1 Introduction

CU1933/Davies July 24, 2004 15:28 1 Introduction 1.1 Religion and its reception This book is an exploration of the form(ul)ation of knowledge in a given context – a process which might well be called education. More specifi- cally, it is about the presentation of religious knowledge in an ancient historiographical context, though, like its subjects, it is occasionally given to ‘digressions’ which either enhance or detract from the text, depending on the reader’s expectations and criteria for relevance. Like its subjects, it can be plundered for individual items of information but will only make proper sense when taken as a whole, where each item is defined to a large extent by its context. It assumes that the historians in question were highly intelligent and deliberate men who went a long way towards achieving a fundamental cohe- sion in their works. It also works on the premise that they built up an image of religious systems as a whole, not by describing a system ex nihilo for outsiders. They represented their model of religion to their world by offer- ing refinements of the understanding that they assumed would be brought to their text by their readers. They presumed to know roughly what this understanding was, though their frequent and deliberate refinements indicate that they also acknowledged that the details would be more or less negotiable and could be debated. What they did not cater for was a fundamentally different matrix of understanding, such as the modern reader brings to bear when reassembling the worlds they created. Without a compatible matrix of knowledge as a context, any statement as an intentional communication is doomed. Any ‘religious’ statement in these historians has two contexts: firstly the (now-incomplete) text itself within which it is situated and, secondly, the cognitive context of the reader. The first of these has, in each case, been the centre of interest as a means of deciphering what Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus ‘thought’. The rather mixed results are, it is suggested, the inevitable product of relative inattention to the latter rather more nebulous cultural context, a concern which is given more weight here than has gener- 1 UNCORRECTED PROOFS. PAGINATION CHANGED IN PRESS! (c) Jason Davies CU1933/Davies July 24, 2004 15:28 2 Rome’s Religious History ally been the case. But before this can be done, some effort must be made to distinguish the interpretative strategies that we habitually bring to the material in question. This discussion therefore aims not only to decipher the meanings of the many religious moments in the historiographical texts but also, after exploring the ways in which we have tended to understand them, to reconstruct the cultural knowledge that informed the text in antiquity: the extra-textual context of the accounts is in fact the most decisive factor in shaping our understanding. Though we shall be attentive to similarities in these authors, it will not be at the expense of a sensitivity to the distinctive contexts in which they wrote – one during the death throes of the Republic and the establishment of empire, another after imperial rule had become the norm and the last in a world where Christianity had effectively eclipsed ‘pagan’ state cult. Historiographical use of religious categories, whether the ‘wrath of the gods’, ‘fate’ or ‘fortuna’, are often treated as if their audience, utterly ignorant of any religious and cultural ideas of their own, were ex- pecting the baldest and most simplistic theological statements, deployed primarily to address broad questions of belief or scepticism about religion. Here, in contrast, it is argued that these terms and other similar categories were important and subtle parts of ancient reasoning. Such an argument is not overdue: our tools for studying historiography have become increasingly, even exponentially, refined in recent years, and we detect subtlety in almost every part of a narrative – except where the religious is concerned. Here a simple formula of ‘belief’ or ‘scepticism’ (unbelieving) is almost universally applied. Yet these men were writing for a society that was not, for the most part, concerned whether the gods ex- isted but rather with how they would impact on the human world, how they should be understood to act and, more importantly, the effects and means of placation – and the consequences of failing to do so. Read from this perspective, these three historians have a great deal to offer to both their expected (contemporary) audience and the present one, whose assumptions are about as alien to their own as is imaginable.1 Even among the three we will find important differences, most notably (but not exclusively) between Ammianus and his predecessors. Livy might just have become aware of the very beginnings of a new cult, if the tra- ditional dating is correct, before he died; Tacitus certainly knew of the Christians but, I suspect, would never