The Religion of Ancient Rome | Page 8

ritual, which tends almost to alienate humanity from
deity, we may turn to another hardly less prominent feature of the
Roman religion--the immediateness of relation between the god and his
worshippers. Not only may the individual at any time approach the altar
of the god with his prayer or thank-offering, but in every community of
persons its religious representative is its natural head. In the family the
head of the household (pater familias) is also the priest and he is
responsible for conducting the religious worship of the whole house,
free and slave alike: to his wife and daughters he leaves the ceremonial
connected with the hearth (Vesta) and the deities of the store-cupboard
(Penates), and to his bailiff the sacrifice to the powers who protect his
fields (Lares), but the other acts of worship at home and in the fields he
conducts himself, and his sons act as his acolytes. Once a year he meets
with his neighbours at the boundaries of their properties and celebrates
the common worship over the boundary-stones. So in[4] the larger
outgrowth of the family, the gens, which consisted of all persons with
the same surname (nomen, not cognomen), the gentile sacra are in the
hands of the more wealthy members who are regarded as its heads; we
have the curious instance of Clodius even after his adoption into
another family, providing for the worship of the gens Clodia in his own
house, and we may remember Virgil's picture of the founders of the
gentes of the Potitii and the Pinarii performing the sacrifice to Hercules
at the ara maxima, which was the traditional privilege of their houses.
When societies (sodalitates) are formed for religious purposes they
elect their own magistri to be their religious representatives, as we see
in the case of the Salii and the Luperci. Finally, in the great community
of the state the king is priest, and with that exactness of parallelism of
which the Roman was so fond, he--like the pater familias--leaves the
worship of Vesta in the hands of his 'daughters,' the Vestal virgins. And
so, when the Republic is instituted, a special official, the rex sacrorum,

inherits the king's ritual duties, while the superintendence of the Vestals
passes to his representative in the matter of religious law, the pontifex
maximus, whose official residence is always the regia, Numa's palace.
The state is but the enlarged household and the head of the state is its
religious representative.
If then the approach to the gods is so direct, where, it may be asked, in
the organisation of Roman religion is there room for the priest? Two
points about the Roman priesthood are of paramount importance. In the
first place, they are not a caste apart: though there were restrictions as
to the holding of secular magistracies in combination with the
priesthood--always observed strictly in the case of the rex sacrorum
and with few exceptions in the case of the greater flamines--yet the
pontifices might always take their part in public life, and no kind of
barrier existed between them and the rest of the community: Iulius
Cæsar himself was pontifex maximus. In the second place they are not
regarded as representatives of the gods or as mediators between god
and man, but simply as administrative officials appointed for the
performance of the acts of state-worship, just as the magistrates were
for its civil and military government. In origin they were chosen to
assist the king in the multifarious duties of the state-cult--the flamines
were to act as special priests of particular deities, the most prominent
among them being the three great priests of Iuppiter (flamen Dialis),
Mars, and Quirinus; the pontifices were sometimes delegates of the
king on special occasions, but more particularly formed his religious
consilium, a consulting body, to give him advice as to ritual and act as
the repositories of tradition. In later times the flamines still retain their
original character, the pontifices and especially the pontifex maximus
are responsible for the whole organisation of the state-religion and are
the guardians and interpreters of religious lore. In the state-cult then the
priests play a very important part, but their relation to the worship of
the individual was very small indeed. They had a general
superintendence over private worship and their leave would be required
for the introduction of any new domestic cult; in cases too where the
private person was in doubt as to ritual or the legitimacy of any
religious practice, he could appeal to the pontifices for decision.
Otherwise the priest could never intervene in the worship of the family,

except in the case of the most solemn form of marriage (confarreatio),
which, as it conferred on the children the right to hold certain of the
priesthoods, was regarded itself as a ceremony of the state-religion.