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6
Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion*
Greg Woolf
RELIGION AND THE INDIVIDUAL

Ritual action has always been about individuals: there are, after all,
no other conceivable social actors. Primatologists observing social
groups among the great apes differentiate group members by their
role and character. Those identities go beyond what is determined
by age and gender. Our individuality is arguably inextricably bound
up with our sociality and our mortality. The mortality of each
member of a social group imposes a biography on the survivors,
and a narrative direction on their life-courses. Social replacement
entails the development and differentiation of the social roles
of its members in ways that might reasonably be described as
individuation.
If we have been individuals since before we were human, it is not
surprising that the rst traces of ritual activity (in the Upper Palaeolithic) include handprints made by individual artists on the walls of
caves, and burial rituals which operated in part to differentiate the
deceased and recognize their individuated identities.1 Much ethnographically observed ritual mediates between individual and group.
Indeed some generalizing theories of ritual are precisely focused on
the means by which collectivities reproduce themselves through the
* I am grateful to all who commented on the paper pre-circulated for the Erfurt
conference of September 2009 and especially to Clifford Ando who read and greatly
improved a subsequent version. I alone am responsible for the views expressed.
1
Gamble 2007; Gamble, Poor 2005. On individual roles in the upper palaeolithic
see also Mithen 1998.
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recruitment, socialization and enculturation of new members.2

It follows that religious individuation must coincide with the rst
appearance of human beings, whether that means homo sapiens
sapiens or even conceivably other late hominid lineages such as the
Neanderthals.
What of individualization? To be useful for the study of ancient
religions, the term should entail more than the religious dimensions
of this mundane individuation that is entailed in all human sociality.
The most obvious additional specicity would be the emergence of
some level of personal choice between alternative world-views and
competing religious engagements. Choice in this sense should mean
the capacity of one member of a group to follow a religious path other
than those entailed by his or her (necessarily individuated) social
identity. That path might be in addition to, or in place of, those
expected by virtue of that persons ascribed social identity. Individualization may be thought of as a measure of the extent to which this
choice is exercised. Emancipation, disembedding, and structural
differentiation offer variant ways of talking about these changes as
they have unfolded in historical time at the level of entire societies.
The variety of these formulations mainly reects differences in where
analytical attention is focused, rather than major differences of
conceptualization or explanation. Our shared narrative of religious
history in the very long term envisages a series of moments of
individualization, points at which society and the sacred became
more and more estranged from one other.
Yet the capacity for choice is a more difcult criterion to apply than
it seems at rst sight. It is widely accepted that a measure of individual
choice already existed in classical antiquity, even if there is less
agreement about how this should be conceptualized. Some scholars
see polytheism itself as inevitably entailing some measure of choice:
individuals might form attachments to particular deities, or at least
choose to attend or give to one temple rather than another.3 The
ubiquitous votive dedications tend to specify the precise identity of
the particular worshippers and gods involved. Those ritual moves
had a counterpart in myth. Personal connections between human
2
For example Connerton 1989. A similar stress on socialization is a theme of Bell
1992. A compatible account of the origins of ritual is offered by Linard, Boyer 2006.
3
For some scholars such attachments are integral to classical polytheism, others
classify them as henotheism, on which Versnel 1990.
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protagonists and particular gods are central to the plots of the earliest
literary works, including the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey. The
fact that those connections take the form of love, hate, jealousy,
respect, disdain, and even kinship suggests that patterns of human
sociality were extended to involve divine persons created by the
dynamics of a polytheistic world view, rather as sacrice invited the
gods to share in commensuality as ritualized within human communities.4 Myth and ritual created gods as well as men who were
endowed with some freedom of action, freedom that entailed choice
as well as agency.
Against this stands an inuential narrative of religious change
which claims that during the Hellenistic and Roman periods new
religious forms emerged that offered heightened levels of individual
religious experience.5 A key feature of these new religious forms (or
religions) was said to be the requirement they imposed on individuals
to make a positive choice to participate, or join, or to become an
initiate.6 Christianity was, of course, the paradigmatic case of a new
religion conceptualized in these terms. As a result, current studies of
the emergence of religious pluralism are inevitably bound up with the
debates on Christian origins.7 That narrative is itself linked to the
emergence of the category of religion, itself increasingly seen to be a
product of Christian thought and discourse.8 The chronology of these
changes is contentious. The origins of Dionysiac cult associations lies
before the Hellenistic period, while key developments in the denition of religion as a category have been located between the second
and fourth centuries ad.9 The problem is not so much an empirical
one as a sign of lack of consensus about what should be considered
the central components of this phenomenon, or narrative.
Where should individualization and personal choice be placed in
these accounts of religious history? One (traditional) option would be
For the view that Greeks viewed their gods as larger Greeks see Nock 1942.
The classic statement is Cumont 1906. A set of responses and reassessments is
gathered in Bonnet, Rpke, Scarpi 2006.
6
The most elegant formulation remains that of Nock 1933.
7
The exercise of choice between competing options is central to the formulations
of North 1992, Stark 1996. But note the powerful critique of the religious market
place model in Beck 2006.
8
On which Asad 1993.
9
On the emergence of the category of religion in Roman antiquity see now Boyarin
2004a; Boyarin 2001; Boyarin 2004b.
5
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to say that persons might be individuated in traditional religion but

