Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke
pure or primitive Roman religion that lies beyond any Greek influence does not exist, as Franz Altheim has demonstrated.6 At the same time, different forms and stages of assimilation can be identified. Hence, in the context of contemporaneous cult names, it seems striking that it is precisely the offspring from the relationship between the god Zeus and the human Semele, Dionysus, who is referred to by a Greek name, although perfectly usual Latin equivalents were available in Bacchus and Liber:7 o Dionyse, optime pater, uitisator, Semela genitus, euhie! (240–242 R). This passage from the Bacchae is not an isolated case. In the Tereus the same god is referred to in a similar manner: Deum Cadmogena natum Semela adfare et famulanter pete (642 R = 445 D). The longest genealogy, from the praetexta Aeneadae sive Decius (fr. I = 676 D), is one of Iuppiter (in the long version of his name): it proceeds in four steps to Anchises. It is completely Greek and ends, significantly, with Anchises, not with Decius.8 The aforementioned genealogy of Evander from the Scholia Danielis may have resulted in a decidedly Greek-sounding text (Atreus I R/D). If one sees this as a form of distancing, the very pronounced statement in the Epinausimache (328 R = 139 D) that the children of gods are mortals fits this ontological separation of men and gods well.
Statements and emphases of this type had contemporary relevance at the end of the second century (the term is used advisedly, since chronological precision in a history of this kind is impossible). In Roman civic theology, there was by this time a long-standing tradition of suppressing or at least eliding genealogical relationships between the gods and especially relationships with humans. Particular attention is paid in this regard to the central god of the community, Iuppiter.9 The hypercorrectness on display in the selection of Jove over Iuppiter, linguistically oriented to the Greek, and like “Zeus” refraining from the use of the epithet pater, which was by contrast applied cultically to other gods (Mars Pater or even Marspiter, Ianus Pater), could be a part of this trend (and not something that should be interpreted as a Greek-ism). It is found before Accius in Naevius (active as playwright c. 235–205) and Pacuvius (c. 220–130).10 It is in opposition to this rationalization of the earlier aristocratic consensus that, at the end of the second century, the claim to divine ancestry is taken up in the public sphere in claims to excellence on the part of individuals, born to politically second-string gentes.11 The advancing of such claims to divine ancestry takes place in the same context of conflict in which the compilation (and invention) of the republican consular fasti occurs—the fasti being themselves both a memorial to and medium of competition for aristocratic distinction with respect to ancestry—and this process will continue into the Augustan period.12
On this basis it is hardly coincidental that the word caelites in the sense of “gods” appears three times in Accian fragments. I interpret this as part of the same trend of ontological separation between men and gods. Accius is not the first to use it. It appears twice in fragments of Ennius’s dramas, and Arcturus introduces himself with this term at the beginning of the prologue of Plautus’s Rudens (1–3):
Qui gentes omnes mariaque et terras mouet,eius sum ciuis ciuitate caelitum.ita sum ut uidetis splendens stella candida.
With him who moves all peoples, seas, and lands, I am a fellow-citizen in the city of the heavenly (beings). I am, just as you see, a shining and bright star.
“Heavenly” means here “inhabitants of heaven” and is to be taken literally, even if the metaphorical meaning “gods” is implied, as the first verse shows.13 The same hierarchy of meaning is found in the Hecuba of Ennius in the formulation o magna templa caelitum commixta stellis splendidis (Scaen. 196 Vahlen): gods they may be, but they also dwell in heaven, among the stars. The more narrowly spatial meaning of the term, which was overdetermined by its etymology, is also preserved in the related form caelestes, which dominates completely from Cicero onward. In Accius templum resonit caelitum (Aeneadae X = 686 D) belongs in this category.
The word gains a new nuance in Ennius’s Telamo. In one passage, which formulates sharp criticism of current religious ideas in several ways,14 the god Telamo himself remarks, in the face of the death of his mortal son Ajax, that the gods do not care about humans: “For if they did take care, it would go well with the good and badly with the bad, which is not at all the case” (nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest, Scaen. 318 Vahlen = Trag. 265 Jocelyn). This is the classical formulation of the problem of theodicy,15 and a standard polemic against the Stoic concept of divine Providence. It is significant that precisely in this connection16 Telamo shifts from the term dei to the term caelites and employs it in expressing the thought that the gods/inhabitants of heaven do not care about humans:
Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus.17
I have always said and will always say that the race of heaven-dwelling gods exists; but I do not think they care what the human race does.
The two passages from Accius must be read in this context.The junctures are similar: the topic is the cult of the—perhaps this adjective best reflects his tone—high gods: in the first case the approach to the caelitum aras (298 R = 606 D) and in the second an exclamation (593 R = 566 D): Delubra caelitum, aras, sanctitudines!18 In both cases the connection to earthly monuments produces a particular tension. The transcendence, or, to use a shameless anachronism, the otherness of the gods, is emphasized, and not the deus otiosus of the Ennianic Telamo. The distance—the form of the distance— given articulation by Accius prohibits any routinized, chummy closeness.
In the scanty remains of the formulations just cited the text is naturally inadequate for a reconstruction of Accius’s theology.19 One could follow the lead of Thomas N. Habinek and point to the creation of an artificial language, far removed from the everyday language of ordinary people. The creation of such a pure Latin would then mark an attempt to create an exclusive cultural resource of the nobility.20 Caelites instead of ordinary dei would mark a social difference. Instead, I suggest that Accius is taking a critical stance in a contemporary conflict within the nobility, arguing against the divine genealogies of Romans by systematizing theological thinking.
The term sanctitudo leads to a further observation. On the one hand, it is the current term in the pre-Ciceronian period, in contradistinction to sanctitas. On the other, the usual glosses provided by way of translation, such as “religious protection” or “holiness,” are not very convincing. In confronting the unfamiliarity of the term in its second-century meaning, we are made to recognize the influence of Cicero’s attempt to transform the term sanctitas into a general religious term meaning “necessary cult.”21 In this connection Accius also makes a pair of nomen and numen (646 R = 450 D, also 691f. R = 704f, playing on the similar sound of “name” and “divine will” in Latin. The forced differentiation can best be understood as an attempt to distinguish the cultic form by which the god is known in ritual—nomen—from its inaccessible personality (numen), or perhaps as an attempt to interpret the former through the lens provided by the latter.
The attribution of a heightened transcendence to the gods enabled the use of the gods’ names as metaphors, a practice already visible in Plautus. I would see the use of duo Mavortes, “two Mars,” as a description of the collision of two rows of soldiers as an example of this. We must keep in mind, however, that Accius marks this kind of usage very precisely as nonliteral: crederes, “one could believe” (321 R = 157 D).
Statements on Natural Theology
The theoretical content that characterizes the passages related to the gods that we have thus far considered can be observed in the formulation of other topics, even if the difference in topic sometimes makes it difficult to identify the processes of rationalization at work in particular cases in terms of Greek natural philosophy. Several passages thematize vitality and life forces: the relationship between reason (animus) and vitality (anima) is referred to in the Epigoni (fr. 296 R = 589 D) and becomes the subject of an explicit psychological