The Gods, the State, and the Individual. John Scheid
The Gods, the State,
and the Individual
EMPIRE AND AFTER
Series Editor: Clifford Ando
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
THE GODS,
THE STATE,
AND THE
INDIVIDUAL
REFLECTIONS ON
CIVIC RELIGION
IN ROME
John Scheid
Translated and
with a foreword by
Clifford Ando
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
English translation copyright © 2016
University of Pennsylvania Press
Originally published as Les Dieux, l’État et l’individu: Réflexions sur la religion civique à Rome ©2013 Éditions du Seuil.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scheid, John, author.
[Dieux, l’état et l’individu. English]
The gods, the state, and the individual : reflections on civic religion in Rome / John Scheid ; translated and with a foreword by Clifford Ando.
pages cm. — (Empire and after)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4766-4 (alk. paper)
1. Religion and state—Rome. 2. Cults—Rome. 3. Rome—Religion. I. Ando, Clifford, translator, author of foreword. II. Scheid, John. Dieux, l’état et l’individu. Translation of: III. Title. IV. Series: Empire and after.
BL805.S3413 2016
292.07—dc23
2015016157
To the memory of Jean-Pierre Vernant
Non pas passer les universaux à la râpe de l’histoire, mais faire passer l’histoire au fil d’une pensée qui refuse les universaux.
—Michel Foucault
Contents
Chapter 1. The Critique of Polis-Religion: An Inventory
Chapter 2. Polis and Republic: The Price of Misunderstanding
Chapter 3. The Individual in the City
Chapter 4. Civic Religion: A Discourse of the Elite?
Chapter 5. Civic Religion and Identity
Chapter 6. For Whom Were the Rituals Celebrated?
Chapter 7. Religious Repression
Chapter 8. Civic Religion, a Modality of Communal Religion
Chapter 10. Why Did Roman Religion Change?
Chapter 11. The Gods, the State, and the Individual
Translator’s Foreword
John Scheid’s The Gods, the State, and the Individual: Reflections on Civic Religion in Rome is an impassioned intervention in a contemporary debate in the study of ancient religion. It speaks for a method or, perhaps, a perspective, as well as a distinctive national tradition. In the book, Scheid himself contextualizes his work within a century’s history of scholarship on religion in the ancient world. This foreword offers an additional perspective on the contemporary context in which Scheid intervenes and explains choices made in the process of translation.
Roman religion has long presented a number of challenges to historians of religion in the Christian and post-Christian West. Among others, one might single out the nonexistence in classical Latin of any term that corresponds to English “religion,” and the similar absence of any vocabulary to discuss religious affiliation or acts of conversion that distinguish those phenomena from, say, acts of political belonging or changes in doctrinal persuasion in the study of philosophy. To these one might add Roman religion’s lack of a sacred text that (nominally) offered a totalizing portrait of the religion’s propositional content or foundational myth, as well as the Roman practice of describing relations with the divine using technical terms for social relations widely employed to discuss relations with other humans: pietas, whence English “piety,” describes dutiful respect toward ties of kinship above all, but also other social bonds; colere, whence Latin cultus and English “cult,” describes sustained acts of attention, respect, and cultivation toward things we cherish: social superiors, close relations, and the land whence one springs.
Building on a long tradition of scholarship, whose contours I trace below and in which he himself has played a leading role, Scheid confronts these challenges head-on. Proceeding with a profound respect for historical and philological detail, Scheid explores the functioning of a religious system tightly imbricated with other structures of social and political belonging.