only individualized in new religions: individualization would then be
placed back into the conventional story of rupture between polytheisms and monotheisms, open religious systems versus exclusive ones,
between religion in society and religion and society. Less comfortably
it would become part of the story of the rise and distinctiveness of
Christianity, a narrative that borrows a good deal from the interested
accounts framed by the triumphant monotheists themselves.10 The
objections to this analytical move are clear. At best we would simply
gain a new vocabulary in which to tell an old story: at worst it would
lend spurious sociological legitimacy to a set of distinctions and
periodizations that are now widely seen as problematic.
My own starting point is the observation that individuals are
assigned quite a prominent place in Roman religion in such accounts
as we possess of actual ritual performances. The second part of this
chapter (II) asks what functions the naming of individual participants
in historical and other records of rituals served. The third part (III)
asks, on the basis of such records, how rituals participated in the
creation of individuals. My examples deliberately straddle the line
conventionally drawn between civic cults and new religions.
PERFORMANCE AND HISTORY

I shall begin with the participation of individuals in the collective
public cults of the classical city, those sacra publica that are often
today placed in one way or another at the heart of Roman religion.11
One of the striking features of Roman historical accounts of particular
ritual performances is the prominence given in those accounts to
named individual participants.
Consider the restoration in 70 ce of one of the central cult places of
Rome, the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, following its destruction
during the Flavian civil war. Tacitus narrates it as follows:
10
Ando, see ch. 4. On the inuence of Christian polemics of different kinds on the
historiography of ancient religions see also Smith 1990.
11
e.g. Beard, North, Price 1998; Scheid 1985). For discussion of this convention see
Bendlin 2000; Gordon 1990a; Woolf 1997.
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The work of restoring the Capitol was assigned by him [Vespasian] to

Lucius Vestinius, a man of the Equestrian order, who, however, for high
character and reputation ranked among the nobles. The haruspices
whom he assembled directed that the remains of the old shrine should
be removed to the marshes, and the new temple raised on the original
site. The Gods, they said, forbade the old form to be changed. On the
21st of June, beneath a cloudless sky, the entire space devoted to the
sacred enclosure was encompassed with chaplets and garlands. Soldiers
who bore auspicious names entered the precincts with sacred boughs.
Then the Vestals, with a troop of boys and girls whose fathers and
mothers were still living, sprinkled the whole space with water drawn
from the fountains and rivers. After this, Helvidius Priscus, the praetor,
as directed by Publius Aelianus the pontiff, rst puried the spot with a
suovetaurilia, and duly placed the entrails on turf; then, besought
Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and the tutelary deities of empire, to prosper
the undertaking, and to lend their divine help to raise the abodes which
the piety of men had founded for them. He then touched the wreaths,
which were wound round the foundation stone and entwined with the
ropes, while at the same moment the other Magistrates and Priests, the
Senators, the Knights, and a great part of the People, with zeal and joy
uniting their efforts, dragged the huge stone along. Contributions of
gold and silver and virgin ores, never smelted in the furnace but still in
their natural state, were showered on the foundations. The haruspices
had previously directed that no stone or gold which had been intended
for any other purpose should profane the work. Additional height was
given to the structure; this was the only variation which religion would
permit, and the one feature which had been thought wanting in the
splendour of the old temple.12
No textualization of any ancient ritual is innocent. Nor can it be

entirely extracted from the larger text of which it forms a part. The
restoration of the Capitol is a focal point in Tacitus narrative of
recovery. Its destruction had been narrated as the nadir of Romes
fortune in a chapter (Histories 3.72) that resumed the history of the
temple from its foundation, and alluded to its previous destruction in
the worst of the civil wars of the Republic. Its restoration follows a
series of debates in the senate, also narrated in the Histories, debates
in which the roles of Vespasian and Helvidius are highlighted. Restoration was certainly an intended meaning of the original ceremony,
one motivation for the considerable cost of the project to Vespasian.
12
Tac. hist. 4.53.
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The project was undertaken at a moment when he still had other

serious concerns, presumably because, like the Templum Pacis, it
might evoke Augustus restorative actions in respect of temples and
cults at the end of his civil war.13 The Vespasianic rebuilding and its
very public performance was an attempt to cement and sacralize his
own victory.14
Tacitus telling of the story raises doubts about the stability of
that order. The rebuilding of the temple represents a brief collusion
of interests between these two protagonistsVespasian and
Priscusbut the conict between them will return. The following
book will represent the Flavians as temple sackers rather than
restorers when the narrative moves to Jerusalem. The temple of
Jupiter on the Capitol was in any case already a focal point in
Roman historiography. Livy (1.556) presents its original construction as the last and greatest act of Tarquin the Proud: his treatment
makes clear that the subject had been prominently treated in the
histories of Fabius Pictor and of Piso. Livy emphasises both its
magnicence and the suffering of the people compelled to labour
on it by the tyrant. Tacitus account of the ritual is carefully
selective but new questions will have been evoked by his allusion
to the tradition.15 What sort of emperor will Vespasian turn out to
be? a new Augustus? or a new Tarquin? or a new Sulla? The
Histories are heading towards Domitian whose Capitoline Agon
will be a symbol for subsequent reigns of his own corruption, rather
than restoration, of the res publica.16
For present purposes, however, I want to put aside the topicality of
the action and the character of Tacitus account, and instead draw
attention to the record of the ritual on which we must presume
Tacitus relied. The exact nature of these records is unclear. The acta
senatus may have included an account of whatever was agreed in the
preliminary debates. The college of pontiffs generated and kept its
13
For full documentation see Gros 1976.

