Testing the Limits of Ritual Choices

This chapter explores Propertian oeuvre's imagination of individual magic practices. Propertius presupposes a set of techniques, characterized by their high degree of ritualization, by the use of instruments or ingredients that do not appear in common or daily praxis. These are termed “magic” and they are clearly distinguished from the realm of the gods and such practices as are termed “sacred.” For Propertius, magic is neither antisocial nor the “religion of the others.” The aims of magical practices might be reached by other techniques of sacralization, but magic is as legitimately open to him as it is to others. However, the ingestion of potions is the most plausible explanation for magic's effects, and this is uncomfortably close to the crime of poisoning. Therefore, one must be wary of admitting responsibility for such magic, or of naming one's contractors. Believing, practicing, remaining silent—these are exactly the conditions that are valid for all imperial practitioners and specialists of magic.

Individual Decision and Social Order

This chapter looks at examples of individual interpretations of traditional priestly roles from the third until the first century BC. There was innovative behavior not only on the part of the plebeian Pontifices Maximi; among the patricians, there were also individuals who interpret a priestly role not in the traditional way but as a specifically religious role. Both case types demonstrate highly individual behavior. It seems that the actors intended to problematize the relationship between their priestly and political offices or to privilege a specific religious obligation over a political role. In each case, they did this by asserting the obligation of perfect religious performance. Basic, however, to these individual attempts to further develop given roles was a shared conviction: the religious framework of the Roman polity was to be provided by its patrician members in particular.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter argues that lived religion and individual appropriations are identifiable at the heart of rituals like praying, vowing, dedicating, and reading. It then assesses how different authors reflect on individual appropriation of religion among their contemporaries. Whereas Propertius remains in the role of the distant observer of a traditional religious role, and Ovid follows him in this, Hermas urgently pursues distribution and thereby opens up new religious roles for his recipients. For him, religious individuality has become crucial. A very old explanation for this exists: the classification of Hermas as a Christian. Neither the causes of Hermas's religious individuality nor its consequences are restricted to what are later claimed as features of a Christian genealogy: being a Jew, a Roman, a businessman, and a citizen of the Roman Empire.

Religious Communication

This chapter examines the notion of “religious communication.” Religious communication is special in its insistence on its vertical dimension, which at the same time allows for very specific and often highly visible horizontal, interhuman communication. Indeed, it is a communication that refers to or directly addresses agents who are frequently, but not inevitably, personalized and who are not within the circle of those who are unquestionably present or relevant to a given situation. These were superhuman agents, or perhaps formerly alive but now dead human agents. The human actor who introduced such agents and chose this mode of action, enlarged her or his own agency, either by forging an alliance with the divine or by reducing the agency of other human actors as a result of the superior capacities of the gods in determining a course of events.

Dynamics of Individual Appropriation

This chapter focuses on ritual performance. An individual performance of a ritual was not merely a simple repetition of an eternally fixed formula, but rather the conscious attempt of a historical individual to do the ritual, to repeat a time-honored pattern, to perform it to and for others in a specific situation, in a particular place. Writing, that is literature, might have been part of the performance. Texts are not only a part of the actual performance but also a part of its context, part of the performer's and audience's knowledge. Communication about ritual performances can be a determining factor in the interpretation and modification of a ritual action, and an individual performance cannot be analyzed in isolation from communication about previous performances or about the norms of the ritual.

Appropriating Images—Embodying Gods

This chapter examines a text by the Augustan poet Sextus Propertius, Propertius 4.2, which has a god speak about himself in the first person. This text analyzes the identity of god and image. On the one hand, the god—who introduces himself by the name of Vertumnus—claims an identity independent of situational appropriations and even of his image. He implicitly claims an identity within different material shapes, including statuettes and paintings. In the fiction of the speech, the god claims such an identity by remembering other and former images. However, he remains subject to them; he is bound to concrete appropriations. Similarly, Vertumnus's physical movements are located in the imagination of observers, where the manifestation of the “present” is extended into imagined sequences of actions.

Instructing Literary Practice in The Shepherd of Hermas

This chapter explores an early second-century text: The Shepherd of Hermas. This text was part of the Codex Sinaiticus, the fundamental Bible manuscript of the fourth century with the siglum Aleph. In its biographical dimension, the text describes a religious practice. It formulates the mode of its reception through multiple references to distribution and writing. Writing the text is therefore described as part of the religious practice of the narrator and protagonist called “Hermas.” This is not about a unique action. The text may in fact, in its different layers, reflect the work of several years and multiple attempts to convey the visionary insights, primarily, in the additions and corrections necessitated by the author's patron. The resulting text invited its audience to engage in individual religious practice and offered itself for appropriation by any of those in situations that are not described as entirely hopeless.

Individual Appropriation of Religion

This chapter focuses on the question of individuality in religious matters. Certain consequences must be accepted if one wants to use the idea of the individual and that of individuality in religious studies to counter the claim of uniqueness in descriptions of “modern” religiosity. These begin with the choice of the objects of research: the focus is on individual practices, on life-cycle rituals in their importance not only for the constitution of communities but also for the process of individuation. Religious activities must not be viewed as solidified or permanent, or as well-organized “cults” and “religions,” formulating and achieving far-reaching normative claims and identities. Instead, they must be analyzed with regard for their temporary and situational character, with regard for the many roles that were involved and the widely diverse strategic interests of the participants. Through the lens of individualization, religion is as much a traditional system of symbols as it is a strategic option for an individual.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of lived religion. Lived religiosity or “lived religion” is a concept helpful for further developing the notion of individual appropriation and reformulating it as a new paradigm in the analysis of Roman religion. Instead of inquiring into how individuals reproduce a set of religious practices and the intellectual tenets of a faith, religion is to be reconstructed as everyday experiences, practices, expressions, and interactions; these in turn constantly redefine religion as practice, idea, and community. The very different, strategic, and even subversive forms of individual appropriation are analytically confronted with traditions, their normative claims, and their institutional protections. Lived ancient religion thus offers a framework within which one can address the whole range of religious practices and conceptions, not as sets of fixed rules or beliefs, but as a permanently changing field of individual actions, inceptive traditions, monumental examples, and incoherent assumptions.

Reconstructing Religious Experience

This chapter discusses Publius Ovidius Naso's Libri fastorum, his commentary on the Roman calendar in its graphic form of the fasti. Ovid's six books, covering the months of January to June, are-together with Propertius's fourth book of elegies to which Ovid reacts-the apogee of such “authoritative” poetry in the early principate. These texts are part of the cultural revolution at the heart of the Augustan “restoration.” Accordingly, they were highly political statements. From a broader perspective, however, the composition of these texts on Roman religion was also a part of the process of insular rationalization, which took place from the third century BC onward, and which—at least for religion—came to a halt in the Augustan era.