CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Creating One’s Own Religion:
Intellectual Choices
Attilio Mastrocinque
Substitutes for State Religion
In the first centurybc, Cicero’s treatises De natura deorum and De divinatione
witness the creation of a systematic rational inquiry into religion in the Latin lan-
guage. Varro, in his Antiquitates rerum divinarum, distinguished among a theology
of poets, one of the state, and a philosophical theology, which he calledtheologia
naturalis,
on which the philosophers have transmitted us many books, in which they ask who the
gods are, where, what their gender, whether or not they have always existed; whether
they consist of fire – as Heraclitus believed – or of numbers – according to Pythagoras- or of atoms – as Epicurus said. That and other things could be easier listened to inside
in a school as in a public square. (frag. 8 Cardauns)
Varro emphasized the legend of Numa as a pupil of Pythagoras perhaps because
he wanted to demonstrate that Roman religion was already aware of the philosophical
level at the beginning of its life (Varro, Curio de cultu deorumI, 35f. Cardauns =
Aug. Civ.7.34f.). Cicero too was looking for the true bases of religious beliefs among
the main philosophical streams, such as the Platonic Academy, the Stoa, or the
Epicurean Kepos.
However, it was not only theologia naturalisthat opened new fields of inquiry to
the cultivated Roman upper class of the late republic. Many of them were attracted
by mystic and secret rituals, by forms of religiosity that common people could not
understand. These forms could not replace public religion. Neveretheless, in taking
up elements of religion that had been known to many Greek cities much earlier,
these intellectual choices further broadened a religious spectrum that was adding