For other attempts to provide religious legitimacy for Vespasians victory in
terms of portents, astrology, and the patronage of Sarapis see Henrichs 1968; Lattimore 1934.
15
Suet. Vesp. 8 and Dio 65.10.2 in contrast stresses the personal engagement of the
new emperor, actually participating in the manual work of clearing the rubble from
the wreckage of the earlier temple.
16
See for instance the comments of Tacitus contemporary, Plin. epi. 4.22 on
which Woolf 2006. Also Caldelli 1993; Hardie 2003.
14
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own records.17 Quite possibly there were epigraphic monumenta of

the ceremony as well. Monumental writing was as important a source
of legitimacy to Vespasian as it had been to earlier emperors. Suetonius describes Vespasians concern to nd copies of three thousand
odd documents originally recorded on bronze tablets around the
Capitol, and to reinscribe them as part of his restoration, and the
Flavian period in general is marked by a resurgence of epigraphic
texts.18
Whatever the medium originally employed it is clear that an important part of the records comprised the names of those involved.
The initiative for restoration is attributed to the new emperor (in what
capacity Tacitus does not specify although the original records may
have done so). Three further individuals are named: the equestrian
charged with the construction, Helvidius Priscus as praetor and Publius Aelianus the pontiff. It was evidently important for those who
recorded the ritual in the rst place to note the names of those
involved, as well as precisely which priests and magistrates were to
play a part. As in other imperial ritualsthe better documented
consecrationes for example, or the various ceremonies described and
prescribed in the new Tiberian epigraphic documentswe are offered
the spectacle of the state performed as a pageant.19 Each of the ordines
is given its place, and their membership is left anonymous. Yet the
identity of the key players was also evidently deemed important.
It is not certain exactly how such rituals were devised. Some
components might have been suggested by the ways in which other
temples had been dedicated, or even by the rites used in the Sullan
restoration. Temple dedications were so common as to be virtually
routine: the Temple of Jupiter itself had been rededicated on a
17
For the documents generated by priestly colleges see the essays gathered in
Moatti, ed.1998.
18
Suet. Vesp. 8 listing senatus consulta and plebiscita recording alliances, treaties
and privileges granted to various parties. Note also the bronze fragments of the lex de
imperio Vespasiani (CIL VI.930) which show Vespasian as concerned as had been
Tiberius at the start of his reign to make the maximum possible use of epigraphic
monumenta. The various copies of the Flavian municipal decree, the reinscription of
the colonial law of Urso, the production of the Orange cadasters are among provincial
exemplars of the Flavian vogue for epigraphic monuments. The existence of a Flavian
predecessor of the Forma Urbis Romae that hung in the Severan reconstruction of the
Templum Pacis has also been suspected.
19
Price 1987; Rowe 2002. Cf. Hopkins 1991.
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number of occasions. Elements of repetition and a punctilious concern with precedent would seem appropriate. But it is clear from the
involvement of the haruspices that planning the ritual was also treated
as the design of something new and unique, its detail the solution to a
complex ritual problem. And at some point, discussion of the rites
must have given way to decisions about the identity of individual
participants. Why Helvidius of all the senior magistrates? Was it
because of his leading role in the debates about restoration? Other
participants were also selected on the basis of characteristics that were
essentially personal. No prior register can have existed of boys and
girls whose parents were still alive. How were they selected? And what
about all those soldiers named Felix, Fortunatus, and so on, plucked
from the ranks to make a lucky day? Their names too are part of the
preparation of the ceremony and of its record.
The same emphases on the planning of a unique ceremony and
on recording the names of the personnel involved occur in Livys
account of the bringing of the Great Mother of the Gods to Rome in
204 bc. On that occasion a lengthy discussion was held about precisely who should welcome her on her arrival. Interpretation of the
Sybilline books had earlier led to the decision to seek the help of King
Attalus of Pergamum, a key Roman ally, in acquiring her from her
sanctuary at Pessinus. En route to Pergamum the delegation had
stopped to consult the oracle at Delphi and had received instructions
about the rituals appropriate to her reception at Rome.20 The debate
which resulted is described by Livy, our main source for these events.
There was also a discussion (consultatio) on how the Idaean Mother
should be welcomed. Marcus Valerius, a member of the delegation, had
travelled ahead to announce that she would soon be in Italy, and a
recent report stated she was already at Terracina. No trivial matter
demanded the senates decision, viz. who was the best man (optimus
vir) in the state. To be sure anyone would prefer victory in this competition to any number of commands or magistracies, whether awarded by
the votes of the senate or the people. The judgement was made that
Publius Scipio, son of the Gaius who had died in Spain, a young man
not yet old enough to hold a quaestorship, was the best of all the good
men in the state. I would gladly relate the specic qualities of this man
that led the senate to this decision, had earlier writers who had access to
the memory of contemporaries passed this on. But I shall not add my
20
Liv. 29.1011 for initial discussion and consultation of oracles.
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own guesses given the long lapse in time since then. Publius Cornelius
was commanded to go with all the matronae to meet the goddess at
Ostia. He himself was to go aboard the ship to receive her and would
bring her ashore and hand her over to the matronae who would carry
her on. After the ship arrived at the mouth of the river Tiber, he did as
he was ordered, sailed out to the ship and received the goddess from her
priests and brought her to land. She was welcomed by the foremost
women of the city, the most prominent of whom was one Claudia
Quinta. The story goes that some had doubts about her reputation
before these events, but her purity (pudicitia) was all the more famous
in later years on account of her performance of this ritual. The matrons
then passed the goddesses from hand to hand in succession while all the
city came out to meet her. Censers had been placed in front of the doors
along the route she took and as she passed incense was burned and
prayers offered up that she might enter the city of Rome willingly and
might bring good fortune. They carried her to the temple of Victory on
the Palatine on the Ides of April. That day became a sacred day. Crowds
of people brought gifts to the goddess on the Palatine, a feast of the gods
(a lectisternium) took place and games were held, called the Megalensian Games.21
These events have been most often discussed for their political
context and for the signicance of the mixture of traditional and
exotic elements that came to characterize the cult of the Great
Mother.22 But for present purposes, I want to underline the fact
that the rituals themselves are composed of fairly conventional elements, and yet great care seems to have been taken in the choreographing of the ritual performance.
Why did it need such careful planning? Here too there were many
possible models that ought to have made planning the events a simple
matter. The evocatio of Juno Regina from Veii is just one of a number
of precedents. Livys account of that event is shorter, but begins with
the selection of a group of young men picked from the entire army.23
After washing themselves and putting on white robes they solemnly
entered the temple and reached out their hands to touch the cult
statue, and one asked the goddess if she was willing to move. Livy tells
21
Liv. 29.14.513. The other main account is Ovid. fast. 4.179372.

