The paper is part of the larger project on 'Isiacus. Embodiment, experience and communication in everyday Isiac cultic practice'
Because of a sort of unconscious cultural debt for dogmatic Protestant models, scholarship has often fallen in the trap of arbitrarily applying to ancient societies some modern interpretative categories which were later proven to be inadequate or even mystifying. Thus recent research (led by John Scheid) has finally rejected concepts like “belief” and “orthodoxy”, moving to the much more fruitful ones of “practice” and “orthopraxy” and showing that Graeco-Roman religion was not based on what it is now conceptualised as faith or creed, but rather on the scrupolous (sometimes nitpicking) compliance with regulations for the correct carrying out of rituals, which entailed the strict observance of interdictions and, in case of infraction, the payment of sanctions. Because of a parallel distorted historiographic paradigm (again built on Jewish/Christian bookrevealed religious traditions and canonical Catholic law), the idea of a Greek and (in particular) a Roman religion strongly focussed on a meticulous respect of ritual prescriptions generated the search for an original Sakralrecht and a related Ritualtext, that is a juridical corpus of laws based on some ancient libri sacerdotum and regulating, item by item, the constellation of different aspects linked to the religious praxis. But, as underlined by Laura Gawlinski, “leges sacrae was a category created in the nineteenth century as part of an effort to organize and make accessible the inscribed documents deemed most useful to scholars of the history of religion”. We cannot deny that religious specialists were regularly involved in political affairs (advicing magistrates in the case of ritual concerns) and that their consultations might be actually registered both in the priestly commentarii (e.g. of the Fratres Arvales) and in the official magistratual reports stored in the public archives. But the transmission of the ritual knowledge was basically operated orally, from one individual to the other, from one generation to the following, and there is no actual evidence supporting the idea of the existence of such unified written collections of laws. In Greece, the huge number of decrees dealing with ritual norms led to the construction of the histographical category ambiguously called “sacred laws” (hieroi nomoi), which has been strongly questioned during the last dozen years. In fact, the Greeks never distinguished it “as a category of rules separate from other laws, nor did they ever gather sacred laws together in any recognizable collection. Leges Sacrae is a modern category with no exact equivalent in ancient Greece”. Despite oracles and myths might be collected into books, and Orphic texts on papyrus rolls could be recited during the Dionysiac initiations, these texts can not be considered tout court “sacred books”. Nor the Romans did possess similar texts describing in detail origin and features of religious regulations or even a systematised corpus of religious jurisprudence (ius sacrum or divinum). This is why, as underlined by Scheid, Augustus himself had to ask lawyers and antiquarians to write down treatises on cultic institutions in order to bring to completion his religious restoration. In spite of the ancient presence of books of Sibylline Oracles, Etruscan libri fatales and libri pontificales, there was no Latin liber sacer or sanctus, and the very sporadic hints at “sacred books” in archaic or early Republican Rome are just mentioned by Greek authors, namely Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch. The latter significantly recalls that the corpse of Numa was buried in a sarcophagus on the Ianiculum, as well as the sacred books which he had written out with his own hand and taught orally to the priests. In plain words, an institutionalised religious norm fixed on written texts simply did not exist in the Graeco-Roman world.
Because of a sort of unconscious cultural debt for dogmatic Protestant models, scholarship has often fallen in the trap of arbitrarily applying to ancient societies some modern interpretative categories which were later proven to be inadequate or even mystifying. Thus recent research (led by John Scheid) has finally rejected concepts like “belief” and “orthodoxy”, moving to the much more fruitful ones of “practice” and “orthopraxy” and showing that Graeco-Roman religion was not based on what it is now conceptualised as faith or creed, but rather on the scrupolous (sometimes nitpicking) compliance with regulations for the correct carrying out of rituals, which entailed the strict observance of interdictions and, in case of infraction, the payment of sanctions. Because of a parallel distorted historiographic paradigm (again built on Jewish/Christian bookrevealed religious traditions and canonical Catholic law), the idea of a Greek and (in particular) a Roman religion strongly focussed on a meticulous respect of ritual prescriptions generated the search for an original Sakralrecht and a related Ritualtext, that is a juridical corpus of laws based on some ancient libri sacerdotum and regulating, item by item, the constellation of different aspects linked to the religious praxis. But, as underlined by Laura Gawlinski, “leges sacrae was a category created in the nineteenth century as part of an effort to organize and make accessible the inscribed documents deemed most useful to scholars of the history of religion”. We cannot deny that religious specialists were regularly involved in political affairs (advicing magistrates in the case of ritual concerns) and that their consultations might be actually registered both in the priestly commentarii (e.g. of the Fratres Arvales) and in the official magistratual reports stored in the public archives. But the transmission of the ritual knowledge was basically operated orally, from one individual to the other, from one generation to the following, and there is no actual evidence supporting the idea of the existence of such unified written collections of laws. In Greece, the huge number of decrees dealing with ritual norms led to the construction of the histographical category ambiguously called “sacred laws” (hieroi nomoi), which has been strongly questioned during the last dozen years. In fact, the Greeks never distinguished it “as a category of rules separate from other laws, nor did they ever gather sacred laws together in any recognizable collection. Leges Sacrae is a modern category with no exact equivalent in ancient Greece”. Despite oracles and myths might be collected into books, and Orphic texts on papyrus rolls could be recited during the Dionysiac initiations, these texts can not be considered tout court “sacred books”. Nor the Romans did possess similar texts describing in detail origin and features of religious regulations or even a systematised corpus of religious jurisprudence (ius sacrum or divinum). This is why, as underlined by Scheid, Augustus himself had to ask lawyers and antiquarians to write down treatises on cultic institutions in order to bring to completion his religious restoration. In spite of the ancient presence of books of Sibylline Oracles, Etruscan libri fatales and libri pontificales, there was no Latin liber sacer or sanctus, and the very sporadic hints at “sacred books” in archaic or early Republican Rome are just mentioned by Greek authors, namely Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch. The latter significantly recalls that the corpse of Numa was buried in a sarcophagus on the Ianiculum, as well as the sacred books which he had written out with his own hand and taught orally to the priests. In plain words, an institutionalised religious norm fixed on written texts simply did not exist in the Graeco-Roman world.
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