In my project on Roman
religion my interest lies in
the interface setting between the civil and the military context (domi – militiae). It is easily observable that occasions of
transition (e.g.
departure and return of the army) were always religiously framed.
I am taking
into account both the structural composition of such events and
the options for
individual orchestrations – which is also reflected in the two
main parts of
this colloquium paper which first treats the ritual of the transvectio and then the singular performance of
Pompey in 70 BC.
The aim is to sharpen our
awareness of contextual and
situational factors that influenced religion in an area of
society which was
not pervaded by ‘sacred law’ but rather relied on a variety of
other
determinants: logics of interdependence between military success
and divine
support, relation to precedents (imitation, innovation),
appealing
presentations of religious claims to different audiences
(soldiers, citizens,
senators) and so on.
Here, the figure of the imperator (the general) emerges as a religious
entrepreneur who,
other than most priests in the city, was barely restricted in
his choice of
religious measures once he had left Rome. Of course, there were
requirements
and expectations – from a usually highly aroused soldierly
audience and also
from the senatorial peers at home. But in the first place, there
was a war to
win and here the end (or rather the result) justified the means.
It comes a no
surprise that there is an abundance of stories about famous
Roman victories
including extraordinary religious behavior by the imperator and curious narratives about divine
interventions.
The appearances of the
Dioscuri treated in this paper
are the perfect example for this ‘field-born’ kind of religion
and they serve
well to demonstrate the interconnectedness with the civil
(urban) context which
was significantly shaped by the actions of the imperatores: Temple constructions, yearly games or
religious festivals
resulted from their battlefield vows and were financed by the
loot. Sometimes
even the gods themselves who received the cultic attention were
‘spoils of war’
acquired from the enemy.
Unsurprisingly, moments of
return of victorious
generals and armies had a great impact on the elite
stratification since they
also marked the moments of reintegration: of the soldiers into
civil society
and of the general into the senatorial environment. Ideally, a
triumph would
commemorate this occasion as well as offering the imperator the opportunity to present himself with
his army in the
city – something that was otherwise unthinkable except for
violent
transgressions during civil wars.
When writing about
religion in a military context
there is a ‘natural’ focus on the most famous figures of Roman
history who were
usually generals. Not only do they have a disproportionally high
presence in
the sources from a quantitative view but they are also the ones
around who the most
interesting narratives of religious behaviour revolve. Since I
don’t intend to
write a history about the ‘big men’ and how they appropriated
religion, it
therefore sometimes becomes a bit of a balance act to squeeze
from their
personal stories information that can be generalized to a
certain extend.
The present
colloquium text is an attempt to do exactly that. Still, for the
bigger frame
in my dissertation it is necessary to cover the historical
background of Pompey
– something which I have largely excluded from this paper. In my
PhD a deeper
analysis of Pompey, his predecessors and the prevailing
circumstances antecede
the discussion of the transvectio.
One of the resulting questions aims at understanding the
(historical) reasons
for Pompey extraordinary deed. This, in turn, is something I
entirely excluded
from this paper in the hope of being able to extract something
worthwhile by
confining my view to the curious ritual of the transvectio and Plutarch’s dense account of how
Pompey used the
occasion to stage his role as imperator.
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