See most recently Burton 1996; Gruen 1990, ch. 1. For attention to the process of
designing the new rituals see Beard 1994. On the identication of goddess and cult
image Ando 2008, 226.
23
Liv. 5.22.58
22
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us the others declared they had seen her nod, then reports an alternative tradition that the goddess actually agreed verbally. Either way
she was apparently moved, as if almost weightless, to her new temple
on the Aventine, this too being taken as a sign of her consent.
Each of these three ritual performances is presented as an exceptional and unique event, even though precedents were available for
consultation in all cases. Part of the explanation must be the difference between our perspective and theirs: a ritual performance that
may seem to us to be routine expressions of a normlike the weekly
attendance of mass for many Catholicsmust have felt less ordinary,
and more laden with immanent signicance to those involved.24 That
difference becomes more acute with the perceived importance of the
performance. Each of these cases underwent a lengthy planning
process, and in each case detailed records were clearly made of
what actually occurred. It looks very much as if both preparation
and memorialization served primarily to assert the special signicance of the events in question, to extend their duration backwards
and forwards in time. The prominence of the selection and recording
of names ags the participation of key individuals as something other
that the routine discharge of their duties. For in all cases it was
apparently not decided simply that such and such a ritual was the
prerogative of a particular priest or subdivision of the community of
the Romans. Nor was random sortition or representative selection
employed. A deliberate public selection was clearly felt important,
and the names selected were remembered even, as Livy complains,
when the reasons for the choice were not.
Can we go beyond noting the emphasis given to the participation
of particular individuals to the religious experience of those individuals themselves? This is not so easy. Nevertheless, Livys account does
suggest both that the selection of Publius Cornelius Scipio was something that might be expected to bring lasting honour, and also that the
participation of Claudia Quinta changed her reputation, her fama. No
personal record survives. But it does not seem too speculative to
suppose that at least some individuals selected for a starring role in
a great ceremony of this kindthe children on the Capitol, the
auspiciously named soldiers, the youths selected to touch the cult
24
On the importance of this difference for the study of cultural action see
Bourdieu 1977, 39. I am grateful to Clifford Ando for drawing my attention to this
passage.
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statue in Veii that until then only members of one Etruscan priestly
family had been allowed to touchmight carry that experience with
them throughout their lives. That might seem to qualify for an
individuated religious experience. How much more striking must
have been the experience of being selected for a priesthood, especially
if it were one like the priestesses of Vesta or the amen Dialis, which
surrounded the body of the chosen ones with elaborate prescriptions
and proscriptions?25 Very occasionally the priestly role seems to have
become central to the perception of a given individual. How much of
this was meant when a Quintus Mucius Scaevola was nicknamed
augur or pontifex? Perhaps the best evidence for the notion of a
sacerdotal identity (as opposed to role) is provided by the priestly
persona Augustus tried to cultivate through iconography and
titulature.26 The experience of such distinction is, however, beyond
reconstruction.
Let us return to the written account of the performance. One effect
of this prominent insertion of the names of individuals into accounts
of ritual performances is to enhance, for the reader, a sense of the
historicity of the events described, of the once-and-for-all occasion on
which each ritual was performed. It is no surprise that historians like
Tacitus and Livy deliberately historicize these events. The rituals they
describe are episodes in narratives that are not primarily religious.
I provided some context for the Vespasianic restoration of the temple
of Jupiter on the Capitol. It would have been equally easy to show
how the story of the Idaean Mothers journey to Rome forms an
integral part of the account of how Rome survives Hannibals penetration of Italy and their initial crippling defeat at his hands, to
recuperate their position and win the second Punic War, or how
the bringing of Juno Regina to Rome has a key place in the story of the
rise of Rome and in the life of Camillus.
Yet it is not only in literary and historical narrations of ritual acts
that the names of individuals are prominent. One of the most striking
features of the epigraphic Acta of the Arval Brothers is the minute
attention with which they record each ritual performance, and with it
the names of the ofciating priests or magistri and of other members
of the college present at the time. These texts may be distinguished
25
On the distinctiveness of this category of priests Rpke 1996; Scheid 1986.