have anticipated the religious change 1 I use the term ‘audience’ with caution. For my purposes, ‘audience’ presumes ‘readership’: I make no claims to distinguish them. We know less than we often assume about public recitals of texts and their readers: see Kraus (1994a) 2–4, esp. n.9 for the little we know about recitations of Livy’s work. Pelling (2000) is a useful discussion of the ways that ancient authors (though Greek in this case) worked with their audiences. UNCORRECTED PROOFS. PAGINATION CHANGED IN PRESS! (c) Jason Davies CU1933/Davies July 24, 2004 15:28 Introduction 3 as we know it from ‘pagan’ to ‘Christian’. These two could work without moving outside the framework that we refer to as ‘paganism’: Ammianus, on the other hand, was writing in a society where large-scale violence could break out on the basis of the difference. His relatively understated (yet deter- mined) drive to paganism drew, by definition, on the traditions of the past, and a strong tendency to continuity underpins his (re)formulation of religious matters. All three, it is argued, offered strong correctives to what they perceived as current and pressing issues pertaining to religion: but the relevance of these discussions is lost if we do not consider the social, political and epistemic climates in which they wrote. Given this attention to interpretative context, I might best begin by declaring my intended extra-textual context: those who are committed to doubting whether religion could ever be ‘taken seriously’ in ancient Rome are about to embark on a lengthy and persistent example of special pleading; those who are readily sympathetic to ancient religion will find it unneces- sarily pedantic and overstated, if ultimately in harmony with their interests. Any who are willing to entertain the suggestion that religion was a fundamental, even immovable, part of ancient thinking but find themselves re- peatedly unable to find in practice that this is the case will hopefully benefit from the accounts that follow. The argument depends on the assertion that there can never have been a single unchangeable entity that we can call ‘Roman religion’, easily recog- nisable in any context.2 It will become obvious that the literary and political context exercised a powerful effect on the way that religion was formu- lated and presented: different ages posed different questions and a similar issue might be addressed in a very different way as the time and context varied. The prevalent model of ancient religion is now that of ‘civic paganism’, which grew out of an attempt to move away from discussions that mea- sured paganism against largely Christian expectations of ‘communion with the divine’ that dominated scholarship of the early twentieth century.3 In its maturity, it has begun to encounter criticism of its own. It has, for instance, 2 A banal version of the hypothesis of ‘brain-balkanisation’ put forward by Veyne (1988): his work represents a watershed in the study of both historiographical and religious (in his case, mythical) material in Greek historians. Many of his arguments can be applied to Roman historians, though his hypothesis of ‘brain-balkanisation’ has often (paradoxically, and certainly wrongly) been used to ‘demonstrate’ ‘irrationality’ in ancient authors. It was not Veyne’s intention to ‘prove’ irrationality once and for all: rather the opposite. Veyne’s arguments rely on the observation that moderns are just as ‘balkanised’ as ancients and that this is an inevitable, even useful, function of cognition: the latter point is often elided. 3 The results of applying ‘civic paganism’ to the material can be seen in Beard North and Price (1998) each of whom has written extensively to criticise the older models and develop the ‘civic model’. Rives (1995a) usefully takes the analysis to its logical conclusion by treating Carthage UNCORRECTED PROOFS. PAGINATION CHANGED IN PRESS! (c) Jason Davies CU1933/Davies July 24, 2004 15:28 4 Rome’s Religious History been asserted that we should not allow an approach that stresses civic identity to obscure the plethora of possible religious identities available to a Roman with his or her familial, professional, local and political ties; but this is hardly a fundamental criticism – none of these is mutually exclusive. We should think in terms of expanding the civic focus of recent approaches, considering them limited and ripe for expansion rather than flawed.4 Civic paganism endeavoured (perfectly legitimately) to shift the goalposts to a more suitable location, chiefly that of the negotiation of identity rather than an attempt to commune with the divine. However, we shall find that in dis- cussing the historians under scrutiny, the older models and approaches still generally hold sway, even in recent publications: we must therefore out- line the older approaches in order to appreciate how these texts have been formally understood.

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