Preface

Summary

This book offers an introduction to the religion of ancient Rome through the early second century CE, using a selection of different kinds of ancient testimony to portray Roman action and opinion in areas that they or we would call “religion” – literary texts, epigraphic and numismatic evidence, together with visual representations of surviving artifacts. No background in Roman history is assumed, but readers are urged to consult the revised third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (2003), which contains articles by the foremost scholars of Roman religion and history.

The commentary on the ancient testimony is organized thematically and more or less chronologically within each theme. Putting these various sources together, however, does not produce a picture of Roman religion at any specific time but rather a patchwork of disparate sources of different dates. “Consider the source” is a maxim that must be constantly kept in mind. The traditional date of the foundation of Rome is 753 BCE, but the Roman literary sources date no earlier than the late third century BCE. Many of the stories concerning early Roman religion derive from authors writing several centuries after the events they purport to describe. First we must ask: who is the author, in what genre is he writing, when did he live, and how far removed in time is he from the events he is describing?

Inscriptions and coins offer evidence that is more or less contemporaneous with the event described or commemorated.