The Religion of Ancient Rome | Page 9

In his private worship then the individual had immediate access to the
deity, and it was no doubt this absence of priestly mediation and the
consequent sense of personal responsibility, no less than its emotional
significance, which caused the greater reality and permanence of the
domestic worship as compared with the organised and official cults of
the state.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Etruscan builders were according to tradition employed on the
earliest Roman temples.
[4] This is all open to doubt, but see De Marchi, Il Culto Privato, vol.
ii.
CHAPTER IV
EARLY HISTORY OF ROME--THE AGRICULTURAL
COMMUNITY
After this sketch of the main features which we must expect to find in
Roman religion, we may attempt to look a little more in detail at its
various departments, but before doing so it is necessary to form some
notion of the situation and character of the Roman community: religion
is not a little determined by men's natural surroundings and occupations.
The subject is naturally one of considerable controversy, but certain
facts of great significance for our purpose may fairly be taken as
established. The earliest settlement which can be called 'Rome' was the
community of the Palatine hill, which rises out of the valleys more
abruptly than any of the other hills and was the natural place to be
selected for fortification: the outline of the walls and sacred enclosure
running outside them (pomoerium) may still be traced, marking the
limits of 'square Rome' (Roma quadrata), as the historians called it.
The Palatine community no doubt pursued their agricultural labours

over the neighbouring valleys and hills, and gradually began to extend
their settlement till it included the Esquiline and Caelian and other
lesser heights which made up the Septimontium--the next stage of
Rome's development. Meanwhile a kindred settlement had been
established on the opposite hills of the Quirinal and Viminal, and
ultimately the two communities united, enclosing within their
boundaries the Capitol and their meeting-place in the valley which
separated them--the Forum. In this way was formed the Rome of the
Four Regions, which represents the utmost extent of its development
during the period which gave rise to the genuine Roman religion. All
these stages have left their mark on the customs of religion. Roma
quadrata comes to the fore in the Lupercalia: not merely is the site of
the ceremony a grotto on the Palatine (Lupercal), but when the Luperci
run their purificatory course around the boundaries, it is the circuit of
the Palatine hill which marks its limits. Annually on the 11th of
December the festival of the Septimontium was celebrated, not by the
whole people, but by the montani, presumably the inhabitants of those
parts of Rome which were included in the second settlement. Finally,
the addition of the Quirinal settlement is marked by the inclusion
among the great state-gods of Quirinus, who must have been previously
the local deity of the Quirinal community.
But more important for us than the history of the early settlement is its
character. We have spoken of early Rome as an agricultural community:
it would be more exact and more helpful to describe it as a community
of agricultural households. The institutions of Rome, legal as well as
religious, all point to the household (familia) as the original unit of
organisation: the individual, as such, counted for nothing, the
community was but the aggregate of families. Domestic worship then
was not merely independent of the religion of the community: it was
prior to it, and is both its historical and logical origin. Yet the life of the
early Roman agriculturalist could not be confined to the household: in
the tilling of the fields and the care of his cattle he meets his neighbour,
and common interests suggest common prayer and thanksgiving. Thus
there sprung up the great series of agricultural festivals which form the
basis of the state-calendar, but were in origin--as some of them still
continued to be--the independent acts of worship of groups of

agricultural households. Gradually, as the community grew on the lines
we have just seen, there grew with it a sense of an organised state, as
something more than the casual aggregation of households or clans
(gentes). As the feeling of union became stronger, so did the necessity
for common worship of the gods, and the state-cult came into being
primarily as the repetition on behalf of the community as a whole of the
worship which its members performed separately in their households or
as joint-worshippers in the fields. But the conception of a state must
carry with it at least two ideas over and beyond the common needs of
its members: there must be internal organisation to secure domestic
tranquillity, and--since there will be collision with other states--external
organisation for purposes of offence and defence. Religion follows the
new