On this Gordon 1990b. For alternative Roman notions of priesthood that had
perhaps a greater charismatic component, see Beard 1989.
26
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from familiar epigraphic forms like the alba and fasti that publicized
and memorialized comprehensive and ordered records of the membership of collegia or civic bodies, true for a given period but not
focused on a single ritual performance. A record of those who
happened to be present on one given occasion emphasises contingency over comprehensiveness, and serves to individualize and
historicize each act of cult performed in the sacred grove.27 It has
often been pointed out that each performance differed slightly, and
that even if reading a series of records might convey a sense of
normative practicespractices of prior debate, of performance, and
of recordingthey were in no sense scripts for future performances.
There is also a growing consensus that no such scripts existed, and
that the creation of such comprehensive accounts and normative
texts as were composed occurred only late in the Republican period
in the context of challenges to priestly authority.28 Both the acta
Arvalium and the letters of Symmachus make clear that priests of
the imperial period did not behave as if constrained by such manuals,
and continued to plot individual performances in minute detail.
My point here is not to claim that Roman rituals were not repetitive
or conservative. They clearly were, as any perusal of a series of entries
such as the Arval Acta makes clear. Generation upon generation of
priests agonized over the design of individual performances without
apparently introducing either radical innovations or procedures for
their mechanical replication. That is to say ritual action remained both
conservative and creative, and what looks to us like repetition was
never simple routinization. Each performance, it seemed, should
conform (in some sense) to precedent. Yet it could never conform so
closely that control of ritual might slip from the hands of aristocratic
priests nor that their expertise would become redundant.29
These considerations suggest another reason for the presence of
named individuals in the written accounts of these performances.
Ritualization more or less demands agreement on a series of signs
that ag a given action as belonging to a ritual tradition: such signs
generate a sense of familiarity as well as recognition.30 That applies to
27
For this point see Rpke 2004, 356.

On this process see Wallace-Hadrill 1997.
29
For Roman religion, this dynamic is most clearly exemplied in struggles over
the publicising of the ritual calendar on which Rpke 1995. Key moments are
illuminated by Purcell 2001; Wallace-Hadrill 1987.
30
Bell 1992.
28
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the actual words, costume, props, and gestures employed as well as to

the physical layout of texts and the formulae spoken and inscribed.
Romans understood perfectly well the sense that certain rituals,
especially those which acquired a xed place in the calendar, stabilized the earthly order by emphasizing the cyclical nature of time.
Ancient commentators on festivals like the Parilia and the Lupercalia
repeatedly stress their antiquity, while Horace famously used the
regular procession of pontiff and vestal Virgin up the slopes of the
Capitol as a gure for remote posterity.31 The eternity of Rome was,
in some senses, bound up with the myth that its ritual tradition stood
outside history.
How then to relate this to the highly historicized accounts of
particular performances that we have in literary texts and on epigraphic monuments? I suggest that what we have to deal with is a
tension between the timelessness of ritualized action and the implicit
claims to the uniqueness and immediacy of each performance. That
tension was part of what gave each performance its charge. The
punctilious itemization of the names of individuals helped to anchor
any given performance in the here and now. Individuals (or their
names) were employed (or deployed) routinely so as to historicize the
transcendent. The place they were allocated was, however, closely
circumscribed so as not to disturb the sense in which ritual ensured
the extension of the present state into the future in a direction that
marked a continuity with the past. Individuals, that is, had their
place but it was carefully regulated, at least in these narrations of
performance.
If this is correct, then the prominence of individuals in these
recorded performances was not a product of an increased value
placed on personal religious participation or experience, nor a sign
of a movement towards emancipation and greater autonomy, both
often taken as markers of individualization. Instead, their names
anchored ritual performance in the here and now, just as the intense
plotting of more or less identical performances marks each one as
unique. Both modes of action contributed to protecting the prerogatives of the priests and the aristocracy from which they were drawn.
31
e.g. Plut. Rom. 21 on the ancient origins of the Matronalia, Carmentalia, and
Lupercalia, Cic. Cael. 26 on the Lupercalia coitio [sc. Lupercorum] illa silvestris ante
est instituta quam humanitas atque leges. On the pontiff and virgin, Hor. car.
III.30.69. Many other such passages could be gathered.
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Religious writing operated in precisely the opposite manner to a

