The Religion of Ancient Rome | Page 8

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 C?sar 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.
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