Ancient Romans

Roman religion asked for correct performance, not correct belief. What mattered, as Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price show in their standard history, was the pax deorum, the peace between Rome and its gods, maintained by exact ritual: a prayer misspoken or an omen ignored meant starting again, and public disaster sent the Senate hunting for the neglected rite that explained it. The work belonged to colleges of priests who were also senators and magistrates, the pontifices under their chief the pontifex maximus, the augurs who read the flight of birds before any assembly or battle, and the fifteen keepers of the Sibylline books consulted in emergencies.

At the center burned the hearth of Vesta, tended by the Vestal Virgins, six women whose ritual purity stood surety for the city itself. The Capitoline temple held the state's great triad, Jupiter Best and Greatest with Juno and Minerva, while Mars kept the armies and the farmland both. Every household ran the same religion in miniature: the lares and penates at the hearth received daily offerings, and the paterfamilias was priest of his own roof.

The calendar wove gods through the civic year, from the Lupercalia's racing luperci to Saturnalia's December license, and the reversed days when the mundus pit stood open to the dead. Romans met their gods not in creeds but in fasti, festivals, vows and the countless inscribed altars that still say, in formula, I paid my vow willingly and deservedly.

Rome credited its religious constitution to the legendary king Numa, but its genius was absorption. Etruscan haruspices read entrails for the Senate; the Greek Olympians arrived early and merged with Latin gods, Zeus with Jupiter, Hera with Juno, Athena with Minerva; and in 204 BCE, on Sibylline advice, the city formally imported the Anatolian Magna Mater, black stone, eunuch priests and all. Conquest accelerated the traffic: Isis of Egypt gained temples in Rome over repeated Senate objections, and the soldiers' god Mithras, whose cult Manfred Clauss has reconstructed from its cave-temples, initiated men in grades from Raven to Father across the frontier provinces.

Empire added an imperial cult. From Augustus onward the genius of the living emperor and the divinity of deified predecessors received sacrifice throughout the provinces, a loyalty religion whose refusal marked Christians out for persecution. Judaism, ancient and licensed, was tolerated; the new movement that grew from it was intermittently suppressed for two and a half centuries, until Constantine's conversion reversed the state's direction in 312 CE.

The end came by law. Theodosius banned public sacrifice and closed the temples in the early 390s; the altar of Victory left the Senate house, the Vestal fire went out, and the old religion faded into the countryside customs its adversaries called paganus, the religion of the villages. Its calendar, its priestly titles and its Latin liturgical instinct passed, transformed, into the church that replaced it.