vernacular book of common prayer: it constrained rather than emancipated, and it consolidated existing power structures rather than
providing the resources with which to challenge them.
RITUALS AND EXCHANGE

The preceding argument depended heavily on Tacitus and Livys
appropriations of records deriving from actual performances. When
we turn to the primary recordsvirtually all epigraphic in natureit
is possible to ask other questions about the participation of named
individuals. I have already suggested that performing a particular
ritual role might be experienced as a form of individuation, a contribution to the ongoing transformation of a participants personal
biography. Corresponding transformations today have a twofold
nature. First they may alter our interiorized sense of self, by laying
down powerful memories which we may revisit repeatedly as a means
of self-fashioning: wedding days and funerals are obvious examples,
but participation in some more public rituals such as coronations can
also provide resources of this kind. Second, rituals transform our
social identity, affecting the way others treat us: weddings again
(and indeed all rites of passage) have this effect. Naturally the two
dimensions of identitythe sense of self and social identityare not
wholly independent of one another, although it is common enough
for them to be in tension.
Was this what it was like for the Romans too? That rites of passage
affect social identity is clear enough in all human societies, but what
of the interior self ? This is the terrain on which oriental religions and
the like were once believed to do the most work. Let me begin with
this inscription from an altar found at the colony of Lyon.
In the taurobolium of the Great Idaean Mother of the Gods, which was
performed on the instruction of the Mother of the Gods, for the wellbeing of the emperor Caesar Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Pius,
father of his country and of his children and of the condition of the
colonia of Lugdunum, Lucius Aemilius Carpus, sevir Augustalis and at
the same time dendrophorus received the powers (the vires) and
transferred them from the Vaticanum, and consecrated an altar
adorned with an ox-head at his own expense. The ofciating priest,
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Quintus Sammius Secundus, was honoured with an armlet and garland

by the quindecimviri, and the most holy town-council of Lugdunum
decreed him a lifelong priesthood. In the consulship of Appius Annius
Atilius Bradua and Titus Clodius Vibius Varus. Ground was given for
this monument by decree of the town council.32
This example takes us into territory claimed by both the sacra

publica and the new oriental cults. The cult of Cybele originated
with that of an Anatolian mother-goddess, worshipped as an aniconic
stone betyl through rites that included ecstatic frenzy and self-mutilation. I have already discussed Livys account of how she was brought
to Rome during the Hannibalic War. Thereafter her public cult
contained elements of what Romans considered exotic rituals, alongside annual games, civic drama, and a temple on the Palatine. Taurobolium in this period meant both a public sacrice of a bull and also
an initiatory ritual conducted for the benet of individual worshippers of the Great Mother. This well-known, if in some respects
enigmatic, text records the installation of her cult among the sacra
publica of another city, the Roman colonia of Lyon.33
The inscription is a monument to a series of rituals that created a
web of relationships between a number of participating parties. The
parties concerned included two individuals, Carpus who was both
augustalis and dendrophorus, and Secundus the sacerdos; two civic
bodies, (the decuriones of Lyon and the priestly college of the quindecimviri); two cities (Rome and Lyon); a god, Magna Mater Deorum;
and the emperor Antoninus Pius. The rituals transformed the relationships between the participants. That was presumably one reason
why the monument was set up by the central gure, Carpus. Another
was to commemorate and publicize the various acts of permission
and sponsorship that had made these transformations possible and
authorized them.
The most obvious change of status is that undergone by Secundus
to whom the ordo of the colonia decreed a perpetual priesthood.34 But
the inscription takes care to name all the other participants involved,
and to document the distribution of gifts through which these
changed relationships were marked. Carpus paid for an altar and
32
CIL XIII 1751 translation adapted from Beard, North, Price 1998, 162.
See Audin 1985; Beard, North, Price 1998, 3838; Turcan 1972, 8098.
34
CIL 13.1751 : . . . . cui sanctissimus ordo lugdunens(ium) perpetuatem sacerdoti(i)
decrevit.
33
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brought the bulls vires from the Vatican; the quindecimviri granted
ornamenta to Secundus; the ordo conrmed the perpetuity of his
priesthood and gave a place for the monument; the goddess commanded the ritual take place; the chief beneciaries of the taurobolium were the emperor, his family and the colonia, the strong
connections between which were thereby asserted. When these gift
exchangesconcluding with the setting up of our inscriptionwere
completed, the social world had been slightly changed. What the
rituals had transformed were the social identities of those concerned,
and specically the relational dimensions of those identities.
How far can we generalize from this example? The cases which
I have so far discussed were not part of the common experience of all
Romans. Nor were all rituals so obviously transformative. What of the
carnival atmosphere of the Saturnalia or the Parilia? What about
festivals focused on the dead like the Lemuria and Parentalia? The
rituals associated with those four festivals were repeated each year, at
different scales of association. On the face of it they seem likely to
have promoted social solidarity and a sense of continuity with the
past and future. Joining or leaving a group that customarily celebrated
one of these together conceivably marked some change of social
identity. Yet collective ritual experience is often said to generate a
sense of common, rather than individual, identity. Roman rites of
passage formed a slightly different case. Putting on the toga virilis for
boys or young men and the dedication of dolls by girls or young
women was not a collective experience, like the initiations which
entire age-sets undergo together in some societies. There is no sign
in Roman culture of a special bond between those who attained
adulthood at roughly the same time. Besides, rituals like these were
perhaps pretty much the same for all children of equivalent social
status. Socialization seems more evident than any differentiated individuation. In many cases, participation in ritual had no real individuating dimension for most Romans. The exceptional cases remain.
Carpus as a dendrophorus and Secundus as a perpetual priest at
Lyon had presumably both taken conscious decisions to devote
themselves to the worship of the Great Mother. Not all exceptional
cases exhibited this degree of choice: the age at which a tiny number
of aristocratic girls became Vestals (rather than brides) was so young
as to suggest that they may have had little realistic say about it.
Religious differentiation did however became a little more signicant in the Roman world than beforehand. The argument is an a
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priori one.35 Opportunities for social differentiation depend to a large

