chapters of the book. But unless it is your professionaln obligation to stay current with the latest one-upmanship of hypercriticismn in the field, the early Christianity presented here will not seemn recognizable. “Christianity” is presented as a second-century confection.n The heretic Marcion is credited with writing the first gospel, inspiringn the reaction that we call the canonical Gospels. Any knowledge of Peter andn Paul’s death is dismissed as pure myth. Paul is a figure mainly constructednas a totem of identity in the later second century. The Book of Acts is not just a romantic history but a wholesale historiographicaln fabrication. Until sometime in the second century, the Christians had “asn yet no actual community.” The persecutions, the martyrdoms, were mostly then work of Christian imagination—a literary experiment that got way out ofn hand. In the second century of the Roman Empire, rival entrepreneurs suchn as Marcion and Irenaeus “invented” the Christianity we know.
n In a work of authoritative scholarship, this presentation is unwelcome—andn revealing. Rüpke builds his picture of early Christianity selectively, orn rather exclusively, on ideas at the edge of scholarly respectability. Forn instance, he presents without context or qualification the views of Markusn Vinzent on Marcion and Otto Zwierlein on Peter. Other important recent workn on these same figures, for example by Dieter Roth and Markus Bockmuehl,n which undercuts the most sensational reconstructions, is damned to then oblivion of missing bibliography. To be fair, it is a big field, orn collection of fields—where Roman religion, New Testament studies, Romann history, and early Christian studies meet—and no one can read everything,n especially in a synthesis of this magnitude. Still, to cite a work on then Petrine traditions (Zwierlein’s Petrus in Rom) that the Romann historian T. D. Barnes recently called “a nadir in historical criticism”n (in his contribution to the volume Peter in Early Christianity) asn though it were simply the state of play in the study of early Christianityn does a disservice.
This imbalance leaves us without a real sense of how Christianity emergedn from the matrix that Rüpke has ably presented. Christian missionizing wasn in sync with the deepest spiritual vibrations of the early empire—andn conducted in a deliberately weird key. Like other early imperial religions,n it was a totalizing system, with a love of texts and an impulse ton encyclopedism. It shared the heightened individualism of the surroundingn religious culture, while also proving deft at creating strong, trans-ethnicn communities. Early Christian leaders (however tiny the number of them whon were literate) could spar with the best of the high Platonists. But the newn faith was intractably strange, starting with the scandal of the cross. Itsn sexual morality tended to be uncomfortably stringent. The starkn intransigence of the martyrs “hacked” into the Roman practice of making an public spectacle of penal torture. Agapê as a moral ideal was an brusque and novel intrusion onto the crowded scene of ancient ethics.n Somehow, from this unstable mix of familiarity and strangeness,n Christianity spread and ultimately triumphed in the Roman Empire.
n We still lack a good, up-to-date history of how this happened. Robin Lanen Fox’s sweeping Pagans and Christians is still a personal favorite,n but it is getting long in the tooth and, like many attempts, is moren focused on the Greek East than on the entire Mediterranean. Had he notn indulged dubious theories of early Christianity, Rüpke could have broughtn us a little closer to answering important and enduring questions with freshn illumination. How did Christianity emerge from the volatile spiritualn milieu of the Roman Empire? Why did the city of Rome exert such an gravitational pull on the early Christian movement? Why did it matter thatn a Judeo-Greek religion triumphed, paradoxically, both because ofn the cultural resources in the capital and despite the hostilen suppression of the religion by the imperial power? To answer thosen questions would indeed be to account for how religio becamen religion.n
Kyle Harper is professor of classics and letters and provost at the University of Oklahoma. n
