Augustan Religion and the Reshaping of Roman Memory (original) (raw)

Memories of the Subaltern: 'Ethnicising Religion' in Roman Imperial Literature, c. 100-300

The context of the Roman Empire, in addition to fostering the tradition of writing about the ‘barbarian’ groups outside the empire, proved to be a fertile ground ethnographical or ‘ethnographicising’ accounts about the provincial groups and their past. But why was the religious past of the provincial groups still ‘good to think with’ in the second or third centuries of the empire? What were the primary aims for writers in a wide variety of genres and registers as they referred to the religious practices and antiquities of provincial – essentially subaltern – groups in an ‘ethnicising’ fashion? What difference did the spread of Christianity, with its strong and exclusionary religion-based but occasionally ‘ethnicised’ identity, make? My paper will focus upon the Roman discourse that sought to portray the provincial groups as ‘remembering’ their pre-Roman pasts even in the context of the High and Late Empire. Memory of the past cults and heroes could, on occasion, be portrayed as a holding of grudge towards the Romans, and some uprisings in the provinces seem to have been imagined to have strong religious, even millenarian, motivations. Generally, however, the empire of peoples, regions, and practices was much more useful for rhetorical or knowledge-ordering purposes if its varietas could be maintained – but for this purpose, it was necessary to relegate the provincials to their ‘ethnic’ roles, about which centuries-earlier material could still be circulated. Such a mind-set is essentially colonial, and thus amenable to readings informed by Subaltern Studies, but it can usefully be studied from the point of view of the Greco-Roman tradition of religious ethnography – or perhaps more aptly ‘ethnographicising outgroup religiosities’. This is the particular ‘relocation of religion’ that my paper explores. The portrayal of what provincials ‘remember’ about their past displays even broader linkages when bearing in mind that during the second and third centuries the concept of religious communities as an ethnos became a more widespread notion – partly through the increasing Judeo-Christian influence, as well as the recirculation of originally Hellenistic ideas about ‘barbarian wise men’. Both inside and outside the empire, peoples’ religious practices and antiquities were suspended in a rhetorical state of ahistoricity, while the only religious change imaginable was the inexorable progress of Christianity’s linear time. For the pagan writers, on the other hand, exploration of the religious traditions of their own past or those of the far-away foreign groups’ supposed present (as in the case of the Brahmans) appeared as an attractive, prestige-building option.

2016 On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome

2016

“On Roman Religion” will add the perspectives of lived ancient religion and individual appropriation to the study of Roman religious institutions and ritual. Lived religion and the individual appropriations need not to be sought at the margins of orthodox religious practices, in the niches of civic religion. These phenomena are identifiable at the heart of rituals like praying, vowing, dedicating, and reading. This book confronts the very different, strategic, and even subversive forms of individual appropriation with traditions, their normative claims, and their institutional protections. Thus the precarious state of institutions and traditions comes to the fore. These are as much means of expression and creativity for their inventors and patrons as spaces and material of experience and innovation for their users and clients. Lived ancient religion is as much about variations or even outright deviance as it is about the attempts and failures to establish or change rules and roles and to communicate them via public authorities or literary discourse. It is such roles and rules, the variations and their limits, the establishment and communication to oneself and others that constitute the material under consideration in “On Roman religion”: priesthoods, practices related to images or classified as magic, literary practices. Observations of contemporary authors like Propertius or Ovid or the author of the “Shepherd of Hermas” on religious experience are analyzed. These authors, in very different ways, reflect on individual appropriation of religion among their contemporaries, and they offer these reflections to their readership or audiences. Other chapters concentrate on the role of literary texts and inscriptions in informing practionners of rituals. The chronological arch is from the second century BCE to the second century CE. “On Roman Religion”offers a history of ancient religion that is not compartimentalized into a number of confessional histories.