degree on the complexity of any given society. Modern societies have
the highest rates because of the extent of the division of labour, the
high level of economic polarization, and the possibilities for social
mobility opened up by both. Ancient societies were much less complex; nevertheless that complexity increased between say 300 bc and
ad 200. Relative increases in levels of urbanization, of economic
activity, of the reach of government, and of education must to some
extent have released many from their social cages.36 Limited social
mobility can be detected.37 Analogies have often been drawn with
modernizing processes of various kinds.38 Diasporic movements and
cosmopolitanism of various kinds were concomitants of these
changes;. so too was religious differentation, and that meant higher
levels of religious individuation, some voluntary, some not.
There is another reason to link these processes with the transformative potential of some Roman rituals. One phenomenon characteristic of those social milieux most affected by these processes was
the appearance of epigraphic memorialization.39 Most inscriptions
are in fact records (or monuments) of ritual performances. The vast
majority are funerary, the second largest category being dedications
to the gods. Both categories of ritual mark the modication of social
relationships, and both were also marked by gift exchange. Epitaphs
offer a nal reckoning of relations between the deceased and the
commemorators, marking the moment at which social roles changed,
through testation and inheritance and the redistribution of authority
and roles within the family.40 Payment for the funeral and the
monument was often an important ofcium expected of the heres
who in any case had a vested interest in public recognition of those
social transformations. Votive altars commemorated signicant
transactions between the human and the divine, exchanges of gifts
that modied social relationships between dedicator and deity.41 The
35
What follows owes a good deal to the parallel argument of Runciman 1984.
For the effects of government see Ando (this volume). For social caging see
Mann 1986.
37
Hopkins 1965; Purcell 1983. Downward mobility is, naturally, less well attested.
38
For application of Wallersteins notion of world systems see Hopkins 1980;
Woolf 1990. For globalization see Hingley 2005; Hitchner 2008; Sweetman 2007.
39
For an explanation of this in relation to Latin inscriptions see Woolf 1996.
40
For similar ideas applied to testaments, see Champlin 1991.
41
Derks 1995.
36
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general importance of epigraphy in making a claim to new social

