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The Time Lords

... the Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior is in my opinion the nature of their religious convictions. I believe it is the very thing ...

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The Time Lords

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    Slide 1:The Time Lords

    Roman Statecraft and Roman Religion

    Slide 2:Roman Religion as a Device of Elite Control of the Roman Masses

    Marx’s “Opiate of the Masses”? Benjamin Farrington, Science and Politics in the Ancient World (1939) Ruling elites used religion in order to overawe and impose their will upon gullible masses Ancient Testimony: Cicero, Livy, Lucretius, Polybius

    Slide 3:Polybius, Histories, 6.56.6-12 “But the quality in which the Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior is in my opinion the nature of their religious convictions. I believe it is the very thing which among other peoples is an object of reproach, I mean superstition, which maintains the cohesion of the Roman state….My own opinion is that they have adopted this course for the sake of the common people…[who] must be held in by invisible terrors and suchlike pageantry.”

    Slide 4:Roman Religion and Roman Social Control (cf. Polybius, 6.56; Livy, 1.19.4-1.20.7)

    Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book 1, lines 102-111 (60s BCE): “You will yourself someday or other seek to fall away from me, overborne by the terrific utterances of the priests. Indeed, how many dreams can they soon invent for you, enough to upset the principles of life and to confound all your fortunes with fear. And for this reason: for if men saw that a limit has been set to tribulation, they would have some degree of strength to defy religious fears and the threats of the priests; but as it is there is no way of resistance and no power, because everlasting punishment is to be feared after death.” Livy, 6.1 (on the records preserved after the great fire of ca. 386 BC): “To some of these even the common people were given access, but those which applied to sacred rites the pontiffs suppressed, largely so that they could keep the minds of the people under control through religious awe.”

    Slide 5:Early Roman Religion: Animistic Religion (numina, ius divinum)

    Household Deities: lares (ghosts of the dead ancestors) and penates (guardians of the hearth) Communal Deities: Agricultural Deities (Mars, Vesta, Consus, Ops, Ceres, Liber) Pervasive numina (non-anthropomorphic)

    A Roman patrician, carrying the busts of his ancestors (from Cary & Scullard, A History of Rome)

    Slide 7:The Roman Priesthoods

    Diversity: Fragmentation of Religious Authority (but held within the patrician (socio-economic elite) order) Subservient to the Senate in the Republican period, 509-27 BCE (in fact drawn from the same socio-economic aristocratic order) Pax deorum: Religion as contract and correct ritual performance

    A statue of a Vestal Virgin, now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome (from Connolly, The Ancient City)

    Slide 10:Roman Calendars: Priest as “Time Lord”

    355-day lunar-solar calendar. “By empirical investigation of the equinoxes and solstices, and of the moon, one can find out that 8 solar years contain 99 lunar months. If then, over a period of 8 years, one adds 3 months to the 96 months contained in the 8 lunar years, one should be able to keep the calendar regulated by both sun and moon” (A. Michels, The Calendar of the Roman Republic (Princeton, 1967, pg. 14). Secret Knowledge-Knowledge as Power: Populace agricultural and non-literate; priests announce days of assembly, market days, festival days, days of bad omen, days for ritual atonement. “Since the men who were pontifices were also as a rule men who held public office, magistrates and senators, an understanding of the intricacies of the calendar would, during the republic, have given them something of an advantage in political life” (Michels, Calendar, pg. 8).

    Slide 11:Excerpt from a Roman Calendar

    Slide 13:Literary Sources for the Roman Priests as “Time Lords”

    “He [the scribe Cn. Flavius in 304 BC] published the formulae of the civil law (civile ius) which had been filed away in the secret archives of the pontiffs, and posted up the calendar on white notice-boards in the Forum, that men might know when they could bring an action.” (Livy, 9.46.5) Macrobius, 1.15.9-13 (probably early 5th century AD), says that the priests opposed Flavius’ publication.

    Slide 14:Post-Enlightenment Distortion?

    A Reconsideration of the Instrumentalist Interpretation

    Slide 15:Michel Eyguem de Montaigne (1533-1592)

    “It is a stupid presumption to go about despising and condemning as false anything that seems to us improbable; this is a common fault in those who think they have more intelligence than the crowd. I used to be like that once, and if I heard talk of ghosts walking, or prognostications of future events, of enchantments or sorceries, or some other tale that I could not swallow…would pity the poor people who were taken in by such nonsense….I have learnt too that there is no more patent folly in the world than to reduce these things to the measure of our own power and capacity.”

    Slide 16:Roman Religion: Diffused Powers

    No clear division in Roman society between religious and secular spheres No unified, hierarchical structure in Roman religion (diversity of fragmented, autonomous priesthoods; cf. Cicero, On the Laws, 2.29) Battles possible among religious authorities concerning proper religious observance (cf. Livy, Periochae 19 and 37.51.1-2; Valerius Maximus, 1.1.2; Tacitus, Annals, 3.71)

    Slide 17:Test Cases

    Human Sacrifice during Hannibalic War in 216 BC (Livy, 22.57.2-6; Plutarch, Fabius, 18.3) Importation of the “Great Mother” (Magna Mater), a meteorite (?) from Asia Minor in 205 BC to help win the war against Hannibal (Livy, 29.10.4-11.8) Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus detained as Roman general in 190 BC because of his duties as a Salian priest (Polybius, 21.13.10-14) Bacchanalian Conspiracy of 186 BC (see especially Livy, 39.16. 2-5)

    Slide 18:The Case of Publius Claudius Pulcher and the “Sacred Chickens” (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, 2.7; On Divination, 1.29, 2.20 and 71; Livy, Periochae, 19 and 22.42.9) The Naval Battle at Drepana (249 BC)

    Slide 19:Roman Military Disasters

    Romans fight only “Just Wars” (Bella Iusta) The Fetial Priesthood and Rerum Repetitio Accounting for Military Disasters Lack of Discipline among the Soldiery Neglect or Errors in Correct Ritual Observance and Sacrifice See Nathan Rosenstein, Imperatores Victi: Military Defeat and Aristocratic Competition in the Middle and Late Republic (Berkeley, 1990)

    Slide 20:To Believe or Not To Believe? That Is the Question

    “It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know.” Pierre Bourdieu

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