Res Divina - Religious Background

Religious Background

The heart of Rome’s natural order was the city of Rome, home to the gods of state, their cults and their senior priest-officials, who in the Republic were the ruling consuls. Rome’s most powerful god, Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Jupiter greatest and best) favoured “his” city because his own power and status were constructed by the Roman law, rites and sacrifice which elevated and honoured him. The same principles constructed the various powers and honours of all other gods of the state pantheon. Public cults (sacra publica) were state funded, at least in principle, and most priesthoods occupied by high-ranking citizens.

Archaic Rome was part of a broader civilisation which included Latin, colonial Greek and possibly Carthaginian elements, dominated by the Etruscans - the rites of the haruspex, for example, were almost certainly Etruscan. In its ascendancy from local to Imperial power, Rome pragmatically embraced the local cults of its neighbouring villages and towns, then of city-states and provinces. Local cult became an instrument of Roman administration, run by locally elected official-priests. Their "foreign" gods never became gods of the Roman state as a whole, but were an essential feature of reciprocal relations between Rome and its provinces. In approximately 155 CE, Aelius Aristides would remark that his own favourite gods, Asclepius, Isis and Serapis, were widely revered in the Empire because of the favour shown them by Rome.