relationships is supported by the sense of public evoked by the
locations in which they were placed.42 It has long been known that
the upwardly mobilesuch as former slaves, or auxiliary soldiers
who have won citizenshipare disproportionately represented in
the epigraphic record.43 Some sanctuaries at least were lled with
texts recording the names of worshippers: this too may be seen as a
means of asserting a relationship between dedicator and deity.44 The
Capitol, with those thousands of bronze tablets recording treaties and
decrees, alliances and grants, was just a very special case of this
phenomenon. Restoring that monumental assemblage was one
means by which Vespasian proclaimed the endurance of the relationally dened identities with the community of the Romans and between that community and its neighbours.
What about that other, internalized dimension of identity that we
term the self? Perhaps there were in antiquity private moments of
revelation, transactions between gods and men that remained forever
internalized. If so we have no access to them. Even the shortest
epitaph takes its anticipated readership into its condence. The
scarcity of pre-Christian texts expressing such a sensibility is notorious.45 There are, I suggest, good reasons to doubt the signicance of
individualism of that sort.
Religious individualization in antiquity, I have suggested, needs to
entail a level of choice if it is to be meaningfully distinguished from
socialization or the human experience in general. Religious choice, as
it emerges in the material I have considered, takes the form of
participating in kinds of gift exchange and ritual action through
which a person acquires a modied social identity relationally. By
relationally I mean this new identity is not a unique and personal
self, fashioned by whatever means, but rather membership of one or
more groups. Put otherwise, individual identity was established by a
process of triangulation on the identities of others. Assertions of
identity made epigraphically took the form of claims about where
one was located in the social nexus.
Non-epigraphic sources often described a change of identity as the
assumption of a new persona. The most recent discussions of the
concept are quite sceptical about the emergence in the Roman period
42
44
43
Carroll 2006; Corbier 1987; Hesberg, Zanker 1987.
Hope 2001.
45
Beard 1991; Scheid 1996; Veyne 1983.
Nock 1933.
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of quasi-modern subjectivities centred on a self-conscious and internalised individuality.46 Persona was, it seems, an important but not a
permanent aspect of the self, and one clearly anchored to externally
dened roles, such as senator, father, or judge: who one was
depended to a great extent on ones (current) statio in life. There is
no real sign of an ethic of individualism, certainly not in a positive
sense. Nor is there a sense that ones internal self is in some sense the
real, essential, and dening core of ones being. Seneca, Pliny the
Younger, and Epictetus all devote a good deal of attention to the
production of the self, but always viewed as a being in action, a person
dened relationally. It is no surprise then that identities asserted
epigraphically, that is as products of ritualized exchanges, conform
to this model. They are typically highly formal and fairly regular in
type. The relationship between the dedicator and the commemorated
on funerary inscriptions does sometimes include affective elements,
but the deceased is rarely described wholly or even mostly in terms of
personal qualities. Names, liation, tribe, origo, citizenship, ranks,
honores, even approximate age all combined to create an identity
with reference to the broader social groups at the intersection of
which he or she was located.
What this means for religious individualization is that when
individuals made choices about religious roles they chose from
ready-made models. This is certainly not the same as unreective
participation in ancestral rites. But it is quite different from what we
understand today by the development of a personalized religiosity, let
alone engagement in personal cosmological and ethical reection that
has been both valorised and condemned since the Reformation.47
A great gulf separates ancient forms of individualization from those
of the early modern and modern worlds.
From a wider cross-cultural perspective this is not at all surprising.
The variability of notions of the self is well known to those anthropologists for whom personhood has been a major subject of debate.48
As individualization is classically related to modernity, so interiorized
and autonomous selves have come to be seen as a relatively recent
46
I have found particularly helpful Frede 2007; Gill 2006, especially pp. 32844.
More widely see the fundamental collection Carrithers, Collins, Lukes 1985.
47
Ginzburg 1980.
48
Carrithers, Collins, Lukes 1985. The collection departs from a lecture given by
Marcel Mauss in 1938.
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invention and one by no means universally subscribed to even today.

With all the usual caveats about generalizing theories, something like
an ideal type of a socio-centric or holistic person has been developed
to describe pre-modern and non-western notions of selfhood.49 Traditional societies such as the Melanesian ones on which much recent
work has focused often treat personhood entirely relationally and
contextually. What we would regard as individualistic behaviour is
liable to be categorized as sorcery or madness. When Melanesians
speak of themselves they portray each individual as a node in a web of
relations, exchanges, and mutual obligations, that same web articulated and explored in terms of gift exchange. The term dividual has
been coined to describe this lay concept.50 Romans were not, of
course, just like Melanesians . . . any more than they are just like us.
But the space between these ideal types seems the best place to look
for the kinds of self we nd elaborated in philosophical texts or
produced by epigraphic records of rituals. The main implication for
the study of religious individualization in historical perspective is that
we are not dealing with a simple movement along a developmental
continuum. For the religious history of the period, the implications
are even more serious. The most inuential accounts of religious
change posit a world full of gods in which individuals, conceived of
in modern terms, selected among competing religions. If, as now
seems most likely, there were (properly speaking) neither individuals
nor religions in Roman antiquity, our explanations will need to be
recast.
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Strathern 1988.
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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF FIRST PROOF, 29/4/2013, SPi

RELIGION AND THE INDIVIDUAL

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Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion

recruitment, socialization and enculturation of new members.2

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Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion

to say that persons might be individuated in traditional religion but

PERFORMANCE AND HISTORY

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The work of restoring the Capitol was assigned by him [Vespasian] to

No textualization of any ancient ritual is innocent. Nor can it be

Tac. hist. 4.53.

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Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion

The project was undertaken at a moment when he still had other

For full documentation see Gros 1976.

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own records.17 Quite possibly there were epigraphic monumenta of

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Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion

Liv. 29.1011 for initial discussion and consultation of oracles.

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Liv. 29.14.513. The other main account is Ovid. fast. 4.179372.

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Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion

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On the distinctiveness of this category of priests Rpke 1996; Scheid 1986.

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Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion

For this point see Rpke 2004, 356.

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the actual words, costume, props, and gestures employed as well as to

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Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion

Religious writing operated in precisely the opposite manner to a

RITUALS AND EXCHANGE

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Quintus Sammius Secundus, was honoured with an armlet and garland

This example takes us into territory claimed by both the sacra

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Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion

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priori one.35 Opportunities for social differentiation depend to a large

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