Associations in Ancient Rome - Religious Associations

Religious Associations

Associations formed for the maintenance of religious cults were usually called sodalitates, though the word collegium was also used for them, as in the case of the college of the Arval Brothers. Of the ancient Sodales Titii nothing is known until they were revived by Augustus; it may have been that when a gens or family charged with the maintenance of a particular cult had died out, its place was supplied by a sodalitas.

The introduction of new cults also led to the institution of new associations. In 495 BC when the worship of Minerva was introduced, a collegium mercatorum was founded to maintain it, which held its feast on the dies natalis (dedication day) of the temple. In 387 the ludi Capitolini were placed under the care of a similar association of dwellers on the Capitoline Hill. In 204 BC when the Magna Mater (Great Mother, or Cybele) was introduced from Pessinus, a sodalitas was instituted which, as Cicero notes, used to feast together during the ludi Megalenses.

All such associations were duly licensed by the state, which at all times was vigilant in forbidding the maintenance of any which it deemed dangerous for religious or political reasons. In 186 BC the senate, by a decree of which part is preserved., made all combination for promoting the Bacchic religious rites strictly illegal. Legal sodalitates are frequent later; the temple of Venus Genetrix, begun by Julius Caesar and finished by Augustus, had its collegium. Sodalilates were instituted for the cult of the deified emperors such as Augustus (see Augustales) and Claudius.