Ethnicity in Roman Religion 473the biblical tradition and taken up by Tertullian and his literary successors. Thus, in the
contemporaryActa Scilitanorumof the late second century, the proconsul finally decides
on the basis of a confession “to liveritu Christiano(according to the Christian rite)” and
to refuse to returnad Romanorum morem(“to the way of the Romans”)(14). Others
were much more careful. The African writer Minucius Felix had his characters in the dia-
logueOctaviusrefer to membership in a sect, employing such expressions as “a man not
of that sect” (ut non ipsius sectae homo), “your sect,” and, finally, once the antagonist has
been rhetorically beaten by Octavius, “already of my sect” (sectae iam nostrae) (40.2)
(Rüpke 2011a: 197 f.).
Secta(orhairesisin Greek) is without any ethnic implication. It was primarily used to
differentiate the philosophical schools of the early Hellenistic age, but could be used for
Jewish groups such as Saducees or Pharisees too (e.g., inActa4.17; Josephus,Bellum
Iudaicum2.8.1). The term is informed by the idea of following a leader, a founding figure
or contemporary head of a school, be it Saint Peter or Bishop Damasus (or Bishop Peter
of Alexandria) in an edict quoted in the Theodosian Code (16.1.2). The pragmatics of
the termdisciplinawere the same. It could denote both intellectual content and a way of
life.Disciplina magorum,Etruscorum,Chaldaica,augurum,andrei publicaeare phrases
from the first centuriesBC. Cato the Elder had already warned in the second centuryBCof
“foreign discipline” (1.4). Firmicus, never shrinking from the extreme, could polemicize
against thediaboli...disciplina(De errore profanorum religionum18.1). “Discipline”
made more explicit what was implied in “sect”: the idea of a body of knowledge and a
special way of life. However, such a way of life was a conscious, intellectual choice, not
an ethnic given.
And yet, it was common knowledge, too, that religion (in our sense of the term) was
part and parcel of cultural exchange. In a situation of massive change, Roman antiquarians
started to reflect on religious institutions and earlier imports (see Rüpke 2012a: 144–51).
According to them, basically, Rome was made up of Latin, Etruscan, and Sabine gods
and cults. The Trojan ancestry, postulated by Greeks from the third centuryBConward
(Erskine 2001, especially 224), was accepted, and religious imports could be imagined in
the Vergilian narrative of theAeneid(Cancik 2006, see also Barchiesi 2006). However,
these contacts were seen as events of a distant past. For the more recent past, cultural
contact with Greece and the Hellenic world (so present in Southern Italy and Etrurian
towns) had been very intensive—and controversial. It was notreligio, however, that was
at the center of such controversies, but rather clothing, luxury ornaments, philosophy, or
rhetoric. Due to continuous contact since the early urban phases, Rome, the city on the
margins of the Greek world, had no significant difficulty accommodating and acculturat-
ing influx from the Greeks, be it Mater Magna from Asia Minor or Venus Erycina from
Sicily. Thus, the testimony of Cicero’s dialogueOn the Nature of the Godsis ambivalent.
In itself a witness to the Romans’ attempt to come to grips with Greek thinking on reli-
gion (historically and philosophically, Rüpke 2012a), the polemical concentration on the
influx of Greek mythology (and ultimately religion) presented by Cotta (3.39–62) is a
demonstration of parochialism (even if parts of the argumentation were taken over from
the Greek academic Carneades).
Other cultural and religious areas remained exotic, neither dangerous nor adaptable—
for example, Syrian fish gods and Egyptian animals (3.39, the latter again in 3.48) or an