Conservatism and Change in Roman Religion

Abstract

The conservatism of the Romans in matters of religion is a generally accepted truth and it is in many ways a very obvious truth. I have no intention of denying it. They set a very high value on their religious tradition; they sought to preserve and reproduce the ceremonies and customs inherited from their ancestors; they thought it wrong and even dangerous to abandon or neglect the many gods, goddesses and sacred places of which the city was full; they had no ideological framework which would have enabled them to think in terms of reforming and improving the national cult, as opposed to reviving and restoring it. I say that this is an obvious truth, because some degree of conservatism in this sense seems to be an inevitable feature of the type of Graeco-Roman paganism of which the Roman State cult is one example. A system in which the emphasis falls primarily on the performance of ritual acts—not on the worshippers' belief, or religious emotions and experiences, or on theology or ethics—such a system inescapably makes it a primary value, though not necessarily the only value, that the known ritual should be successfully repeated. This in turn must imply some implicit respect for the past and for the tradition from which the ritual emerged. For the Romans of any generation, the real validation of their religion lay in the fact that it had worked: that their ancestors had won battles, survived crises, eaten dinners, begotten children and expanded their power by the practice of the self-same rites and ceremonies as they practised themselves. For the Romans of the last generation of the Republic, it was a fact that their ancestors had won more battles and eaten better dinners than anybody else.